Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Susan Tichy.
Yang Jian
Translated from the Chinese by Ye Chun, Paul B. Roth, and Gillian Parrish 
In the Morning

In the morning, a man passes, swinging a stick.
"Up so early to herd the pig?"
I greet the hard worker. He chuckles, "Off to kill the pig,"
swinging the stick — "Go, go."
My soul trembles with the streetlight
as if it's clutching its own arrest warrant.
And the quiet county is like the whistling branch in his hand.


Seeing Far on Dongliang Mountain

From under an old plane tree rises the fragrance of simmered herbs,
and I know this is my country.
At night someone will smash a medicine jar in the middle of the road,
and I know my country will flow from this jar.

Kneeling,
kneeling here.
Kneel so the turbulent heart
becomes a stone statue.

At the foot of the mountain that has been blasted open,
there's a chunk of old willow, like the corpse of a dragon,
surrounded by scorched grasses.

The mountaintop has none of this,
the mountaintop is filled with emptiness;
I have not reached the realm of emptiness.
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Image of elaborate graveyard
"What's Up With Ancient Greek Epitaphs"
 
"Anepitaph is a little dab of poetry that you stick on a gravestone. It doesn’t have to be about the deceased, but it usually is. Keats suggested a good one for himself, and they actually used it: 'Here lies one whose name is writ in water.' That’s not really a poem, but it’s a little dab of poetry. It counts."

via PARIS REVIEW
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Susan Tichy's handwritten lines from "Logging"
What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on Gary Snyder's
"Logging"

"I was eighteen when I picked up the original edition of Snyder’s Myths & Texts....I had been writing poems for several years, and even had published a few, but something new happened in those pages: I heard/saw for the first time how a web of sound could juxtapose unadorned image + simple statement into something…not exactly larger than its parts, but other than its parts. No longer were expansive and intensive poetics opposed: they were allies, creating the voice of a mind and a body finding place on earth."
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