Perdón

Abstract

“Sorry” aims to blur the boundary between poetry and the essay. It is in the tradition of the “creative” or unconventional essay. The essay intends to apologize for not being connected to others. This guilty feeling, or feeling of shame, is realized as a series in the form of email responses. The presentation of apologies is intended to be double-edged because it is clearly written, ironically, during the pandemic when none of us were able to be in touch with our friends and communities and, yet, it is truly trying to reach out and feels badly about not reaching out. On another level, Sorry intends to implicate other apologies in literature that have taken a more central role in today’s poetics dialogues: for instance, an apology for the exclusivity of the Western literary canon. Several of the entries in Sorry speak to new and continuing ideas in contemporary poetry –as such, the aforementioned apologetic tone affects those passages.