Monica Youn’s (CRF 2013, Juror) sequence of poems on “Study of Two Figures (Dr. Seuss / Chrysanthemum-Pearl)” was published in The New Yorker last month. We share them now in honor of Poetry Month, April 2021. The poems consider Theodor Geisel (pen name: Dr. Seuss) alongside the imaginary daughter that he and his wife Helen invented.
Youn’s poetic portrait tackles “the shocking anti-Japanese stereotypes that Geisel perpetuated in propagandist cartoons before and during the Second World War… this latest in Youn’s ongoing series of double portraits reaches us in a moment of reckoning with and reaction to the problematic imagery in some of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. Poets are often prescient that way, drawing out connections that might otherwise be invisible and giving voice to unspoken tensions. Youn finds humanity in the inhumane and a poetry in the make-believe world of a child whom Dr. Seuss could only dream of, but was surely writing for. Her sequence inhabits Chrysanthemum-Pearl’s own perspective—“something behind / her face is buzzing like a bee / that’s lost its hive”—making noise and hay and, above all, meaning out of these overlapping faces, grappling with the fantasies that formed her, and with the disillusioning process of growing up, as we all must.”
See the poems and listen to Youn’s readings of them here.