On ‘Moon Jar’

The journey to completing my poem “Moon Jar” was more an uncovering than an outpouring. Since 2022, after the release of Dream of the Divided Field, I have been reinventing my writing process with more intention and purpose. One of the books I read that was instrumental in redirecting me was Louise DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing, particularly her practice of keeping a process journal.

The concept is simple: keep a journal on hand for the project you are working on in that moment, using it as a place to write about the problems you’re facing and your ideas for how to get around them. It is thanks to my process journal that I know I wrote the first draft of “Moon Jar” (then called “Irises in Late Spring”) on 10 May 2024 at around 8:21AM:

I can’t believe it. I wrote a full poem completely intuitively just now. I feel a connection to myself. Something deeper lodging into place. The title a complete fluke, then the direction it went. Irises in Late Spring, about the flowers but also about sight, second sight, hope and possibility still when the world burns too hot too quickly. […] The spark was in seeing the irises blooming slowly next to the mailbox and in the boxes around us in the neighborhood. Just my delight in watching them grow, the delight of predictable surprise—today was the day that the bud bloomed! And though I know each will wither away, I hold their beauty in me.

Curious but profound to me, each time it happens, was that I was going about my usual business of taking our dog out for the morning when the poem came. Yet, as I wrote, I had been watching a box of irises making progress in front of the apartment mailboxes for several weeks at that point. Here is that first draft that I wrote:

Irises in Late Spring

Morning slants on the irises that have grown taller than me,
Their violet delights overhanging the border of the flower box
on concrete. It is one of those days when the sun is already hot
at seven; when the birds have been singing long enough to teach us.
These buds I saw under the moon. These buds that watched
The rabbit run from me as a shadow within shadow. I forgot this:
That there are places darker still than night. That these visions are
a Janus pair. The eye upon the world must be the sun. I have not
yet named the one that look upon the interior. This orb that’s cleaning
out the color and cicadas as a rabbit leaps within me
beyond what dreams can see.

It was an image from the night before, a silhouette of a rabbit leaping deeper into the shadow of a tree, that proved to be the final needed piece. By that time, I was about six months into studying astrology, and the dual luminaries, the sun and moon, and what they each allow one to see, were very much on my mind.

In my first drafts, I do not worry too much about line, and just as many of my drafts start out as prose. The goal is always to get it out first, however clumsily. If I had been writing the poem by hand, I would have had a fair share of cross-outs. Before I ended my session I did a rough pass for lineation:

Irises in Late Spring

Morning slants on the irises that have grown
taller than me, their violet delights overhanging
the border of the flower box on concrete. It is one
of those days when the sun is already hot at seven;
when the birds have been singing long enough
to teach us. These buds I saw under the moon.
These buds that watched the rabbit run from me
as a shadow within shadow. I forgot this: that there
are places darker still than night. That these visions
are a Janus pair. The eye upon the world must be
the sun. I have not yet named the one that looks
upon the interior. This orb that’s cleaning out
the color and cicadas. As a rabbit leaps within me
beyond what dreams can see.

I experimented with lineation again a few days later, working out only one textual change (“These buds I saw under the moon / watched with me while the rabbit ran off as a shadow / within a shadow”), and then did not look at the poem for another year. On June 15, 2025, I finally reported the following:

I’m glad to have revised a few short pieces and even more that there is a sense of “finished” for at least three of them: “Irises in Late Morning,” “Poem (I miss your feathers),” and the surprising one about my twenties.

Before the pandemic, my friend Jean Yoon told me that they were trying to throw a moon jar, a beautiful, bulbous vessel indigenous to Korea. While I can no longer locate whether it was Jean who said this to me, or if I read it on the plaque next to the moon jars I visit time and again at the Met and the Brooklyn Museum, I distinctly remember learning that moon jars, as difficult as they are to make by hand, did not have an apparent purpose. The Asian Art Museum does state that “[t]he specific functions of the jars have not been clearly identified” but it also states, as others do, that the moon jar had utilitarian and ceremonial purposes.^1 The moon jar has, over time, developed a symbolic function for Korean aesthetics, as it stands apart from Chinese or Japanese ceramics of that era, and therefore resists those colonial legacies. Today the moon jar continues to influence contemporary Korean art and culture far beyond the world of ceramics.^2^3

I carried the moon jar with me, specifically the story, whether there was any grounding in it, that no one knows why they were made. Through my mentorship with the writer Ysabelle Cheung,^4 I was reminded of the Chinese myth of the yuètù (月兔), the moon rabbit.

Then, in June 2023, a beloved college poetry professor, Saskia Hamilton, passed away too young. On that day, what I missed most was the melodious voice she had in the seminar room, and I found a 2010 video of her reading from a (then) new poem called “Night-Jar,”^5 referencing a bird whose main activities are at twilight.

Thinking back on it now, everything about my own poem was developing for years out of view in a process more like fumbling in the gloaming than technical revision. Memories came to a head with the present, and my penultimate draft of the poem, from 22 June 2025, contained the final title change, among other pointed references:

Moon Jar

Morning slants on the irises that have grown
taller than me, their violet heads swinging over
their borders of concrete. It is one of those days
when the sun is already hot at seven; when the birds
have been singing long enough to teach us.
These buds I saw under the moon watched with me

while the rabbit ran off as a shadow within a shadow.
I had forgotten this: that there are places darker still
than night. That these visions are a Janus pair.
One eye upon the world must be the sun. I have
not yet named the one that looks within—an orb
that’s cleaning out the color and cicadas

as a rabbit leaps within me
beyond what dreams can see.

“Moon” and “jar” separated and clung to other associations—Saskia’s night-jar at twilight and the rabbit on the moon; Miłosz’s encounter and the astrological moon as harbor of emotions, body, and home; the gift of an idea passed on to me from a friend from another time; my life which had been unplucked and unstrung by the circumstances of the past several years, existing without previous purpose, or rather, returning to having no purpose, and toward a future beyond intuition and unconscious. History had made “the border of the flower box on concrete” clearer as “borders of concrete,” as it was impossible to write without thinking about ICE or Palestine. “Concrete” was the actual material walling people up in detention and crumbling after drone strikes; it was also the “border,” that line that touches both sides, between the material and the symbolic.

I put the draft aside again. Six months later, as I was gathering new work for the faculty reading at Warren Wilson’s 2026 winter residency, I made a few technical adjustments to the poem while reading it out loud. After reading it for the residency community, it was evident to me that the poem was done.

Sometimes, to read to each other can be more ritual than performance. That is, the last stage for this intensely private poem was to give it utterance and audience, uncovered in secret, and then released, like birds during the darkest twilight before the lightening of the year.

With special thanks to poetry editor Sally Wen Mao, the final version of “Moon Jar” appears in the June 2026 issue of The Believer. You can read it for free online.

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Notes

^1 Asian Art Museum. “Moon Jar - Collections - Asian Art Museum.” Collections, 5 Nov. 2020, https://collections.asianart.org/collection/moon-jar.
^2 “Everything to Know About Korean Moon Jars.” Christie’s, 20 Mar. 2026, www.christies.com/en/stories/everything-to-know-moon-jars-4bf48c8e40db4bdd8cbc5cd6c79c9b51.
^3 Dowdy, Clare. Why Korea’s Moon Jar Is so Iconic. 15 May 2023, www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230510-the-ancient-symbol-that-defines-korea.
^4 Cheung, Ysabelle. Patchwork Dolls. Blair, Durham, 2026.
^5 Boston University. “Kieron Winn and Saskia Hamilton: ‘There Lives the Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things…’” YouTube, 10 Apr. 2010, https://youtu.be/CVpToo9i9cI?t=532.