Ashleigh Young
Ashleigh Young is a freelance writer and editor currently living in Wellington. Her first book of poems, Magnificent Moon (Victoria University Press), was included in the Listener’s Best Books of 2012 review. Her essays and poems have appeared in places such as Sport, Landfall, Turbine, and Booknotes. This year she is guest-editing the literary journal Hue & Cry. She blogs at eyelashroaming.com.
Young comments: ‘This is dangerous territory for a poem, I guess—the SOUL. There’s probably an old, unspoken rule that a writer must not write about the soul more than once in their lifetime. And in fact this poem almost didn’t make the cut in my book—it was accused of being silly, or maybe grasping at things it had no business grasping at. But I’d wanted so badly to write about the idea of the soul. I couldn’t suppress it any longer. I thought one way to talk about it would be through the words of someone else, someone who’d always seemed to me to be particularly soulful—who even plays a character burdened by the heaviness of his soul—the actor Paul Giamatti. Then, once I had lured the reader in with the interesting things that Giamatti had said, I could throw the net over them with those final lines. “Actually, this is all about MY soul!” It’s a mean trick, I suppose. But those final lines are not really about me at all; they’re about an imagined me. If I had a soul, I think it would be more like an old piece of Blu-tack that doesn’t stick any more, or a bit of Fimo.’
