Eileen
R. Tabios introduces the Poetry Section of BOLD
WORDS: A Century of Asian American Writing, edited by
Rajini Srikanth and Esther Y. Iwanaga
(Rutgers
University Press, New Jersey and London, 2001)
ABSORBING AND BEING ABSORBED BY
POETRY
“The
dragons on the back of a circular bronze mirror
swirl
without end. I sit and am an absorbing
form”
--Arthur Sze
I sit before a manuscript I received
as a gift: the poems in BOLD WORDS.
I have read them all and am returning to an excerpt from “The
Redshifting Web” by Arthur Sze. To
paraphrase this poet whose clear-eyed openness to the world has taught me as much
as his words about the grace that is poetry, I absorb “the moments of molten
gold” wrought by this book’s 27 poets.
I turn to a goblet on my desk and
raise the thin crystal to the white light embracing St. Helena, California
where I recently moved from New York City.
Within its hold lies a swirling liquid poured from a bottle of Philip
Togni cabernet. The wine is colored dark
red—and I recall mother’s gift of a ruby bracelet. I notice glycerine leaving visible tracks
against the wine glass—and I recall a long afternoon looking at London behind
rain streaming across a hotel window in a manner similar to the liquid coating
my glass. I raise the wine and revel in
its bouquet, inhaling aromas of vanilla, leather, oak and herbs—and I recall
the scent of my grandparents’ tobacco fields in the Philippines where I once
frolicked as a little girl. Finally, I
take my first sip; the wine does not disappoint with its rich and concentrated
tannic taste bearing elements of plums and black berries, leather and smoked
meats—and I recall a set of memories involving goats: a backyard barbecue in
Vallejo which, in turn, evoked an alley in Kathmandu where I had stared at the
long-whiskered animals peering at me from second-story windows.
Once more, I return to Arthur Sze’s
poem: “as moments coalesce, (I) see to travel far is to return.” Yes, it is time to return to the poems
themselves. Are these “Asian American”
poems? After the seminal anthology PREMONITIONS
(Kaya, 1995) edited by Walter Lew required over 500 pages to even come close to
displaying the range and diversity of Asian American poets, I am considering
the challenge posed to any scholar, editor or critic asked to put together a
collection representing “Asian American” poetry. Such a task occurred for the editors of BOLD
WORDS amidst a growing recognition at the turn of the century that there
may be no such thing as “Asian America.”
Perhaps the label was once—for some, is still—convenient for addressing
the invisibility of certain writers within the so-called literary canon of the
United States, as addressed by the first anthology I read described as Asian
American poetry: the groundbreaking THE OPEN BOAT (Anchor
Books/Doubleday, 1993) edited by Garrett Hongo.
But, unless all such anthologies can bear at least 500 pages of poems,
does not the label also work to reduce the presentation of diversity within its
community?
As I consider what to say about the
poems in BOLD WORDS which is described as an Asian American anthology
encompassing a century of writing, I sit and am an absorbing form. And it occurs to me that much wisdom might be
available in simplicity: what I wish to suggest to you, Dear Reader, is to read
and interact directly with the poems themselves. Read the poems for what the poems say to you,
rather than through the clouds of context in which the poetry of their authors
have been featured, whether as works by writers-of-color, creations from a
multicultural canon, songs from a diaspora, or hymns from Asian America. These poems are not tokens—let alone tokens
of something that artificially exists, or may not exist, called “Asian
America.” These poems are poems.
These poems are poems—what
does that mean? I suggest that poems
have their own lives separate from what are said about them, and that they
exist so that you, Dear Reader, may respond directly to them and not to
what I or anyone else would say about them. A poem, or any work of art,
can engender a space for interaction with the audience—there is no need to
predefine the nature of that engagement.
Indeed, I suggest that poems ask you to respond to them in the way I
responded earlier in this essay to the experience of tasting Philip Togni’s
cabernet. Like poetry, wine can be about
nostalgia—linking a smell, sight, taste and feel to a prior experience by the
wine drinker. Thus, one can hear
oenophiles relating wine to such things as “grilled lamb,” “tobacco,”
“blackberries,” “the smell of wet hay,” “dust,” or “gravel.” Notwithstanding phrases that may seem
over-reaching, the wine lovers are trying to relate the experience to their
memories—is this not how one may also read a poem? That is, a poem transcends its author’s
autobiography when it manages to articulate a space where different readers
will feel a variety of emotional responses to the same words—a variety of reactions
because each reader bears a different set of memories.
Consequently, I don’t wish to
present the poems in this book within only one context, e.g. “Asian
America.” I don’t ever wish to tell
readers how to respond to Art. How can
I? Dear Reader, you and I are different
people. For instance, how can you mirror
my response to Janice Mirikitani’s poem “Recipe” unless you were (with) me as a
teenager attending Gardena High School with someone we shall call “Tammy.” Gardena, California contains/ed one of the
largest Japanese-American communities in the mainland U.S. Tammy was an unprepossessing-looking girl who
easily got lost in the crowd. The first
time I noticed her was when she arrived at school one day bearing the
feature of “round eyes” for which Mirikatani had written a recipe-poem. Julia
apparently attained the desired result, complete with double eyelids, through
bodily surgery rather than through the use of scotch tape and black liner as
suggested in Mirikatani’s poem. As I
envisioned the scalpel slitting the smooth seamless slopes of Tammy’s eyelids,
I winced.
It is the same wince I felt upon
first reading Mirikitani’s poem. But
you, dear Reader, who’s never met Tammy or someone like her, might respond
differently. You might look at the poem
and think it a comment on society’s views on what defines Beauty; that the poem
uses recipe to reference the importance of food in Asian social interactions;
that the directive “Cleanse face” rather than “wash face” implies something
“dirty” about the Asian face; and that the overall focus on “face” relates to
the masks attributed to and, indeed, worn by some Asian Americans.
Both responses are equally valid—my
response of a deeply-felt shudder or the latter reaction I imagined from a
reader sensitized to read the poem in an Asian American context. I share both interpretations because I
believe that most if not all of the poets in BOLD WORDS—to the extent
they even consider their poems’ audience—would not wish to privilege one type
of response over another. Do you need to have the phrase “Asian America”
running through your mind to appreciate Li-Young Lee’s love poem, “This Room
and Everything in It”? Lee sings: “This
desire, perfection./ Your closed eyes my extinction/ . . .The sun is/ God, your
body is milk/ . . . it had something/ to do with love.” Faced with these words, I wish only to move
out of the poem’s way.
In another example, one of my friends read Vince Gotera’s
poem “Beetle on a String,” a poem set in the Philippines. My friend loved the poem because it reminded
her of similar childhood play in New Orleans. “The poem,” my friend added,
“made me realize how intimate this vast world can be.” As my friend did, dear Reader, go directly to
the poems themselves. Read and trust
your responses—or lack thereof—to the poems.
Sit and be an absorbing form. The direct relationship between
reader and poem unencumbered by critics, academics and theorists (or writers of
poetry introductions) is the most honest, most passionate and most true interaction.
*****
I confess that I am also reluctant
to contextualize poems because I believe it is impossible to fully capture the
poem in talking about it; one can experience the poem without verbalizing the
experience. The impossibility of
defining the golden moments called poems relates, I believe, to the experience
of the poem being formed significantly by what the reader gives to it. Empathy—with its related intangibles
that have been called “heart,” “spirit,” “grace” and “compassion”—are crucial
if one is to engage with the poem, whether in writing or reading it. Thus, in discussing the poetry in BOLD
WORDS, I am left inarticulate—and wish to remain inarticulate—in addressing
the humanity of the poet and reader that would determine their experience with
a poem. But I can address poetic form.
Many of the poems in BOLD WORDS use a narrative which
allows the poets to share stories: Alfred Yuson’s co-optation of the Pop
artist-icon in “Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipino Maids”; Garrett Hongo’s
moving description of how Los Angeles in October “seethes like a billboard
under twilight” in “Yellow Light”; Chitra Divakaruni’s heart-rending evocation
of the sacrifices of Punjab immigrant farmers in “The Founding of Yuba City”;
Lawson Inada’s urgent love cries in “Filling the Gap”; Cathy Song’s deft riff
on miserliness in “A Conservative View”; the sensuality of chocolate in Tina
Koyama’s “The Chocolatier”; and the way memories refuse to die in Linh Dinh’s
“The Dead.” These poems explain why
Meena Alexander was moved to write, “We must always return/ to poems for news
of the world.”
I wish to address poetic form because the presence of
Marilyn Chin and Kimiko Hahn in BOLD WORDS reminded me of the
controversial THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY (Scribner, 1998)
edited by Harold Bloom. This anthology
was culled from the 1988-1997 BEST AMERICAN POETRY annuals. The 1996 volume guest-edited by Adrienne Rich
and featuring many ethnic-American writers such as Chin and Hahn was the only
volume not represented in Bloom’s compendium.
Indeed, Bloom attacked this volume as one where he “failed to discover
more than an authentic poem or two in it.”
Bloom explains, “That 1996 anthology…seems to me a monumental
representation for the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of
overwhelming us.” Us? Bloom continues, “It is of a badness not to
be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most
are race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of
the would-be poet.”
After reading Bloom’s essay, I immediately recalled Chin’s
counsel in my book which interviews 15 Asian American poets, BLACK
LIGHTNING: POETRY IN PROGRESS (AAWW, 1998).
Chin notes, “My advice to young poets is to cultivate a strong stomach
for rejection. The dominant society will
tell you that you may not enter the canon, because what you have to say does
not matter to them.”
This is not the place to rebut Bloom and those who feel the
way he does. But I wish to note this
issue—and for young Asian American poets reading this book, to offer
encouragement—because this issue is not likely to go away. How can it?
Poems are not mere words; they are living creatures. Bloom is entitled
to his opinions—but should not his criticism directly address the “badness” of
the poems rather than the overall approach of the poems in addressing “race,
gender, sexual oriental, ethnic origin and political purpose”? Poets write poems based on their concerns. For example, Mitsuye Yamada’s poem “Thirty
Years Under” evokes a disgraceful period in U.S. history when Japanese
Americans were interned in camps: “there is nothing more/ humiliating/ more
than beatings/ more than curses/ than being spat on// like a dog.” Such a poem needs to exist. The alternative is, as Yamada writes, to
“travel[…] blind.” Let me repeat the
excerpt from Alexander’s poem “News of the World” and continue it one line
further: “We must always return/ to poems for news of the world/ or perish from
the lack.”
How can an Asian American poet ignore one’s culture,
ethnicity and community in writing poems?
The question evokes what I consider to be a dead-on assessment by poet
and critic John Yau which he shares in BLACK LIGHTNING, “The identity
issue is a major issue not being addressed by modernist and post-modernist
poets. It’s not been addressed by later
modernist poets because many often want to assimilate and be part of the
mainstream and, thus, do not question the mainstream’s use of identity, how it
fixes them with a narrow possibility.
It’s not being addressed by post-modernists because they say the author
is dead. But why is the author dead at a
point when demographics have changed such that all these people who were once
marginalized and silenced can now talk—but during a period when the author is
supposedly dead?”
Identity, of course, is a critical issue for the Asian
American community where the silencing of poets may mean the silencing of
history or translate to invisibility within “mainstream” culture. Indeed, one of BOLD WORDS’ strengths
lies in how—as an Asian American collection—it includes the work of ethnicities
less published than East Asians: Vietnamese-, Filipino- and South
Asian-American poets. Indran
Amirthanayagam recalls how a civil war devastated a country now lost to him called
“Ceylon”—“Pity the poor lion,/ pity the poor tiger,/ the cobra, the elephant,/
the fish and fowl/ the birds and beasts/ who see their jungle cut down/ to
build huts/ for knife throwers guns/
bombs rapists/ thieves of every
color// who come to drink the milk/ and eat the bread/ of young boys and girls/
who’ve always been told,/ when the beggar comes/ give something, give something
you like/ like your life.”
Whatever poetry’s unique special demands may be are not
necessarily divorced from a poet’s social concerns. Some Asian American poets who do not “talk
story” in their poems do so in opposition to a sociological reading of their
works which often prevails among critics and academics. The latter response, however, still reflects
a poet’s social consciousness. Thus,
when it comes to poetic form the Asian American poet’s concerns—to the extent
one understands that such factors as racism and objectification have afflicted
Asian America—might also lead to the rupturing of traditional poetic forms
which predominate in the literary mainstream.
I, for one, am interested in disrupting narrative in my poems as a
result of exploring issues of colonialism and postcolonialism. In this book, one may interpret form as
opposition through the prose paragraphs of Christian Langworthy’s “Sestina”;
Jessica Hagedorn’s bow to Black vernacular in her poem “Smokey’s Getting Old”
written during a period when she was searching for a language that also evoked
the hybrid “Taglish,” a combination of Tagalog and English; Walter Lew’s
gorgeous use of the page as a field in “Ch’Onmun Hak”; Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s use
of Hawaiian “local” language in “Kala Gave Me Anykine Advice Especially About
Filipinos When I Moved to Pahala”; and, naturally, Janice Mirikatani’s
recipe-like structure in “Recipe.”
A significant number of Asian American poets have addressed
and continue to push the boundaries of poetic form: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
(whose groundbreaking poems informed by a feminist perspective turn politics
into astoundingly-beautiful art), Yau, Myung Mi Kim as well as more emerging
poets such as Catalina Cariaga, Tan Lin, Brian Kim Stefans, Sianne Ngai, Nick
Carbo and Oliver de la Paz. (I specify
these poets partly because they have published at least one poetry
collection). When one understands that
the 21st century is unlikely to leave behind the race-based atrocities or
diaspora-induced anguish that have afflicted Asian America, it makes sense to
me that many Asian American poets also would write in opposition.
Nonetheless, it is the slippery nature of art that as soon
as one attempts to categorize it, the art slips away. As a poet—thus, practitioner—I realize that
before a poet came to write something that is later labeled “oppositional” the
poet may have intended something else, including simply trying to develop one’s
craft. Sometimes, a poem is just a
poem—or, as Eric Chock writes in his poem “Strawberries” and which I choose to read
as a metaphor for this point: “I’m just an ordinary man/ who loves
strawberries./ I love to grab the green
fuzziness/ in my gathered fingertips/ and dip the seedy point in sour cream/
and brown sugar/ and into my waiting lips./ Mmmm, that’s a sweet kiss worth/
repeating all night,/ just an ordinary man/ loving his strawberries./ And I don’t
want to have to think/ who picked them with/ what brown illegal alien fingers,/
back bent under the California sun….”
In other words, a poem by an Asian American poet can be
read, too, for pleasure alone rather than within a particular context. This possibility again highlights the
importance of the reader investing attention in reading a poem for it is that
investment which will cause the poem to mature.
Indeed, I mentioned earlier that BOLD WORDS is admirable for
including members of ethnicities not as well represented by older Asian
American anthologies. However, the more
that one widens the net cast to round up poets for a collection, the more one
may see commonalities of experience: the pensiveness of reminiscence in Aga
Shahid Ali’s “In Search of Evanescence”; the meditation/mediation on dying in
Bao-long Chu’s “The bitterness of Bodies We Bear”; the questioning of laws in
Luis Francia’s “Walls”; the disconcertion—hidden fear?—felt by a child
monitoring how parents slip irrevocably into old age in Barbara Tran’s “The
Body”; the anticipation of returning to a childhood home in Reetika Vazirani’s
“Reading the Poem about the Yew Tree”; and an immigrant’s invisibility in
Alfrredo Navarro Salanaga’s “They Don’t Think Much About Us in America.”
This “universality” makes sense, and
only emphasizes again the critical role of the reader in making poems
live. Critics have written about how
humanity relates to common experiences in the remote past when many of our propensities
were acquired as adaptations to environment.
In a recent conversation, the Filipino poet Bino A. Realuyo said, “I
look at a page the way I have always looked at a canvas because I used to
paint. Our eyes have an intense desire
for symmetry. Even those who try to go
against nature by drawing assymmetrical lines eventually create beauty through
abstraction—one reason why the avant garde never quite remains avante garde for
long is because they eventually fulfill our human desire for beauty.”
In other words, poems live through
the exercise of the shared humanity among and between poets and readers. You, the Reader, play a critical role in the
life of a poem. The poem is a hand
reaching out and it lives only if you yourself reach out and clasp that
hand. I return to Arthur Sze’s poem
which—like many of this poet’s works—is marked by his ability to find
connections among varied elements within the universe. The open-minded and open-hearted empathy in
Sze’s words may teach much about how one may write and read a poem: “I absorb
the weight of a pause when it tilts/ the conversation in a room. I absorb the moments/ he sleeps holding her
right breast in his left hand/ and know it resembles glassy waves in a harbor/
in descending spring light. Is the mind
a mirror?/ . . . I absorb the stench of burning cuttlefish bone,/ and as
moments coalesce see to travel far is to return.” Dear Reader, sit and be an absorbing form.
*****
In response to a request by BOLD WORDS’ editors to
predict some trends in Asian American poetry, I believe there will be a
continued diversity in poetic styles without departing from the stories in
one’s community—neither are mutually exclusive.
This point seems rather basic, until one understands that a major
tension in contemporary American poetry has been the debate between (i)
language as material versus (ii) that the poem is rooted in the ego. This paradigm cannot adequately address Asian
American poetry. For Asian American
poets, the poem is not separable from culture even when the form would seem to
suggest less focus than overt narrative indicates on issues related to
identity.
It is apt for poetry to combine two seemingly opposing
positions—the reader’s subjectivity and the importance of the poet’s
biography. As Alexander noted in BLACK
LIGHTNING, “The poem on the page is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of what endures, turning into the soil
of the poem, is carried within, unseen, even worldless.” Autobiography matters, and the Poem
also transcends autobiography.
In fact, it seems to me that being an Asian American poet
lends itself to transcending not just canonical views on “form” but to
transcending poetry itself to work in other categories such as fiction and
essays. As one who edits in addition to
writes, I consider all of my activities integral to being a poet, particularly
as an Asian American poet. Garrett
Hongo, David Mura and others who also write both prose and poetry have spoken
about the importance of providing criticism concurrent with creating their
poems. In particular, I recall Mura once
saying that he writes memoirs partly to lay out a context for his poems—that
otherwise no one else might do so, or perhaps do so in a manner that Mura would
appreciate.
I believe the overwhelmingly positive response to BLACK
LIGHTNING resulted because, as Sze notes in his Introduction, up to BLACK
LIGHTNING “critical discussion of Asian American poetry lag[ged] behind
artistic accomplishment. The discourse
tend[ed] to center on race and identity, and …just beginning to address theory
and practice and the polysemous nature of the work.” However, by offering a poetry-in-progress
format, BLACK LIGHTNING also allowed poets to comment on their own
writing processes versus the more common presentation of having
"others" critiquing their works. Subsequently, my favorite review of the book would come to
be from a critic who said the book damned the notion that there is no “I”
behind poems.
*****
The best poems resonate, leave behind a simmering feeling in
response to its words. The same occurs
with wine: long after the wine has been swallowed, its aftermath lingers along
the edges of your tongue. What we might
call “resonance” in a poem is what oenophiles call “finish” for wines. For me, I often say about a moving poem, “It
has a long finish” versus “It resonates.”
The poetry in BOLD WORDS reverberate in a manner I need not
define for you. Dear Reader, simply Sit
and be an absorbing form.
Let me share some of what resonates for me from the poems in
BOLD WORDS: questions, not answers.
Christian Langworthy’s question, “Why does autumn undress the way you
do?” Meena Alexander’s question, “What
ink can inscribe them now/ the young of Tiananmen?” Marilyn Chin’s question, “What shall we cook
tonight?/ Perhaps these six tiny squid/ lined up so perfectly on the
block?” Vince Gotera’s question, “It
makes me shiver now/ to wonder what thoughtless boy holds my string?” Cathy Song’s question, “How else are you
going to get those damn pa-kes to share?”
Jessica Hagedorn’s question, “did you/ come with yr daddy in 1959/ on a
second-class boat crying all the while/
cuz you didn’t want to leave the
barrio”? Alfrredo Navarro Salanga’s question,
“Who cares?”
I introduce the poetry in BOLD WORDS by asking you,
dear Reader, “Which poem(s) shall transport you with a long finish?”
*****
No comments:
Post a Comment