On poetryfoundation.org, I found a ‘micro essay’ by Linh Dinh on teaching poetry, in which he states, “Poetry should astound and frighten.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/01/what-i-usually-say-to-my-students/

I was drawn to and puzzled by his pieces, so I wanted to learn more about where he was coming from. Dinh immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 (as an 11 or 12-year-old), so it is presumable that the imagery in his poems, “The Fox Hole” and “The Most Beautiful Word” was informed by the child’s experience of direct war. Read without context, it would not be clear whether these episodes were from that war or another—they are not accompanied by the usual dogma of Vietnam War literature. And so they escape categorization. Each is a fresh, brutal, grizzly—and at once oddly comic, romantic—depiction human-imposed suffering, fear, and death. These poems startle their way into our systems, jolt and fragment our awareness.

“The Fox Hole” reads like a short story. The first sentence, “‘Oh great,’ she yells, ‘a fox hole!’” reads as light-hearted and jovial, as though an adventure is about to begun. Upon second and third readings, it is unclear what the woman’s emotions are behind this line—it could be frustration, relief. But Dinh immediately begins by turning us on our heads: the foxhole is a referential for a wartime setting, but the tone and punctuation of the statement doesn’t necessarily suggest the fear or anxiety that one associates with that setting. The proceeding images transform the foxhole into a grave, a living tomb: “throwing a clump of dirt on her head…bunched up like a mummy…almost completely buried.” The references to her beauty and her youth contrast the grave imagery: “flush of youth…pretty woman.”

One could almost read over the line, “There’s dirt in her nose, in her eyes, in her mouth,” because it blends right into the center of the paragraph-block. But I found this image, on second reading, to be the most horrifying. Imagining the sensation of having hard, gritty dirt in those orifices is unbearable—and the woman’s position suddenly jerks from living being (whom we were cheering on for successfully hiding and outwitting the soldiers) to cadaver. The dirt piles, she cannot get it out of her body, the feet are padding it down over her: she is being buried alive. The reference to a soldier being able to walk right over her also brings to mind the desecration of actual graves, and how colonization and war often disregards past graves. Here Dinh is flipping it around again—established graves are not just disturbed, but living graves are created and ignored.

Finally, the poem comes to a climactic end, when the woman questions what she has sat upon. We move from root (natural, benign), to hand (disturbing, but still safe) to hand grenade (death stamp). This last line demonstrates the same emotional progression as the rest of the poem: first relief, the growing horror, then devastation. In the last line and the last words it is confirmed that we are not on an adventure, that our heroine is not safe, that there is not safety in a war field.

In “The Most Beautiful Word,” the speaker is more defined than in “The Fox Hole”—which draws in the questions of complicity, and physical and emotional distance. We begin with a dreamy statement about language, specifically the English language. So our speaker knows English—did s/he know it then, at the time, or is s/he only using it now in reflection? (Clearly the poem is written in English but, in context, we can assume it is placed in Vietnam.) The next few images of the injured man conjure food and feasting: “steaming…harvest…” But the speaker’s tone remains casual, detached: “I myself was bleeding.” His injury’s are certainly not as extreme as the other man’s, but is he in a state of shock? The speaker has retreated from the present moment to an intellectual, ethereal meditation on language. He replaces the word “yaw” (movement from side to side), still in the context of injury/war/death, lyrical, playful words: “danced, tumbled.”

And suddenly we are in a scene between two would-be lovers—it is now “my man” who is lying, face-down, and the speaker is an “impatient lover”—still casual, distant. The dominoes of his bones or teeth “Clack! Clack!” and we are delivered from kitchen to bedroom to rec room. His blood is a “pink spray,” a “rainbow”, and the veins in his jaw are “blue threads to the soul”—all words that incite comfort, beauty. Is this to preserve the preciousness, the dignity of human life, or is this over-the-top language the mimics the ways in which we (English-speakers, Americans) are consistently protected from the gruesomeness of war? Several words also demonstrate medical knowledge: “C-spine” (cervical spine, or vertebrae just below the skull), “mandible” (lower jaw), “extracted.” So we wonder who the speaker is, a medic? Was he a doctor or will he be one? Or are these words all participants in active war learn because they are so consistently exposed to the body in a brutal way?

The word play this prose poem demonstrates the disjuncture between what death/war actually look like and what we are told. It also displays the human mind’s capacity for escapism in processing the horrifying—what cannot be processed. There are images from daily life/households, the spin off on sounds of words, and the movement into medical terms—all distracts from the suffering body blatantly displayed before us.

So how is this political? In every way that it’s not political: Dinh avoids a polemic with playful language, misleading storytelling, mixed metaphors, and ambivalent narration. He disarms us, but when we blink, look again, we realize he’s drug us into hell and left us there, marooned.

Mong-Lan does personal as political like whoa

Whoa! Mong-Lan! Whoa! Personal as political! Whoa!

I’m blown out by this poet, by her insane diction and impeccable timing on and across the page. I looked her up right away to see what new book she has out & found that she hasn’t published since 2008 because she’s been busy with Fulbright scholarships in Vietnam and silly things like that. Psh, get back to work!

On her website, Mong-Lan is quoted as saying “Behind the image, the imagination.” I think this is a really acute & open-faced summary of the ways in which her poems are stacked thick with layers and tightly wound. I’m looking specifically at “Field” on page 102 of AAP. The poem itself doesn’t physically take up very much room, a half page at best. But the psychic space the poem inhabits unfolds indefinitely off the page and into my lap, my bed, the floor. I read her poetry and I think YES. THIS is what good poetry is supposed to be capable of doing.

“Crows land like horses’ neighs” and I’m on the floor. What just happened? She blew in and touched down like some tornado off the radar. The juxtapositioning of this first gusty line and the quiet flatness of the title allows this to happen, allows us to be surprised and engaged and yet not at all misled. This is where the layering begins, where we find the imagination behind the images. “Crows land like horses’ neighs / rush of rocks,” and we can hear it before we see it. This poem is so tightly crafted!

The poem continues with a question that, without these particular line breaks, would otherwise slow the poem significantly. “how many buffaloes / does it take to plow a disaster?” she writes, sliding more layers on quickly. We are shown the buffaloes right after the aural rush of power in the first stanza, allowing us to hear the buffaloes here too, a herd of them. But then Mong-Lan enacts the plow and we are watching buffaloes tear up land into a disaster and watching buffaloes working fields for an unyielding crop, all at once. When she calls upon women in the last two lines of this stanza, we are allowed to recognize the possible gendering of the buffaloes in the previous lines.

The next stanza complicates nouns into verbs, layering imagination upon images that we think we understand. “shoots of incense / hotly in her hands” represent both shoots or stalks of incense and also the shooting pains of aging hands, ones that have cleaned up many messes. “she bows toward the tombstones / face of her son” and suddenly she is not only looking at the tombstone, but at it’s face and that it’s face is that of her son. Her hands hold the pain of grief and of many years where the “revolutions [are not] realize[d].”

The final full stanza leaves the poem ringing before the last couplet. The last line, “to dye what she’s earned” infuses the poem with the death & disaster that’s obviously prevalent in this life, on this field, but takes it a step further to layer her own age and inevitable death as well. Mong-Lan shows us that there is no reason for the speaker to dye the grey hair she has earned in her lifetime, but the poet also deposits another coating by implying “to die for what she’s earned.”

The whole poem sits on that last line. On her back. The field, the animals, the disaster, the death, the hesitations, the refusals, the weather, the age. Everything sits on her back.

Mong-Lan brings the political into the personal in ways that invite the reader to investigate both more fully. I’m really excited to see how the groups elaborate on the personal as political, especially in terms of poetry’s responsibility to both.

The Shared Emotions

My focus this week is on a poem by Adrienne Su, Savannah Crabs. Su's poems in this anthology are all written about what seems like her personal experiences, yet she has a way of pulling me in and making me feel my personal story in her poems.

Savannah Crabs pulls my southerner out and reminds me of the many, many, many stories I could share around the event of live crabs being brought into my house. From the time I was three I played with live blue crabs, learned to put them to sleep, and, like Su, would watch as "the first mute batch reddens and stills." Su takes me back to those times and to times when I was older and passed my blue crab lessons on to the younger kids in the family.

The fact that this poem is about more than just blue crabs really comes out in the last line of the poem when she reveals the prophecy of the hermit crab, "You'll find joy, but you must leave the family." Right here, I just grabbed my chest -- she punched me. I won't go into my personal family stuff on this blog, but I will say that I wanted to stand and applaud Su for this landing.

Other elements of this poem that really stood out to me are:
1.she titles the poem "Savannah Crabs" which makes me think of Savannah, Georgia -- a beautiful coastal city near Jacksonville, the last Florida city I lived in. Georgia and Florida share a border on the north east side of Florida yet Florida is known for its oranges and Georgia for its peaches, so the choice that Su makes to say the crabs were "packed tight as oranges" is an important one, I think. You can't really pack peaches tightly or they will bruise -- which I think says a lot about the conversation under the words about family and home.

2. the way Su moves us in time is really important in this piece. We start in the present "they come from the coast in the iced trunk." Then she moves us to the future, "She does not think / of her mother, who'll die this fall..." Then back to the present and a shared moment between siblings and parents -- she and her brother crouching and poking the crabs as the parents chase two across the lawn. Then the crabs predict the future, "You'll ache; you'll smother; you'll never be able to talk to each other." Then back to present, "It sits on the dryer." Then finally the last line gives us a glimpse of the future (as proper prophecies should). The use of time in this piece gives a greater picture of the family Su is profiling in this poem. Not only do we get the story that is happening with the crab, but we get the future stories of the relationships between siblings and between family in general. It's a powerful use of chronology.

3. Her verbs are amazing in this poem. Here are the ones that struck me most:
packed tight (S1:L1)
sunk in thoughts (S1:L3)
dread that will stain her (S2:L1)
tends a back pain (S2:L2)
crouch by the crate (S4:L2)
poke slow ones (S4:L3)
scuttle and flip (S5:L2)
we salt them (S5:L4)
reddens and stills (S8:L1,2)
I peer (S9:L1)

Su is my new favorite, this week. Her ability to make the personal seem universal is a powerful moment of a poet (if that is your goal). I look forward to more of her work in my future.

peacelovelight
Kiala

Adrienne Su is my favorite new poet for this week. Each of her four poems packed so much, and I read them several times—first for language, then deeper, for theme, allusion, imagery, then deeper once again, to try to read into where she was trying to leave us with the poem. But particularly in the final two poems, her language & imagery seduced me the most.

“Female Infanticide: A Guide for Mothers” was like a slap in the face, each time, each roman numeral, over and over. But there was a change from one section to the next. The last three sections are the most disturbing—imposing psychological torture to keep the daughter from moving forward in society or with her life. The last line is most unexpected, most disquieting, “In old age a daughter is fine good fortune.” Suddenly the idea of a daughter’s value is completely manipulated; though she is worth little as a child or growing woman, if her spirit is broken down enough, and if she proves impossible to expend, she will eventually gain a purpose of servitude. This last stanza suggests the concept of care—that the unwed daughter will care for her parents when they age, though they have not cared for her (or have, but only by keeping her alive). This is the least expedient option, and yet the only time in which a relationship of caring (even love?) between parents and a child has been suggested. I was particularly taken by the subtitle of this piece, “A Guide for Mothers.” Why mothers and not fathers? Does the responsibility fall on the mother (a woman herself, once a girl baby herself) to decide if her daughter will live or die? This calculated list is insidious, inhuman, and I think it is telling that the message is to a woman, with regard to another woman. The speaker in this poem is clearly neither, but a man, a representative of patriarchal power, one whose life was never considered in this way, who would never have to make this choice himself.

“Savannah Crabs” took on the narrative of immigration and assimilation with a particular potency. The language took so many turns throughout and revealed several layers of themes. First, the colors stood out to me throughout this piece: bluish and thirsty, oranges, blue Buick, African violets, pink bedclothes, white birds, off-yellow shell, reddens and stills. These colors carry us through the poem—the crabs are blue (asphyxiated) like the very American Buick, drained of life, color, originality. The pink bedclothes are soft, feminine, childlike, but they ironically hold the lonesome, loveless death of the grandmother. She escapes the bedclothes, the bed and the world in which she resides, on the prophetic wings of the white doves.

Prophecies are strong throughout this piece. The first appears on the eyelets of the grandmother’s gown. Next, unexpectedly, one rains down with the salt poured on the sinkful of blue crabs. “When it rains it pours,” the children chant the motto of Morton Salt. The brand announced the slogan after having developed a salt whose granules wouldn’t stick together in humidity. Rice kernels are often used to keep salt from clumping and sticking. But, with Morton salt, no rice was necessary, the salt will pour freely all over the bodies of the crabs. I can’t escape the image here of Americanized ways of living that supposedly make lives easier, but are in fact slowly killing (burning, dredging) the lives of those who must change & conform. The children are taken with the gymnastics of the very much alive crabs, but pour the salt over them, nonetheless. The next prophecy comes from the crabs: “You’ll ache, you’ll smother;/you’ll never be able to talk to each other.” This is a warning to the children, of what and whom they might lose if they continue on with this assimilation.

Finally, we return to colors, with the yellow crab. This crab is only saved because she is forgotten; it is pure chance that she is left behind while the others are “waving hello/” break “and goodbye. The mass of crabs turns deep red as their lives end. At first, I was unsure whether the yellow-shelled crab was alive (as it is just referred to as a shell), but I decided that it is. She is injured, has suffered, is far from the familiar sand of her home, but she survives. Is the life she will live worthwhile; at what cost has she escaped the fate of her salted brothers and sisters? The poet calls the crab “he” but I believe it is “she” (represents narrator). She is ugly (injured, different looking than the others); she is a hermit (alone, separated from her pack); she is threatening (she carries the knowledge of this history on with her—she threatens the stability of the world in which crabs are salted).

The final prophecy is a message from the surviving crab to the narrator: “You’ll find joy, but you must leave the family.” This is the path she must take, and it could be a path leading to love, prosperity & success—but these words carry with them the chill of the other crabs’ prophesy (“never be able to talk to each other”), as well as the sad final words with which the grandmother left the world (“loneliness, lovelessness, white birds”). In this poem the voices are many: the narrator’s (from the poet’s experience?), and the messages she has gathered living between two cultures. Her instrument is her food, which is also perhaps her family’s livelihood. Perhaps the crabs are a great delicacy, or perhaps they are the food they need to survive. Perhaps they represent the bounty one can find in Georgia, or perhaps they are a food that the two cultures have in common. This poem is about survival—aligning the lives of animals with human is common (as with “Animal Liberation” & the duck), but the idea of a family’s nourishment as representation of their loss of culture/loss of self is more radical, and closer to the bone.

I am eager to hear other interpretations of Su’s work—to hear how it may have affected others in a way I missed. What do people think about the significance of using crabs as an instrument? And what about the mention of the aunt and her violets? I have trouble weaving those two lines into my interpretation of the poem. Thanks for your thoughts!

The English Canon by Adrienne "BadAss" Su

There are a number of poems in this week’s reading that I find exciting and worthy of further exploration. The one I keep coming back to, however, is Adrienne Su’s “The English Canon” in the AAP book (this anthology is such a goldmine for me this semester). Her work is shockingly fresh. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve read a feminist poem that didn’t make me roll my eyes or turn the page feeling as if it had been done a million times before? Or done better? I think, literarily, feminist poetry or feminist-themed poetry has hit a plateau. Whether that’s because we’re at an impasse politically or because we haven’t found a new angle for the old argument, I’m not sure. Even in the Intro to Poetry class I’m TAing for, most freshwomen believed Joan Larkin’s Vagina Sonnet (ridiculously radical at the time it was written) was old hat. One queer student even said, “If I hear one more poem that uses the word ‘vagina’ like it’s revolutionary or something, I’m gonna gag.” I just about fell out of my chair. We, as women, are living in a totally different climate of gender-politics than has ever existed before.

All that said, I think Adrienne Su bypasses all that is “old hat” and addresses feminism, academia, power structures, and even cultural differences (not just among people, but among women) in a way that is fresh-faced, effective and downright radical. This poem moves me. I love first and foremost that the poem is called “The English Canon,” not just “The Canon,” as we (or rather, I) often refer to it, hierarchically assuming that everyone will understand it to be the English one. I don’t think she does this to suggest that canons in other languages are necessarily more inclusive, but rather to point out these levels of access. Excuse the generalization (or call it out), but I’m not sure folks of the English canon (white, male, educated) really believe there are other canons. Or, if they do, that they could ever imagine which poets might inhabit them. At the same time, this poem is showing up in an anthology of Asian American Poetry, written by an Asian American poet, allowing us to assume that maybe this is a book (or poem) that folks of the English canon might not even read; perhaps the designation of “English” is a signifier to those reading this book (Asian American poets or otherwise) that she is not talking about them, per se, but standing in solidarity against this huge oppressive literary establishment of exclusion.

She begins both the first and second stanzas with the phrase “It’s not that…” letting us assume that she’s narrowing the dimensions of the poem’s focus. She says it’s not that women were portrayed seldom and only in a certain light, it’s not that folks of color were ignored except when their exotification added humor and triumph to the poem – but by bringing these things to the forefront of the poem and negating them, we not only know that they happened, but that they do matter. It is about exotification of varying heritages, it is about sexism and the power dynamics between genders. It is exactly that.

What she really means, she says, is that those portrayals have outlasted their time and, where literature is supposed to be a place of access to knowledge for everyone (who can read), the lessons the English canon teaches have perpetuated this marginalized experience for her (and everyone else, let’s be honest). We recognize the power of the English canon and the implications of being published in something like The Norton Anthology or something equally boring & best used as a doorstop. Doorstop or not, we recognize that power, and in recognizing it, understand it to be true on a level beyond our say. Whether or not it is actually true, doesn’t erase its authority.

The way Su ends the poem is sharp and twists hard. She knows we are, in light of the 2nd and 3rd waves, allowed to and obligated to own our autonomy and demanding it. Still, a woman has to be part of the (capitalist) system and make money, a system that still holds up the English canon as The Canon. “Because what do her teachers know, living in books, / And what does she know, starting from scratch?” I fall out of my chair for real at these lines, know so intimately that inbetween point of being part of the system in order to change the system, as the same time that we must question what has come before while simultaneously building up our own classic history from scratch.

i have new poet crushes!

I think I’ve found one of my new favorite poets. This is huge.

Lisa Asagi’s work takes me by the throat. She nails isolation, I mean really freakin nails it. Is her series of dated prose poems (April 14, 15, 22) part of a larger book? The acknowledgments say yes, that they first appeared in Twelve Scenes from 12 A.M. Incredible! Just incredible!

In “April 14,” Asagi sucks me in with her authoritative but delegating tone. She requires the reader to be responsible, she expects the reader to be comfortable without hand-holding and instead trusts us to read through the fragments easily as if we were following her through her sister’s house to the child’s room. Everything changes with the line, “And I wish it could stop,” referencing the plastic fish bobbing mechanically in circles. Before we even reach the following line (equally jarring and vortex-like), she transforms the color of the space from childlike to dark and very adult. I find it interesting that Asagi writes “could” instead of “would.” The phrase, “I wish it would stop,” which I find myself saying often when the dog next door won’t quit barking or when the craziness of scheduling rolls out of control, implies that whatever is happening is physically capable of stopping. That it can happen. When Asagi writes “I wish it could stop,” the room shuts down. She implies with one word a new level of intensity, of impossibility. The poet stops talking about the fish or the room in that moment. She speaks of something much bigger and immortal.

By the next line, we understand this futility, that the ability to stop is rendered hopeless. It expands from the room to the “motion of this living.” Bam! We climax here, this is the moment the poem has been building toward. And surprisingly, she eases us back out. I find that endearing and wonderful; most poets will bring you to the edge and leave you.

I thought a lot about how reading this particular work and others in this week’s reading has already changed my writing. I’m watching what they’re doing and absorbing the directions they’re giving me. I feel like I have new routes to travel, new and more exciting ways to arrive at similar spaces. This is exhilarating. These poets (and Asagi in particular) have rewired tiny parts of my brain, directionally. Even in “April 22,” Asagi writes “But it feels like one by one ropes are being untied and tossed onto a boat I am standing on.” How many times have you known that feeling but not articulated it in a way that makes sense to someone or hasn’t been done a million times? God, I’m in love.

Other poets that are teaching me things:

Agha Shahid Ali, in the poem “A List Memory of Delhi,” re-introduces me to film on the page. The poem reads as if each stanza is a clip from a movie, a series of short scenes in which we get a larger story with ineffable motion. We are literally moving through the poem, we are the camera lens. (This is also really helpful to me for selfish reasons in that I am currently writing poems about memories for which I was not present, much like Ali’s retelling of a time when he was not yet born. Awesome.)

Brandy Nalani McDougall’s poem “How I Learned to Write My Name,” is using similar techniques, but feels more like a single camera angle that moves in and out of focus between the foreground and the background. While she is remembering how she learned to write her name, she’s using this foreground to tell the real story of her father stealing from her mother and leaving while her mother is in the shower, in the background. The distraction is what tells the story, the poem sits at the fuzzy place in between foreground and background. Such a smart and beautiful poem.

Similarly, I thought a lot about how I might learn from these poets’ particular stylistic choices. I’ve already expressed my conflicting feelings about this idea of  “published = finished” on the blog, and I by no means intend to try to edit or workshop these poets. Still, I look at Vandana Khanna’s poem “Alignment” on page 83, for example, and wonder at the job that the asterisks are performing (all the while knowing Elmaz is secretly cringing, hah). I wonder why space is not enough to separate these stanzas and think back to my own work, wondering if & where such punctuation (is an asterisk a punctuation mark?) might function, much less benefit, the poem. I’m also looking at that last stanza where it is mentioned that the parents of the narrative voice met with an astrologer to see if their “stars were aligned.” Could this be a physical/visual enactment of that stanza’s intention, that all of these stars (four sets of three) are aligned neatly & reliably? Whether or not this is the case, I begin thinking about different ways to accomplish the same affect without using a symbol like the asterisk. Khanna has me thinking stylistically and I appreciate it.