Lee Young-ju
Translated from the Korean by Jae Kim

    Foreigners are sitting. Even though it’s my house, only the use of a foreign language is allowed. A person who’s lost her language, I circle the living room. A bright steam rises from the kettle and dissipates. A soft pitch. Languages are afloat, like feathers. Soft wings. I stretch my hand out to catch a scurrying sound. If I lose my meaning, can I slowly rise? Like this? What is meaning if it won’t reach each other? White snow falls, falls outside my window. I hear words I don’t understand, and as someone who can’t speak, I’m now the quietest person in my house. Foreigners brush each other’s shoulders, like brushing off feathers. If I lose the deeper meaning, would I be able to fold my wings, leave my house, and get to a new house? Outside the window, it’s snowing, snowing. As the only person in my house who’s lost a house, I drink a cup of tea, like the foreigners do. A soft steam. A soft missing.

from the journal LANA TURNER: A JOURNAL OF POETRY & OPINION
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Exterior posed photograph of a seated, older Michael McClure
Beat Poet Michael McClure Dies at 87

"Michael McClure, the young poet recruited to put together the famed Six Gallery readings in 1955 that launched the San Francisco Renaissance and the legend of the Beats, died Monday, May 4, at his home in the Oakland hills. He was 87."
 
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Cover of the book, The Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger
What Sparks Poetry:
Gillian Parrish on Paul Celan's "In the Daytime"

"This poem also expands my view of poem-making as a practice of attention to include poem as communion, as something more like prayer. Clearly, Celan’s poem is a poem of attention. Better yet, it is a poem that attends without wanting, that rests in a ready waiting-that-is-not-waiting. For only in such an open space can wildness arrive and minds meet."
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