![]() ![]() ![]() Occasionally I invented historical texts, as in “The Bronze Helmet (a Retrospective),” or mashed up the historical with the contemporary, as in “Cyclorama.” One passage I kept returning to is from Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, where he talks about how his book “aims to characterize and preserve the intervals of reflection, the distances lying between the most essential parts of this work.” Show the paper and the holes in the paper. That’s probably why I’ve been so interested in delving into history-whether it’s about Korea at the end of World War II, or the crazy story of how a 6th-century Greek bronze helmet got into the hands of Korea’s first Gold Olympic medalist.Īs I started writing poems for Into the Cyclorama I found myself drawn to collaging together fragments of my personal history with facts I’d researched about the larger historical backdrops to my narratives. ![]() Like a lot of other immigrants, my own family history is pretty thin. How did that pairing come about in the process of writing the poems that make up Into the Cyclorama?Īnnie Kim: I’ve always envied people who could map family trees back to the Mayflower or pull out some great-aunt’s diary from the attic. Michael Collins: Your collection has a lot of interplay between the personal and the historical. ![]()
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