What Is by Jeffrey Yang

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 23, 2015   What Is   Jeffrey Yang

or is true as Happiness   Birth A pure river   Conditions for the equal good to be as wise and fortunate   at the start   Lost in the pursuit Under a white oak two children sitting back to back on a plank swing, calling   The hand that touches the earth  to witness   Presses the metal latch, opens the screen door out from home   sunlight, pond water silence damselfly at rest on a frond Having come with you this far into the drafty air            Copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey Yang. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “George Oppen’s poem ‘A Theological Definition’ has stayed with me for many years. The center of that poem—its question and statement—forms the title plus opening of this poem, and so this poem sets out as an extension of the other, written in response to it, to its worldly theology and mystery, but also continues as a response to a certain experience of, and questioning of, that happiness in the present, and the consciousness that radiates around this experience in words. Words that manifest the poem’s existence through an act of faith, however transitory the world feels.” —Jeffrey Yang   Jeffrey Yang is the author of Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011). He works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books and lives in Beacon, New York.   Photo Credit: Nina Subin Most Recent Book by Yang   Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011) "The Happiness" by Jack Hirschman "Compassion IV" by Noelle Kocot "The Place Where in the End / We Find Our Happiness" by Anne Boyer Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038