The poets are serious. The translators are serious. Everyone is serious but me.
First the stakes
were low
Then the stakes
were high
Then the stakes
were in my heart.
I asked the administer
of hearts
Who stabbed the
stakes in there
And she said that
the people who
Put them there
would like to remain anonymous.
Already stabbed,
it was hard to heart
anything or give the
heart to somebody.
Who did I do
wrong?
I became extremely
paranoid.
I thought about
what to do for a long while
And it seemed
there was only one possibility.
I took my staked
heart
And stabbed onions
and peppers
Onto the stake
And put it on the
grill
In my backyard.
In Korean there is
an expression
Eat my heart
Which means you’ve
made up your mind.
I added salt and
pepper and listened
To the sound of my
heart sizzling
Like a cartoon
snake
While I drank a
diet dr. pepper out of a can.
Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
In my backyard
Was my old friend
the saguaro cactus named Bill.
Bill had been there
Thousands of
years, but had only
Grown a single
arm.
A cactus wren
poked a hole in Bills head
And made a nest inside.
When the bird
slept at night
It looked like
Bill had a bird in his mouth.
This afternoon the
bird looked hungry and scared.
Do you want to eat
my heart?
I asked the little
cactus wren.
The bird looked at
me
Then my heart
Then at me.
I sipped my dr.
pepper.
Ssssssssssssssssss
Sizzled my heart.
Kim Jong Un and
Jake Levine
When Kim Jong Un’s
father died
And Kim Jong Un
rose to the position of Supreme Leader of North Korea
And Leader of the
Workers Party of Korea
Jake Levine got
hired at Sejong University.
Kim Jong Un and
Jake Levine are the same age.
Kim Jong Un and
Jake Levine both gained weight.
Kim Jong Un and
Jake Levine both struggle
To control their
smoking habits.
And yet, Jake
Levine is not married to a famous North Korean singer
And Jake Levine
has no nuclear warheads.
Although Jake
Levine and Kim Jong Un live on the same peninsula
And watched Dennis
Rodman play basketball as children,
Jake Levine does
not have a security detail
Jake Levine rarely
has people cry when he meets them.
Jake Levine has
had very cool haircuts
And yet he has
never held hands
With South Korean
president Moon Jae-in.
Jake Levine got a
PhD and reads a lot of books
Each book he reads
means he knows
that the more he
knows
the more he
understands
how little power
he has.
Ode to Belly Lint
They say humans
have really big brains, and yet
Because I am not
that far evolved
From a troglodyte,
I have a lot of body hair.
I produce a ball
of lint in my belly button
Everyday I wear a
shirt, which is mostly
everyday. At first
I thought these balls of lint
Were shaped like
small animals
So I imagined them
as tiny dolls
Children could play
with. But then I came to recognize
The bellybutton
lint as my alter-ego.
Everyday I am born
And picked out of
a shallow hole
And at night I am
thrown into a bin or washed
Into some drain.
Everyday I am
different and yet
Everyday I am the
same.
At the end of the
long day I wonder
does the belly
lint come into consciousness?
And if it does,
does it think its alter ego
Is a human being named
Jake Levine?
My friend James
Hall told me
That it is
important you decide
Who your inner
diva is.
My friend Bo
McGuire’s inner diva
Is Dolly Parton.
My friend Jen Hui
Bon Hoa’s inner diva
Is Jacques
Ranciere.
My inner diva is
belly lint.
Negative Capability
Today I got lost
in the fog
The brain fog.
It was thick with
no light at the end.
I was paid
To grab my students
in their black Zoom boxes
and drag them into
the fog.
A blue
Alligator with no
teeth
Stuck its head up
from the swamp and
Smiled at our
feet.
I stuck out my
foot.
I wanted to let
the alligator eat me.
Eat me Beast! I
screamed.
I wanted to be entertaining
So that my
students got something
For their money.
I said Behold
the Human Sacrifice!
But with no teeth
the alligator just sucked
And gummed my leg.
I bought some
medicated cream
For the rash that
developed
On my leg that the
alligator bit.
The fact that it
itched
Was something I
didn’t share.
A rash is not
something to make a spectacle out of.
Jake Levine is an award-winning American translator, poet, editor and scholar. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Keimyung University and serves as the editor of the Korean poetry series Moon Country at Black Ocean. After receiving both his BA and MFA from the University of Arizona, Jake was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Lithuania. While there he co-founded the Vilnius Bagel Project with Menachem Kaiser and a group of local artists. The bagel project was a series of events and pop-up installations, reintroducing Jewish culture through bagel making and bagel eating. The project appeared in various spaces, including as part of an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius and at several cultural events hosted by the United States Embassy.
Previously Jake has served as the editor-in-chief of Sonora Review, as the poetry editor of Spork Press, and as an assistant editor at Acta Koreana. Additionally, he edited a syndicated column of interviews and articles about contemporary American poets for Munjang webzine. He has published, co-published, and translated or co-translated over a dozen books. His translation of Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season that Does Not Exist in the World (Black Ocean) was a finalist for the Lucien Stryk prize in 2017. In 2020 he was the co-recipient of the National Translation Award and the Lucien Stryk Prize for Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (Action Books), first time both prizes have been awarded to a single collection. Subsequently Hysteria has also been nominated for the inaugural Sarah Maguire Prize. His work has also appeared in publications like Boston Review, Guernica, The New York Times, and Granta.
Most recently his
co-translations of Kim Minjeong’s Beautiful and Useless (Black Ocean) and The
Poems of Hwang Yuwon, Ha Jaeyoun, and Seo Daekyung (Vagabond Press) were
published in the fall of 2020. Outside of literature, he has recently
translated lyrics for Big Hit Entertainment and exhibition material for the
Daegu Art Museum with Soohyun Yang. He is currently ABD in a PhD program in
comparative literature at Seoul National University, where he attended with the
support of a Korean Government Scholarship.