Tony Hoagland wasn’t sure he wanted us to publish his poem “In the Beautiful Rain.” He was concerned it didn’t “snap and crackle in the right way,” and at one point he withdrew it. A few days later he changed his mind. The poem, he wrote, was “good enough for me, if you guys like it.”
We do. “In the Beautiful Rain” is the forty-second poem of Hoagland’s that we have published. We finalized the proofs one day before he died. He was sixty-four.
His contributions to The Sun, to poetry, and to the culture will be sorely missed.
— Ed.
