What Sparks Poetry a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series focused on Translation a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.  
Kim Hyesoon
Translated from the Korean by Cindy Juyoung Ok
Tough after all
we who still remain
just by gathering it is lovingly
even while building each other’s tombs
even while patting each other’s backs

When each one turns around
both arms tight! Opening
across and embracing what
I do not even recognize as my grave
I hug and hold harder and harder
lay the sleeping mat and lay the blanket, stretching four limbs out
I love you I love you even in my sleep
In this world from which crying birds disappear
only I am left


새들이 모두 가버린 다음

그래도 질긴
우리는 남아서
모이기만 하면 서로 사랑스레
무덤도 지어주면서
등도 두드려주면서

그러나 저마다 돌아서면
양팔을 힘껏! 벌려
품에 품고는
제 무덤인 줄도 모르고
더 힘껏 더 힘껏 부둥켜안고는
요 깔고 이불 깔고 사지를 좌악 벌려
사랑한다 사랑한다 잠꼬대까지 하면서
울던 새들이 사라진 이 세상에
나만 남아서
from the journal ASYMPTOTE
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Cover image from the April 2022 issue of Asymptote, in which the poem, All the Birds Have Gone, first appeared
What Sparks Poetry:
Cindy Juyoung Ok on Kim Hyesoon's "After All the Birds Have Gone"


"Stanzas and whole poems refuse the unit of the sentence, creating new syntax and refusing to designate themselves relevant to the constructs of past, present, or future. Kim’s is a poetry of present aftermath—of the annihilation absolute but not completed, of the past yet also ongoing. Although the source text of 'After All the Birds Have Gone' is in the present tense, its frame of reference is of survival, invoking the past, while the implied conditional hints at the future." 
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Photograph of Peter Schjeldahl and his wife in the eary 1980s
"Peter Schjeldahl, Art Critic With a Poet’s Voice, Dies"

"Since 1964: New and Selected Poems, a collection drawn from several volumes of his verse, was published in 1978. Soon after, he told Interview magazine, 'the art criticism ate the poetry.' But poetry, he wrote in the introduction to Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker (2008), had instilled in him the habit of 'tracking truth by ear, stalking surprise, not knowing what I have to say until I’ve said it.'"

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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