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What Sparks Poetry is 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.
Tomaž Šalamun
Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry
What is the sea? The sea is a forehead.
What is a forehead? A forehead is night.
What is sand? Sand is the dawn.
What is the dawn? The dawn is a king.
A king is a clothed man.
A clothed man bears a burden.

What is a bag? A bag is trash.
What is trash? Trash is a wheel.
What is color? Color is gas.
What is gas? Gas is a child.
A child embraces the Bible.
Break his Bible.

What is to bear? To bear is delight.
What is delight? Delight is Bach.
What is wisdom? Wisdom is silence.
What is silence? Silence is the four.
The four, crossed and circled.
The world is a boot stirrup.
from the journal NEW HUMANIST
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What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Henry on Tomaž Šalamun's "Sutra"


"Though Šalamun would leave the interview format behind, he continued to ask many questions in his work, sometimes building poems upon a series of questions, as in the poem featured here. Although the title, 'Sutra,' implies the imparting of wisdom or knowledge, Šalamun was more interested in the interplay between the questions and answers than in satisfying the expectations of a conventional sutra."
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Color headshot of poet A. E. Stallings
"The Poem’s Apprentice"

A. E. Stallings contemplates her selected poems, This Afterlife. "You can write to please certain editors or workshop leaders or critics, you can write in the mannerisms of your time (in a way, of course, we can’t help being of our time) and the award-winning poets of the day, but that is ultimately limiting. I sometimes think about Sappho and wonder what her ‘readership’ or audience would have reasonably been....And yet we are still reading her, and she somehow speaks directly to us."

via POETRY BIRMINGHAM
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