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Read “Missed Time” on the Poetry Foundation site here.
Embarrassing admission: Until I ran across this poem a few months ago, I didn’t know Ha Jin wrote poetry. I’m a huge fan of his novel Waiting, which I read maybe 15 years ago, and I’ve always thought of him strictly as a fiction writer. For all these years, Waiting has stuck in my mind for being gently subversive, but also immensely entertaining. Similarly, I love the cleverness of this short poem, “Missed Time,” how he weaves together two contradictory thoughts: a person who is so happy that he has had no need to write about it, and a poem about that fact.
This poem is like a sliver, the thin edge of a wedge that reminds me that I need to track down more of Ha Jin’s poetry books and find out what else I’ve been missing.
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* (Honestly, I decided to just link to where the poems are already published because I didn’t want to have to get permission to publish each one on this blog—hey, if 20 years in the music-publishing business taught me anything, it’s that licensing is a pain in the butt.)
Beautiful - thanks, Amy. Even more subversive today than when it was written almost 20 years ago. In this social-media age, how can one be happy without posting about it?
ReplyDeleteIt was strangely prophetic.
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