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).
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.
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
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…
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]
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:
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.
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.
Pier Alice James Books
2011
by Janine Oshiro
ISBN: 9781882295883
Reviewed by WENDI M LEE
Janine Oshiro’s first poetry collection, Pier, is a haunting masterpiece tinged with fantasy and the shifting landscapes of nature, decay, and creation. Oshiro writes of family histories: a deceased mother and ailing father, growing up in Hawaii and living on the Mainland. This is far from narrative poetry, however. Strangeness lurks on every page. Spoons swim through the ocean, dancers twirl without the use of legs. The possibility of dark magic is imminent. Oshiro’s beautiful, off-kilter images are often tempered with large segments of white space, revealing to the reader what cannot be expressed with words alone.
Everywhere is a potential
exit, except the door
I drew a high wall at the skin;
at the bottom I drew a gutter.
I was eleven.
These are the words I have for it.
Creation plays a central role in this collection. In “Praise,” the speaker “is clapping my hands” in anticipation for her siblings to “invent the world” via the stage, a world closed to her by normal means. The elegiac “Move” is composed of very short stanzas, hinged upon an image reminiscent of a biblical creation story. “On the first day,” is the recurring phrase here, as we move from “sea squirts” and “frogfishes” to the slow and steady disintegration of a beloved father.
In “Anniversary,” a kingdom is erected piece by piece, the protagonist carefully inserting houses and daughters into a landscape of wildness, willing domesticity and nature to collide. Order is of utmost importance here, perhaps to soften the chaos of everyday life, but so is the bated apprehension of disaster.
I kept an eye on the animal and nothing happened.
The mountain blistered and popped into its plural.
I kept an eye on the animal.
The sky remained where it was, distant.
The obedient daughters kept their houses neat.
Creation then is uncertain, a metamorphosis always on the brink of occurring, a disappointment when it does not arrive. Sight and language also produces unease and uncertainty. Potentially traumatic events occur without the awareness of the protagonist, yet nonetheless accepted as factual. Sometimes these experiences can be named. Others are so mysterious they remain shrouded in the spaces off the page, referred to only in passing.
Having not seen it
happen but knowing
it happened
a black snake
crawled down my spine.
Even sight ultimately proves to be unreliable as what is proven to be “fact” crumbles. A mother’s likeness is caught in a passing cloud formation. Ghosts walk unbidden into rooms, to reassure grieving daughters. Nature itself becomes a landscape of startling revelation.
Before I saw snow, I saw
pictures of snow and believed
in it. And so of bears.
Snow blinded I am. A bear
is nothing like its picture.
The dichotomy of what is seen/not seen, witnessed/believed resonates. What gives these poems so much power is Oshiro’s ability to transform the landscapes of her experiences. I also grew up in Hawaii, but the world she presents to her readers exists in the twilight of unreality, where grief and beauty can be fully explored. Her words illuminate and mystify in equal measures. Pier is an impressively startling first collection, and well-deserving of the 2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize. I am fascinated to see what she has to offer next.
______________
WENDI LEE was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and currently lives in Pittsburgh. She has a chapbook, Knotted Ends, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and poetry and fiction published in Karamu, Portland Review, Oyez Review, weave, Passages North, and Hawai’I Pacific Review.
Since its inception just over a year ago, Math Paper Press’s Babette’s Feast chapbook series has introduced a host of new voices to the literary scene in Singapore. The voice that emerges in Carol Chan’s first collection is lyrical, ‘ever soft, gentle and low’, and, like Cordelia’s in King Lear, it is both compassionate and unafraid to speak its truth. The World Must Weigh The Same is an examination of the connections between the personal and political in contemporary Singapore – a tentative attempt to articulate a vaguely-felt malaise that Chan names in one poem as ‘first-world boredom’ struggling to find purpose in the face of ‘human dreams’.
It is hard not to take a topical reading of some of the pieces here. Published in 2011 after Singapore’s watershed May 7th polls, the collection contains coy references to ‘elections’ and ‘rallies’ tucked into poems addressed to unnamed interlocutors who could be friends, lovers, government, or State. ‘Common State’ is perhaps the most successful of these, and incidentally, also the most representative of the concerns of the collection as a whole. Read as a love poem, it is a heartfelt plea for ‘difference’ in a relationship that has gone stale from too much predictability; read as a political poem, that same plea acquires additional resonance in the context of a ‘dead silent country’ where the ‘future you think is possible’ is ‘one I do not see’. These would have been brave words twenty years ago, before Alfian Sa’at’s One Fierce Hour, especially in a first collection. Now, they are typical of a sentiment that, thanks to the Internet, has become a commonplace. Lamenting a lack of vision in the nation’s leadership and bemoaning a sense of personal disempowerment have become national pastimes, like shopping and eating. And Chan does it more eloquently and poignantly than most; at times, as in ‘Electives’, even playfully:
& not to be soggy but there are limits to how much
we care about whatever. Say nothing / say love / say war.
In ‘State’, the speaker wonders if
…… what you run
up against
is only the lines
from your dreaming
or the language to speak
out of line.
The self-reflexive awareness of the perils of sogginess, of our complicity in our disenfranchisement, rescues these poems from cliché.
Yet, the question is – what is the expected readerly response to such discontent? At the risk of reproducing the standard discourse pattern of Singaporean bureaucracy, the instinctive reaction is to wonder what sort of aesthetic vision is being offered as an alternative. ‘Briefcase’, the gem of a short story that opens the collection, proposes an answer – love, commitment, the comforts of familiarity and domesticity, and the hidden beauty of the everyday. After going through something of a midlife crisis in which he questions, for the first time, the way his life has turned out, protagonist Mr Zhang arrives at a place of contentment, learns compromise. Forget politics, forget idealism – there is ‘something precious’ in the life that happens to us, or, at best, that we meander into. ‘(T)he memory of soft-boiled eggs with dark soy sauce’, a letter from a daughter, these are the compensations for our choices – or non-choices, enacted in the very language of the story: an ordinary, homely diction most noticeable for its plain-spoken poignancy. And this in itself isn’t a bad answer. It may not even be an unsatisfactory answer. I like the empathy, and the clear-eyed honesty – these qualities were what first drew me to Chan’s writing, and make for a heartfelt story that gently criticises without condemnation. But the story’s placement at the start of the collection, rather than at the end, suggests a tentativeness, a refusal of closure; and the reader is left looking to the rest of the pieces for some development in the dialogue, a new way of seeing, perhaps, or an aesthetic space with room for imagination and change.
And there is certainly some of that. ‘Key Performance Indicators’ satirises standard bureaucratese with deliberately unintelligible consequences; while ‘File > My Scans’ fits a series of gnomic musings into the linguistic structure of a computer filing system. And then there is the delightful whimsy of ‘Trees Don’t Have Midlife Crises’ that segues into a quiet meditation on identity and change. On the whole, though, the collection doesn’t quite take flight. The reader is left with the sense of having been comfortably disturbed, but the sparks of conflict and friction are never allowed to develop into a full-blown conflagration, which, granted, was probably never Chan’s intention in the first place. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if it is possible to write about smallness and limitation, in a way that transcends, or at least, transforms that limitation, makes it new – and does so in ways that do not sacrifice sense in the process. What to make, for instance, of lines like these?
Say the answer lies
in our denial of this crate;
Don’t pretend
the lack of dream thinks.
Why ‘crate’, and what is it a metaphor for, and even supposing that the closing of ‘State’ is an abstract, Ashbery-esque comment on how a lack of vision (‘dream’?) is often excused in the name of reason or rationality (‘thinks’?), the suddenly awkward syntax is distracting and not well-integrated with the rest of the poem.
Such awkwardness is, thankfully, confined to only a few of the socio-political pieces in the collection. Where Chan excels, however, is in her sensitive rendering of the personal and familial. And when the personal becomes a lens through which the political is examined, it reveals a subtle, self-questioning poetic sensibility that should, with time, grow in its ability to weigh the world without getting weighed down by the world.
Prose poetry is essentially an urban form, although we should do better to refer to it as both essentially and existentially an urban form. A cursory look at the development of the prose poem in mid-nineteenth-century France provides an insight into just why and how this form came to embody the modern metropolis in which it is invariably set and with which it coincides.[1]
As Baron Haussmann’s wave of urban renewal swept through Paris, bringing it—expropriations and all—from the Middle Ages right up to the cutting edge of Modernity, with which it became instantly synonymous,[2] Charles Baudelaire was achieving fame as the author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). But even as his fame spread, Baudelaire’s disenchantment with the lot of the poet, and his verses, was leading him towards a new mode of expression. Where, famously, he had previously painted the poet as, inter alia, an albatross, majestic in the air but clumsy on the ground, he now sought to bring poetry down from the abstract objectivity of the Heavens into the mundanity of the city streets. And if he chose to smash the verse form of his art against the cobblestones of Paris, it was precisely because the city was as much beyond his comprehension as his poems were to the man in the street. The Paris that he remembered was fast becoming a mythology as the Paris that met his senses morphed ever faster into a space that was not his. In short, Paris was no longer what it had once been. And yet, of course, Paris was still undeniably Paris, with all that this signified. The new poetics that Baudelaire created captured this tension between the Paris that was and the Paris that was not. It was a poetics to encapsulate this paradox, both overarching it and pulsing at its heart: it would simultaneously present Paris in its everyday, prosaic reality and re-present it in all its poetic associations.[3] The new poem symbolized a new critical stance in relation to the modern world and quickly became the instant-belated lens of Modernity itself: the oxymoronic ‘prose poem’ got both inside Paris (with the close-up of the developing art of photography) and soared above it (like the Montgolfière that adorned posters of the expositions universelles), capturing it doubly, (re)presenting it as the auto-antonymic capital of the alienating new urban experience.
The oxymoronic nature of the prose poem cannot be overstated—it is markedly not a prosaic form of poetry or a poetic form of prose. It makes no attempt to synthesize the binary terms of the albatross’s predicament. Instead, Paris is now both on the wing and on the ground, poetic and prosaic, at the same time. As Baudelaire notes in his prefatory letter to Arsène Houssaye, his collection of little prose poems, or Paris Spleen “has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally”.[4] In this way, every line of every prose poem serves no purpose other than to pose the conundrum of prose poetics, and in so doing to perform Parisian self-alterity. Thus, the poems typically balance on a central axis, ostensibly offering two distinct halves (a poetic one and a prosaic one). But on closer inspection, the poetic half exalts the Beauty of “things” and the prosaic half teems with capitalized Abstract Values; indeed, the central axis itself (marked by a knock on a door or a disingenuous adverb of concession) functions as a problematic limen, both demarcating and promoting transgression.
Nowhere is this structure more flagrantly displayed than in the French title itself, Les Petits Poèmes en prose : Le Spleen de Paris, which lends itself to a chiasmatic analysis. The axis is the colon that separates title from subtitle, and the two halves, thus formed, reference each other across it. Notice how the littleness of the prose poems is elevated by French title capitalization on the one side and how the visceral reality of spleen is identically altered on the other.[5] The initial oxymoron of the prose poem suggests, chiasmatically, that Paris (in all its glory) opposes spleen, but the capitalization of Paris, which cannot be written any other way, simultaneously veils and symbolizes its double meaning. Paris then both opposes spleen in the subtitle and picks up the upwards motion of Spleen (its elevation from the splenetic to the ethereal), tending to overarch the dynamics of the combined title. In this way, Paris equals prose poem, always already. Which means, of course, that in addition to being, always and only, prose poetry, the prose poems are also, always and only, Paris, whether their action is set in a city street, a desert island or nowhere at all. Hence, the famous “Any Where out of the World”, which is all about aspiration to travel and not about travel per se. For, in all the prose poems, intense motion (and counter-motion) is brought back to earth as powerfully as it transcends. This is the centrifugal and centripetal power of the city. And this is why prose poetry is, essentially and existentially, an urban form.
Alistair Rolls,
The University of Newcastle, NSW
[1] For a history of the British prose poem, see Nikki Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002)
[2] Arguably, Paris was not only synonymous with Modernity as it unfolded in France, but the French capital’s ultra-reflexive reappraisal of itself made it metonymic of Modernity worldwide. See, for example, David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York; London: Routledge, 2003) and Patrice Higonnet, Paris, capitale du monde (Paris: Tallandier, 2006).
[3] For an excellent reading of presentation versus representation (or re-presentation) in Baudelaire’s prose poems, see Michel Covin, L’Homme de la rue : Essai sur la poétique baudelairienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).
[4] I am quoting here from Louise Varène’s translation of Les Petits Poèmes en prose : Le Spleen de Paris, published as Paris Spleen (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. IX.
[5] For a more detailed analysis of Baudelaire’s title along these lines, see Covin, op. cit.
Silencing Voice, Voicing Silence: A Review of Fish-Hair Woman
Silence
In her previous novel The Solemn Lantern Maker, Merlinda Bobis had developed what the literary critic Susan Sontag once called as an “aesthetic of silence”. Bobis’ sparse, economical style so unlike the usual lyricism of her prose reflected her central character’s very own muteness (aptly named Noland), as well as the difficulty of expressing what can hardly be represented in words, but perhaps only felt catachrestically. Noland’s grim story of child prostitution and abject poverty in the Philippines imposes silence because, and as Sontag argued, ‘ “silence” never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence.’[1] What happens out there in the so-called “Third World” thus looms large over our consciousness, disturbingly close from home – and in this silence, we as readers cannot but feel complicit:
There is no room for another time. The hut is too small even for the present. Life must be squeezed to pocket size, breath must be kept spare, so there’s enough left for the next day, so the walls hold up. Be frugal where life is fragile.[2]
What Sontag viewed as a form of ‘impoverished art, purged by silence’[3] also constituted an attempt by the author of The Solemn Lantern Maker to paradoxically draw attention to the particular timbre of her literary voice, an act of resistance in the face of censure and overdetermined readings of her work. This gesture was similar, albeit in another context, to Arte Povera’s minimalism in the late 60s as a means of thwarting philistine approaches to use-value and the seamless transparency of meaning in art. In her essay, ‘‘Voice-Niche-Brand: Marketing Asian-Australianness’, Bobis quotes Frederic Jameson on the work of Ernest Hemingway to remind that “ethnic” writers, beyond their nationality or gender, are first and foremost artists in their own right.
It is a mistake to think that [his books] deal essentially with such things as courage, love, and death; in reality, their deepest subject is simply the writing of a certain type of sentence, the practice of a determinate style.[4]
The “Gate”
While this is not a review of The Solemn Lantern Maker, this novel and the aesthetic of silence impregnating it informs in turn the story behind Bobis’ first (and until now) unpublished novel Fish-Hair Woman (2011). If her previous novel represented an outcry of a mute sort, and had to be first published in the United States after facing initial rejection in Australia, Fish-Hair Woman stands as revenge against fate and what Bobis defined elsewhere in a recent essay as the “gatekeepers” of the Australian publishing industry. In effect, it took more than seventeen years for the novel to be published, interspersed by multiple rejections, editing, and ‘silence.’[5]
As it happens, the novel’s chief “vice” is that it is set in a militarised village in the Philippines during the Filipino government’s crackdown on communist insurgency from the late 70s onwards, and that, therefore, Australia and the “Australian story” appear marginalised. Bobis prefers to deal instead with subaltern voices and to ‘privilege the underclass – peasants, labourers, and the like – as agents of historical change’[6] in what represents a decolonising gesture akin to the work of Filipino scholars known as Pantayong Pananaw (‘for-us-from-us’ perspective).
The culture industry and its tendency towards compartmentalisation does not wish a diasporic author like Bobis to “dabble” with style; neither is it inclined to giving full reign to the diasporic voice unless it is domesticated, made heimlich. The dominant paradigm for the Asian Australian author has so far been the “migrant story”, a movement from A (Asia) to B (Australia), and sometimes back to A so as to remind the reader that the “Asian story” is Australian enough but not quite. In so doing, the Australian “gate” is safeguarded while “enriched” at the same time. However, Fish-Hair Woman, like Simone Lazaroo’s Sustenance (2010) a year before, reverses this movement in a “conspiratorial” attempt (Bobis’ own term) to regionalize Australian identities and open the floodgates by immersing white Australian characters in foreign, menacing Asian settings instead.
In so doing, the garde-fou (French for parapet, literally “madness keeper”) is let loose, perhaps irreversibly, as an effect of globalising trends and the fact that (Asian) Australian authors are now transnational in what may be deemed a post-diasporic world. In this new paradigm, the hyphen in Asian-Australia is not a straightforward road from A to B that can be easily co-opted into the migrant narrative, but a conflictive zone of incommensurability and “abject” resistance writing back to the gatekeepers of the industry.
Behind the Philippine Commercial and Industrial Bank, among the garbage bags, a vagrant is abusing the security guard. […] He’d been scavenging, throwing out ‘unusable’ garbage onto the street before the guard found him. […] Suddenly, the vagrant jumps up, gripping Luke’s arm and shouting, ‘Mr Amerkano, Mr Amerkano, my bank, my bank!’ He’s pointing to the garbage, demanding affirmation. (119)
As Bobis reflects in her essay: ‘Should one exit from the diasporic narrative to break this bind? Why not shift the gate?’[7] This is what Bobis does in Fish-Hair Woman, and by shifting the gate she also shifts perspectives. The novel starts off in the century-old tradition of an ‘Australian thriller about a past crisis in some Asian country [with] the questing Australian male (usually) who was tempted and challenged, and muddled through mayhem.’[8] Centered on the mysterious disappearance of Australian writer Tony McIntyre in the Philippines and his son Luke who sets out to find him, and with all the ingredients of the oriental thriller in place – including a revolution, a corrupt leader, and a love affair with one of the “natives” – Fish-Hair Woman however quickly departs from what the Australian literary critic Alison Broinowski once described as ‘the fictional Asia we used to know and love (or not know and fear).’[9]
It is in that sense that this novel can be deemed “avant-gardiste”, that is, at once one “story ahead” and standing before, rather than inside or outside, the gate.
Luke freezes, unable to look away from the man’s demented eyes, the whites turned blue by the light. Stella shouts at the vagrant to back off, he does, and she grabs Luke and they both run to the Australia Centre. Behind them the altercation continues: ‘My bank, my bank!’
She leans against the silver column, both hands catching her brow. ‘I’m sorry…I’m sorry for my country.’
She’s apologising to me? But Luke misses the tone of despair in which he does not even figure. (119-120) (italics mine)
“Text-ility”
Merlinda Bobis has often described herself as a “border lover” with a deeply humanist and planetary vision. Her work travels wide and far, relentlessly straddling various art forms, genres, languages and cultures, inscribing difference and alterity in place of reified categorisations and the strangleholds of identity-thinking as few writers have been able to. For Bobis, literature starts with the body, ‘a technique which is not just of the word, but of the body.’[10] Through the bodily metaphor of hair-growing, weaving and unknotting, remembering and forgetting, the reader is caught into the rhizomic nets of “text-ility” in this magico-realist tale of a woman with twelve metre-long hair who fishes out the dead river bodies of a torn cultural fabric, the product of a ‘senseless war’ (9).
My memories weave in and out of death and love. […] I wept over the enemy as my hair grew, its red and black strands shooting from all ventricles up to the scalp, to declare that the heartspace is not just the size of a fist, because each encounter threads a million others. The capillaries of love and war flow into each other, into a handspan of hair. (142)
While we are told that there is no hero in this story, with ‘too many stories weaving into each other, only to unweave themselves at each telling,’ (259) there are also too many vividly painted characters in this family saga à la Garcia Marquez to give them full justice here. The novel spans across three decades and continents, from the Marcos regime’s “Total War” against the Maoist New People’s Army (NPA), the military wing of the Communist Party, through to the February 1986 People Power Revolution and onto the year 1997, as Luke flies to the Philippines from Sydney on a cryptic note sent his father after thirteen years of silence that the latter is dying. There he meets instead with Dr. Alvarado, just returned from years of political exile in Hawaii and who claims to have known his father very well.
These are stories that demand to be told – and heard – stories all too familiar for anyone who is aware that ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror’ (6); stories of farmers’ expropriation, being pushed off their land and turned into landless wage labourers by power-greedy mestizo elites like Dr. Alvarado, alias Governor Estradero and his private army, the Anghel de la Guardia; stories of rape, torture and murder by the State with the complicit backing of the West, including Australia; stories of first-world do-gooders and eco-tourists who ‘look for villages still at one with nature, unadulterated by progress [but] who might just run into problems if the farmer in the village suddenly demands. ‘But I want your BMW too, and your toilets that flush and all your wonderful amenities. Is this possible?’ (121). For those who refuse to hear and see, Bobis will ‘weave an alternative tale about us nice folks brewing this exotic spot with coffee cups on our heads and dancing up a fiesta. A postcard shot if you wish…so you can quell your shudder with a longing sigh for this village in the East.’ (57)
Voice
Finally, there is the author’s own meta-story, Bobis’ awareness that she, too, is partly complicit in that ‘your [her] author is only interested in saving a white man [Luke’s father]’ (227). Professor Inez Carillo’s husband was murdered while investigating on the deaths of the villagers of Iraya, north of the island of Luzon, where Bobis was born. As she further explains to the Australian diplomat Matt Baker: ‘the worst are our own expatriate writers, those migratory birds. First they abandon us to fly to greener pastures, then return as vultures to feed on our despair. Then they take off again. Take, then take off.’ (226)
In this complicity, we as readers, along with Bobis’s fish-hair woman, cannot but feel silent – an oxymoronic act of penitence for an author and a book with so fulsome and generous a voice that it leaves one emptied out at the reading end.
But can words ever rewrite a landscape? Can the berries suddenly uncrimson with talk? Can bullets be swallowed back by the gun? Can hearts unbreak, because for a moment its ventricles are confused at the sight of a refurbished coffee grove, besieged by peace and domesticity?
I can dive a hundred times into the river, fish out this or that beloved and tenderly wrap a body with my hair, then croon to it in futile language such as this, but when I lay the dead at the feet of kin and lovers, their grief will just shame my attempt to save it from dumbness. Listen to the mute eloquence that trails all losses, the undeclaimed umbrage at having been had by life. This is a silence no one can ever write and least of rewrite. (58)
[1] Sontag, Susan. ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’. Styles of Radical Will, Penguin Classics, 2009, p. 11.
[2] Bobis, Merlinda. The Solemn Lanter Maker, Pier 9, 2008, p. 24.
[4] Bobis, Merlinda.‘Voice-Niche-Brand: Marketing Asian-Australianness’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 45, Nov 2008, p. 119
[5] Bobis, Merlinda. ‘The Asian Conspiracy: Deploying Voice/ Deploying Story’, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, Oct 2010, p. 15.
[6] Reyes, Portia L. ‘Fighting Over A Nation: Theorizing a Filipino Historiography’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2008, p. 241.
[7] Bobis, Merlinda. The Asian Conspiracy, opcit, p. 10.
[8] Broinowski, Alison. ‘The No-Name Australians and the Missing Subaltern: Asian Australian Fiction’, Asian Australian Identities Conference, 27-29 September 1999.
New and Selected texts are increasingly popular with well-established poets and are, in fact, a good way for readers to gain an insight into their manifestos and technical development. This is particularly so in the case of Gig Ryan, who, as a poet, is judiciously enigmatic and always one step ahead of her readership. In this collection, Ryan has put together her choice of landmark poems from her previous five books and added a section of new poems written since then.
In her first collection, The Division of Anger (1980), appear most of the hallmarks of Ryan’s technique and avant-garde approach to her subject matter − the metaphysical similes, the fractured syntax (resisting any kind of predictability) and the almost complete absence of lyricism. Clichés and worn-out tropes are mockingly undercut. Nowhere is this more evident than in the iconic “If I Had A Gun,” which concludes the selection from this book.
Ryan’s similes in her early poems rely on shock value and violence, sometimes unerring in their aptness (“His sincerity clacking like chainmail”; “His eyes/ romantic as aluminium strewn against a sea-wall”), sometimes bizarre (“the water lies down like a saint”; “worries like a tablet”), but never willing to be ignored. At times this full-on technique may irritate, threaten to overwhelm the reader with its close-packed mixed similes, but bombardment may well be the intention, or at least the outcome, as in the poem “Getting It”:
He kisses, his pale guilt blowing
like a flower. You’re luxurious, unsure.
Your eyes opening like telescopes
on a clean brain.
You’re so silly in the kitchen, like a new appliance.
(p.5)
More complex, and equally effective, are similes that merge into metaphor (“I will go down into the black water/ and peel its wetness back into the shore/ where it will shiver like a dress”). In later collections, Ryan uses similes more sparingly, often developing them into extended metaphors that control the poem as a whole.
The Division of Anger and the next two collections, Manners of an Astronaut (1984) and The Last Interior (1986), share a subject matter of inner-city politics, of sex, drugs and jazz, and an ‘angry’ take on conformity, further disrupting the comfort-zone of the reader. Dramatic monologues intensify the ironic stance of the poet/persona. In “The Buddha Speaks,” a serious message underlies the flippant exterior:
I have eliminated the possibility of pain.
The slopes are crawling with pain.
Any movement, after all, is futile,
so I have cut down on aid generally
and talked myself out of violent feelings
(p.31)
In “Half Hill / Half…”, one of the best poems in this section (Manners of an Astronaut):
The bars of the street go to the new next place
where your yearly emotion won’t come
and don’t hail me like letters. You don’t need to.
I mean, you’ve lined the walls and sucked drugs.
………………………………………………………………….
The world holds you in place like hairspray.
I walk home stoned, eating my favourite apple,
hearing birds fall out of trees,
super-conscious of walking.
How can you explain boredom in 10 minutes?
(p.40)
The short selection from The Last Interior features a number of dramatic monologues utilising phatic ‘nothings’, clichés and conventional rhetoric, sometimes curtailed to emphasise the predictability of colloquial conversation. Likewise, the endings of poems are incomplete, not needing completion (“I mean, that’s not correct etiquette is it. If I/ could just find out the correct behaviour, the pattern,/ and learn it and learn it”; “My religion’s too strong inme, though he turned at the end,/ a gesture. He was that sort, you know,/ £5, you got roses./ the handsomest man I ever”).
Excavation (1990) shows a more measured and integral use of simile, a widening of perspective and a political component. Examples in this New andSelected text include “On first looking into Fairfax’s Herald” and “1965.” In the whimsical “Six Goodbyes”:
Surf music seeps from the separated father’s flat
A madman in the lane shouts nothing
The walls shudder with the traffic
The Government doesn’t know you from a bar
I plug my ears with wax to hear the sirens
Every second weekend his kids invent a yard
between stumps of furniture, a tin shed and a gate
The fridge is tanked with frost
(p.69)
In poems like “Napoleon,” “Penelope” and “Achilleus,” historical and legendary figures begin to make their appearance, albeit in modern guise, exploding the conventions/pretensions of love and its conformities. In later collections, there’s a shift in the functioning of such figures. “Electra to Clytemnestra” and “Ismene to Antigone” (from Heroic Money), while relying on a similar approach, together provide a balanced argument on the subject. The new poems “Ismene” and “Antigone,” the imagistic references increasingly double-edged (“your wine-dark car turning in the drive”), contrast attitudes of the two sisters to the ‘truths’ embedded in their mythologies.
The collection Pure and Applied, which won the 1999 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, is strongly represented here, believed to be Ryan’s best book to date. Again we come to grips with dramatic monologues, ironised by representational handling of the subjects’ own rhythms of speech and confessional stance. In “London Saver,” for example:
probably Istanbul or Spain the guys’re divine
There used to be an eleven but they’ve all pitched off
into Outer Mongolia or something She throws the fags
It was lashing everywhere when I clicked the tickets
deciding on a country
(p.84)
And in “Eating Vietnamese,” “This restaurant’s divine They’re refugees/ Asians are beautiful don’t you think, quite hairless/ She wore apricot chiffon There were kids everywhere/ So demanding” (p.106). “Interest Rates” is even more savage in its revelation of personae through self-delusion and banal diatribe:
‘I used to be like you, full of icy self-regard
but life monotonously catches up and culls you
and all the others’ Things begin to glow
like your own house, car, and love’s equivalent
You get sick of being alone and raddled, and he’s a real pet
…isn’t he? So I buckled under, got a richly job
and I’m, you know, fulfilled. Before that it was just a covey of unrealistic aims
Everybody told me.
He dusted me off
who had once been lost
Now it’s solid, tangible
The baby’s like cement to me
Otherwise the million things I wanted every cider brick
I’d be just drifting or immersed’
(p.104)
By contrast, “Two Leaders” returns to the authorial voice, exposing these easily-recognised political figures with considerable contempt. The pièce de résistance, however, is the title poem “Pure and Applied,” denouncing the news media in different styles and voices.
Heroic Money, shortlisted for the 2002 NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry, seems stylistically a bridging text between what has gone before and what is to come. Poems evince the characters of the ancient Athenian world but also continue to take in contemporary cultural constructs. “Eurydice’s Suburb” (pre-empting, perhaps, Adamson’s lambent “Eurydice in Sydney,” though located differently) is an assured portrait:
The wings of home enfold you and lock
under the city’s poisoned coronet or halo
You gaze at the supermarket’s petrified food
and respond like a zombie to the past’s ghosts
and semblance of meaning
(p.133)
“Profile” gives us an exposé of the poetry world in dramatic monologue form, some of the details of which may suggest an aspect of self-mockery or, at least, a well-trodden path :
‘I started out with a frayed and urgent lyric
I suppose it was a comparative poverty
then learning appealed to me, though the past scared
then the Orpheus poems
a sort of self-commentary
You’ll see in my second book how I’ve
tackled national themes
(p.140)
When we come to the new poems, there’s considerable continuity, both of theme and style. Some of the poems appear to move in the direction of new lyricism (“The Last Spring”, “Ismene”, “Antigone”), until the reader is confronted with the way they function to explode stereotypes, “illustrating a cliché.” There is more inter-textual wordplay (from poets, proverbs, legends, nursery rhymes), and many opportune similes and metaphors. With surreal and unsettling imagery, the poem “Iphigenia” both evokes and dismisses a nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It is worth quoting in full:
Ships slinged in low elastic waters knock
who chug you to the altar
where old blood crumbles.
Orange fire tassels air.
You look out from the coast
back when twisting horses rise…
and clay figurines scout on your shelves
or back, lost geraniums shimmered August
and then expunge, then ‘fluey tenants later, then tied between two screens
your binary presence more real than soft dawn
when ritual tatters
and reversible names converse over the galloping maps.
Her teary pillar shrives a velour sea.
Your hair tacked with daphne and myrtle. Birds creak, a charmer −
nett bridegroom, mock stag −
to keeling ships, to dimple wind
coins close your eyes
(p.197)
At the end of the collection, there is a brief page of notes, referencing a handful of allusions. At the risk of advocating the scenario of the poem “Profile” (“Later I was avant-garde/ You can read the accompanying text’s/ explication of process”), I feel that a few more references might help the reader. Not too many, because in the end Ryan’s impact relies more on an apprehension of superb poetry than on textual exegesis.
MARGARET BRADSTOCK has five published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (awarded the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Her sixth collection, Barnacle Rock, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in 2013. Margaret recently edited Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white poetic responses to “settlement” (Phoenix, 2011).
A salient quality of the Ern Malley hoax is its incommensurability. There is something about it that, no matter how hard we try, how far we go, where we look, will never be properly explicated, never entirely understood. This quality is shared by the poems but this isn’t unusual with good poetry; whereas those works the circumstances of whose composition remain enigmatic are rather fewer: Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is the most famous example. It is the mysterium surrounding the writing of the Ern Malley poems, as much as the poems themselves, that has kept people coming back to them; and now we have, in David Brooks’ wonderful The Sons of Clovis, a sustained attempt at an inquiry into that particular circumstance.
Brooks says at the outset—and who could deny it?—that we would be foolish to take at their word admitted hoaxers when they describe the way they made their hoax poems. If they invented a poet and his poems, might they not also have invented the circumstances in which (they say) the said poems were composed? Of course they might. They probably did. Not that Brooks attempts to deny the Saturday afternoon in the Victoria Barracks alibi; he is after something larger and far more interesting: a genealogy for the poems themselves, their DNA perhaps: where, as poems, do they come from, what is their provenance, what their affinities and their contraries?
His suggestion, maugre the received version—the poems represent a kind of DIY antipodean surrealism mixed in with a bit of impromptu automatic writing indulged in by a couple of bored soldier-poets on a lark—is that their roots lie principally in the writing of the French Symbolistes; and that the means of their transmission can be traced, via Australian poet Christopher Brennan, into the early work of the hoaxers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart. As the sub-title indicates (‘Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a secret history of Australian poetry’), Brooks feels he has discovered, in the French hoax poet Floupette, an actual precursor for Ernest Lalor Malley. Not the sole precursor—one of the most entertaining things about this very entertaining book is its discussion of other literary hoaxes, including an illuminating account of the Demidenko Affair—but certainly the main one.
It seems on the face of it an audacious speculation, difficult to sustain, let alone prove; but this is where the secret history becomes so fascinating. Christopher Brennan, it turns out, corresponded with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century. He owned a copy of Les Déliquescences by Adoré Floupette (Paris, 1885), perhaps acquired during his European travels in the 1890s and certainly the only one in Australia at that time; astonishingly, the original of two versions of the painting by Evariste-Vital Luminais that gives its title to the first poem in Floupette’s collection—Les énervés de Jumièges—is in the Art Gallery of NSW and has been since it was purchased on behalf of the gallery, for an unknown sum, by an unknown person, in Paris in 1886. This is the same work that, under its alternate title, Brooks uses for his book.
James McAuley, in the immediate pre-war years, wrote his MA thesis on the Symbolistes. At around the same time Harold Stewart was spending time in the State Library of NSW copying out, by hand, poems by Mallarmé and other French poets, which he then translated and published in student magazines. Whether either had in fact read Floupette, or even knew of his existence, is more difficult to establish but Brooks does show that McAuley, at least, could have done so: Brennan’s library, containing Les Déliquescences, was available to him.
The point of these connections is that they allow the speculation that, in creating Ern Malley, the hoaxers were, in part, indulging in a Yeatsian argument with their own younger poetic selves. This is a central point in Brooks’ thesis, one he develops in detail, and credibly, over the course of the book; and it gives a possible answer to the question as to why the Malley poems continue to emit such a strong emotional charge: they are not simply a hoax, they are not just parody. They stem directly from the chaos of two versions of the poetic unconscious where psycho-sexual battles are fought and lost or won.
As Brooks follows this line—with many twists and turns and a number of digressions, all of which are enlightening—a curious thing happens: one of the hoaxers, Harold Stewart, more or less disappears into the shadow cast by the other, James McAuley. It does seem likely that McAuley was the senior partner; it’s certainly the case that he is much better known in Australia than Stewart, who spent the second part of his life in Japan and whose later work is obscure and in some cases still unpublished. But you can’t help thinking also that McAuley, the tortured Anglo-Catholic alcoholic, the literary cold warrior, the politician of poetics, is more susceptible of analysis than the semi-retired, comprehensively veiled, homosexual Buddhist living anonymously in Kyoto.
McAuley, you come to feel as you read through The Sons of Clovis, is the sole clerk of [his, that is Malley’s] metamorphosis; while Stewart is not just hidden but, in Brooks’ own words, hiding something, perhaps even from himself. I put this forward, not as a criticism of the book so much as an index of how the Ern Malley imbroglio continues to elude explication, even in the consciousness of as sophisticated and erudite a commentator as Brooks. As I read on, and there was less and less about him, I found myself thinking more and more of Harold Stewart: as if he were yin to McCauley’s yang; the secret heart of the poems perhaps; the key to their darkness, their obsessive invocation of absence and loss.
Brooks is a superb close reader of texts and much of the interest of the book lies in his ability to get inside the words of poets—Malley is by no means the only one he eviscerates—and also in the way he casts his net wide enough to include in the discussion figures as disparate as Frank O’Hara on Manus Island and Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon; but there isn’t any mention of an intriguing adjunct to the Malley poems: the eleven, perhaps twelve (one seems to have been lost) Ern Malley collages put together by Harold Stewart some time after the poems were written. Perhaps they are too faux-surrealist to be of real interest, though I still like the iteration of wraithy, disembodied hands therein. They suggest the twinning of McAuley and Stewart: some kind of intrinsic relationship which meant that each supplied the other’s lack. And that together they made a third.
And twinning is the point: the sons of Clovis, two mutilated young men wounded and set adrift by their own mother on the waters of the Seine, recur as avatars through Brooks’ book; which, inter alia, is preternaturally alive to correspondences of many kinds. His language crackles off the page with a type of manic intensity that recalls the ticks of a Touretter. There are asides upon asides, parentheticals within parentheticals, footnotes on footnotes: indeed, early on he distinguishes, typographically, between crucial and non-crucial footnotes in an attempt to compel the reader’s attention towards the former.
He also suggests at several points that readers might wish to skip a chapter or two and obligingly informs you where you should go to pick up the main line of the narrative. These provocations, which I ignored (I read everything, including the non-crucial footnotes), are in a confidential tone of voice which, as it were, ushers you through a hall of mirrors pointing out reflections within reflections within reflections; and remarking on those junctures where the maze discloses a recursive, indeed infinite, regression.
Some of these lead to alternate (or parallel) traditions, including one in which Ern Malley influences Frank O’Hara and John Ashbury who then, in appropriately clandestine fashion, transmit the influence back, via Donald Allen’s epochal anthology, to Australian poets of the Generation of ’68: a kind of future in the past that is both credible and a revelation of the occult and serendipitous manner in which literary influence, skipping time, from self to fractured self, does in fact work.
I don’t think I’ve enjoyed an excursion into Malley land as much as this; it deserves to stand next to Michael Heyward’s very different (and at one stage apparently definitive) The Ern Malley Affair (1993); and some other examples of a small but compelling genre: works like Nick Groom’s The Forger’s Shadow (2002) which take as their subject the always fertile field of literary forgery, frauds and hoaxes; and show us how closely skeined together, indeed Janus-faced, are the twinned acts of faking and making.
Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965
