AMBIENT PARKING LOT

Ambient Parking Lot by Pamela Lu | Kenning Editions 2011 | $14.95

Parked in a corner of Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, I turned up the volume on my headphones and listened long past the comfort level of both my bladder and my thirst, testing the limits of the quickly fading sunlight. I chuckled and tick-marked at record speed, drunk with the spot-on parody and ridiculous brilliance of her lines. What I love about Lu’s work is her sharp wit, subtle delivery and deadpan hilarity, which you have to slow down and listen for in order to fully appreciate. Thus, parked, I listened.

Lu’s characters, all of them, are also listening. This book is a mock-documentary novel that tracks the mid-highs and mid-lows of a band of ambient noise musicians, the Ambient Parkers, who record in parking lots and garages and sample car trunk thuds, gridlock traffic honks, revving engines and the like. Aspiring to capture the nature in the machine, their material is capitalism and its doomed, sublime ambience.

Reading this book is like watching an indie webisode spin-off of “Behind the Music” (“Behind the Noise”) run by a group of nerdy, over-enthusiastic volunteers and bored unpaid interns with MFA degrees. Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute mediocrity in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic loops. Parts of it read like an overly self-conscious, overly detailed fan blog with absolutely no web traffic, which is crafted with earnest, superb engineering and is as addictive as low-calorie reality TV. The band’s fits of self-induced melodrama and cheesy enlightenment register as mere blips and farts to The Alternative Mainstream—yet, anonymously, the band continues, and miraculously, they continue to be heard.

Our album was released in the spring to the deafening silence of the public. Urged on by our manager, we held anemic signings at record stores and granted interviews to lackluster radio personalities, who kept fidgeting in their seats and mispronouncing the titles of our songs. Bearing the cross of those who serve up reality over euphemistic fabrication, we braced ourselves for the onset of poverty that would surely follow our disappointing sales. Our one consolation was the darkness that descended upon our suite each night, relieving us from the sight of our manager combing the want ads and calling our attention to openings for local waitstaff. (125-6)

This book asks us to listen to the intonations between noise and silence, between constant movement and abrupt stillness, between entropy and paralysis, between the cars and the lot. The Ambient Parkers unknowingly stumble upon these spaces, accidentally bumping into other failures of capitalism, other awkward nerds and excessive outcasts. Together they sip weak tea and theorize in a co-op across the street, grappling with their ridiculous and “unspectacular existence[s].” Their refusals—their starts, deletions and restarts—fall like bulldozed trees in a future parking lot, which splinter and crack underneath the bureaucratic electric saw of free-market time. Their attempts beg the question: What does it mean to fail, as J. Halberstam asks in The Queer Art of Failure, if the hegemonic rubric of success is pre-designed?

* * *

Lu brings a boom mic up to the excessive amounts of noise that capitalism constructs and demands be meticulously maintained, from the white noise of gentrification to the mobile phone radiation of global communication systems to the pretentious hype of green trends and the academic elite. If we are often complacent and complicit in these structures, Lu plays back the thrilling complexity of their inaudible sounds and gestures so that we can no longer ignore them. The Ambient Parkers sample and record our sense of worthlessness, insignificance, loneliness and sheer absurdity as artists “superfluous to the discourse” and paralyzed by excess. The “always on” or “always on vibrate” cultural standard means that silence is not something we’re trained to hear.

To train our ears, Lu builds the Ambient Parkers’ profile from a variety of source materials—first in their own manifesto and then in the manifesto of a rival copycat band, the Ambient Barkers. This is followed by “The Salaryman Chronicles,” a hilariously detailed report compiled by a private investigator that documents the bored and empty minutes of a band member who has sold himself out to the corporate cubicle world. We stop to listen to extended tracks: a radio interview with a dancer on her previous collaboration with the band (complete with indications for [Pauses], [Shifts in her chair] and [Forty-five seconds of radio announcements]) and a 50-page email from the Station Master of a pirate radio station who they’ve been stalking (including the band’s ridiculous attempts to reply).

The Station Master, who refuses to play the band’s music on air, chronicles an epic saga from his youth, which includes his blind trek into the woods of “the Orient,” where he encounters a strange creature called Agatha and “hear[s] a new kind of music.” Much of the saga also centers on the rise and inevitable downfall of the Station Master’s lover, Annika, a Swedish opera singer. At a major turning point in her story, she says the following:

When I was singing, all I could hear between the measures was silence—that inhuman silence, the silence of eternity. I often think I must have married that silence before I was born, in some past life perhaps. It’s my one passion, the meaning of my existence. My singing is an attempt to move it and change it, make it turn around and speak to me. My fans mean the world to me and I’ve dedicated my career to them, but I’d give it all up for a single moment alone with that silence, a single moment of recognition. (86)

* * *

The Station Master’s email finally ends in a museum with “a towering animatronic model of a saber-toothed tiger and a giant sloth.” After narrating his journey of global insignificance, Lu focuses our attention here:

The action lasts all of twelve, maybe thirteen seconds. At the end of this time, the cat’s fangs are suspended in midair, less than an inch away from the sloth’s neck. No blood is drawn, no appetite is sated. The inevitability of nature is stalled through human mechanization. Then artifice takes over and the scene is duly reset. With motorized precision, the models slide back to their starting positions. This is perhaps the strangest and most heart-wrenching part of the program, and it is this industrious backsliding, complete with the creaking wheels of machinery concealed beneath the fur, that reminds me indelibly of your music. (119-120)

Caught up in the absurd mechanizations of their lives, the characters in Ambient Parking Lot strive for “a moment of recognition” with silence that is never quite attained or successfully replicated. In their extreme awkwardness, they share an “air of distraction…a restless shifting and quiet shuffling.” They stall; we idle. Our listening stretches out long past what’s comfortable; we listen to them systematically occupy all 116 parking spots in a corporate garage and busk in a park to pathetic results for 21 days.

This kind of prolonged, awkward endurance is embodied by the dancer, who performs an exhausting scene of “experimental torture” inside a wrecked car as part of a collaborative performance in response to events that can be inferred as the aftermath of 9/11. She stretches a 3.5-hour set choreography into a 12-hour improvisation and in effect stages her own death. In her interview with The Radio Host, we witness the traumatic and nearly debilitating effect the performance had on her body. At the end of her interview, she describes a moment of pain (while her friend works on a tattoo) in which she extends through the “miniature trauma site” of her shoulder:

And in that moment of freefall, I understood that I had never really left the car wreck at all. I was still wedged inside the twisted shell, my legs pinned together, a sharp splinter of metal digging into my shoulder. I was dancing, Jerrod’s needle was dancing; we were performing a duet. I was trying to communicate something through each one of my movements. I could feel the pressure of the audience gathered outside, the open-mouthed awe of the musicians as they pointed their microphones at the wreck. [...] The musicians are probably still congregated around the wreck, peering inside its jagged openings, documenting the freakish silence with their studious machines. They strain to hear what they can’t hear, to capture what they can’t possibly capture. (174-5)

Everyone in Ambient Parking Lot lingers anxiously in an awkward gear, shifts and shuffles, and conducts their own kind of endurance art. For the dancer to lift herself out of the wreckage, to break through the carapace, is an impossible yet simple act, filled with symphonies of micro-movements and the labor of stasis. In straining to hear what they can’t hear, to capture what they can’t capture, the band is hushed by their inability to replicate stillness’ echo. Lu asks us to open our ears to these auditoriums of absence. She gestures toward the potentiality buzzing in every pause, which waits to be given a voice, to make a move, to become transformed. These moments of emptiness, of realizing something is yet unfinished and missing, are the moments the Ambient Parkers begin to listen for.

An image from THE TREE OF LIFE

I’ve seen two fascinating films recently, both of whose images and underlying attitudes have seeped (mysteriously, inexplicably) into my work.  The first is The Tree of Life, whose cosmic interludes (and I mean this literally: one minute you’re observing a family at a dinner table and the next you’re panning across sunspots and galaxies… or maybe a child’s conception?) and drifting trajectories through time make you feel like you’re living inside a Jorie Graham poem.  The second is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a lush, sometimes perplexing film whose primary effect was to draw me back into the sounds and mythologies of my childhood in Southeast Asia.

What I found after watching these films, Uncle Boonmee in particular, was that certain scenes began to haunt me, such that while drafting entirely unrelated poems I would start stitching lines together from the perspective of a character in a movie, or with an emotional pitch keyed to a particularly memorable scene.  Weirdly enough, I found this productive; elements of the poems derived, however indirectly, from these films turned out to be not at all foreign to the impulses of the overall piece.

I’ve watched documentary films to fuel my poetry before, mostly to capture a sense of the figures who populate historical moments I’m fascinated by (and removed from), but this was different.  This was a less linear process, because rather than engaging film as a purely communicative medium, I had allowed myself to stew, so to speak, in the visual rhythms and narrative dynamics of a piece, then emerged to transmute these impressions into writing.

Prompt: 

Think back on a film you’ve seen recently (or watch one of the two I’ve mentioned here) and recall some of your dominant feelings and impressions.  Which elements of the film now haunt you?  Was it the quality of the light in a particular scene, or the look on a character’s face as they came to realize something?  Think about particular moments or images that have “lodged,” so to speak, in the sticky web of your poetic sensibility, then start writing—from within the world of the filmmaker’s art.

Janine Oshiro

Janine Oshiro holds degrees from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University), Portland State University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon’s Literary Arts. Her first book Pier was the winner of the 2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize and was recently published by Alice James Books. She lives in Hawaii and teaches at Windward Community College.

LR: In Pier, which is so richly evocative of the complex emotions surrounding the illness and loss of a loved one, you strike a fine balance between confession and creative license, authentic experience and fantasy. How did you find this balance? And how did you avoid sentimentality?

PIER

JO: I’ll first respond to the “S-word.” I didn’t think consciously about avoiding sentimentality; while I don’t want to be sentimental, I do think that sometimes the fear of sentimentality can inhibit the exploration of emotions. Sometimes the truth of a person’s experience can come off as sentimental in a poem. There is no way around that. I would much rather read a poem that strikes me as authentic and a little sentimental than a poem that is just hip and ironic or detached and intellectual. I think about a poet like James Galvin, who in his latest book has a poem called “Two Angels,” featuring a boy with a mental disability and a dog. It walks the fine line. I truly admire that he doesn’t shy away from what might be construed as sentimental. In a way I think the fearlessness to even approach the sentimental is what makes some of his poems so powerful for me. I know that I have written some sentimental poems and poems I would never want anyone to read, and those poems have been important in my development as a writer and as a person.

I don’t really know that I can answer the question about balance. Did I have a strategy for finding a balance? No. I had all these questions about losing my mom, seeing my dad’s health decline, experiencing invisible presences, having a distinctly marked body, and feeling an “other” to myself. Writing the poems was my way of trying to answer these questions—even though I wasn’t really aware of that as my “project” at the beginning. Of course, I could have chosen to answer these questions through journaling and therapy, which I did to a certain extent. But then there is this—making a word-object with sound constellations, reimagining experience, creating a new and authentic experience in the word-world. What really happened? I didn’t really see a school of spoons swimming in the ocean though I write about it in the poem “Setting,” but I really did experience something crawling out of a zippered compartment in the wall and running down my body as I describe in “Next, Dust.” In the world of the poem what really happened doesn’t matter. It is all really happening in the world of the poem.

LR: How did you discover the language of this book, which, as in poems like “Three Capes”, “Eleven Dancers”, and “Next, Dust”, makes ready use of off-rhyme, sentence fragments, interjections, disruptions, and onomatopoeia?

JO: I love fooling around with words. I love just writing words on the page and giving those words sound siblings to see what happens. I love found language and jotting down words and phrases that are striking. I remember reading something once in a National Geographic about bodies oxidizing, and that ended up as “our bodies rust” in the poem “Relic.” I have found language from medical texts, of course, and books about grammar, book arts, gardening, critical theory, psychology, etc. I even find the explanatory language of the dictionary compelling. It is often the case for me that found language triggers an idea or emotion that starts a poem. Sometimes the found language finds its way out of the poem at the end, and sometimes it stays.

LR: Your voice is restrained, ethereal, sometimes clinical, and other times, it captures the whimsy of childhood. Did you have particular strategies of craft in mind while you were shaping this voice?

JO: The word “strategy” has been tainted for me by my college’s accreditation activities, which results in so much chatter about “strategic plans” and “strategic outcomes,” so I’m having a bit of trouble connecting strategy with poetry. Right now I want them as far away from each other as possible. I guess I think there is a danger in too closely identifying a strategy. Okay, so something happened, and I like it, but it isn’t the case that I necessarily want the same thing to happen again. I don’t want an “exportable strategy” in poetry. In the writing process I stumble upon a voice, and I want to see how far that voice will go. Maybe it keeps going, or maybe it dissolves. Maybe I stumble upon another voice, and I want to see how the two voices will work together. The poet Mary Szybist visited a class I took at Portland State University, and I’ll paraphrase here something she said: I’m not interested in finding my voice, but in making many voices. This was liberating for me to hear at the time, and I still think about it today. How many voices can I make?

LR: How did you come upon the tripartite structure of the book?

JO: Going from a manuscript to the published book was a fascinating experience. Sarah Gambito actually helped me to find the structure. It was originally just ordered without sections, and then I put it into five sections. I remember she asked, “Why five sections?” I really had no answer. I started thinking more about what I wanted the reader to experience as a whole. It took time for me to be able to see the poems without attachment to the order in which I wrote them and surface content, but eventually I eliminated some poems and came to this sequence. The simplest way for me to explain it is that in section one, there is a problem. In section two, I’m trying to act out various solutions to the problem. Section three attempts to resolve the problem. It creates an arc, though hardly original, that makes sense for the individual poems. It seems simplistic as I’ve explained it, but it took quite a process to figure it out.

LR: Can you describe the journey that this book took in its writing and path to publication?

JO: I certainly couldn’t conceive of a book when I first started writing poems. These poems were written and revised during my three years in graduate school at Portland State University and my two years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I am so grateful for the poets I worked with in Portland and Iowa, both fellow workshoppers and teachers. Many of these poems are in conversation with poems I read in my workshops. I continued to make minor revisions for a couple of years after graduate school, but the poems were mainly formed during those five years. After I won the Kundiman Prize, I did more revising and the final shaping of the manuscript. Sarah Gambito was my “editing buddy” during that time, and it was such a pleasure to work with her. Everyone from Alice James Books was incredible; I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Of course the manuscript was rejected countless times before this. When Sarah Gambito called to tell me, I cried. It was happiness, but something else, too. It was maybe fear, maybe a sense of emptiness. This one thing that I wanted more than anything had happened. Now what?

LR: Do you have any advice for poets who are putting together their first books now?

JO: I loved my time in workshop, but I think the time when I most needed feedback was when I was looking at the manuscript as a whole. Getting feedback on the whole manuscript or even a small collection seems more useful to me now than feedback on individual poems. Mark Levine was my thesis advisor at Iowa, and he suggested an ordering for the manuscript that was radical for me because I was attached to the order in which I wrote the poems; he suggested ending the manuscript with the poem “February,” which I never would have considered on my own. The idea of ending the manuscript with the line “It was not spring” was so devastating to me that it actually made me write the poem “Chorus,” which now ends the book. I didn’t know that thinking about the poems as one manuscript could generate new poems.

I think it’s important for poets to feel good about their own process—no matter what anyone else is doing. When I was in graduate school, I was shocked by how prolific some poets were—and they were writing amazing poems, so it wasn’t just quantity! I work slowly, and now that I teach, it’s going even more slowly. It used to make me a little anxious, but now it’s okay. I’m writing my poems in my own way and in my own time.

LR: What is your writing process like? What do you draw on for inspiration? Do you have favorite exercises or rituals that you like to use? If so, can you share a few of them?

JO: I accumulate notes and journal entries and scraps of language, and then I play around with them to make something meaningful for myself. I think play—exploring and enjoying language— is essential, no matter what the content. I like to write, go for a walk, and then write a little more. I usually have some formal concern that I am also working through—maybe couplets, or the relationship of prose chunks to lines, or iambic pentameter, or just writing a nine-line poem. What can happen in nine lines?

LR: How do you keep yourself accountable? Do you have writing partners, people to whom you send your work, or a writing group to which you belong?

JO: Sometimes writing is a priority. Sometimes teaching is a priority. Waking up and meditating is always a priority. Moving toward spiritual growth is always a priority, and writing is definitely part of that growth. I haven’t been writing very much lately, and that is fine. I’m not a fanatic about writing every day. I don’t have a writing group right now, and I’m much more interested in starting a reading group at the moment.

LR: Pier won the first Kundiman Book Prize. How has your involvement with Kundiman influenced you as a writer?

JO: Because I grew up in Hawaii, I really didn’t identify with the term Asian American. It wasn’t until I moved to the mainland that it even made sense to me. I really didn’t know that I was missing anything until I went to the Kundiman Retreat in 2006. I had been in many amazing and supportive workshops prior to that, but there was something present at the retreat that I had not ever experienced. I was so much more conscious of belonging and being an integral part of a group. With that sense of belonging came a different kind of confidence in myself. It was a confidence that was also a call to action because I learned that belonging was not automatic; it required that leap to be part of and to embrace community. I’ve had a few experiences that have given me more confidence in myself as a writer—and being part of Kundiman is one of them.

LR: Aside from Kundiman, what other resources would you recommend to emerging Asian American poets who might be either outside of, or freshly graduated from, the M.F.A.?

JO: Definitely look to Kundiman, but I would also say that everyone is a potential resource and friend, and don’t underestimate your own ability to create community wherever you are and with whoever happens to be around you.

LR: Do you have any new projects in the pipeline? If so, can you talk a little about them?

JO: I’m working on individual poems that aren’t intentionally part of a project. I remember a friend once telling me that my poems were noticeably absent of people. These newer poems have more people, more men in particular. I don’t quite know what to make of them yet, but I’ll find out.

The NY Times began the new year with a piece about the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and the cultural context in which it operates. And our most recent issue of the Lantern Review put a spotlight on HAWC in Community Voices. This is only the beginning of much-deserved attention for this unique generation of new writers.

How Do I Begin is an apt title for an anthology of writers whose ethnic identity is doubly marginalized: though the Hmong roots are in southwest China, most emigrated/fled to the US from places like Laos or Vietnam after the Vietnam-American War. Burlee Vang, in his introduction to the book, describes himself as “born into a people whose written language has long been substituted by an oral tradition.” The written language of the Hmong was lost after assimilation in Imperial China long ago; this is not to mention assimilation into Thai and Lao culture, where most Hmong are provided an education only in their host countries’ official languages. The Hmong language has remnants in traditional embroidery but they have become indecipherable. Writers identifying as Hmong American today, therefore, have the tremendous task not only of writing themselves into history and literature, but also of gathering their names and identities from the pieces available. English is their adopted language, and so these writers must weave a warp and woof through multiple traditions.

The writing of themselves is a doubly difficult task because of the relationship between art and identity politics. Almost worth the purchase of the book alone are the short statements beginning each author’s pieces: in them, the writers describe their relationship to the term “Hmong American writer.” Many of How Do I Begin’s contributors wonder whether the Hmong part or the writer part takes primacy, and many are skeptical of the “object of exoticism” and of ethnic identity as “artistic limitation.” They struggle with negotiating the universal (empathy) and the individual (alienation). These writings are like a hand opening and closing, pulsing, from palm to fist. The impulse to “transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries” is paired with the impulse to preserve those boundaries and distinctions. Vang writes, “We have overcome ourselves. Our writing attests to this. Legitimizes us.” That overcoming is a matter of ownership and self-creation; yet the question of legitimacy is raised, and one wonders, On whose terms? Mai Der Vang uses the word paradox in her statement: “Writing for me has become a roadmap to navigate the paradoxes of life.” Sandra McPherson writes in her advance praise that these writers “are new to themselves and yet they already have their elders.”

Because their chosen language is English, these writers’ elders must be equated across cultures. The two epigraphs of Vang’s introduction, for instance, are from Shakespeare and Hmong American poet Pos L. Moua. The Shakespeare quote comes from Hamlet V.ii, when Hamlet describes waking suddenly on his execution-bound ship: “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, / That would not let me sleep . . .” He finds the letter from Claudius commanding England to behead him, and he rewrites the letter, thus rewriting his fate. The scene’s metaphor echoes with two of the last lines of verse in this anthology, from a poem by Mai Der Vang: “When all along you think the only war / is the one inside you.” And the epigraph from Pos L. Moua is the voice of a different elder: “Then they rode in canoes secretly arranged for them . . . / straight toward the world where the torches are burning.”

All throughout the anthology are reconfigurations of cultural inheritance. Iconic images like picket fences are challenged in Soul Choj Vang’s poem “Here I Am,” while the Carveresque image of fishing in Americais written from a different perspective in V. Chachoua Xiong-Gnandt’s “Lake Red Rock, Iowa” and then in Ying Thao’s essay “The Art of Fishing.” Martha Vang’s poem “Still Life of a Fruit Bowl” paints for us not apples and oranges but

plaintains, lychees, longans, and mangoes.
Pomegranate seeds are sprinkled around the
spiky jack and durian.

Soul Choj Vang’s “Our Field” lines up a mythic history of place names and people’s names that begins in the East and ends in the West. The poem concludes with the exhortation: “Hold on to our new fields!” Bryan Thao Worra’s “The Spirit Catches You, and You Get Body Slammed” plays with exotic expectations by taking us to Missoula with thoughts of “an auspicious moon above ancient Qin” while a shaman speaks enthusiastically in Hmongabout “Randy Macho Man Savage!” The image of the wrestling ring is an apt one as we think about the way these writers grapple with themselves in the box of their spaces, and as we think of Anthony Cody’s words, a Mexican American writer contributing to this anthology in the “hope to connect to tangents of the universal human experience and tie us to one another.”

The experience of the alien is another theme. That now-indecipherable embroidery, the paj ntaub, graces the cover of this book in an artistic rendering. In Burlee Vang’s author statement, he claims as his goal “some universal experience or truth, despite how alien the world, situation, or characters . . .” Andre Yang’s poem “Cousins” gestures at a painful language of love and recognition even “amongst the chorus of insects / that must have been so familiar to you, that were so foreign to me.” Bryan Thao Worra’s poem “Modern Life” ends with the speaker

Waiting for the cops in their fancy cruisers
To blink
So our race can begin

That is a blink of longed-for recognition from authorities, and it is a blink that quickens the gap between the alien and the invisible.

There is a self-estrangement involved in all writing, in the creation of all memories, and it is useful to consider Ka Vang’s formulation: “Being Hmong makes me a better writer and being a writer makes me a better Hmong.” This awareness of a split identity is one of upward lift, like two waves rising in their collision.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this anthology, or how exciting it is to read these new voices and see the stirring of a people in words. I believe that the work of this anthology is not merely one of extending history or of grafting on labels. “Hmong American literature” is not a name; it is a conversation, an evolution. Bryan Thao Worra writes:

There is often the implication that ethnicity can be separated or masked in writing. This cannot be done any more than we can disguise the time in which we write. [. . .] my work remains, and that is my true body.

January. The living room window.

We start 2012 with a prompt that was suggested to us by one of our former staff writers, Supriya Misra.

After reading Richard Meier’s poem “[Untitled] The child thought it strange” in Poets.org‘s Poem-a-Day newsletter, Surpriya was so struck by the opening line that she emailed us to share it. “I think the first line of this poem would make an amazing poetry prompt!” she wrote.

We couldn’t agree more. Hence, today’s Friday Prompt.

Prompt: Write a poem that begins with some part or variation of the line: “The child thought it strange to define words with other words.”

To read the rest of Richard Meier’s poem,  click here.

Brenda Hillman | photo by Brett Hall Jones

Brenda Hillman has published eight collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar(1997), Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009), for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982); Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995); and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). In 2010 she co-translated Jeongrye Choi’s book of poems, Instances, released by Parlor Press. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

***

INSTANCES cover

LR: What attracted you to rendering translations of Jeongrye Choi’s poetry?

BH: I met her at Iowa at the International Writers Workshop, and it proved to be interesting and fruitful to work on her poetry with the other students who had some knowledge of Korean. When I found out she was working in Berkeley the following year, we were able to continue working on her poetry, but I needed help from several other people to complete the project. Wayne de Fremery, a Harvard PhD candidate in Korean Studies who lives in Seoul, had met Jeongrye before and agreed to do the transliterating for me and LTI Korea backed us financially. Poet Gillian Hamel served as an advisor and helped produce the manuscript and Byungwook Ryu designed it. Jon Thompson at Free Verse Editions and Dave Blakesley at Parlor Press were also instrumental to this work.

LR: You’ve done some translations before this book. Was there anything that interested you about Choi’s work in terms of the craft of her poetry specifically?

BH: I was interested mostly in her aesthetic and her commitment to the strangeness of the everyday. She has a perception of reality that’s not just run-of-the-mill surrealism. I know she’s doing a lot of language play in Korean, but because I don’t know the original language, I had to rely on what Wayne would tell me was going on. As far as I can tell, one of the things she does is use a lot of—not exactly punning—but she keeps the possibilities of language open so that things can be read as punning on different situations, and that really interested me. I tried to get that sense when we were rendering it into English. I think the quality of imagination is rendered really well, so the images do carry a lot of linguistic content. And the things that do translate well are the repetition and intimate forms of address that are open to the reader and can also be taken as an address to self. At times, you can’t tell whether she’s addressing herself or the reader, and I found that really appealing as well.

LR: Did you notice any particular differences in the cultural transformation of bringing a contemporary Korean poet to an American audience?

BH: There’s a bringing forth of a feminist, politically motivated and more populist poetry that speaks to everyday experience and that’s also considered more linguistically radical. I think she fits into that too. There’s an effort that might be in keeping with some of what has gone on in American avant-garde poetry, a continuance of the engagements with modernist fragmentary forms, and also with the psychological and with women’s issues.

She’s a very precise writer. I found it really interesting because I had two different experiences with translating in a span of two years. The first was with Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Asher Etwebi, a collection of work from a Libyan poet that I co-translated with Diallah Haidar. My experience with Jeongrye had to do more with discussions of how literal to be with the Korean because it’s really hard to be literal when the grammatical structures are so different, even in the way the sentence is maintained.

LR: In the introduction, you wrote that in Choi’s poetry “meaning is restless: it goes back and forth,” and Choi herself says that her work deals with “fragments of memories.” As I was reading, I also thought that a lot of her poems pull the reader in and out of time. In one poem she writes “time floats on the muddy water,” which seems to describe the experience for me reading her work. Did time and fragmentation affect your rendering of her poems?

BH: Wayne and I tried to work on the sentence structure, so it’s not as fragmented as someone like Barbara Guest. It is very disjunctive, where you’ll set up one thought paratactially next to a very different one. A better description of what Jeongrye does is that she puts fragmented thought into grammatical context. That’s how it was described to me from the transliterations. They were usually in disjunctive, fragmentary sentences. Jumpy is a good word.

LR: Going back to what you said about Choi having a sort of feminist or politically motivated bent to her work. Also, in the book’s introduction, you wrote that you find her work to be feminist “in an instructive way.” As a poet who also tackles issues of feminism in your own writing, and as an activist, how do you find her work to be instructive?

BH: She’s of a younger generation, and I feel in some way that American feminism has informed a lot of international poetry too. I feel instructed by her—maybe instructed is the wrong word—but a solidarity and sisterly-ness with her sense of quirkish freedom that reminds me of slightly previous feminism from the 1970s. Even though it fits into a sort of grouping, her mind is very playful. She’s wild. She has freedom of emotion, and she expresses a community with other women, like in her poem “Lebanese Emotion,” which is one of my favorites. She says:

Veiled women pass by
against a background of buildings pocketed by bombs exploding.
Hollowed eyes flashing; they come and go like gulls;
Maybe it was me.

She’s really getting at a condition of identification for all people in that poem, and identification with a difficult condition of the world through a more emotional approach—through the image that women are allowed to express more freely in all cultures. That draws me to her feminism.

LR: I know in your own work that you have a spiritual or mystical connection to the natural elements and that a current interest for you is eco-poetics. Does Jeongrye Choi’s work interest you on that spiritual or mystical level too?

BH: Again, that draws me to it because she has a playful connection to the nonhuman. For instance, she writes about crabs with one leg inside the hole. She writes poems to geese, and tigers, and frogs, and watermelons, even the moon gets a lot of attention and shadows. In my own eco-poetics, I’m more interested in naming things. Hers comes from more symbolic representations of trees, and plants, and animals, but they’re all animated in a way that involves an interaction with human imagination. She interacts with shadows that she mistakes for something else, and that makes it special.

Very often, those things are figures for either emotions or relationships. For her, I think relationships are problematic, and so the natural world, or the nonhuman world, is a way of entering into these human relationships with a different kind of symbolic figuration. There’s a poem called “A Forest of Donkey Ears” that I really love, in which the poet thinks she sees donkey ears, but it’s really leaves, and then it turns into memory and becomes a figure for the mistakes we make.

Like understanding the cry of the redpoll
only as the red of berries,
like something heard before
with a knitted brow—
Who was it? What was it?

If you can understand the animal or the nonhuman, then you can somehow get clearer on what’s often difficult for this poet.

LR: Do you think her work has universal appeal?

BH: Like all good poets, she works with local situations that get bigger as they become symbolic as a whole. Again, I think she’s speaking to women’s experiences that become representative of here’s how it is: to have children, to have different love affairs, to have hope in a dangerous situation. She’s on the border of dangerousness a lot, so there’s a sense of the universal. She writes of departure and love affairs that haven’t worked—it’s never quite clear why. I think she gets “universal” mileage of never saying the why but just saying the what.

With the where, I think of a poet like René Char who writes symbolically about living in the French countryside, but the places he talks about could be anywhere as opposed to someone who’s writing very specifically about one place. Then there are writers like Gary Snyder who write about their own locale, and you can extrapolate a lot from that. Jeongrye seems to me an urban, or suburban, poet because she writes about being in cities and seeing the things that are there in the city, or in the house. The editors constructed a statement on the back that says she “creates environments at once familiar but dreamlike,” and I think it’s a very good description actually.

I also like her statements at the end, and I sort of take her saying, “Now that I am alive and have a memory and can feel things deeply, I have to answer the questions of who I am, and where I am. So I write,” back to the question of women’s experience and poetic experience in the world. I like to have themes emerge in the brain. There’s a powerful nature of living in a symbolic world that teaches you more and gives you more material. It enriches reality to live very deeply and strangely and imagistically in the world. I wouldn’t say it’s only particular to her work, but poetry in general. The delicacy and intricacy of her poetics, like many poets who write conversationally offers a deeper, more vital way to live.

Click!, oil, 24" x 28" by Shizue Seigel

Shizue Seigel, an Asian American artist I know in the Bay Area, recently introduced herself to a group of women by saying that so many of the movies she sees don’t speak to her life at all. As much fun as it is to watch Meryl Streep being chased around by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, she can’t relate to Streep’s movies because the experiences are so far from her own. I admit I was completely baffled by this statement because Meryl Streep is one of my favorite actresses. I could understand where Shizue was coming from since there was a time in my life, not too long ago in fact, when I complained about every book I read and every movie I saw because they failed to represent me, or any Asian American perspective—but never Meryl Streep’s movies.

Dark Matter was the first film I saw at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in 2007, and I gravitated towards the sympathy her character, Joanna, showed for the Asian gunman oppressed by the school’s racism and department politics. When I went back to K College after the film fest, my Asian American studies mentor told me that after a similar shooting in the 1990s, militant students would hang pictures of their professors in crosshairs to protest oppression. At that particularly militant point in my life, Dark Matter, and Streep herself, became emblematic of me and my college experiences.

Streep studied music before studying acting at Vassar. She has said that it was because of her profound love of music that she knew she never would be a truly great singer. She has too much respect for the craft to call herself one, whereas many of her fans, myself included, extoll her singing voice in movies like Silkwood, A Prairie Home Companion and Mamma Mia! The more I learn about writing craft and genre, however, the more I’ve come to understand what Streep means. Back when I was writing “poetry,” it didn’t feel right because I wasn’t writing poetry so much as disjunctive, and sometimes lyrical, essays. I might follow the rules of poetry, rather than prose in my writing, but I’m not a real poet, and I have too much respect for poets to call myself one.

Earlier this fall, my advisor had a breakthrough about the kind of writing I’m attempting. “You’re a mixed media writer,” she said, and it made sense instantly. The most fulfilling experience of my career so far was my reading last spring for the A Place of Her Own exhibition where I used found objects and created an art installation to interact with during the reading of my lyric essay, “The Red Frame.” I can now see that my installation was a large-scale manifestation of how I write on the page. I borrow from personal experience, other texts, pop-culture, art and philosophy and use them in a variety of ways: to write large chunks of exposition, brief scenes, lots of litanies, ekphrasis and campy persona bits in the spirit of Ai and Walt Whitman. I like to use different forms and styles of essays: academic, braided, personal, disjunctive, spiral, lyric—whatever suits my fancy and is able to contain my thought process, which is perhaps why the lyric essay has become my home-base.

In “On the Lyric Essay,” Ben Marcus describes the lyric essayist as “an artist of information not saddled by conventional readerly expectations.” It’s a wonderful label—an artist of information. Until moving to California, I’d never considered myself to be an artist of any kind, but it is a label that I’m beginning to embrace as the best way to describe my writing aesthetic, particularly after the last time I met with my Fall workshop leader, Wesley Gibson, a nonfiction writer whose novel, Personal Saviors, was just published this fall.

It’s not uncommon for writers to cross or blur genres, but the “mixed media” label inhabits a certain blending of many different, and sometimes even opposing, genres, styles and techniques within one piece of writing—a blending that is always in service to the information being relayed and the tensions that exist within the work itself surrounding the very notion of genre, and the nature of perception, or being, in the world. Last month, Gibson asked why I’m so dead-set on writing a collection of essays for my thesis instead of a whole book if they don’t actually stand alone as distinctive essays. As I was explaining my concept to him, he said that he understood it in the same way he understood an installation he’d seen years ago in New York, in which a visual artist had created hundreds of paintings that revolved around Germany in the mid-twentieth century. They were, in fact, separate paintings but viewed on their own didn’t make much of a statement. Taken as a whole, however, they made perfect sense because the other paintings created the context for understanding each one as an individual.

And, that is how my mind works. Things might be distinct from one another, but they are always part of a larger framework that cannot be separated into individual parts. I make connections between subjects that my colleagues see as completely disparate, like a Meryl Streep movie and an Asian American woman’s life, but there it is. Mixed media writing reminds me of something the poet, Richard Brown, says to Streep’s character, Clarissa Vaughan, in The Hours: “I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment… all our feelings—yours and mine—the history behind who we once were. Everything at all.” I want to write about everything too—who I am, who I was, who I might have been if I’d grown up in Korea or gone down a different path in life, who I will become and all those who have influenced me along the way.

In the meantime, we’ll be putting together the issue, and preparing to exhibit at this February’s AWP conference in Chicago, where we’ll be sharing a table with Kartika Review under the name “The Asian American Literary Collective.”  Planning on going to the conference this year?  Please let us know, or at least plan to stop by the table — we’d love to meet you in person!

Warm thoughts for a happy, healthy 2012,

Iris & Mia

All the best for a happy, safe, and peaceful holiday, and a wonderful New Year! See you in 2012.

* * *

PEOPLE ARE TINY IN PAINTINGS OF CHINA

People are Tiny in Paintings of China
by Cynthia Arrieu-King
Octopus Books, 2010
Recommended by Iris:
“I lost my father in late 2010, and the delicate—almost brittle—transparency of this collection (which has much to do with fathers and familial heritage) struck me to the bone.  Arrieu-King’s language is beautifully evocative, but economical; her poems are rendered with slim, decisive strokes that are as breathtaking for their clear-eyed, precise minimalism as they are for their wry, sharply observant (at times downright blunt) commentary.  Acts of mathematical counting, division (or inability to divide, as in the case of the poem titled “Prime Numbers”), and serial repetition are motifs in the collection, as are colors, lenses or frames of vision, the contours of landscapes and language. Taken together, these themes serve to magnify and illuminate the speaker’s gaze as she negotiates what it means to claim a multiracial, transnational identity in a world that irrationally desires, even demands, perfectly divisible, concrete forms.”

* * *

ARDENCY

Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
by Kevin Young
Alfred A. Knopf, 2011
Recommended by Mia:
“Kevin Young’s latest book, Ardency, is at once epic and lyric, documentary and wholly imaginative.  Written from the perspective of various figures involved in the Amistad rebellion of 1839, the three sections of this book, ‘Buzzard,’ ‘Correspondence,’ and ‘Witness: A Libretto’ unfold in a dramatic reimagining of this moment in history.  While it’s true that with this collection, Young ‘[places] himself squarely in the African American poetic tradition pioneered by such writers as Langston Hughes’ (as the Washington Post claims on the book jacket), he also uses it to reinvent the tradition.”

* * *

THE ANATOMY THEATER

The Anatomy Theater
by Nadine Sabra Meyer
Harper Collins, 2005
Recommended by Mia:
“Nadine Sabra Meyer won the 2005 National Poetry Series Award with this collection, and I can’t recommend it more highly.  The poems draw deeply from history and mythology, studies of the human figure—its dissections, assemblages—and the tradition of the body in medicine and art.  Her work is riveting, beautifully crafted, and a must-read for anyone interested in, as John Koethe puts it, the human body and its relationship to the transcendent.  Luckily, Harper Collins lets you browse the contents of the book on their website, so you can preview a selection of the poems online.”

* * *

CHEERS TO MUSES

Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women
Asian American Women Artists Association, 2008
Recommended by Kelsay:
“Cheers to Muses is a truly inspired and inspiring anthology featuring visual art, poetry, fiction and nonfiction by Asian American women who challenge contemporary and historical assumptions about what it means to create Asian American art in all of its forms. Barbara Jane Reyes, Kathy Aoki, Keiko Nelson, Nellie Wong, Katherine Westerhout, Genny Lim, Catherine Ceniza Choy and many others share pieces of work and tributes to the Asian American women who have influenced their creative lives. Aside from being visually appealing, it offers a taste of how Asian American women approach the contemporary art scene.”

* * *

APOCALYPTIC SWING

Apocalyptic Swing
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Persea, 2009
Recommended by Henry:
“This was recommended to me by someone who’s completing a dissertation on boxing and Modernism. I’ve boxed and had a hard time writing about it, and have never come across any literature about the sport/art that isn’t mere glory or gossip. But this book of poems is ‘it.’ Brutal, beautiful, sincere. It’s the one that blew me away this year.”

* * *

bough breaks

Bough Breaks
by Tamiko Beyer
Meritage Press, 2011
Recommended by Jai:
“I am excited by this book’s inquiry into and desire for queer conception and how it imagines what queer mothering would look like.”

* * *

For yet more evocative reading, we also recommend any of the following titles, which we have reviewed or featured in the last year:

Poetry

• Mouth by Lisa Chen (reviewed in this post by Henry)
• Travel & Risk by Monica Mody (featured in this post)
• Spit by Esther Lee (featured in this post by Henry)
• แล้ว and then  entwine by Jai Arun Ravine (featured in this post)
• Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man by Ronaldo V. Wilson (reviewed by Stephen Hong Sohn in this post)
• Poems of the Black Object by Ronaldo V. Wilson (reviewed by Stephen Hong Sohn in this post)
• Toxic Flora by Kimiko Hahn (winner of the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; mentioned here; also see Wendy’s interview with Kimiko Hahn)
• Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz (1st finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; mentioned here and reviewed by Supriya in 2010)
• We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry (2nd finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; mentioned here)
• The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees by Marc Vincenz (featured in this post)
• Ligature Strain by Kim Koga (reviewed in this post by Jai)
• Yellow/Yellow by Margaret Rhee (reviewed in this post by Jai)
• Sông I Sing by Bao Phi (reviewed in this post by Greg Choy)
• not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them by Jenny Boully (reviewed in this post by Jai)

Prose, Mixed Genre, & Comic Art

• Kartika Review: 2009-2010 Anthology (featured in this post)
  
• Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (reviewed in this post by Henry)
• How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology  (edited by HWAC, whom we profiled in Issue 3; featured in this post)
• Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (featured in this post by Henry)

What is the best book that you have read in 2011, or what books are you planning to read (or give) over the holidays?  Let us know in the comments!