November 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town
by Heather Taylor Johnson
ISBN 9781921869662
Interactive Press
Reviewed by NATHANAEL O’REILLY
While searching online for new collections of Australian poetry in 2008, I came across Heather Taylor Johnson’s debut collection, Exit Wounds (Picaro Press, 2007). As an Australian residing in the United States, I was immediately intrigued by Taylor Johnson’s bio – she is an American who moved to Australia in 1999, married an Australian and is now raising children in Adelaide. As an Australian living in America, married to an American and raising a child in Texas, I sensed that I would find much to connect with in Taylor Johnson’s work. When I read Exit Wounds, I was pleased to find a collection of wonderful poems about expatriation, family, loss, belonging, acceptance, distance and establishing a new life in another country. When given the opportunity to review Taylor Johnson’s second collection, I was eager to discover how her poetry has developed.
Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town addresses many of the same themes as Exit Wounds; however, the new poems are set in the United States rather than Australia, focusing on experiences, events and relationships during 2010, a year Taylor Johnson spent with her family living in Salida, a small town in Colorado. The collection contains forty-eight poems, some of which have appeared previously in journals including Mascara, Transnational Literature, Five Poetry Journal and Page Seventeen. Taylor Johnson’s poetics favours personal poems less than thirty lines in length, although she also composes the occasional prose poem. She experiments with stanza and line length, sometimes adhering to a specific pattern, such as the eighteen couplets of “Everything is Possible Today,” at other times incorporating stanzas and lines of varying length, as well as spaces within lines, as she does in “Ladies’ Night at the Vic.” Taylor Johnson often employs punctuation minimally, but it is never totally eschewed. The overall result is a style that is casual and playful, yet not highly experimental. Taylor Johnson’s diction favours the vernacular and is always accessible; her poetry invites and welcomes the reader into her world, never excluding or pushing away.
The physical environment in Colorado, especially the Rocky Mountains, plays a major role in Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town. The opening poem, “Salida,” establishes the focus on nature: “You have always been – / when the sun rose / as the trout swam / before the Rockies had a name.” Throughout the collection, the poet and her children, husband and friends are frequently depicted outside enjoying nature, marvelling at the mountains, playing in the snow, riding bikes, swimming in waterfalls, being caressed by “a sexy wind” (“Amongst It”) “while lazing outdoors, always outdoors” (“We Are All Consonants”). Thus, Taylor Johnson combines nature with the personal in a manner reminiscent of the British Romantic poets. The collections’ title highlights the personal focus of the poems, many of which are love poems to Taylor Johnson’s husband. The poet repeatedly celebrates love, joy, beauty, motherhood and family life.
In “We Are All Consonants,” Taylor Johnson mentions Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman, and she also quotes Angelou in “Morning After,” while Rita Dove and Erica Jong are both named in “I will give you soup.” The acknowledgment of the influence of feminist writers is not surprising, especially for readers familiar with Taylor Johnson’s previous work. Taylor Johnson’s poetry celebrates many aspects of womanhood, including the physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional. Additionally, the acknowledgment of Angelou’s influence points to the inspirational aspect of Taylor Johnson’s work, which can be clearly seen in “Ladies’ Night at the Vic” and “I will give you soup.” Inspirational poetry is disparaged in some quarters, and the challenge for a poet like Taylor Johnson is to write about such topics without doing so in a manner that is trite, overly sentimental, or simply uninteresting to anyone who does not know the poet personally; whether or not Taylor Johnson’s work crosses the invisible border is purely a matter of the individual reader’s taste.
The engagements with the issue of expatriation in the new collection reveal an evolution in Taylor Johnson’s poetics. Rather than the exit wounds of her debut collection, the poet’s expatriate status is acknowledged and accepted, but not lamented. In the humorous prose poem, “An Ode to American Microbrews,” the speaker describes her accent as “hybrid” and “hemispheric,” signalling recognition of a changed identity and suggesting that the new hybrid status is an addition rather than a subtraction. In the same poem, the speaker declares “I love my country,” referring to the United States, but plans to mail the labels steamed from the beer bottles “back to Australia.” In “Love Poem,” an American flag is “torn to shreds” by the wind while the Australian flag flies solidly beneath it, perhaps suggesting that a choice has been made regarding allegiance. Throughout the collection, Australia is positioned as the permanent home of the poet, and America is presented as a temporary dwelling-place and former home. Nevertheless, the dark side of the expatriate condition is never far below the surface; in “Distant Cousins,” a poem about visiting relatives in Aberdeen, Washington, Taylor Johnson writes:
Sadness catches in my chest as I inhale Pacific mist
wonder if we’ll see each other again,
Australia so far it bends even time.
At our age we think about these things –
family, mobility, the hesitation of each day.
Funerals also too easy to imagine.
Despite acknowledging the dark side of life, Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town is an overwhelmingly positive collection. Taylor Johnson obviously enjoys and appreciates life and has the admirable ability to find joy in the everyday. Her ability to experience simple pleasures, rather than merely observe them, is evident in “I ♥ California”:
Cold patches in the lake
and oh, the water, how we drank
the runoff of the Sierra Nevada
how we caught it from the river
(The phrase “oh, the water” seems to be borrowed from Van Morrison’s “And It Stoned Me,” in which the phrase is used repeatedly.) The physical pleasure of engaging with nature is also declared in “Love Poem” when the speaker exclaims “it’s this sun my god licking me / I’ve been drunk on it all day.” Taylor Johnson also clearly derives a great deal of pleasure from reading, writing and publishing poetry. In “Book Launch,” the speaker declares, “Poetry / you move me to silence / … / I wake with you, all day / mine, others, friends, those dead / all day you, and the rest is life.” The poet’s joy is abundant in the final stanza of the poem:
Oh the bound book! The published collection!
The reason to wear my frock!
Poetry, you sly unspoken pearl,
tonight I wear you like a necklace.
For her second collection, Taylor Johnson has moved from one fine publisher of Australian poetry to another. Interactive Press has produced an eye-catching colour cover featuring a photograph of a turquoise flower with pink and red leaves lying in the sand. The back cover is adorned with a photograph of a smiling Taylor Johnson and blurbs from Chris Ransick, Jill Jones and Libby Hart. Interactive Press are to be commended for producing a beautiful book, but the choice of font, especially the cursive style of each poem’s title, strikes me as lacking gravitas. Similarly, I found Taylor Johnson’s use of spaces and forward slashes within lines distracting and affected. The spaces may encourage some readers to pause a little longer between phrases, but the forward slashes do not seem to add anything to the poems, appearing more decorative than substantive. Nevertheless, it is the content of the poems that matters most. I particularly admire Taylor Johnson’s willingness to write honestly about the personal and her ability to develop her own individual voice without regard for movements, trends or critical snobbery. Taylor Johnson has produced another fine collection of contemporary poems that deserves a wide audience and multiple readings.
NATHANAEL O’REILLY is the author of two chapbooks, Suburban Exile: American Poems and Symptom of Homesickness, both published by Picaro Press. He teaches Australian, Postcolonial, British and Irish literature at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.
November 16, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Red Sea
by Stephen Edgar
Baskerville Publishing
ISBN 978-1-880909-78-2
Reviewed by JAL NICHOLL
What a peculiar thing the meditative lyric is. How different in spirit from Basho’s instruction to poets: “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn.” Of course, Western art has generally been practiced in a more “Faustian” spirit. And as it happens, Stephen Edgar’s collection has a poem which takes Oswald Spengler for its speaker:
The animalcule in a drop of dew—
And so diminutive
That if the human eye should look clear through
That globe there would be nothing there to see—
Although it only has a blink to live,
Yet in the face of this is free;
The oak, in whose vast foliage this dot
Hangs from a single leaf, is not.
Although the speaker usually resembles Edgar himself (or someone of his generation and nationality), the Spengler poem is typical in that many poems here have as their explicit occasion or premise a scene which is mute in itself – a quiet seascape, as in the title poem – on which the poet projects his recurrent themes.
Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
“The Red Sea” begins, before ending, once more, with sunset:
And sunset’s dye begins to spread
[…] As though hoping to disown
The blood of all the innocents he’d shed
Macbeth incarnate or his grisly clone
Had stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand
Thematically, time and death are everywhere in this collection. Edgar is a poet unafraid to hit the thematic nail on the head: an attitude which, parallel to a use of form that most contemporary poets would rather be gagged and bound than emulate, is what pre-eminently marks Edgar’s style as classical.
Edgar’s syntax forces one to read intellectually. His formalism, often remarked on, is the most obviously distinguishing characteristic of his verse. But on a deeper level he is distinguished by his discursiveness: there are no songs in this book; every poem is a meditation.
The dominant mood in this volume is of nostalgia – and for more than the just the lost time of personal history but for a “Western” civilisation that now, in the twenty-first century, exists ambiguously between a life and death of its own. We live in a time that is experienced as peculiarly atemporal in the confluence of images mediated by technology. Indeed, the representational power of technology is a theme in more than one poem here. “Man on the Moon,” for example, televisually recalls Plato’s parable of the Cave:
Crouching in Mr Langshaw’s tiny flat,
The whole class huddled round the TV screen.
“Living Colour”, similarly, deals with
Torch-haunted rallies conjuring the tribe,
The pavements lined
With adoration’s awful unison;
And the corpses piled like clothing,
a mere four lines fully disclosing the deterministic mediation that was already lurking in the final line of the first stanza:
This Munich, underneath the flawless blue
The poem is hereby located self-knowingly within a genre of cultural representation in which Steven Spielberg outshines Anthony Hecht.
Throughout The Red Sea the reader is stuck by the extent to which Edgar’s language and style, despite their universalistic formality, can be culturally specific to the point of parody. In “The House of Time,” for example, a door opens in some quaint manse of the mind, and we meet
his aunt
Playing a Polonaise by Chopin
Badly. “Lenore,
We know you think you can, dear, but you can’t.”
Behind an image, a register and a rhythm (in what is a psychological, rather than an historical poem) it is possible to highlight a potent, though self-effacing cultural specificity of which Edgar, as a late representative of an Anglophillic poetic tradition stretching back through Peter Porter, and A.D. Hope, is perhaps unaware.
Associated with membership of an ethnic group in decline within a given territory goes, understandably, a sense of unease in respect to those on the advance:
Among the suburbs summer has its way
And foreign scripts on once habitual
Shopfronts flash to remind
The jogging passenger that still today
Continues the old ritual
With a new but undeflectable endeavour,
For all that childhood has resigned
Granting that Edgar is a classical poet, childhood here must signify innocence in the sense of blissful ignorance (as opposed to its romantic signification of limitless possibility). His use of the politically incorrect “foreign” signals a stoic alienation before the changing cityscape—and what are we to make of “endeavour”?!
In an Australian poetry scene to which Ouyang Yu contributes his “Invading Australia” sequence, Edgar’s WASP-ish propriety, his eschatological themes and his persistent tone of alienation and melancholy are surely just as interesting, from an ethno-poetic viewpoint, as minority or immigrant perspectives.
But it may be that the ironies and implications to which I have just pointed are more in the nature of complicities. Edgar is, after all, a kind of literary Velasquez, whose Las Meninas is the subject of “Diversions of a Painter”:
But art begins here to bamboozle.
What seemed a portrait on the wall
At first glance is, on close perusal
Really a mirror after all.
In the same way, Edgar’s are always flowers that have the look of flowers that are looked at. Take, for example, this characteristic likening of the natural to the artificial, the real to the representation:
You stood beside your gloved and hatted mother,
An undeciphered pictogram
You’d almost take to be another
Ghosting the grainy footage.
The end of this insidious process, in which, perhaps, Spengler’s philosophy of technics plays a supporting role, is that –
You’re caught between
Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.
By description after description the human subject recedes, as though rendered obsolete by technological advance, and the classical reserve of Edgar’s style threatens, at least in principle, to morph into something as de trop as Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:
From “Midas”:
And truly it was out of him they came—
Too soon not at his bidding, precisely where
And when and how he wished each one to tease
The nerve of his delight, but ever more
Autonomous, unchecked, incontinent.
A poem like “Midas” possesses as much autonomy as, perhaps, it is possible for a linguistic artifact to do; one probably wouldn’t describe it as unchecked or incontinent, however!
Alan Watts, in The Wisdom of Insecurity, speaks of ‘the confusion of Ouroboros, the mixed-up snake, who does not know that his tail belongs with his head.’ This condition, Watts suggests, is characteristic of civilised humanity as such. Edgar makes reference to many myths and mythical beings in The Red Sea, and though the autophagous snake is not among them, ‘Midas’ quoted above, may have a similar point. What it is, I will not be so earnest as to make explicit, except to say that Edgar is a civilised man – and he knows it. As for his classicism, Edgar doesn’t make what is difficult look easy; his strength is to make it look exactly as hard as it is.
JAL NICHOLL is a poet whose work has appeared in The Age, Cordite, Mascara and elsewhere. He lives in Melbourne and dreams of escape.
The editor notes a review of Stephen Edgar’s poetics, which does not emphasise an ethno-poetic reading, appears in issue six.
November 12, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
All Just
by David Herd
Carcanet Press
ISBN 9781847771636
Reviewed by ANN VICKERY
All Just (2012) is David Herd’s second collection published by Carcanet Press (the first being Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir (2005)). The epigraph by Giorgio Agamben foregrounds the volume’s key theme which is to explore what it means to be political in contemporary times: “The thought of our time finds itself confronted with the structure of the exception in every area”(n.pag.) In many respects, All Just is Herd’s response to the epigraph to Agamben’s own book State of Exception(2005): “Why are you jurists silent about that which concerns you?” Agamben views the state of exception as the site of uncertainty or “no-man’s land” between the legal and the political.(1) As he points out, the state of exception is a structure in which the law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension and is increasingly a dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. Perhaps the most obvious example is the U.S.A. Patriot Act which “allowed the attorney general to ‘take into custody’ any alien suspected of activities that endangered the national security of the United States.” This Act, as Agamben points out,” “erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being.” He or she becomes simply a ‘detainee,’ the “object of a pure de facto rule”(3). In “Fact,” Herd notes a similar erasure of rights in the British system: “when a detainee/ from the Dover Immigration Removal Centre” is not entitled to attend his own bail hearing and the bail hearing is “officially un-/recorded”(27). The poem foregrounds the dehumanisation involved in applying the letter of the law under a state of exception. In transposing the legal statement to verse form, chopping it into lines, and framing it through William Carlos William’s whimsical imagist poem, “This is just to say—”, Herd undoes the statement’s objective, totalising force as rule.
In his essay on Kafka, Walter Benjamin proposed that “[t]he law which is studied but no longer practised is the gate to justice”(qtd in Agamben 63). That is, justice is approached not through rejecting a law that no longer has any meaning, but “in having shown that it ceases to be law and blurs at all points of life.” Agamben argues that only a “studious play” with the law will be that which “allows us to arrive at that justice […] a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical”(64). He continues, “To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of ‘politics.’” For Agamben, politics has, of late, been contaminated by law, “seeing itself, at best, as constituent power.” However, in Agamben’s view, “The only truly political act […] is that which severs the nexus between violence and law”(88).
This may seem like a lengthy way to getting around to talking about All Just but necessary, I think, in order to demonstrate just how significant and pressing a task Herd takes on. Herd dedicates All Just to Alpha, a synonym for “beginning” or first of a new use. It is a utopic gesture. The opening poem, “3 a.m.,” considers what Alain Badiou might call an evental moment of Rimbaud writing,
What he imagined was a vanishing point,
A tenacious correspondence between diverse spheres.
Or rather, a kind of serenity [eue’maneria, beautiful day]
The new politics which remains largely to be invented.
That’s what it’s all about,
3 a.m.
Candle. Birds. Trees. Bread.
Seized [s’est chargé],
Already the staccato.
Just about, merely
Circulating. (11)
The elements of this “new politics” can be found in terms, “3 a.m.,” “Candle,” “Birds,” “Tree,” “Bread.” As Agamben notes, language too can be cut from the confines of grammar although it gains meaning through discourse or through “merely/ Circulating”(37). In seizing these mundane words, Rimbaud stages an act of violence and challenges their normal use. In so doing, he reveals language as an empty space. This “staccato” is the suspension of the law, by which there is the possibility of “Just about”, a possible glimpse to the “vanishing point” of justice.
The collection’s title All Just suggests that the poems within might be viewed together, studiously or ‘just’ playing with, or layering one another towards the state of justice. As such, they can be approached singularly but have additional charge if read serially. Sometimes, this might be a recurring word, such as “plum.” Tying the poems between each other and back to William’s “This is just to say”, Herd ranges from a state of potential in being “plumready”(23) or “When the plums were first ready”(31) to that of destruction, with an image of plums smashed in other poems. In some cases, the connection between poems is made overt (such as through a play on title) and could be seen almost as variations. These are poems where words and phrases are extracted and rearranged, a process of condensation that encourages (Objectivist-like) a heightened attention to the remaining words and to their surrounding space. The following two poems is an example of this pairing:
Ecology
Along the broken road
nearby the disparate houses
where summers, coming into purple
the mallow blooms,
scattered,
carting children,
complex tools and fishing nets,
women,
‘environment acting’,
stop and exchange;
beneath wires where
afternoons
goldfinches gather,
‘Adoration of the Child and the Young St John’,
nearby the outbuildings,
a variant,
slipped open early,
‘based on conflict’,
as morning comes;
where seagulls stand
allover into language,
where mallow blooms purple along the broken road,
scattered, disparate,
‘beautifully economical’,
you stood one time
struggling
to arrive at terms. (32)
Ecology (out set)
What stands discrete
scattered against the outbuildings
mallow goldfinch complex terms
and you, stood there
not knowing if you’re coming or going
‘beautifully economical’
‘hostile world’ (33)
The first poem foregrounds being located in a particular place and time, one that seems to be of a Kentish seaside town and with the modern parent’s responsibility of “carting children” around. The poem, on one level, can be read as a glimpse into the privacy of the living being, situated between the aesthetic and the functional, between natural cycles (the seasons, life and death) and human degeneration. Yet on another level, the poem is focussed on its own artifice and, indeed, doubles up on itself in recycling its own terms and being ‘beautifully economical.’ The poem ends with “you stood one time/struggling/to arrive at terms,” questioning at one level, the terms of governance and the state prescribed to the ‘normal’, but at another level, asking what the living being might mean in relation to words. This is also reflected in “[W]here seagulls stand” being made “allover into language.” The second poem is an act of condensation from the first poem, intensifying attention to a few words and phrases. Attention is now drawn to the emptiness or white space surrounding the words. The words and phrases are “[w]hat stands discrete” out of a traditional verse form. One’s relation to these terms and phrases is less easy to navigate without poetic conventions, such that one is cast into “not knowing if you’re coming or going”. In placing terms like ‘hostile world’ in quotation marks, Herd foregrounds their clichéd over-use and possible emptiness.
A further poem, “One by One,” both enacts and reflects on Herd’s multiplication or fragmenting of poems, stating:
The poem splits,
It has no desire to become a nation,
It traffics in meanings, roots among stones,
Mallow,
People,
The things they have with them,
Corrugated outbuildings
Along the broken road. (37)
In the poem’s second stanza, the immigrant is marked as “it,” splitting identity “To begin again”(37). Identity papers are, of course, a way of positioning within and binding a living being to nation. The tendency of documents to ‘fix’ a person has been well-theorised. A number of poems in All Just explore the relationship between living being and documentation. “Sans papiers,” for instance, considers how the history of migration does not lend itself to empirical or juridical analysis because of the lack of documentation:
Where parts of the message must have disappeared
With time but also through violence, errors in transmission
So it couldn’t be framed how much movement there had been (12)
Herd puts tension on words (language) and genre (form), testing their degree of circulation and separation. Occasionally he merges words together into neologisms such as “seagullsallover”(52) and “sweethairbefalling”(55). In these instances, words are literally brought closer together, whereas in other cases, he tests word “scattering” against the blank page. He parallels the experience of making sense of linguistic terms with the difficulty of negotiating terms between two individuals. All Just is a wonderful collection because it has poetry that does what many do not, meditating upon the long-term nature of a ‘holding place’ in which to live (of intimacy, “[m]aking a home”(53) and “establishing a living”(53)). The articulation of personal structures, both their fragility and routine nature, is tenderly and eloquently set out. Not only this, but there is also a contrast between the efforts required to maintain connection and security against an alternative transience of life that marks those moving across places, such as refugees. The difficulty of knowing ‘where one stands’ both in space and affect, whether it requires particularising or details, whether one can choose where one stands, is perhaps the condition of being modern and is explored in All Just in a way that is resonant and haunting.
All Just articulates the ambiguities, uncertainties, and intersections between living beings and the structures that bind, including that of language itself. Herd suggests that “what we need surely/ Is a new kind of document equal/ To the places we constructed between us.” One might add, and to the dynamics between ourselves. All Just attempts to write just that and in doing so, is affectively moving, linguistically playful, and emphatically political.
Works Cited
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
David Herd. Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2005.
—–. All Just. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012.
November 12, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Domestic Archaeology
by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne
Grand Parade Poets, 2012
ISBN
Reviewed by BRONWN LANG
This is Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne’s second publication. Her first, People from Bones, was co-authored with Bron Bateman and the new collection, Domestic Archaeology, “has been ten years in the making and aims to take you on the journey of infertility and out the other side with your optimism left firmly intact.” Pilgrim-Byrne is indeed true to her aspirations and it is the unflinching exposure of the personal that makes this collection so charming. What seems striking about this collection is the anthropocentric inventiveness; the way Pilgrim-Byrne’s use of nature adds layers to her personal poems.
We Mums
A third of Laysan albatross pairs are female and have been known
to couple for up to 19 years.
We’re Laysan Albatross People
co-operatively breeding a new generation
of squawking individuals
(39)
Domestic Archaeology offers the reader a detailed review of Pilgrim-Byrne’s biographical experience and her familial landscape. Fertility / infertility are a central theme and throughout her collection weave a sequence of poems which document the author’s personal journey through four and a half years of IVF treatment with her same sex partner and the eventual birth of their daughter. Pilgrm-Byrne is writing for and from her times. The subject matter of her poetry is unique in its approach to universal themes and their expression in the contemporary world. She uses her poetics to specify and detail the experience of same sex motherhood in lyric and metaphoric layers.
26092007
the slice of her abdomen
the slick and slip, pull and tug
your quivering arrival
delivers the (other) mother
(16)
Domestic Archaeology is a triptych, each territory of which is exceeded in size by the next. These sections chronicle the journey between and beyond fertility / infertility. When viewed as a whole, this narrative appears to begin in medias res with “Venus of Willendorf … Her vulva trapped / between fold and fat, / a luxurious peak / of convergence” (9); this ekphrastic poem also featured in The Best Australian Poetry 2009 anthology.
Like layers of sediment the three subdivisions within Domestic Archaeology, “Excavation”, “Fauna” and “Cataloguing”, invite the reader into a process of unearthing, discovery and construction of narrative.
For those who came before
I feel as if I have let you down
scrubbed out all your hard earned
physical hand-me-downs
broken the chain–a thousand years
of pox on me.
(…)
Yet here’s an intriguing thing about families
–similarities are not all hard-wired
and in our daughter we see facial expressions,
overexcitement, or the flourish of a hand gesture
that have been gifted from you by me to her
a precious package of inheritance.”
(18)
Despite the intimate focus of the narrative, this collection never slips into self-indulgence. In part, this is because the very personal and confessional material dominating the content is tempered with works such as “My Maiden Aunt’s Lips” and “Snake in my laundry room (4am)” which view the author’s immediate surroundings through a wider lens. Perhaps this is the most obvious in Fauna which consists of a series of poems which are deft and analytic in their examination of various living creatures. Any risk of sentimentality is also avoided through Pilgrim-Byrne’s wry sense of humour.
I’m going to build a monument to infertility
where there will be no penises no breasts.
There will definitely be no vaginas–
though there will be lips
and they will be pursed and cinched
and of course, downturned.
These lips will not be dusted red
and they will not be plumped,
they will be …
blue
(14)
Domestic Archaeology deals with powerful emotions and the experiences of grief and loss. These poems appear alongside the ecstatic; harmony is found between the felicitous tone of these works and those of the darker poems such as “Home” written “In memory of Rafferty James Manhatan Downes 15/7/11 – 30/7/11” and “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.
And I learnt that if there is a God
prayer isn’t the language he understands
because if this Kris guy, after two years of living on the cusp of Hell
has been sent home to make books and videos for his sons …
if there’s no hope for him
then we’d all better learn to let the light in.
(69)
The longest poem in this collection is “Juvenesvcence, variations on a theme”. In this nine part piece aphorism and powerful imagery combine in an impressive whole.
business students learn
how to rule the world, the arts kids shape it
scientists (for better or worse) change it
(42)
… Listen
like drums
with their skin pulled tight
how the young sound
(47)
The poem from which this collection takes its name is an excellent one from which to draw the essence of Pilgrim-Byrne’s solo debut. Here, evocative imagery meets the uncluttered strength of her free-verse.
Like excavators
we sift through simple ruins
carefully
cultivating people from bones.
(50)
Domestic Archaeology is the third collection released by Grand Parade Poets, a press which believes poetry “must be at once elitist and democratic since it brings high-powered imaginative entertainment and intellectual pleasure to those willing to meet it at least part of the way. Grand Parade Poets wishes to publish poets of music, passion and intelligence”[1] and, like Pilgrim Byrnes herself, this publisher also delivers what it promises.
[1] Wearne, A. An Accidental Publisher: Alan Wearne on Grand Parade Poets and Christopher Bantinck, [16.11.2011] spunc.com.au/splog/post/an-accidental-publisher-alan-wearne-on-grand-parade-poets-and-christopher-bantick
November 10, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Grit Salute
by Keri Glastonbury
Papertiger Media
ISBN 978-0-9807695-2-4
Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON
More than any collection I’ve read recently, Keri Glastonbury’s work takes us along for her travels – we are the notebook in her back pocket, and accordingly, she wants us to remember a few things with her. And what an excellent trip. It’s a rare thing to find energetic exuberance combined so well with sharply calibrated specificity, and when this appears in poetry you know you’re in for something good.
now I’ve been toNew Yorkit’s official: no lack left!
& though I can’t lose my nostalgia, I can’t hide my relief
at the ambivalence I feel the strategies I imagined I
learnt for nothing?
(87)
Grit Salute is Glastonbury’s first full-length collection following chapbooks hygienic lily (1999) and super-regional (2001) and the distance between them has resulted in a collected that is super-honed. Questions and asides pop out constantly in these poems; they do seem to speak directly to us, as though she has somehow managed to melt the page off (like a transfer or temporary tattoo from a showbag) leaving just the words, and it’s all we can do to converse with them. There are ‘literal’ geographic travels here as well as poetic; the volume is divided into segments that include those titled and located in hygienic Italy, anti-suburb, triggering town and local/general. I would argue that the beautifully named opening group of poems ‘8 reasons why I fall for inaccessible straight boys every damn time’ is a destination just as recognisable to many of us as a European holiday (‘Take me to Unrequited, I hear the capital is lovely in the Spring…’).
The references that I always hope for are presented in spades. When looking for something new, in poetry (as anything else), I genuinely want to see things being woven in that are ripe for the plucking. I want to see work that tells me it’s of our time. I’m not talking about tokenistic inclusions, that operate like a time-and-date stamp, but nuggets of observance that beg to be put in a poem. It feels too simplistic to call these ‘pop culture’ as they are presented with lightness and a solemnity that surprises at exactly the same moment that it reassures. This is content that has the confidence to assume I know what it’s talking about. And surely this is the idea, to take for granted the importance of these thematic strands. (And it is only because I don’t see it as much as I would expect to, in ‘published’ Australian poetry, that I feel need to mention this at all.) So much is held in small fragments, such as ‘we did the sydney scene so differently’ (‘Glory That’) and ‘you never did grow up to be that carol jerems photo of a topless woman some oedipal hitch with identity’ (‘The Red Door’). The shorthand of ‘this is how I see it/sometimes we’d fuck to guitar pop/ sometimes to ambient electronica’ says more about whole decades of people’s lives than three lines should be able to contain, and yet retain nonchalance.
There is a fair serve of teenage rural memories, which can difficult to do without just seeming sentimental. Somehow it never veers towards this, despite evoking and evoking until you’re not quite sure which are Glastonbury’s ‘memories’ and which are mine. Or indeed, the second-hand memories of my friends, which she seems to have carriage of also. I know these people, and I know the attendant feelings. There are farms with tennis courts, and twilight barbecues with local squattocracy, with Glastonbury even somehow getting away with ‘your once best friend is now a companioning house frau at least she’s made it into town and is no longer “stuck out there”’.
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to have sliced up the lines of the work in the way I have; the small quotes do nothing to show the fabric they make in whole poems, a style further enhanced by the running together of lines into blocks of text. I love the manner of reading this can create, where you need to run your eye back to check whether something was an ending or a beginning. Of course it’s both, and this just sweetens the deal. ‘Triggering Town’ (from the section of the same name) shimmers with this all the way through:
…the flouncey skivvy
a show of rare authenticity which sees you investing appreciation
into perceived flaws you hope disqualify the beloved
to everybody except you generous arbiter of redoubled fantasies following a familiar maternal loop she’s not
trying to get out of interaction the moment it snares
her like everybody else is around here…
As well as journeys, the collection gives us many hints that choices, or the slipping away of choice, is as fine a parameter as any for the creation of strong and feisty poems. We can’t always see where we’re at, while we’re in it, and never more so than at the point of history where we are overloaded with information, and stimuli, and people in all their heartfelt and oversharing modes. Poetry does its job when it takes some of it and places it just so. Not to understand ourselves (God forbid), just to see. And to hear how it sounds when it’s arranged better, with cooler syntax and humour that sidles up to you and gets it right. Grit Salute has loads of style and exclamation marks to burn, and deserves much attention.
MELINDA BUFTON is Melbourne-based poet and occasional commentator on the creative process. She is currently undertaking postgraduate studies in creative writing at Deakin University and has most recently been published in The Age, Steamer and Rabbit.
November 10, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Brokenness Sonnets I–III & Other Poems
by Mal McKimmie
5 Islands Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7340-4425-9
Reviewed by TOBY DAVIDSON
When Mal McKimmie’s debut collection Poetileptic was released in late 2005, I attended the launch at Carlton theatre where I had just seen Oscar Wilde’s Salome. A small, high-quality audience of esteemed poets, editors and friends were treated to the birth of a book which had to fight and kick to be born, being from a West Australian poet in the East without extensive connections. As a result Poetileptic deserved to be born many times over, and perhaps it was in certain quarters, although it was telling that most of the Melbourne ‘scene’ preferred a simultaneous launch of a sound poetry collaboration featuring home-town standard PiO. Poetileptic was positively but sparsely reviewed, and ignored in the haphazard process of national prizes, unlike its successor which was recently awarded The Age Book of the Year Award for Poetry.
For many readers The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems, will be their first contact with McKimmie. Others may recall Dorothy Porter’s selection of the Howard-era satire ‘Jubilate Agony’ in Best Australian Poems 2006, his appearance on ABC Radio’s Poetica also in 2006, or ‘The Higher, the Fewer’ in Meanjin last year. A reader doesn’t have to have read Poetileptic to enjoy and engage with The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems, but they should be aware that the two collections are thematically, structurally and metaphorically conjoined to a greater degree than most first and second collections, not least because the ambition of the poetry is greater than most first and second collections.
The Brokenness Sonnets I, which opens proceedings, is reproduced in its entirety from the middle section of Poetileptic, with some title and order changes and the addition of a twenty-fifth piece, ‘With my dream-catcher I caught the dreams,’ where the dramatic voice is that of a woman lost in imagined past lives:
my past is my present and I am
famous in it. Who can claim as much as that?
Ssshhh … There I am up on the screen,
am I not beautiful? Goodbye Father —
No, I am happy here, here I am free —
Out on a limb, dancing in the light all day,
like a cartoon character that has sawn
the tree away.
O my mad lost daughter
While this resounds with a gravitas akin to the other voices of human brokenness in the sequence, its insights also correspond thematically with the only sonnet in the Other Poems section, ‘Doomed Youth — Newmarket Railway Station, Melbourne’:
What happiness for those who live as chattels?
— Only her monstrous personalised ringtone,
Only his triumph in playstation battles
Can make them feel they are not owned, but own.
No poetry for them; no words of power;
No New Idea, save the magazine
That shrill, demented Rupert in his tower
Excretes to supplement the TV screen.
Here, updating Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the displacement of a whole persona into borrowed fame in ‘With my dream-catcher I caught the dreams’ has become the displacement of a print culture into the digital, with the self as borrowed celebrity. The first is near-mad, the second near-collective. Little separates them, and yet because ‘Not by poets, but by prose-police / Shall their history be assembled piece by piece’, opportunities to delineate and question this are not so easily downloadable. The reference to ‘owning’ is especially poignant given the use of the word in gaming circles to mean ‘mastering’ or ‘beating’, as depicted in the recent mockumentary Pure Ownage.
Yet poets themselves are hardly absolved. Some poets’ borrowed celebrity is repeatedly stung in a piece which marries apiological allegory and ars poetica, ‘The Higher, the Fewer’:
Poetry is now the only difference between
Those who write poetry & those who do not.
Fear of this is why poets read to poets and are happy.
She said of her 500 Facebook friends:
‘They’re not a swarm, they’re a print run’.
Ouch. But to characterise this poet as broadly cantankerous, with a didactic attachment to the margins via form is akin to ignoring the loved hearth of a house you refuse to go in because roof glowers at you.
Love and joy are at the centre of McKimmie’s world, and their compression by layers of irony, cruelty and injustice only makes their eruptions more vivid and volatile, audibly so in the reactions of live audiences. Consider these:
Come, bring your newborn to me. I will hold
a river, like a baby, in my arms. (‘Yes, he will become Narcissus. It is’)
In Calcutta the beggar I could not shake was Art.
God fell from my head. She rose in my heart. (‘Escape from the Rat Gods’)
Unfurl the white flag of your surrender:
she waits for you as patient as a mirror,
but she is not a mirror, she is free.
And you love her as the wave loves vast the sea. (‘Requiescat in pace’)
Despite the pitfalls of taking lines in isolation, these snippets from The Brokenness Sonnets I indicate the deeper project of McKimmie’s work and also serve to explain why he cares enough to write the more scathing social pieces in the first place. ‘The Higher, the Fewer’, having dispatching its Facebook poet, continues in this vein with a nod to Blake:
The anonymous reader is the true apiarist, humming
From page to page, cramming his pockets with pollen until he’s
Jodhpur-thighed, trailing legs shaped like hams & is become a bee.
He might be living in a house on fire, smoke might have
Pulled a grey Salvo-Army blanket up to his chin & tucked him in,
But in his sleep, one by one or two by two, like the zzzzzzzzzz of a
Gentle snoring, bees slip from his mouth, his dream
& swarm into the shape of tomorrow.
Everything seemed like an accident:
All I did was keep bees & sleep, bees & read, sleep & bees.
Writing was only to stay awake in the smoke. Now what am I?
(Somehow saw the bloom in slow-motion,
Caught a glimpse of the locksmith opening the flower.)
There is a strange, oblique transference of identity from reader to sleeper to poet to smoker to lover to reader of all that these identities entail through the bee allegory, its Old Testament honey through the hive voice reminiscent of Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World more than any Plathian beekeeper. Is it any accident that ‘The Higher, the Fewer’ is followed by the final, and spiritual, poem of the book, ‘Three Readings Heard in a Temple’?
Like, but also beyond, his voices in The Brokenness Sonnets, McKimmie is a poet who resists the easy path and thus resists easy encapsulation. This sonneteer writes about bikies, DNA and the Internet in the same breath as religion and myth. The free verse raconteur also writes against his greatest asset, that of sustained compression, in three sections of ‘homunculi.’ These, although tiny, are not always fully formed enough, and I find some, such as ‘Like windows / Souls don’t just happen’, to be nowhere near the quality of others (‘Fish are subatomic physicists, separating O from H2O. / (I saw them doing it.)’; ‘“This is Lazarus. / I need an outside line.”’). Of highest quality still is ‘Lapsed Corona’ from ‘The Brokenness Sonnets II,’ a multidimensional masterpiece whose communing with the reader I’ll leave as a private affair, other than to recommend the work as one capable of the same immense religio-dramatic absorption as Francis Webb’s ‘The Canticle.’ And, like Webb, in The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems, the heavy weather is also the transcendent sun.
In just two collections, this poet has outstripped many more venerated poets and, while he takes his time doing whatever comes next, we should take some time with his works, because there are parts of them that are necessarily beyond their creator –and there can be no higher praise. If Mal McKimmie is not recognised as an integral part of the front rank of twenty-first century Australian poets by his next collection, I’m in the wrong game.
The Brokenness Sonnets I–III & Other Poems was awarded the 2012 Age Poetry Book of the Year.
TOBY DAVIDSON is a West Australian poet, editor and reviewer now living in Sydney where he is an Australian Literature lecturer at Macquarie University. He is the editor of Francis Webb Collected Poems (2011, ebook 2012) and author of the upcoming study Born of Fire, Possessed by Darkness: Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Cambria Press).
August 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965
by Timothy Yu
Stanford University Press, 2009
Gwee. Your book Race and the Avant-Garde, published in 2009, gives voice to the racial complications in the poetic avant-garde of America since the 1960s. You strongly suggest that its various formations have never been defined by mere abstract aesthetic principles. How do you describe the gap between white experimental poetry and Asian-American poetry and the development of this gap?
Yu. Part of my point is to question the existence of such a gap–or perhaps more precisely, to historicize the emergence of this gap. I argue in the book that at the time of its emergence in the 1970s, Asian American poetry was highly experimental. Asian American poets had as part of their challenge the task of defining what an Asian American poetic voice would sound like. So they experimented with different forms, styles, and influences. And I also argue that white experimental poets of the same period–particularly those associated with language writing–were quite self-conscious about their racial position. So while these two groups of writers may not have sounded the same, I’m suggesting that they shared similar impulses at the outset.
The idea of a gap between Asian American and (white) experimental writing seems to have emerged somewhat later, when both modes of writing had become more institutionalized, and the idea that Asian American writing was primarily autobiographical and narrative had gotten quite entrenched. In the book, I quote Ron Silliman stating that writers of color primarily want to “have their stories told,” while white progressive writers seek to deconstruct their own speaking positions (i.e., write “experimental” work). The perception of such a gap has persisted. What I tried to show is that this gap has a history and that it isn’t something essential about Asian American or experimental writing.
Gwee. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is an enigmatic figure for you. Her ethnic identity used to be suppressed in white avant-garde discourse while her experimentalism was overlooked by Asian-American criticism. How is she central to your argument?
Yu. Cha is fascinating to me because, as an avant-garde artist, she was originally not seen as fitting into Asian American literature at all! I quote a number of Asian American critics saying that they initially hated the book and couldn’t identify with it. Later, in the 1990s, of course, Cha’s Dictee, her best known work published in 1982, was embraced by Asian American readers, who hailed it as marking a new moment of hybridity and experimentation in Asian America. But in my view, many still couldn’t quite come to terms with those more abstract or avant-garde elements of the text, instead trying to link it to more traditional narratives of Asian American identity. Cha’s work seems to have this unique ability to disrupt our critical categories, and the reception of her work shows us the histories of categories like “experimental” and “Asian American.”
Gwee. You point to how black experimentalists are able to absorb and deploy a rhetoric of dissent in a manner that escapes Asian-American writers. Does this trajectory not fall back on a measure of cultural stereotyping: eg. Asians are more practical-minded, have an inassimilable, ancient culture, etc.?
Yu. My point isn’t that Asian Americans don’t have a history of dissent and resistance; they do, of course. But many Americans who saw themselves as progressive or radical in the post-1960s era tended to look to the African American example of struggle, particularly in the civil rights movement. I cite a number of examples of Asian American activists quite consciously taking African American activism as their model. Remember that “Asian American” was an invention of this activist era; Asian Americans as a pan-ethnic coalition didn’t exist before that. Of course, white radicals often felt the same anxiety with regard to the African American example; for example, I cite Tom Hayden saying of African American activists, “We should speak their revolutionary language without mocking it.”
Gwee. There is a word you appear to resist using directly in your book: racism. Is there a reason for this? What do you think the scope for such a charge in the various relationships you observe is?
Yu. That’s an interesting observation. I’ve heard at least a few people say of the book that I should have been far less hesitant to label particular attitudes or statements as racist, and that I went too easy on certain figures in this regard. I even read one review that said I embraced a “post-racial” viewpoint! Well, I didn’t consciously try to avoid talking about racism–obviously the entire Asian American political project is an anti-racist one. But if I did avoid labeling certain writers or works racist, it was probably because I wanted to contextualize and historicize rather than to issue an easy judgment. I was more interested in the fact that for Silliman and many other white experimental writers, there was an active conversation going on about race, behind the work and often within it as well–even if some elements of that conversation might create some discomfort as we read it.
It may be true that racism isn’t a major focus in my discussion of Asian American poetry, perhaps because I’m looking at the constructive dialogue happening within Asian American writing (during the 1970s particularly) about the invention of an Asian American voice. Of course responding to racism is a part of that, but it was also a matter of how Asian Americans would address each other in literature and form a literary culture, perhaps distinct from that of the (racist) mainstream.
Gwee. The term “Asian-American” is itself broad, compounding multiple distinct traditions, journeys, and private struggles. Does an insistence on the singularity of dislocation, alienation, and adaption not prove ironically restrictive in some way?
Yu. I certainly wouldn’t insist on the singularity of Asian American experience. I hope one thing I did in recovering some of the history of Asian American poetry was showing how much struggle there has been over its definition and how capacious it has been as a category. Anyone who thinks that Asian American writing is restricted to a limited number of themes probably simply hasn’t read very much Asian American writing. To be fair, though, even most Asian Americans are unaware of the breadth of work that has been done by Asian American writers. Asian American critics have often been as guilty as anyone about returning to the same narratives and the same few canonical works. What I find most interesting in Asian American poetry is its interest in opening aesthetic and thematic questions rather than limiting them.
Gwee. What do you see as the challenges to Asian-American writing today?
Yu. In a lot of ways, Asian American writing is more vibrant than it has ever been. We now have several generations of prominent writers who can serve as models and mentors, a growing number of organizations and publications devoted to Asian American writing, and a truly astonishing number and range of young Asian American writers. What I think leads a lot of younger writers to still feel that being an Asian American writer is a struggle is a continuing sense of isolation–a sense that they are working on their own. One thing that I think can help in this respect is simply more knowledge–an awareness that there is a powerful tradition of Asian American writing out there, and that they can find in it support for almost anything they want to do. Universities are still doing a pretty poor job of informing young writers about this tradition; although the situation has certainly improved, I still find that most young writers are hungry for more knowledge about Asian American writing, past and present. I’d like to hope that as a critic and teacher, I can provide some help to younger writers who are seeking to understand the tradition from which their work emerges.
Gwee: Thank you for this opportunity to engage you and for your insightful answers.
Gwee Li Sui is a literary critic, a poet, and a graphic artist. He wrote Singapore’s first comic-book novel, Myth of the Stone, in 1993 and published a volume of humorous verse, Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems?, in 1998. A familiar name in Singapore’s literary scene, he has written essays on a range of cultural subjects as well as edited Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature II (2009), Telltale: Eleven Stories (2010), and Man/Born/Free: Writings on the Human Spirit from Singapore (2011).
August 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
There is a painful edge to the word race. Sometimes I cannot help thinking of it as a wound, something that cannot be cleft apart from my femaleness. And yet there, at the same time, when I step back a little, there is always the sense that race is an illusion, something made up. Otherwise why would I be so different in different places—by which I mean seen differently, treated differently, almost becoming another I? So it is that when crossing borders—between India and America, or even between the rich multiethnic mix of New York and the white suburbs—I feel a transitoriness in the self, the need for a febrile translation. And somehow there is a violent edge to this process of cultural translation, the shifting worlds I inhabit, the borders I cross in my dreams, the poems I make.
I was giving a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a bookstore. I read prose pieces, poems, ending with the last two sections of the poem “San Andreas Fault.” A woman raised her hand. She picked out details from the poem: “How can you allow these facts of the world, terrible things we would not normally want to think about, get into your poem? What does it do to your life?”
Quiet for a bit, I took a while to respond, musing on the section of the poem she had picked out. It begins with a speaker, a woman, who enters a dream state. At the end of her vision she faces her muse, a weightless creature, born of air, who has forced her to this:
Late at night in Half Moon Bay
hair loosed to the glow of traffic lights
I slit the moist package of my dreams.
Female still, quite metamorphic
I flowed into Kali ivory tongued, skulls nippling my breasts
Durga lips etched with wires astride an electric tiger
Draupadi born of flame betrayed by five brothers stripped
of silks in the banquet hall of shame.
In the ghostly light of those women’s eyes
I saw the death camps at our century’s end:
A woman in Sarajevo shot to death
as she stood pleading for a pot of milk,
a scrap of bread, her red scarf swollen
with lead hung in a cherry tree.
Turks burnt alive in the new Germany,
a grandmother and two girls
cheeks puffed with smoke
as they slept in striped blankets
bought new to keep out the cold.
A man and his wife in Omdurman
locked to a starving child, the bone’s right
to have and hold never to be denied,
hunger stamping the light.
In Ayodhya, in Ram’s golden name
hundreds hacked to death, the domes
of Babri Masjid quivering as massacres begin—
the rivers of India rise mountainous,
white veils of the dead, dhotis, kurtas, saris,
slippery with spray, eased from their bloodiness.
Shaking when I stopped I caught myself short
firmly faced her “What forgiveness here?”
“None” she replied “Every angel knows this.
The damage will not cease and this sweet gorge
by which you stand bears witness.
Become like me a creature of this fault.”1
She was in the back of the room, a small, neat-looking woman, her brown hair drawn back, and she was waiting for an answer.
“There are two things,” I began, “and they stand apart, then come together. One is the music of poetry. Not something I am altogether conscious about, but it works with the language, and it allows the thoughts, the ‘facts’ if you will—the terror, the violence—to be raised up, so that even as we see them imprinted in consciousness, there is a hairbreadth that allows release, allows for the transcendence poetry seeks.
“Then my personal life.” At this I stopped, took a sip of water, looked around the small room, the faces listening intently, the windows with the white shutters letting in a pearly light. The shutters looked as if they were cut from rice paper. Outside was spring sunshine, magnolias on the brink of bursting into light, crocuses prickling through the grass, spurts of purple among the old parked cars, the gas station on the other side of Hampshire Road.
I took courage from all that lay around and the women and men listening in the small back room.
“I bring the intensity of my inner life, very personal emotions, into relation with these ‘facts’ of the world. I may be standing in the kitchen looking out of the window, or washing grains of rice for dinner. Or I may be folding a pile of laundry, yet within me there is an emotion that the gesture of my hands cannot reach.
“And often there is news of the world that reaches me. And I contemplate it. So really it is by looking long and hard, allowing the intensity of that otherness to enter in, that the charged rhythm of the poem, its music, comes. Breaks out onto the page.”
I may not have said all this, there and then. And I wanted to speak of something that was too hard for me at the time: the migration of sense a poem requires, the way writing is tied up, for me, with loss, with what forces forgetfulness and yet at the very same time permits passage.
“A bridge that seizes crossing,” I wrote in a poem, trying to touch the edge of migrancy that underwrites the sensible world for me. This was at a time when I felt that I needed to begin another life, to be born again. And now I think, for me, to be born again is to pass beyond the markings of race, the violations visited on us.
Awhile back there were a series of racial incidents in New York City. Two black children were spray-painted white, a white child raped in retaliation, an Indian child stoned. Haunted by these events, I made a poem called “Art of Pariahs.” Pariah is a word that has come from my mother tongue, Malayalam, into English.
Perhaps one of the few benefits of colonialism is being able to infiltrate the language. I imagined Draupadi of the Mahabharata entering my kitchen in New York City. The longing to be freed of the limitations of skin color and race sings in the poem.
A year later I was in Delhi for an international symposium, put together by the Sahitya Akademi. Writers, artists, filmmakers were invited to ponder the ethnic violence that was threatening the fabric of secular India. Worn out by the flight that got- ten me in at one in the morning, I turned up a few minutes late for the start of the conference. The hall at the India International Center was packed. There were half a dozen people on the dais, dignitaries including Mulk Raj Anand, grand old man of Indian letters, the novelist who had written about the lives of Untouchables. There was no room in the auditorium, nowhere for me to sit. I stood uneasily at the edge, casting about for a place to sit, watching as a man dressed in white khadi, looking much as I would imagine a contemporary Tagore, spoke eloquently about the destruction of Babri Masjid and the communal riots in different parts of the country. “Our novelists will write about this,” he said, “but it will take them several years to absorb these events.” He paused, then added, “As the poet said.” After what seemed like a space for a long, drawn-out breath, he recited the whole of “Art of Pariahs.” He did not mention the poet’s name, but anonymity made the matter more powerful as the poem, in his voice, flowed through the packed room. And listening, standing clutching my papers, I felt emotions course through me, deeper than the power of words to tell. For a brief while, a poem composed in solitude in a small New York City room had granted me the power to return home.
Art of Pariahs
Back against the kitchen stove
Draupadi sings:
In my head Beirut still burns.
The Queen of Nubia, of God’s Upper Kingdom
the Rani of Jhansi, transfigured, raising her sword
are players too. They have entered with me
into North America and share these walls.
We make up an art of pariahs:
Two black children spray painted white
their eyes burning,
a white child raped in a car
for her pale skin’s sake,
an Indian child stoned by a bus shelter,
they thought her white in twilight.
Someone is knocking and knocking
but Draupadi will not let him in.
She squats by the stove and sings:
The Rani shall not sheathe her sword
nor Nubia’s queen restrain her elephants
till tongues of fire wrap a tender blue,
a second skin, a solace to our children
Come walk with me towards a broken wall
—Beirut still burns—carved into its face.
Outcastes all let’s conjure honey scraped from stones,
an underground railroad stacked with rainbow skin,
Manhattan’s mixed rivers rising.2
What might it mean for Manhattan’s mixed rivers to rise?
How shall we move into a truly shared world, reimagine ethnicities, even as we acknowledge violent edges, harsh borders? These children in Manhattan, the Muslim women raped in Surat, the Hindu women stoned in Jersey City, coexist in time. Cleft by space, they forge part of the fluid diasporic world in which I must live and move and have my being.
I think of Derek Walcott’s “terrible vowel, / that I!”3 And I understand that my need to enter richly into imagined worlds cannot shake free of what my woman’s body brings me. I cannot escape my body and the multiple worlds of my experience.
And the sort of translation the poem requires—“translate” in an early sense of the verb, meaning to carry over, to transport, for after all what is unspoken, even unspeakable must be borne into language—forces a fresh icon of the body, complicates the present until memory is written into the very texture of the senses.
NOTES
1. Meena Alexander, `San Andreas Fault’ in *River and Bridge*( Toronto South Asian Review Press, 1996) pp.85-85
2. Meena Alexander, `Art of Pariahs’ in *River and Bridge*p.35
3. Derek Walcott, “Names,” in Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 306.
Acknowledgements
This essay was first published in Transformations 9:2 (Fall 1998), a special issue on race and gender. It is reprinted in Meena Alexander, Poetics of Dislocation (University of Michigan Press, 2009) c. Meena Alexander 1998, 2009 all rights reserved.
August 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
On Search and Recognition:
Adopted Korean Diaspora and Poetry
Unlike the stranger returning home to discover his childhood village disappeared, the poet enters Korea as a social ghost resisting erasures that stripped him of family, geography, history, language, and memory and sent him overseas for adoption to one of 15 western receiving nations.
One of an estimated 200,000 adoptees from the world’s largest and oldest adoption program that has continuously sent children overseas since 1952, the poet transgresses simply by arriving again in South Korea because her Korean passport and orphan paperwork were designed for a one-way trip overseas. With this arrival, the poet breaks the original adoption contract predicated on alienation and authorizing someone else to design her identity.
As an adult, the poet can speak for himself. The poet can represent herself. Imagining themselves, they betray the bureaucratic abbreviations, shorthand, dashes, and blanks facilitating their forced child migrations:
Father’s Name: No Records. Mother’s Name: No Records
Father’s Residence: No Records. Mother’s Residence: No Records
…. Include here guardian’s attitudes and motives in
Releasing child: President Kim would like the baby in a nice home.
$450 Payable, Dec. 76. Remarks/File No. ___ Child’s attitude: N/A
(J. Kwon Dobbs, “Face Sheet”)[1]
This agency language devours itself, rips out a Korean tongue even as its syntax describes an orphan’s mouth, “N/A” as in Not Applicable. Yet he talks anyway speculating on what songs his omma might have sung before she surrendered him for adoption. He listens to the tremulous quiver:
…that deep chant of a mother
saying goodbye to her son. Who can really say?
Sometimes all we have is the blues. The blues means
Finding a song in the abandonment, one
you can sing in the middle of the night when
you remember that your Korean name, Kwang Soo
Lee, means bright light, something that can illuminate…
(Lee Herrick, “Salvation”)[2]
She reads each hang’ul letter as a gesture: tree, kneeling tongue, unlatched door, bird meat. She builds a vestibulary:
hanging, an execution of duty;
crow approaching unfamiliar limb;
letter folded into flag;
infinite tympanum of God.
(Sun Yung Shin, “ciue ㅈ”)[3
They began as Seeds from a Silent Tree (Pandal Press 1997), edited by Tonja Bischoff and Jo Rankin, the first anthology of adoptee poetry and writing. Now a diasporic grove, they include Them Averick, Thomas Marko Blatt, Dana Collins, Molly Gaudry, Lee Herrick, Anyssa Kim, Eva Tind Kristensen, Casey Kwang, Maja Lee Langvad, Mara Lee, Katie Hae Leo, Anneli Östlund, Nicky Sa-Eun Schildkraut, Sun Yung Shin, Kim Sunée, myself, and others to come. Not a school or even an organized literary community, they nonetheless share a common history of erasure through overseas adoption to which they have responded with vigorous experimentation ripping apart their adoptive languages and sometimes fleshing it with the Korea they know or dream of. Hungry for embodiment, they write in the language of their assimilation – English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, or Spanish – which is also their first language of desire. They publish books speaking to their adoptive countries and win awards and grants for these acts of psychic survival.
Without the dongpo’s (동포) usual cultural resources inherited through family and immigrant community, the poets’ imaginations turn to blood, skin, hair, and teeth – the body’s vocabulary – and to speculation, tectonic movements, winged migration, shreds of paper collaged together, fragments, found and destroyed documents, military maps, botany collections, syntactical disruptions, and multiple voices stitched together for words truer than flesh and more sturdy than bone to give erasure a face and to name its movements.
Sometimes she searches as an artistic impulse through the Korea she cannot forget even as Korea has unremembered her while constructing its economic miracle.
Sometimes his syntax limbs in the direction of search, not for nostalgic relics, but for historical remnants to imagine beyond absence widening as progress quickly strips the forest for graveyards and razes buildings for new urban construction. His mapping stakes a claim in the direction of possibility. What place might the poet, who was never supposed to return after his adoption, create through this undeniable document, this map of blood – his body inherited from generations before him?
How might the poet’s family recognize her? How might they reach across the table without tripping? Can this poet’s dream pass through translation to touch a Korean audience who might be her father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, grandparent, or even you reading this?
It’s an understanding of languages’ vulnerability to each other that possesses more feeling and insight than the correct textbook answers:
도/do
det koreanske ord도 er en lyd, der ifølge 15.000 tegnsordbogen har 121 forskellige betydninger…
do
Jysk udtalemåde af du[4]
(Eva Tind Kristensen, do/도)[5]
Like reuniting with family, reading this poetry might be discomforting as a translating stranger leans in whispering, and yet it’s the promise of felt insight that compels this act of attention, this difficult yet necessary dialogue turning erasure inside out:
3.
Are you disappointed that I was adopted to Denmark and not to the US, as you have always believed?
4.
Should you have not given me up for adoption: What consequences do you imagine it would have had for my sisters, my father, and yourself?
(Maja Lee Langvad, “20 new questions for my biological mother”)[6]
Diverse in prosodic style and wildly resourceful, these poets present a new diasporic literary direction that offers an embodied vision of reconciliation with the very erasures that produced them as adoptees. They give witness to that violence’s vicissitudes or speak from an intimate knowledge of silence’s cleaving embrace:
if last night was a dream, I remember
not her words but what I felt when the silence
turned white and
the lonely piano drowned in smoke.
much (and much too often) strays off beat
when the lion roars for no reason like
the gaping waves of the sea that curl above
a lost child:
(Them Averick, “Baffoon”)[7]
At language’s source – smoke, the lion’s roar, and gaping waves — the poet finds himself a maker of a beauty that cannot be easily forgotten. Like him, she remembers the proper names against linguistic deprivations while inventing new ones that have the power to renew. May they be recognized not as strangers but as poets and welcomed as kindred and kin.
_________
JENNIFER KWON DOBBS, Ph.D. is assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at St. Olaf College and has received awards and grants for her writing.
[1] Dobbs, Jennifer Kwon. Paper Pavilion. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2007. Print.
[2] Herrick, Lee. This Many Miles from Desire. Cincinnati: Word Tech Editions, 2007. Print.
[3] Shin, Sun Yung. Skirt Full of Black. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006. Print.
[4]도/do
The Korean word 도 is a sound that has 121 different connotations according to the 15,000 characters dictionary.
do
The Jutlandic pronunciation of you.
(Danish/English Translation by M.J.T. Nielsen.)
[5] Kristensen, Eva Tind. do/도. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009. Print.
[6] Langvad, Maja Lee. “New Questions.” Journal of Korean Adoption Studies 2.1 (Spring 2010): 157-168. Print.
[7] 김성현and Them Averick. 메트로폴리스. 서올: 한솜, 2008. Print.
August 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kundiman is a literary organization dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry. Founded in 2002 by two poets, Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi, Kundiman supports the artistic and professional development of emerging Asian American poets, and aims to preserve and promote the cultural legacy of the Asian American diaspora. It is the only non-profit of its kind in the U.S. But what does the Tagalog word “Kundiman” mean? Kundiman is a classic form of Filipino love song—or so it seemed to colonialist forces in the Philippines. In fact, in Kundiman, the singer who expresses undying love for his beloved is actually singing for love of country. The name then serves as inspiration to create and nurture artistic expression. It also acknowledges the political struggle that fuels change, and harkens to the shared roots of hyphenated Americans. Building community and fostering the voices of Asian American poetry are at the heart of Kundiman’s mission. They go hand in hand. Kundiman gathers together Asian American poets, providing them with a safe, creative space. To accomplish its goals, Kundiman has three main programs: an annual poetry retreat, a book prize, and a reading series.
Started in 2004, the Kundiman Poetry Retreat is a five-day residency program open through a competitive application process to emerging Asian American poets who seek to improve their skills in a rigorous yet supportive environment. Kundiman fellows—those who are accepted and attend the retreat—immerse themselves in poetry through workshops and mentorship sessions with renowned Asian American poets, salon readings, talks, community-building activities, and, most importantly, writing. For the past two years, Kundiman has made its retreat home at Fordham University’s beautiful Rose Hill Campus in New York City. Our roster of faculty members and guest speakers are a veritable list of who’s who in the Asian/Asian American poetry world: Lawson Inada, Bei Dao, Myung Mi Kim, Kimiko Hahn, Arthur Sze, Marilyn Chin, David Mura, Tan Lin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Patrick Rosal, Prageeta Sharma, Paisley Rekdal, Regie Cabico and many others.
But why sponsor a retreat solely for Asian American poets? One cannot argue the importance of people, especially members of a minority group, being in the same company as those who share their background. There is an innate sensitivity, an immediate understanding of common histories and cultures. Kundiman fellows frequently express how they don’t have to “explain themselves” while at the retreat. Many of them arrive from places where they feel isolated as Asian Americans and/or as poets—as Asian American poets—therefore, a safe gathering ground becomes even more vital and crucial. Beyond the racial and cultural, however, the most enduring bond at the Kundiman Retreat is the collective love of writing and poetry. In its history, 92 emerging Asian American poets have attended the Kundiman Retreat at least once. Each fellow can attend up to three times and then they “graduate.” This format is utmost important in building a solid peer group. New fellows find mentorship and camaraderie not only with staff and faculty but also with returning fellows. Graduated fellows are at times asked to return as part of the staff in subsequent retreats, acting as liaison, as bridge.
The created community extends beyond the summer retreat. Through the Kundiman listserv, fellows continue to interact online. They share everything from creative and professional accomplishments to writing prompts to pedagogy. They form writing groups, virtual and real. They sit on panels together, curate readings, exchange poetry postcards, meet up in foreign cities. I once overheard a fellow exclaim that because of Kundiman, she has many family members sprinkled all across the country. The Kundiman Alumni Association raises funds for scholarships to the retreat. As the organization grows, it radiates outward like tree rings.
Outside of the Retreat, Kundiman reaches out to the community by creating a wider audience and broader appreciation for Asian American poetry. The Kundiman Poetry Prize is one such vehicle. Awarded in partnership with Alice James Books, the Kundiman Poetry Prize guarantees the annual publication of at least one collection of poetry by an Asian American. It is open to all Asian American poets, previously published or not. In addition to book publication, the winner receives a cash prize and a feature reading in New York City. In fall 2011, Alice James Books released Janine Oshiro’s Pier, the inaugural winner of the Prize. Janine launched her book with two Kundiman-sponsored readings at Fordham University and NYU. Forthcoming is the second winner of the Prize: Matthew Olzmann’s Mezzanines. These publications help to diversify the American literary landscape. Our written words help give voice, tell our stories, and strengthen our people’s presence in pluralistic society. Many Kundiman fellows have followed suit: to date, thirty-one fellows have published, or will be publishing, their books and chapbooks.
Finally, Kundiman maintains its vibrant presence in its NYC home base by running the Kundiman & Verlaine Reading Series. Housed in an artsy lounge in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the reading series, now in its 9th year, has featured over one hundred Asian American poets. It has created new audiences for Asian American poetry by showcasing the works of emerging and established poets. Moreover, in the past few years, as part of its community outreach initiative, Kundiman has invited poets from other literary organizations serving minority groups, such as Cave Canem and Acentos, to read. This has not only boosted the organization’s audience base, but also established and strengthened relationships with like-minded institutions.
In keeping with giving voice to the Asian American community, Kundiman is developing an oral history project called Kavad. As part of Kavad, Kundiman produced the multi-media show Together We Are New York to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11. In this community-based arts project, Kundiman poets interviewed Asian Americans affected by 9/11 and wrote poems in response to these interviews. This enables Kundiman to further community documentation, healing and dialogue. Tapping on its core of poets, Kundiman hopes to narrate the stories of Asian Americans as a people, and so strengthen Asian American solidarity and identity.
If American literature is going to help us understand our place in a multi-racial, multi-cultural global society, it needs first to reflect the racial and ethnic complexity of American society and American experience. In training and supporting the next generation of Asian American poets, Kundiman is playing a transformative role in American culture and history. Through vital programming, mentorship and advocacy, Kundiman is building a vibrant community of committed poets. This commitment then translates into empowerment for our diasporic and marginalized communities. Kundiman envisions the arts as a tool for community engagement and social activism, encouraging Asian American poets to find their true desires and perfect their skills through education and performance. Consequently, Kundiman strives to create a rich legacy.
JOSEPH O LEGASPI is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press). He lives in Queens, NY and works at Columbia University. He co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poetry.
Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town
