Susan Stewart
Now that the thread has caught fire,
the hem lies ragged.
Now that the pain throbs deep,
the vein appears.

The vacant sky above,
the funneled hours, the whirling
days, each yanked away
to night that follows night.

Now that the little lies
accrue into the vast
incredulity, fear on fear
swells: a wave.

Slipping down the dune or
climbing? Who can tell?
The small cries, growing smaller,
fly past and vanish.

Were they gulls or drowning children
—and who was meant to hear
and who to act? The spare grass
dead beside the carapace

emerging. The shell soon cuts
its form into the strand
and stays. You despaired,
abandoned,

but then you saw
the cornflower, felled
within the bramble, the menace in
the permanence of sand.
from the journal CONJUNCTIONS
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As many readers will recognize from its title and opening "now," this poem began as a translation of Victor Hugo's magnificent lyric, "Paroles sur la dune." But it rather quickly turned from a translation to a kind of homage as Hugo brought to mind on our own exiled circumstances during this strange period of crises within and without.

Susan Stewart on "The Dune"
Color photograph of Jay Hopler
In Memoriam: Jay Hopler

"His first collection of poetry, Green Squall, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by Nobel laureate Louise Glück, who would become a dear friend. His second collection of poetry, 2016’s The Abridged History of Rainfall, was a finalist for the National Book Award." Jay Hopler died on June 15, aged 51.

via MCSWEENEY'S
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Cover of Suji Kwock Kim's book, Notes from the Divided Country
What Sparks Poetry:
Sarah Audsley on Suji Kwock Kim's Notes from the Divided Country


"It was 2011, at The Frost Place Conference on Poetry after Vievee Francis’s talk. Afterward, when I became a bit emotional—her talk opened me up; the best talks do; I cried—she looked at me and told me to read Suji Kwock Kim, to search out and to read poetry by Korean/Korean American poets. As an adoptee, born in South Korea and raised in rural Vermont, this was a decisive moment for me."
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