A Poet and a Lark
Elizabeth Acevedo has a story she tells about rats. And a poem. The story concerns a creative writing professor (and poet) who tells her that rats are not noble enough creatures to be the subject of an ode, and she needs to get more experience. You can watch Acevedo tell the story and deliver the poem on YouTube, but here's a few lines from Rat Ode. Because you may be inelegant, simple, a mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished, little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall from the corner of our mouths, but you live uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco and fed to fat snakes because you’re not the maze-rat of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained. Elizabeth Acevedo is not going to be told what it is OK to write about. Her novel, The Poet X, which won the Carnegie medal in 2019 is the story, told in a series of poems, of 15 year old Xiomara, a Dominican American growing up in New York City. Xiomara has a troubled relationship with her very religious mother and