Ha Jaeyoun
Translated from the Korean by Sue Hyon Bae

Hanging on my sides there might be fig seeds somebody spat out millions of years ago, fine strands of dust cover me like a hand-woven blanket, for a while now when I try to remember the breathing of the land above that’s passed me by and the bright light shining down, my sides hurt

I’m not trying to say I’ve existed so long I can’t remember the quiet noon, the work of keeping the body open in cracks of time, dead skin flakes landing from the sky open with long travel day and night, the ceiling grows remote 

Blue dust, fine-grained fungus, my good soil, the leaves and stems of the figs inside me reach infinitely into phone lines, across the universe, and at some noontime, they will lightly stroke a prone woman’s eyelashes. All the while I dream of that brilliant touch of the hand, all the while nobody visits me

from the book RADIO DAYS / Black Ocean
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I confess now that I inserted a small allusion of my own, which, as a translator, I shouldn’t do, but as a poet, I’ve always believed a poem should contain a secret. The poem could just as well have said "on the other side of the universe" or "cosmos" but I went with "across the universe" to jive with the other Beatles’ references in "Radio Days."

Sue Hyon Bae on"Old Bed"
Color image of a detail from William Blake's The Ancient of Days
"How William Blake Became Rock’s Favourite Poet"

"'The thing about Blake is that he appears unexpectedly,' observes John Higgs, the author of William Blake vs the World. 'He comes to us in memes, horror films, video games and pop songs. These are not respectable routes for information. You fall off the tracks and Blake is there, waiting to be discovered.'"

viaTHE TELEGRAPH
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jessica Fisher on Language as Form


"When the voice began, it wasn’t mine, nor did it belong to anyone else in particular—it was instead something like the possibility of speech beginning again, after a period of long silence. Writing often begins for me with this form of potential opening, and the work is to follow the voice as it accrues—or, to follow its underlying rhythm. I love that the I/you relation so central to lyric poetry can accommodate a simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, that there doesn’t have to be any external circumstance to which the poem refers."
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