Just One Thing with Janelle Tan

The poet’s household cat

Janelle Tan’s May issue poem “Goethe’s Last Words Were ‘More Light’” glows like its title’s final wish come to fruition. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“This poem started with the title: ‘Goethe’s Last Words Were ‘More Light.’’ It was a poem that specifically lived on my work computer: I would add a line during a particularly boring prep period, or re-examine it at the end of a long day. Through teaching a lot of Frank O’Hara in my classes, I became personally obsessed with his work. I was reading this Kemi Alabi poem at the time (‘Against Heaven’) and felt pulled to try the golden shovel. Because this poem lived on my work computer and I worked on it in fits and spurts over several months, the poem became a patchwork of everything I'd been thinking about and reading. ‘For Grace, after a Party’ is my favorite O’Hara poem, and the line ‘and someone you love enters the room and asks if you would like the eggs a little different today’ beautifully describes the care and love of making eggs for someone in the morning. I think about that gesture regularly: the acts of care that come from cooking for someone, and from the regular everyday movement of domestic life. That gesture of everyday care has come to define how I see community and love, whether romantic or platonic.”