The Best American Poetry

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

In honor of Auden's birthday last week, I thought of this comic and of this lecture on Auden by David Lehman:

Notes on a Past Life: David Trinidad in Conversation with Kristina Marie Darling [by Kristina Marie Darling]

David Trinidad’s newest book is Notes on a Past Life (BlazeVOX [books], 2016). He lives in Chicago, where he is a Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College.

KMD: I truly enjoyed your latest collection, Notes on a Past Life, which was just published by BlazeVOX Books. As I read the work, I was reminded of Marianne Moore’s philosophy with regards to poetry. She actually coined the term “conversity” to describe the dialogic nature of the arts, to evoke the idea of the poem as a conversation with other creative practitioners. Similarly, your collection contains references to such writers as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Doty, as well as incisive commentary on the business of poetry. With that in mind, I’d love hear more about your beliefs about contemporary poetry as a dialogue among its practitioners. Which elements of the conversation are you most interested in preserving, and which of these are you most interested in refining, reconstituting, and even discarding? To what extent is your poetry, your participation in this literary conversation, an interventionist gesture, an effort to effect change through narrative, as well as form and technique?

DT: I think Moore’s term is apt. I’m always in conversation with other poets. In Notes on a Past Life, I set out to tell the truth about my own experiences in the New York poetry scene. That was all. But as I was writing the book, I realized it was a fairly stringent critique of the poetry business and ambition in general. Prior to starting the book—and while I was writing it, too—I read a number of poets who helped show me the way. I was looking for direction, and for permission, without really knowing it. It wasn’t a completely conscious process; I don’t know that writing, for me, ever is. Or can be. How do you write about unpleasant experiences with real writers, living and dead? How do you reach back, touch those old hurts, reignite them, and transform them into art?

Two poems I found helpful were Sylvia Plath’s “The Tour” and Ted Hughes’s “The Literary Life.” Both are about Marianne Moore, actually. Thom Gunn’s “Famous Friends” is a poem I’ve argued with for a long time. Ultimately, I think it’s valuable. Certain poems should trouble you. John Berryman’s Love & Fame showed me many things; I’ve been reading that book on and off for years. There were others. Lorca’s Poet in New York was helpful in terms of structure and pitch. Stylistically, Hilda Morley and A.R. Ammons helped me. James Schuyler and Anne Sexton always help me. The poets I’ve mentioned are all dead, of course.

To be honest, I don’t feel that contemporary poetry has very much to tell me.

I don’t think very much is actually being said, or said in an interesting way. There’s a sameness, and a safeness, a mundaneness, an eye to getting ahead that deadens the poetry. There are a few voices that seem distinct, concrete. Maybe there always are just a few. They stand out, but how many hear them? I think of what Elizabeth Bishop said about one of Marianne Moore’s books. She praised “the wonderful ALONE quality of it all—like the piano alone in the middle of the concerto.” I guess that’s what I’m always listening for, that solitary—and brave—individual in the midst of the rabble.

I’m curious to know what you find valuable in contemporary poetry. Does it nurture or inspire you? Who are the living poets you’re in conversation with? Who are the dead poets you talk to?

KMD: I certainly agree with your discussion of the “safeness” of much of contemporary poetry. I think part of this problem of homogenization comes from the increasingly corporate nature of the universities in which creative writing programs are housed. So many contemporary poets write towards what they perceive as the markers of legitimacy, rather than writing from a place of urgency, honesty, or risk. Yet there are so many contemporary writers whose work I return to again and again. For me, the most exciting work in contemporary literature is taking place at the very periphery of what we consider to be poetry, happening at the interstices of poetry and other genres and mediums: lyric essay, short fiction, literary criticism, even photography and the visual arts.

I spent some time at Yaddo in 2011, and remember having a conversation with the poet Sam Taylor, who said that the great frontier in contemporary poetry is not finding new ways to innovate or experiment. Rather, it is integrating tradition and innovation, placing the literary tradition we’ve inherited in new and provocative contexts. The most exciting contemporary texts often arise from the dialogue between the poetry, its tradition, and its artistic resources, and other modes of representation. Recently, I was moved by a collaboration between Sandy Florian and a visual artist, Alexis Anne Mackenzie, who works with collage. The juxtaposition of text with images gave the collection a generative quality, allowing each poem to open out into more imaginative work, more possibilities for readerly interpretation. Similarly, Keith Waldrop’s Several Gravities contains magnificent collages that act as kind of field guide, instructing the reader as to how to understand and appreciate the architecture of the poems. The work of Allison Titus, Julie Marie Wade, Emma Bolden, and Jenny Boully, particularly their experiments in lyric essay, has also been of paramount importance to my thinking about what is possible within contemporary poetry.

And so you’ve probably guessed that the dead poets I talk to include mostly female modernists—H.D., Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore in particular. They really began this undertaking of exploring the possibilities for dialogue between poetry and other disciplines. I’m particularly interested in the ways they placed the literary arts in dialogue with the work of philosophers of the time period—Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and especially Sigmund Freud. They really showed me that the smallest stylistic choices can convey powerful assertions about philosophy, literary theory, and psychology. And even these seemingly small stylistic choices are often politically charged. They remind me that poetry contains a unique repertoire of artistic resources, which can illuminate and complicate work from other fields of enquiry.

I’d love to hear more about what poetry made possible for you in telling the truth about your experiences in the New York scene. This collection could have arguably taken a much different form—anything from a roman à clef to a memoir. Why did you turn to poetry as a vehicle for representing these experiences? What did the vast range of poetic forms in the book make possible within the narrative, within your own thinking about the past, and within your conceptualization of time?

DT: That’s quite a trilogy of influences—H.D., Loy, and Moore. All troubling figures, in their own way. Eccentrics. I love that Loy described poetry as “prose bewitched.” Not long ago I reread H.D.’s Sea Garden, which I first read when I was in college in the ‘70s. I remembered liking the shorter pieces focused on a single subject, like a flower or tree. But this time I responded to the longer poems, such as “Pursuit” or “Prisoners,” where she gives just a snippet of a larger plot, like a scene from a movie, yet an entire narrative seems to rise up and blossom around it. Something similar happens when I read your poems. They’re full of details—ornate, romantic, and (dare I say) “feminine” objects. Lockets, silver charms, a velvet curtain with “silk tassels and lavish golden trim,” bone china “rimmed with tiny black crocuses.” There are chalets and opera houses and nightingales and chandeliers. Things gleam and glitter. The word “luminous” shows up again and again. It feels as if we’re situated in another time, as if a Victorian novel, or a whole universe of Victorian novels, haunts every page. At the heart is a sense of mourning, desire, the mystery of human experience. I can see your affinity with Jenny Boully, especially in your “footnote” pieces. Though the story itself is intentionally withheld, it’s interesting how much pours in around the “ornaments” and “embellishments,” around a mere gesture or single moment. As with H.D., there’s the suggestion of a narrative, or the trace of one, that gives the writing a ghostly or disquieting quality.

It was only natural that I would write about my New York years in poems, since poems are what I write. Poetry has always been, for me, a place where one can be absolutely truthful. More than in a novel, say, as fiction isn’t real. I guess in my mind that makes it less truthful. Less raw. And in a memoir I would have felt bound by narrative and facts. I’d have to spell everything out, make it all make sense. Notes on a Past Life is, more than anything, an experiment in memory. Often a poem would start with a color or object; images and feelings would begin to swirl around it and the memory would come forth and take shape, as language. A looser and more honest language than I was used to, which I found surprising and exhilarating. I was amazed how much I was able to remember, how much came back.

I outlined the book fairly early on, knew in advance which people and experiences I wanted to write about. Still, it felt, in the two years it took to write the book, like I was retrieving, putting the puzzle pieces of my history back together. To make sense of it. To understand what it was that I actually went through. So in some ways it was a fragmentary process. This allowed me to pull in passages from old notebooks, quotes from writers who were important to me in the past, even old discarded poems. I’m talking about decades-old poems. There was a kind of redemption in being able to include poems I had once considered failures. Or being able to rework some of them into the fabric of the new poems. So they were salvaged, finally of use. No effort is wasted or irrelevant. Or completely abandoned.

By the way, I thought of two more poems that were important signposts for me. Both by May Swenson. One, “March 4, 1965,” is about being a judge for the National Book Award in Poetry and feeling guilty that she played it safe by giving the award to dead Theodore Roethke instead of Galway Kinnell, whose book she preferred. The other, “At the Poetry Reading,” is about being bored at a reading by “stodgy” James Merrill: “The hour seems an age.” These poems were published in a journal after Swenson’s death, but not included in her collected poems. Why? Too honest?

Sentenced to Gender: The Women of Blazevox Books [by Kristina Marie Darling]

All too often, writers possess great technical ability, but they lack ambition with respect to the larger ideas that seemingly small choices within a text—a line break, alliteration, and even the visual appearance of the work on the printed page—can communicate. For many practitioners of the literary arts, style remains mere ornamentation, rather than functioning in a more substantive way. And so we are left shivering in a beautifully painted corridor after the performance, with the doors latched all around us.

At the same time, three recent texts by women remind us that form, and the behavior of the language itself, can function as an extension of content, opening up possibilities for readerly interpretation that transcend the semantic meaning of the words as they appear on the page. C. Kubasta’s All Beautiful & Useless, Ruth Danon’s Limitless Tiny Boat, and Anne Tardos’ Nine each present us with subtle technical choices that call our attention to the politics inherent in language, grammar, and the literary forms we have inherited. We are asked to consider language not as a given, but rather, as a set of implicit hierarchies, judgments, and assertions of power. Even more importantly, the reader is reminded that language structures conscious experience, and even the most subtle implications of grammar are internalized by the subject. In these deftly crafted works of poetry and hybrid prose, we watch as each author simultaneously inhabits and revises received structures for thinking and writing, ultimately subverting them from within that familiar and deeply entrenched order. Although somewhat different in style and approach, these innovative texts certainly share an investment in approaching poetic technique as politically charged, the smallest nuances of formal innovation offering opportunities for social justice within the literary landscape, and well beyond its boundaries.

What does possibility look like, then? How will we recognize her, and what glittering ammunition does she carry?

*        *        *

I did not say this exactly. I said
I am alone. I am ashamed.
I said I am so thirsty I

want something to drink. And
I said there are small shells
crushed beneath my feet. And I
also said one simple thing…

Ruth Danon’s Limitless Tiny Boat provocatively juxtaposes inherited myths with invented forms, which often use the space of the page as a visual field. By presenting her artistic inheritance alongside the wild machinery of her own imagination, Danon ultimately calls our attention to the arbitrary nature of the forms, narratives, and linguistic conventions that circumscribe what is possible within thought itself. Indeed, the cultural imagination from which we all borrow is revealed as the result of chance, and what’s more, it is only one of many possibilities.

At the same time, Danon’s graceful retellings of classic myths remind us that these shared narratives, these symbols and motifs that circulate within culture, are necessary for dialogue, artistic exchange, and even community. Danon fully acknowledges the necessity of a repertoire of forms and narratives, and the larger collective consciousness to which they give rise. She herself is implicated in sustaining this chance assemblage of cultural knowledge. Yet she skillfully works within these received structures for thinking and writing to expand what is possible within them.

What will we find when we open the door?

*        *        *

Any sequence of three lines

suggests a narrative…

As Danon’s book unfolds, familiar myths, and the literary conventions that structure them, are rendered suddenly and wonderfully strange. Indeed, we are made to see that the story of Narcissus and Echo offers myriad possibilities for identification on the part of the reader, among them a silenced female beloved, who discovers the possibility of speech by traversing the darkened corridors of her own psyche. Narcissus, who normally occupies a prominent role in the story, becomes a tertiary figure, mere ornamentation.

As Danon works to excavate Echo’s agency from this familiar mythical dreamscape, narrative convention is revealed as a source or order within a text, but also, a diversion, a limitation, a silencing. When we are asked to attend to Narcissus, we miss the possibilities at the margins of the text, the subversive and provocative gestures that exist only on the periphery of a larger cultural imagination.

Indeed, narrative convention is revealed as an attempt to impose order on an inherently unruly human psyche. What we discover through Danon’s work is the multiplicity that is housed within any experience, perception, or event. As we struggle to sort through these glittering possibilities, our attempts to find order inevitably replicate the power structures within the culture we inhabit. Danon’s work offers us a profound interventionist gesture, which inevitably expands what is possible within this familiar narrative, and the larger power structures that narrative replicates.  

When Danon forces us to unsee Narcissus, we see Echo for the first time.

What else is waiting for us when we meet her?

*        *        *

Mix of funk and freejazz Miles Davis musical response.
Lucretius saw the universe as something having a nature.
Bernstein: “Estrangement is our home ground”-Yukon bullfrog flu.

Barely arrived, it seems, and almost time to leave…

In her most recent collection, Nine, Anne Tardos acknowledges the necessity of shared conventions, myths, and narratives for creating community, and in turn, works of art. Yet her interrogation of these constraints is as relentless as it is fiercely intelligent. She ultimately eschews the rules of grammar, syntax, and narrative, choosing instead to define her own.

Written in nine end-stopped lines of nine words each, the poems in this provocative collection make us suddenly aware of the many constraints that are imposed upon conscious experience. Much like Danon, Tardos reminds us of the chance nature of the rules, and the larger cultural imagination, that we have inherited. This burdensome inheritance, accidental as it may be, ultimately circumscribes what is possible within thought itself. And for Tardos, the vast terrain of the cultural imagination we all inhabit is wholly subject to revision.

As Tardos redefines the rules that lend structure and meaning to experience, she allows this radical grammar, these new syntactical structures, to open up unforeseen possibilities for her own thinking, and for our imaginative work as readers. The poetic line becomes both a self-contained unit and a gesture toward infinitude, the possibility of indefinite extension. Similarly, the wild and provocative juxtapositions within each line strike sparks within one’s imagination. Each moment of rupture within these fragmentary narratives becomes an aperture, a doorway through which the reader is beckoned. Indeed, the poet no longer gives meaning to an audience who passively receives it. The text instead becomes a machine for generating meaning, and practitioner’s job is merely to guide the reader in his or her own imaginative work.

Writing as a Kind of Improvisation: Matthew Rohrer in Conversation with Kristina Marie Darling

Matthew Rohrer is the author of 9 books of poems, most recently SURROUNDED BY FRIENDS, published by Wave Books. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.

KMD:  Your collaboration with Joshua Beckman, Nice Hat. Thanks., is as lively and engaging as it is thought-provoking.  More specifically, I’m intrigued by your approach to collaborative writing as a kind of improvisation.  This makes possible a degree of surprise, chance, and wonder that is rare in single-author projects, which tend to be much more deliberative.  With that in mind, how does one invite such spontaneity into one’s own writing when working in isolation?  Within your own artistic practice, how do you negotiate planning and structuring book manuscripts with the kind of invention and improvisation that we see in your collaborative work?  

MR:  I think for years now I have been approaching all of my own writing as a kind of improvisation. I am very uninterested in planning out a poem, and am not very interested in reading poems that are obviously written like that. I just don't find it interesting to engage in writing that way (I'm not, after all, a novelist) and luckily for me I am pretty prolific -- so if an improvisation doesn't really work, I just toss it out. I write another one. 

I do think, though, that this came to a head after or while working with Joshua on NICE HAT. THANKS. The freedom and excitement and unalloyed FUN of collaborating with him was so intoxicating that I couldn't imagine going back to my own poems with anything other than the same sense of freedom and improvisation.

I got to interview Ron Padgett in 1995 about his Selected Poems and that's something he said then, which I remembered but which I don't think I fully understood until later; he said that after doing so many collaborations with Ted Berrigan, he began to approach his own writing as if it were a collaboration as well. And I think it's that sense of surprise at every turn in his poems that's so amazing, and which I humbly would like to also have in my own.

When I think of your recent collaborations with Kristin Giordano -- the GHOSTS OF BIRDS sequence, I'm amazed at how you are able to take these very spare and stark photographs in black and white-- really just bones on a black background -- and find a world or a poetic space in which they can live alongside your new poems. The sea plays a large role in them too -- which makes sense since the photos almost look like bones washed up on a beach.  I'm curious about how you approached the making of your poems in terms of these photos --- how you got to that moment of awareness that let you create this space in which the poems and the photos could live together?

KMD: That’s a great question. And I definitely agree with you that all of writing is a collaborative endeavor. After all, consciousness itself is essentially social, an ongoing dialogue with the various cultural texts, fragments of language, and phenomena that we encounter. But I think there is definitely something unique about collaborating with another practitioner of the creative arts. When I started working on The Ghosts of Birds with Kristin Giordano, I was amazed at how Kristin’s work allowed me to say something that I wasn’t able to say when writing in isolation. In some ways, the spare, barren landscapes in her photographs limited what is possible within the text. At the same time, though, this reduction of possibilities, and the inherent simplicity of the vocabulary of images that we were working with, actually made it easier to represent my experiences faithfully. There is something wonderfully generative about constraints. After collaborating with Kristin, I ended up with some of the most autobiographical writing that I’ve ever done, and they’re also some of my most honest poems.

At the time, I was writing grants and traveling full-time, and thanks to fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, 360 Xochi Quetzal in Mexico, and Willapa Bay AiR in Washington State, I spent an extended period of time near the ocean. For the entire time, I was entirely out of cell phone range. The poems make frequent references to letters sent and received, and the anxiety associated with correspondence. White spaces, silences, and ruptures begin to speak more clearly, more forcibly than the text itself. These anxieties and inferences, the torn envelopes and the nerve-wracked shorelines that appear in the poems, were a very real part of my life during those months. I think there is something spontaneous and liberating about collaboration, but I also believe that we choose our collaborators for a reason. Looking back, I think I gravitated to Kristin’s work because it resonated with my experience, my aesthetic predilections, and my emotional state at that time. Yet her beautiful photographs also pushed me to simplify the vocabulary of images I was working with, to allow meaning to accumulate around them. Honestly, I was amazed at how much I learned about the craft of poetry from her exquisite artwork.

Which actually brings me to my next question. I recently had the good fortune of attending your excellent craft talk in Paris, where you discussed collaborating with unwitting co-writers, dead poets, and appropriated texts. Collaboration becomes a way of thinking through and interrogating another writer’s work, with or without their express permission. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how collaboration intersects with other modes of engaging with and responding to works of art. Within your own practice, when does collaboration become an act of readerly interpretation, the end result being a work of criticism (albeit an untraditional one)? To what extent does this practice of creatively responding to texts begin to democratize criticism as a genre? Can poets make necessary contributions to the ongoing work of interpreting, analyzing, and theorizing literature?

MR: Hmmm. That’s a good question and one I’m not sure how to answer. I do think that, at least for me, much of my collaborative instinct does come from actually wanting to engage with the text (or maybe art work in a museum) in a way that helps me understand it more. Certainly that is what happened when I did my collaborative “translations” of Hafiz poems that are in my last book. I was fascinated with Hafiz and his ideas, and came across some truly dreadful-sounding English translations that threw up huge roadblocks to really engaging with Hafiz in any meaningful way. So I did those as a way to think through what it was I saw in Hafiz.   In terms of the collaboration becoming, in the end, a form a criticism, I think that’s probably true – though in a way that traditional critics might bristle at! But I guess I think there’s something to that – I certainly am not interested in criticism written by people who don’t also engage in the act they criticize (I know, I know…. there are lots of examples of good critics who do this but this is perhaps my way of politely expressing my distaste for criticism in general). You’ve written things like this, and I’m interested in hearing more about what you think its role is --- by which I mean, I guess, that if it’s so non-traditional, will it even be read as criticism? Do we need someone (and could this be you?) to introduce the idea of a collaborative, creative criticism?

KMD: These are great questions. First, I think that the concerns you raise about legitimacy, and whether non-traditional criticism could ever be taken seriously within the academy, are important considerations. Much of my writing, collaborative and otherwise, comes from a desire to democratize what are very privileged, carefully guarded scholarly forms of discourse. To make them more inclusive, more hospitable to a diversity of voices and viewpoints. To carve a space for autobiography, aestheticized language, and moments of beauty within these academic forms of writing. With that in mind, the question of legitimacy is fraught with ethical problems, since traditional criticism seems at odds with the desire for inclusion and diversity (in terms of voices, as well as modes of representation and the forms that engagement with literary and cultural texts may take). For me, this is what makes the collaborative, creative criticism so fascinating. It not only creates a more democratic space for thinking through texts, but also, it allows the unique resources of poetry and the arts to be brought to bear on complex theoretical and philosophical discussions.

I recently finished writing a collection of essays called Women and Ghosts, which is now available from BlazeVOX Books. The book is part of an ongoing engagement with Shakespeare’s tragic women, and uses erasure, strikethrough, and greyscale to address themes of voicelessness, self-censorship, and gendered violence in Hamlet, King Lear, and several other tragedies. As someone who also works in more traditional scholarly forms, it was truly liberating to use the space of the page as a visual field, and to see the novel work this could do in conveying an argument about these very familiar plays. For me, the white space within the book spoke more clearly than text, or a description of silencing, ever could. The space of the page also helped the reader to experience viscerally (I hope) what was being described, to render the moments of rupture within the text suddenly and disconcertingly palpable.  

Voice, Alterity, & Hybrid Forms: On Three Recent Prose Experiments [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Are the rules of language ever enough to maintain the separation between oneself and another?

In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James argued for a vision of the subject as essentially relational, actualized by one’s interactions within a larger community. We are made to see self as world, and prompted to take note of the astounding multiplicity housed within each of us. The human voice, then, is not a singular thing, but rather, it is a choir comprised of luminous fragments: a newspaper headline, a botanist’s field guide, the hit song played over and over again on the radio.

Three recent books of innovative prose remind us, through their most subtle stylistic choices, that to be human is to be a conversation. Cassandra Smith’s u&i, Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star, and Laura Mullen’s Complicated Grief each dismantle the boundaries between self and other with astonishing grace, wit, and stylistic dexterity. Indeed, they ask us to consider the artifice inherent in the divide we often imagine between subject and object, calling our attention to the role of language, its rules, and its implicit hierarchies, in sustaining a poetics of binary distinctions and exclusion.

Within each of these collections, seemingly small technical choices become politically charged, evoking the myriad ways that consciousness is mediated by linguistic conventions that are hostile to it. In other words, language and its implicit binaries, the larger power structures that are enacted within each of its rules, are inevitably internalized, leading us to overlook the constant presence of the other within the self. For Smith, Gerard, and Mullen, the sentence, and the paragraph, for that matter, become a battleground, its most beautiful monuments usurped, interrogated, and subverted from within. While somewhat similar in style and approach, these carefully crafted works of prose offer us three very different ways of conceptualizing a grammar of both alterity and resistance.

*        *        *

u&i worried that our bodies were growing differently. u&i clung to each other and after the fire it became very important that we were two who were clinging…

 

In Cassandra Smith’s u&i, we are presented with a poetics that is undoubtedly relational. The speaker of these linked works of lyric prose is at once both subject and object, self and other, viewer and viewed. Moreover, the reader is often unclear as to whether the “u” who is being addressed is external or internal, embodied or imagined. The poem sequence could be read as social interaction and an exchange between parts of the self or parts of consciousness. With that in mind, the narrative is both externally voiced and a manifestation of the speaker’s inherently dialogic imagination.

This purposeful ambiguity within the sequence allows meaning and possibility to accumulate. The other is revealed as an ever-present part of the subject, but also, self-knowledge remains possible only through one’s interactions with the other. It is this ongoing dialogue that allows us to see ourselves, our individuality, and our own conscious experience in sharper relief. If the self is essentially a social being, made and unmade by the workings of a larger community, is there such a thing as difference? Or alterity, for that matter?

The questions raised by the text strike sparks against Smith’s formal innovations and stylistic nuances. For instance, the reader is frequently presented with prose that appears pristine, logical, and orderly. Yet we are offered only the illusion of coherence, a continuity that is possible only through the reader’s own imaginative work. In much the same way that the boundaries between subject and object are dismantled and interrogated, the poem itself becomes a collaboration between the artist and her audience, particularly as the separation between them grows less and less clear. In Smith’s skillful hands, the poem becomes a locus for dialogue, authorship being merely an ongoing process of curation.

Now the movement of leaves, that laughter in the distance.

To whom is she speaking, then? What is being gathered here, and for whom?

*        *        *

u&i alone in a forest were the only subject of all these cards, alone on a wall in a forest. these cards were stack on a bookshelf, a stack on the floor. a stranger would enter and the cards would tell stories of how to tell more…

 

As Smith’s book unfolds, our most solitary moments are revealed as socially constructed, as consciousness itself is only possible through a shared cultural imagination. Smith offers not only lyric prose, but also, a philosophy of mind and a grammar to accompany it.

In many ways, u&i seems oddly reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Here, too, a narrator finds herself alone in a forest, yet at the same time, conversation—with culture, with literature, and with the multiplicity housed in the self—becomes almost infinite in its possibilities.

Yet what begins as dialogue inevitably gives rise to discord.   What happens when conflict arises within the subject? Can one ever escape the movement of consciousness itself?

*        *        *

I want to not want that all the time. I want to forget I want that.

I want not to want what I think I want. I want to not want what I want.

I don’t want to smoke.

I’m tired.

I want to sleep.

I’m afraid…

 

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star begins as a love story. A young female protagonist struggles with an eating disorder, while her boyfriend remains engulfed in depression and substance abuse. Yet it becomes clear that they are destroying each other, piece by piece. Gerard invokes strange and luminous metaphors from astronomy to suggest that these individuals, these distant stars, are actually part of the same system, held together by a deathly gravitation pull.

A Collaborative Interview About Collaborations: Heather Fowler in Conversation with Kristina Marie Darling [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Heather Fowler is a poet, a librettist, a playwright, a fiction writer, an essayist, and a novelist. She is the author of the debut novel Beautiful Ape Girl Baby, forthcoming in May of 2016, and the story collections Suspended Heart (2009), People with Holes (2012), This Time, While We're Awake (2013), and Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness (2014). Fowler’s People with Holes was named a 2012 finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans in 2015 as well as an MA in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University in 1997. Her collaborative poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, written with Meg Tuite and Michelle Reale, was the winner of the 2013 TWIN ANTLERS PRIZE FOR COLLABORATIVE POETRY and released in December of 2014. Fowler has published stories and poems online and in print in the U.S., England, Australia, and India, with her work appearing in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, Feminist Studies, and more, as well as having been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award, Sundress Publications Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prizes. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine.

KMD:  I enjoyed reading your collaboration with Michelle Reale and Meg Tuite, Bare Bulbs Swinging.  More specifically, I was fascinated by the book’s structure.  Each of the three writers’ contributions to the text are clearly marked, and so too are collectively authored pieces.  So much of the time, writers talk about minimizing the individual in collaborative manuscripts.  Could you say more about what artistic autonomy makes possible within a project like this?  How did you arrive at this structure for your collaboration, and what unique opportunities did it offer?  

HF: The first thing that must be said is that when I see talented women leaning in to work together and am invited, I often shelve more solitary projects. I had already enjoyed collaborating with visual artists like Elisa Lazo de Valdez (Visioluxus) for a few hybrid texts for The Better Bombshell Project and would soon be working with artist Pablo Vision for my illustrated story collection Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness. When Meg and Michelle wrote me and asked to do a book of poems, they’d already been on my radar as writers I admired. The premise of working together began with: Could we write a collaborative book of poems—three talents trading off and amplifying the themes already present in each poet’s solitary work? It was never an effort to blend, always an effort to stand together and apart. The only poem in the whole book we wrote without designations of who wrote what was the first poem in the book, and we wrote that last.

Like that scene in a movie when you see a band of outlaws where each has her own distinctive personality traits, this project let us radiate as individuals as well as those joined in purpose. I loved the idea of that much estrogen gathered in strength, in camaraderie, in art. The structure of each poem taking off from where the last one ended, each poem carrying the author’s name, was done as a part of that alternation. We were uninterested in erasure, or the blending of voices—more so in having a poetic conversation between women. We worked from the premise of integrating published poems with new poems written to create the book.   Unlike an anthology where work is simply reprinted together, this was interaction. I knew my poetics were invested in different formal structures than Meg’s and Michelle’s. I also know I couldn’t pass up the chance to enter the deep spell of making words carry ideas in imperfect but heartfelt harmonies. And then we won the contest. Our book became a testament to our friendship and openness, a visible public record, a poem book baby with many mothers.

Yet even had we not won, we’d still have come away with the joy of our close exchange, the memory. Kind of like the experience of building a boat with a few friends—the time spent fabricating the effort was as much about building relationships as creating the project.

But you’ve done some beautiful collaborations. Do you feel the same, where collaboration is artful play embraced for joint pleasures, almost regardless of outcome? I note you’ve also done work with visual artists in creating narratives, particularly I am thinking of Music for Another Life with Max Avi Kaplan. How did that come together? Were the poems first, or the photos first, or was the book made in a congress of building and gathering? How did Adelle come to be? I’m fascinated by persona projects.

KMD: You very eloquently described collaborative poetry as a visible public record of a conversation, and this is exactly how I imagined my work with Max Avi Kaplan on Music for Another Life. Max is a very talented visual artist, photographer, and costumer, and when the opportunity arose for us to work together on a book project, I was delighted. Max initially sent me a set of ten or so photographs, in which he had brought Adelle to life. He found a model, period costumes, and the perfect backdrop: New England in the fall, the foliage aflame. My task was to give voice to this character, whom I must credit Max for imagining nearly in her entirety. I wrote a poem in response to each photograph, and after that, Max crafted scenes and took photos in response to my text-based contributions.

In many ways, this is what’s great about collaborations. They give rise to shared imaginative space, in which anything becomes possible. When writing alone, I find that things are often completely different. So much of the time, writing becomes about achievement, about career advancement rather than spontaneity and play. I’m grateful to Max for restoring a sense of surprise and wonder to my artistic practice. We created a world together, which ultimately brought us closer as friends. In my experience, this is how collaboration almost always happens. I’ve never worked on a collaborative text that didn’t enrich my artistic practice in some way. After working with Carol Guess on our book, X Marks the Dress, I came to consider Carol one of the most inspiring mentors I’ve had in my writing career. And I recently finished a book-length collaboration with poet and editor John Gallaher, and I will say that I admire his work even more than when we first began working on the book. We initially started writing about landscape, but he showed me that this very specific idea contained the entire world.

With that in mind, I’d love to hear more from you about how collaboration relates to questions of community and literary citizenship, as well as your own artistic practice. How has this collaboration changed your friendship with these two writers? What has collaboration made possible within your thinking about literary community? Lastly, has collaboration changed or broadened the scope of your practice when writing single-author texts?

HF: There’s a solitude to writing that feels unmatched in some of the other creative disciplines. I think many of us are hungry for connection and relish the spark brought by interfacing with other people’s talents. After all, community and solid literary citizenship are created and amplified by collaborations, whether these be creative or promotional.

Every time an editor selects my work, the book, issue, or anthology in which it appears becomes a part of his or her professional record, just as I become part of the community interested in his/her affiliated projects. Every time I interview another writer, I feel I’m doing a good thing for literary citizenship by helping a peer get the word out. These networks grow—and every person touched by them enjoys a slightly larger community.

Regarding my own artistic practice, whenever I collaborate with one or more artists directly, there’s this magical thing that happens where I decide the world may be an artist’s candy store. I almost instantly want to take on ten more creative projects since the combinatory play of new themes or differing representations becomes irresistible. It really doesn’t matter whether I’m collaborating with visual artists, writers, or composers. Different people open different doors in the psyche. Encouragement from people in other creative realms creates new movement into unexpected genres:

Had I not met composer Jon Forshee, for example, I doubt I would now call myself a librettist, but he offered me the opportunity to convert a published story he’d read and loved from my fourth collection into an opera. I wrote the whole libretto in poems, in old French poetic forms. He then wrote music based on the libretto, so together we’ve now made performance art for the stage with a chamber opera called Blood, Hunger, Child. When the singers roam in, there’ll be yet another level of collaboration. And the director. And the set design folks. And, and, and… The collaboration of ideas and perceptions continues all the way out to the audience.

Regarding Meg and Michelle, I’d say our work on Bare Bulbs Swinging has only heightened the existing friendships since I’m still in direct communication with both on a fairly regular basis. We are still part of each other's support network. In fact, while I recently struggled with a painful professional setback this January, unbeknownst to Meg Tuite, I got an encouraging, surprise card from her in the mail one day that made my week, that essentially reinforced my desire to go on with literature.

Yes, it sits atop a jury duty summons. It’s trying to obliterate that summons from my line of sight—doing good work there. Anyway, my point about the card, or the loveliness of Meg, or about the ways that friendships and collaborations impact personal trajectories in the arts is this: It’s hard to be an artist alone, and the more creative relationships we begin and nurture, the more of a safety net we both receive from and provide for artistic others. As we speak, Michelle is waiting for the advance review copy of my spring 2016 novel release Beautiful Ape Girl Baby, which she’s graciously agreed to blurb.

With regards to how having collaborated impacts the scope of my practice when writing single-author texts, would it be too brassy to say I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a single-author text? Even when I write alone, I borrow. I draw style and theme ideas from those I’ve read before, seen before, heard before. I am a raven, stealing attractive, glimmering objects from those both dead and alive.  

Speaking of which, you’ve just published a stunning experimental text called Women and Ghosts, at play with the themes and the work of William Shakespeare, where line-throughs, footnotes, multiple narrative lines, and alternating gradients of text are used to tell stories of female negations in both modern life and Shakespeare’s day.   Did you ever fear using such a huge figure in literary canon to assert truths about gender roles? Was it daunting to subvert such a giant, particularly with strategies that visually eradicated passages of his texts and/or re-wrote them?   How did you learn or first internalize the poetry of white space, the poetics of silence and silencing?

KMD: These are great questions. First, I wanted to say that I appreciate your observations about collaboration, particularly the ways that art isolates us, and we often crave connection and community with other practitioners. I believe that all texts are in essence collaborations, that the act of writing is not possible without a larger community. In many ways, every speech act is a collaborative endeavor, as voice is itself a social construct. And I would go so far as to say that consciousness itself is collaborative in nature, as we continually draw from a shared cultural imagination, even in our most solitary moments.

With that in mind, I saw the erasures in Women and Ghosts not as an adversarial gesture, but rather, as a collaboration with Shakespeare’s plays. There are many ways that erasure can function in relation to a source text. The erasure can serve as an excavation, a bringing to light forgotten or overlooked parts of a literary text. Additionally, erasure can redirect the focus of scholarly attention, prompting us to attend to something that might currently exist only at the periphery of our ongoing interpretive work. I definitely see Women and Ghosts as an excavation, a redirection, a reframing, rather than as a subversion of a literary giant. I had hoped to excavate these female characters’ voices, to give them agency and visibility that they did not have in the original text. While this is certainly an interventionist gesture, I don’t see it as an adversarial one, as the possibility of voice and agency was merely buried in the work, overshadowed by so many other words.

I did have a tremendous amount of anxiety about the project, though. I worried most of all about the erasures that incorporated text from female characters, as I was concerned that they would seem like just another silencing. This was not my intention, as I hoped they would read as a coaxing out of voice, an exhuming of the most provocative and subversive of these female characters’ observations about power, violence, and the world around them. I first internalized the poetics of white space when I myself felt silenced. I cannot count on two hands the number of times my poems have been erased, defaced, or otherwise marked up by an individual in a position of privilege. This is not due to the lack of examples, but rather, it is due to the limitations of human anatomy. The poetics of white space, of silence, became way of representing my own experience in a way that felt emotionally true, more so than words ever could.

Which brings me to my next question. How do your beliefs about community, literary citizenship, and collaboration inform your work as an editor and curator? How is this different from their manifestations in your own creative work? What holds true across your work as an editor, curator, and practitioner?

HF: I love what you did with that book. Women and Ghosts definitely made me reflect on the horror of what happens when women’s stories are viewed as less than primary, or fall beneath the radar. Exhume is a perfect word for your work there—and that book is so important in that respect.  

Related to literary citizenship and community (and the topic of female visibility itself), I think not just of curatorial and editorial work, but also the role of reviews in women’s careers. I hear fewer men will choose women’s titles for reviewing assignments at larger review venues. Many of the visible female figures in the field don’t review due to multiple stressors on their schedules, so you have these beautiful books that no one sees or hears about. Reduced audiences. Less impact. Fewer award considerations.

Due to this, I have enormous respect for reviewers of both genders who read and spread the word about books making key statements on gender and power, particularly those by female-identified authors. In fact, when I make choices about what to pursue in that arena of literary service, I often think of a 2013 interview between Margaret Atwood and Gina Frangello at The Rumpus where Atwood discusses, in a very real way, why women’s literary books have different visibility—and why women’s power politics have different investments. Atwood says, “Well, let me ask you this question: you’re a female writer, you put a lot of time into writing your book—and you also have a family. Then somebody asks you to write a review…” Read closely into the subtext of that. I live it. For every review I choose to write, as a single parent who works full-time, I accept choosing away from using my limited free time on my own work. For every hour I spend editing or curating, I sustain a chosen hit for the sake of contributing to the community I care about, but it all comes down to what each person thinks is important enough for which to make sacrifices. I pretty much only write full reviews for women, for this very reason.   Because Atwood struck an undeniable chord. Because she's right: Often, there are demands on my time that make doing that service extra arduous or less desireable.

But here’s a theory: If powerful, visible women don’t give back to their community for the sake of creating more balanced representation, in a sense, they have the same power card as visible male authors to change the literary landscape, to be more inclusive of talented women authors, but they aren’t using it. And what good is a power card you won’t play?

I can tell you quite honestly, my work as an editor or curator has one purpose: To promote the voices of people I think are talented. As Poetry Editor for Corium Magazine, I’m looking for work that lights me up and I’m hoping to select content for issues with a balance in gender counts. I don’t care in the slightest about what’s in vogue. I don’t solicit a lot of the journal’s content from known quantities—or even read cover letters. “Does the work speak to me?” is my first question. My second line of thinking is regarding whether I have enough diversity and female representation in each issue. I know the Editor in Chief at Corium, Lauren Becker, considers this issue for fiction selected as well.    

Conversely, my own creative work isn’t service to the literary community or citizenship—it’s pure artistic release.   Every bit of my endeavor in that realm is hedonism, is play, is channel.

You’ve written so many books, over twenty collections of poetry and hybrid prose; you’ve also had an active role in helping other women. What are your clearest thoughts on how to view the significance of reviews regarding the reception of published books? What costly investments of your time have you felt most rewarding in terms of community support?

KMD: First of all, thank you for the kind words about my book. And the role of reviews in women’s careers is such a great question. I admire your commitment to reviews as a form of literary activism, and my approach is somewhat similar. Within my own practice as a critic, I try to shine light on works that may have been overlooked, and so much of the time, this is because the work doesn’t fit neatly within the frameworks we have for understanding genre. The categories we have (Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, Criticism, etc.) are steeped in gender politics, and more often than not, it’s women who write across, beyond and in spite of these genre boundaries. Yet at the same time, the categories we use to frame literature become a way of silencing innovative women. After all, the channels of distribution are predicated on these simplistic categories, and this makes it even more difficult for hybrid texts, texts that interrogate the power structures at play in our understanding of genre, to reach an appreciative audience. For these reasons, I tend to focus my attention as a critic on hybrid work. This is a way of evening out the playing field, as you so eloquently mentioned when describing your own practice.

You are absolutely right that reviews are a costly investment in terms of time. Yet I’ve made great friends and even met mentors and collaborators as a result of my critical work. For example, I reviewed Carol Guess’s Tinderbox Lawn, and after reaching out to her and doing a book trade, we wrote two books together: X Marks the Dress and Instructions for Staging. I now consider Carol to be one of the best mentors I’ve ever had. She has been extremely generous sharing her experience and expertise, and for that I’m so grateful. And I might never have connected with her if it weren’t for reviews. Poetry criticism has been a great way of expanding my consciousness as an artist, and my ability to appreciate work much different from my own, but more than anything, it has expanded my community. What I love about doing reviews is that they excite people about poetry and help them make connections across geographic and artistic boundaries.

Another aspect of reviews and criticism that I’ve found incredibly meaningful is a recent experiment in lyric criticism. I’ve been working on lyric responses to the work of writers I admire, and what I love about this form is that allows me to examine perhaps two or three different texts at a time. The books become a point of entry to larger questions about the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, viewer and viewed. There is also tremendous room for creativity within lyric criticism. I love being able to use the artistic resources of poetry to build intricate theoretical and scholarly arguments. More than anything, though, lyric criticism has helped me to refine my thinking about issues that are important to me (for example, collaborations, voice, alterity…) while also connecting these ideas to my own creative practice.

Which leads me to my next question. How does your work as a critic shape, inform, and expand what is possible within your creative work? When reviewing, how do you negotiate work that is much different from your own? What is the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about yourself as a creative practitioner while reviewing?

HF: I think the best response to your question involves learning to slow down, sitting in front of a text and examining what it does that works—or doesn’t. When I first started teaching literature decades ago in Northern California, I realize I selected texts for my syllabi primarily due to “loving them” as a reader. But when you have to teach something you love, “loving it” alone isn’t enough: How to translate personal taste into a discussion of craft is the operative question. How to translate personal epiphanies into universal lessons in writing well. For me, there’s so much hybridity in texts that surprise or delight me, hybridity I integrate into my practice.

But to learn anything or teach anything, you have to slow down. You have to take the text on its terms and examine specific strategies and stylistic choices. I think it’s a given that the practitioner who spends hours writing a paper (or preparing a lesson plan) learns more about the heartbeat of a piece, its patterns, its predecessors, than someone who simply enjoys it and walks away: The one who studies and explores retains. There’s memory magic in close reading, deep study.

The same retention of style and substance occurs for me when I review books, and I negotiate work that’s different than my own with the delighted sense of an explorer. What can you teach me, is my underlying reason for my zooming in on a certain text. Charting new terrain also keeps my own work fresh and open to new influences, helps me to avoid a sort of stylistic stagnancy. I think the most unexpected thing I’ve learned about myself as an author when I do review work is that, with each work I study or delve, my own sense of what I do as an author, or am willing to do, has a chance to mutate. I’m always looking to try unusual tools that others use.

But reviewing itself is also a collaboration of the reviewer’s experience and the author’s aesthetic. I find it fascinating how many authors my work has been compared to, this stemming largely from the identified “good stuff” canon of each reviewer in my view. Do you agree? In prose reviews, I’ve been compared to Shirley Jackson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez in drag, heir to Angela Carter, Flannery O’Connor, Franz Kafka, and Haruki Murakami, among others. In terms of my poetry’s form and function, I often borrow influence from the imagery of Federico García Lorca, formal structure cues from Edna St. Vincent Millay, thematic quandaries from Shakespeare, and confessional life observation impulses from Sylvia Plath. I get a lot from Atwood, too. But ask me tomorrow and this list will change.

Something I’m curious to ask you in terms of collaborations, since we share enjoying doing them, is have you ever selected a collaborator to bring out specific underutilized aspects of your style or psyche? Sometimes I say, “If you want to meet your inner Wordsworth, you have to find your Plath to force that contrast,” and I feel like collaborations allow me to explore different kinds of energy so are often selected specifically to do so. Do you, too, play with the lightness and darkness of others when you make aesthetic choices about next projected projects or participants?  

KMD: I loved your comment about book reviews as a form of collaboration. For me, what’s great about book reviews is that they push you to read, engage, and think through work that’s often very different from one’s own. Books that challenge, interrogate, and push one’s own aesthetic choices.

This is also one of the great benefits of collaboration. Most of the projects I’ve co-written (X Marks the Dress, which I worked on with Carol Guess, and most recently, GHOST/ LANDSCAPE, a collaboration with John Gallaher) were rewarding because I was working with someone whose style was different from my own. This is usually great because it creates different textures of language within the manuscript, but also, there’s tension between the various styles of writing and literary forms that populate the work. And it’s usually this tension that drives the manuscript, that entices the reader to read on.

For instance, when working on X Marks the Dress with Carol, we both brought very different strengths to the book project. Carol is an expert novelist with a gift for structuring a beautiful narrative arc. I tend to gravitate more toward lyrical language, and it was a joy to see how this lyricism could work with (and complicate) the narrative itself. Similarly, with GHOST / LANDSCAPE, John and I both brought very different strengths and interests to the collaboration. While my sections of the book were usually pastoral and fairly lyrical (with the occasional ghost), I was constantly amazed by the humor, strangeness, and wild juxtapositions in John’s work. In many ways, the different styles worked even better in dialogue than they would have in isolation.

For me, it’s open-mindedness, and a willingness to engage work that’s very different from one’s own, that keeps the spontaneity and playfulness of collaboration present when returning to one’s own creative practice. But it’s important to remember, too, that all of writing is collaborative, and each literary text is a deconstruction of all the writing that came before.

 

KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry -- Spring 2016

KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry -- Spring 2016!!

 

Feb 29  David Lehman + Mark Halliday 

Mar 7    Liz Clark Wessel + Jay Deshpande + Kristin Prevallet

Mar 14  David Tomas Martinez + Morgan Parker 

Mar 21  Lawrence Joseph + D. Nurkse   
Mar 28  John Koethe + Michael Dickman + Bianca Stone 

Apr 4    Post AWP Open Mic Competition  

Apr 11  Claire Donato + Todd Colby   

Apr 18  Jennifer Nelson + Uljana Wolf & Sophie Seita 

Apr 25  Major Jackson + Hannah Gamble + Rich Smith

May 2   Charles North + Tony Towle
May 9   Brenda Shaughnessy + Robyn Schiff

May 16  Amber Tamblyn + Thomas Sayers Ellis w/ saxophonist James Brandon Lewis

 

85 East 4th Street (near the  NW corner of Second Avenue)

All readings begin at 7:30. To get a good seat, plan to get there by 7:15 PM.

 

The series is directed by John Deming, Ali Power, and Matthew Yeager.

 

Here are some photos from past KGB readings. . . Geoffrey O'Brien top right; Michael Quattrone and Star Black, left; a group of talented writers on lower right. . .

Kristina Marie Darling, Guest Author February 22-26

This week we welcome back Kristina Marie Darling as our guest author. Kristina is the author of over twenty books of poetry. Her awards include two Yaddo residencies, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, as well as grants from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard University's Kittredge Fund.  Her poems and essays appear in The Gettysburg Review, New American Writing, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, The Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.   She is currently working toward both a Ph.D. in Literature at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo and an M.F.A. in Poetry at New York University.    

Welcome back, Kristina

-- sdh

Road Kill Sightings or My Struggle with Confessional Poetry [by Nin Andrews]

The other day I was reading posts on Facebook by the many poets who admire Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.” So I read the poem over, stopping at those lines: Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

I began to wonder. Do you really want to know about my despair? Do I want to know yours?

Because honestly, I’m not sure I like confessing. Or that I like confessional poetry. But I’ve been struggling to write it lately, studying the how, the why. (If I am critical of a kind of poetry, I make myself try it on for size.)

It seems that many confessional poets start with their parents, describing the terrible things parents did to them: the betrayals, the abuse. So that’s where I wanted to begin, too.

I started with my mother who was totally in love with nature. She also admired Mary Oliver. I consider that a serious betrayal.

Once after hearing that same poem, “Wild Geese” on NPR, she asked me why I didn’t write nature poetry. You should write a poem about wild geese, she said. (The truth is she would have liked me to write about anything besides orgasms.)

My mother could name every bird, plant, and tree, and when I was a girl, she tried to teach me to do the same. I was a lost cause. I never learned the names of any birds or trees or flowers beyond sparrow and spruce and tulip. Discouraged, my mother begged me go to a nature camp, but I refused. She had sent my older sister, D, the year before, and when D returned, she had two new skills: snake handling and taxidermy.

These two skills are my metaphors for confessional poetry. Snake handling is writing about the living. Taxidermy—writing about the dead. Today, I’d like to expand on the taxidermy metaphor.

Because after her stint at nature camp, D spent our vacation in Maine staring out the car window, looking for a dead animal to stuff. We’d be driving along the freeway when suddenly she would shout STOP at the top of her lungs. My mother would screech to a halt, and D would climb out of the car to inspect a dead deer or dog. My mother called these stops road kill sightings.

Usually D would decide the animals weren’t fresh enough. It’s kind of like selecting vegetables and fruit, she explained. You want the dead to be just right.

Isn’t that just like writing poems about the dead? So often we don’t really do them justice. And something begins to smell bad, at least to us. Or anyone who actually knew the person we are writing about.

Also, a memory can come so quickly, like an image seen from a speeding car. Often it arrives at an inopportune time, maybe when you are swimming or having a drink with friends or drifting off to sleep. And you don’t write it down. By the time you are sitting down at a desk, you can’t recapture the scene, the mood, the excitement.

I remember how once, in frustration, my sister, D, went searching for dead animals along Route 1, and when she returned, she was carrying what she said her teacher from Nature Camp would have called a real fine carcass. (We poets have a few of our own Route 1’s, I think—those places we go again and again for well-traveled sources of inspiration.)

This raccoon hasn’t been dead that long, she assured me before dumping it onto the kitchen counter. Slicing neatly and sliding the raccoon out of its fur, she explained that skinning an animal is as simple as taking off his jacket. See? she said. The insides stay together, just like they’re in a Glad baggy. She held up a shiny sack of entrails up to the light for me to admire.

I suppose I don’t need to explain the analogy here to the experience of writing about those we love, discovering and exposing those choice, glistening moments. But let me expand a little more . . .

Because sadly, D’s raccoon’s head was a bit squished. And my sister wanted to make him look really alive. She dabbed his face with black paint where the fur was missing, and replaced his eye balls with yellow marbles. Then she named him Buddy Boy before posing him on a stand. One front leg was bent, and the other was stretched forward as if he were in full stride. Buddy Boy looked as if he were racing off the platform, still trying to escape an oncoming car.

How many poems have I dabbed and painted over again and again? How many look back at me with yellow marble eyes?

After she’d finished, D wasn’t sure she wanted to sleep in the same room with a dead animal. Neither was I. Buddy Boy was beginning to stink. D stuck Buddy Boy on the flat roof outside her window. Soon a sickly sweet scent wafted through the bedroom. In a few days buzzards circled overhead.

I couldn’t help thinking that maybe we should have left the dead well enough alone. Let its spirit fly away like Oliver’s wild geese.

I picture the dead parents of confessional poets in their afterlife, seeing us still coming after them like an oncoming car.

Bitching With Nin Andrews [by Nicole Santalucia]

This is the first in a series of blog posts that Nin Andrews and I will write about our writing process, or lack thereof. We like to bitch about writing, and I've been not writing and then bitching about not writing . . . 

CALL IT WRITER'S BLOCK

1. I say I am going to write but then I can't decide where to start. I feel like a little kid with her pants to her ankles standing in the middle of a high school lunch room—vulnerable, exposed, full of fear. 

2. I say I am going to write and this has me in a tizzy. So I take for a walk to de-tizzy. 

3. I say I am going to write so I make myself a sandwich instead. I open a can of tuna fish and toast some bread. I don’t have any mayo, so I get in the car and drive to the store and get a jar of mayo. When I get home I find that the dog ate the bread.

4. I say I am going to write but then I realize that I am late to a department meeting and I needed to make photocopies for the other committee meeting after the meeting. When I stand in the copy room and wait I recite “In a Station at the Metro” over and over.

5. I say I don’t have time to write so I show up to the department meeting early. This turns out to be the perfect place to disappear into a poem. My colleague’s must think I take very good notes at our meetings.

6. I say I am going to write as soon as I am done reading those papers. As soon as I finish reading those papers I collect more papers.

7. I say I am going to cook dinner, something special, but instead I heat up leftovers. I wait till tomorrow to go to the farmer’s market and get fresh produce: spinach, arugula, watermelon radishes, purslane, purple potatoes, pea shoots, and heirloom black beans.

8. I say I am going to write so I vacuum the house for two hours. I get on my hands and knees to scrub the baseboards then start a load of wash then take the dog for a walk.

9. I say I am going to write but then I get in the car and drive to the antique store and look at dressers. I open and close the doors on old dressers, rub my hand around the insides to see if anyone hid a letter. I convince myself that some old dresser drawer sitting in an antique shop has a letter hidden inside.

10. I say I am going to write but then I call my mom and ask her for my great grandmother’s recipes. We stay on the phone while she digs through the kitchen drawers and then she reads me recipes over the phone for an hour. She says wait till summer to make the cagootz and don’t forget to slice the zucchini thin before adding the eggs.

11. I say I am going to write but then I call Nin Andrews instead. She tells me a story about this one time when she was at a fancy restaurant before a reading. She and her friend kept yelling out. It went something like this: Nin: Should I read the vagina poems? Friend: Yes, read the vagina poems. Nin: But, I don’t know if I should read the vagina poems. Friend: Oh, yes! You just need to wear the right dress to read the vagina poems. Nin: Okay, I will read the vagina poems.

12. I say I am going to write but then I check my email, iron all my shirts, dust the light fixtures, replace the eyehook on the screen door, make a few phone calls, fall asleep at a decent hour, wake up, exercise a little. I completely forget that I said I was going to write. I go teach a poetry class in the prison and sit around the table with ten women. I write a poem about escaping and call it “Writer’s Block.”

Not writing is part of the process. But, there are those times when I feel guilty or fearful and all I need to do is to keep going, keep being, keep showing up. Too often, I get that feeling of not remembering how to write, but just like all feelings, this one is temporary, too.

Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 12 pm, Psychobiography with Gail Saltz: On Frank Sinatra with David Lehman

 

Location: 92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue at 92nd St
Venue: Classroom
Price: from $25.00

The inner lives of great people are often more mysterious and fascinating than their public lives. Dr. Gail Saltz invites experts and brings her own expertise to bear as she examines the psychology of people who have shaped history.

The acclaimed poet and critic David Lehman discusses Frank Sinatra, his music and his larger-than-life story with 
psychologist Gail Saltz, and shares insights from his new book, Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World.

More information here. 

Flashback circa1965 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

I'm walking with my father through the first floor of Alexander's department store on 3rd Avenue and 58th Street. A tall, well-dressed and made-up woman walks by. My father shakes his head. "Now there's a rangy broad!" 

'Among My Souvenirs' [by David Lehman]

 

        Jazz standards and Hollywood movies of the 40s, usually in black and white, often in a noir mode, go together like streetlamps and shadows, seam stockings and high heels, fedoras and belted trench-coats, scotch and soda. They’re as right for each other as Rogers and Astaire -- or Rodgers and Hart. The pleasure in developing this thesis lies in furnishing apt illustrations. Let me give a few. You’ll note that certain names recur; they “keep coming back like a song,” to quote a lyric Irving Berlin wrote for Bing Crosby in 1946.

         Max Steiner composed some exciting suspense music for The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks’s 1946 movie of Raymond Chandler’s novel. It is very effective, and so, in its way, is the swinging number Lauren Bacall and band perform at the casino run by racketeer Eddie Mars: And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine (music Stan Kenton and Charles Lawrence, lyrics Joe Greene). The lyric locates us in noir central: “She’s a real sad tomato, she’s a busted valentine.” But my favorite musical moment in The Big Sleep is subtle enough that you might not notice it the first time around. Bacall (as one of the notorious Sternwood sisters) and co-star Humphrey Bogart (as detective Philip Marlowe) are bantering in a restaurant. In the background, a piano player is playing two great jazz standards: I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan (music Arthur Schwartz, lyrics Howard Dietz) and Blue Room (music Richard Rodgers, lyrics Lorenz Hart). At first you might think that what you’re hearing is just tremendously appealing café music. Only later do you realize that the two songs themselves have captured, in a whimsical fashion, the structural meaning of the scene.

        The Big Sleep will culminate in the image of two lighted cigarettes in an ashtray as the words THE END appear on the screen. It’s a fitting image for the romance of Bogart and Bacall, who like to smoke and drink and make witty repartee in a roadhouse café. The by-play between the two romantic leads is utterly charming, but it is also, for much of the picture, utterly incongruous because incompatible with the story-line. The movie needs them to be lovers, the audience expects them to flirt, to link, and to clinch, and this duly happens, but at considerable violence to the logic of the plot, which puts their characters on the opposite sides of a quarrel.

Though this duality may threaten the coherence of the picture, it makes the scenes between Bogart and Bacall doubly entertaining. The dialogue is full of double meanings and playful digressions. In the restaurant scene with the piano soundtrack, the two are nursing their drinks. They employ an extended racetrack metaphor to communicate their sexual interest. She: “Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they're front-runners or come from behind, find out what their hole-card is. What makes them run.” He invites her to take a stab at summing him up. “I’d say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, and then come home free.” He: “You don't like to be rated yourself.” She: “I haven't met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?” He: “Well, I can't tell till I've seen you over a distance of ground. You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go.” She: “A lot depends on who's in the saddle.”

 

The ostensible purpose of the encounter is for Bacall to pay Bogart off – to pay him for the work he has done and get him to drop the case. Thus: I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan. Once this plot requirement is out of the way, Bacall and Bogart get down to the real cinematic purpose of their being there: to tease and flirt and advance their budding romance. And now the piano player plays Blue Room, which idealizes the successful outcome of such a romance. Lorenz Hart’s lyric stars you and me and the prospect of our betrothal and a subsequent time ever after when “every day’s a holiday, because you’re married to me.” It’s a song second perhaps only to Tea for Two (music Vincent Youmans, words Irving Caesar) as an idealized fantasy of marriage so beautifully innocent it almost brings tears to your eyes.

 

The Big Sleep needs the two songs in the background, and not simply because they are in exact counterpoint to the course of the conversation between Bogart and Bacall. A soundtrack of popular songs by Rodgers and Hart, Schwartz and Dietz,  Irving Berlin, and the other great masters of the thirty-two bar song is as necessary in noir movies of the 1940s as the city streets, the silhouette in the window, the Mickey disguised as a highball, and the night spots the characters frequent, from Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca (1942) to Eddie Mars’s casino in The Big Sleep, where beautiful costumed girls check Bogart’s coat, offer to sell him cigarettes, and vie for the privilege of delivering him a message.

 

Nor do the songs suffer from being relegated to background music, shorn of lyrics. The solo piano renditions of I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan and Blue Room insinuate themselves in your consciousness. If you don’t recognize them, fine; if you know them, so much the better. When you listen to an instrumental version of a song whose lyrics you know and like, what you’re hearing is a metonymy of the song: a part standing for the whole. The text is not altogether absent if you the listener can supply it. (When the septuagenarian Frank Sinatra went up on the lines of The Second Time Around the audience helpfully sang them). But to make my point about the interdependence of Hollywood films and popular songs, let me offer this montage:

 

-- What better way to convey the faithful consistency of “iron man” Lou Gehrig, the Yankee first baseman who long held the record for most consecutive games played, than with Irving Berlin’s song Always? In Pride of the Yankees (1942), the song does double duty as the musical affirmation of Gehrig’s loving fidelity to his wife, Eleanor, played by Teresa Wright.

            -- Johnny Mercer’s lyric for Tangerine (music Victor Schertzinger) extols the charms of a vain and fickle Latin beauty. To the strains of this song, Barbara Stanwyck plays the ultimate femme fatale in Double Indemnity (1944), who conspires with insurance man Fred McMurray to eliminate her husband. In a flashback in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), the same song plays on the car radio when Stanwyck, playing a neurotic heiress this time, flaunts her father’s wealth to betray a friend and seduce Burt Lancaster. The great Jimmy Dorsey big band version of this song features Bob Eberle’s romantic solo followed by Helen O’Connell’s brassy satirical retort.  

          --- As David Raksin’s theme for Laura (1944) plays in the background, the homicide detective played by Dana Andrews becomes obsessed with the murder victim, a beautiful dame (Gene Tierney), whose picture hangs on the wall. Laura obligingly returns to life -- the corpse in the kitchen belonged to somebody else – and whenever in future we need to summon her up, we need only hum Raksin’s theme. Johnny Mercer added his lyric to the music months after the movie was released.

         --- To Have and Have Not (1944) is notable for being the first movie pairing Bogart and Bacall. It’s the one in which the foxy young actress seduces the hardened skeptic by teaching him how to whistle: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” The song she “sings” in the movie’s nightclub scene is How Little We Know (music Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics Johnny Mercer). There are three things to keep in mind about the scene. 1) It is the composer who is playing the piano. 2) The song is an under-appreciated gem in the Carmichael – Mercer canon; I like it almost as much as Skylark. 3) It is said that the young Andy Williams enhanced the voice coming out of the throat of Lauren Bacall. (4) Jacqueline Bouvier loved the song, and during her junior year in Paris, she wrote out the bridge in English and in her own French translation for the benefit of one of her French hosts.

        -- In The Clock (1945) office worker Judy Garland meets soldier Robert Walker on a two-day leave in New York City. At the moment they realize they are falling in love, the piano player in the restaurant is playing If I Had You (music Ted Shapiro, lyrics James Campbell and Reginald Connolly).

        --- Somebody puts a coin in the jukebox in the diner and out comes I Can’t Believe that You’re in Love with Me (music Jimmy McHugh, words Clarence Gaskill), triggering the recollected psychodrama in Edgar Ullmer’s strange reverie of an unreliable (unbelievable) narrator in Detour (1945). The movie is a paranoid masterpiece, and the very title of the song goes to the heart of its mystery. The viewer “can’t believe” the events he or she is witnessing, because the narrator is either delusional or a liar or both in some blend. The same song punctuates The Caine Mutiny, where it has a more conventional signification.

        -- A drunken Fredric March still in uniform and his game wife Myrna Loy dance to Among My Souvenirs (music Horatio Nicholls, lyrics Edgar Leslie) on his first night back from the war in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).  Hoagy Carmichael tickles the ivories at the gin joint where the reunited couple have gone with their daughter (Teresa Wright) and returning airman Dana Andrews.

        -- Rita Hayworth invites the American male in the form of tightlipped Glenn Ford to Put the Blame on Mame (music Doris Fisher, lyrics Alan Roberts) in Gilda (1946). In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the same red-haired enchantress seduces Orson Welles and coyly sings Please Don’t Kiss Me (same songwriters), a phrase that says one thing and means its opposite. Given the way Hollywood films wink at one another, it’s no surprise that we hear an instrumental version of Put the Blame on Mame in the background when tough-guy Glenn Ford sets out to foil the killers in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953).

        -- The radio reliably pours out love songs in keeping with the plot twists in Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947). Humphrey Bogart plays an escaped convict with a new face who will escape to South America with Lauren Bacall if he can figure out who killed his pal and framed him for the murder. During the course of the movie we hear instrumentals of I Gotta a Right to Sing the Blues (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Ted Koehler), I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan (music Arthur Schwartz, lyrics Howard Dietz)\, and Someone to Watch Over Me (music George Gershwin, lyrics Ira Gershwin). “You like swing, I see,” says Bogart. “Yes, legitimate swing,” Bacall counters. When Dark Passage gets serious about the love story, we see a record spinning on Bacall’s record player and the golden voice of Jo Stafford sings Too Marvelous for Words (music Richard Whiting, lyrics Johnny Mercer) and legitimates the romance.

        -- In Key Largo (1948), the fourth Bogart-Bacall movie on this list, Claire Trevor plays a washed-up night-club singer and full-time lush in the entourage of gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson). Trevor sings Moanin’ Low (music Ralph Rainger, lyrics Howard Dietz) a capella, her voice faltering, and when she finishes the torch song, says, “Can I have that drink now, Johnny?”

        -- Manipulative Anne Baxter supplants Bette Davis as queen of the stage in All About Eve (1951), and the romantic Broadway ambiance of New York City is communicated in background instrumentals of all-star songs by Rodgers and Hart (Thou Swell, My Heart Stood Still), Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler (Stormy Weather), Arlen and Johnny Mercer (That Old Black Magic), and Ralph Freed and Burton Lane (How About You?). The last named begins, “I like New York in June.”

        The use of Among My Souvenirs in The Best Years of Our Lives is exemplary. Edgar Leslie’s 1927 lyric communicates regret at the passing of time. Trinkets and tokens diligently collected and treasured offer some consolation but do nothing to stop the flow of tears. In the movie, when the U. S. army sergeant played by March comes home he brings souvenirs of the Pacific war as gifts for his teenage son. But like the knife in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England,” when it has become a souvenir on the shelf after Crusoe returns home from his island, the mementos of the global conflict have lost their meaning. They seem vaguely unreal, lifeless. In contrast, the photograph of his wife that a hung-over March looks at the next morning – another sort of souvenir – has all the meaning in the world for him. And Among My Souvenirs – played on the piano by Hoagy Carmichael, hummed in the shower by a drunken March, and heard as background music -- unifies the whole sequence and endows it with the rich pathos that make the song so durable a jazz standard. I recommend that you listen to Art Tatum play it on the piano or, if you can get your mitts on it, a recording of Sinatra and Crosby doing it as a duet on television in the 1950s

[A version of this essay appears in Boulevard, ed. Richard Burgin.] -- DL

Annals of Arlen II [with Ruth Etting, in 1933]

 

The singer is Ruth Etting, the piano player is Harold Arlen, the year is 1933. Sing Hallelujah, c'mon get happy,

Happy Birthday, Harold Arlen [by David Lehman]

June 1939. Standing left to right: Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow), MGM executive L.K. Sidney, Yip Harburg, composer/ conductor Meredith Willson (who wrote The Music Man), music publisher Harry Link. Seated: Judy Garland and Harold Arlen. (Photo courtesy of Yip Harburg Estate)

Arlen wrote the music and Harburg the lyrics for the score of The Wizard of Oz. Harold turned 34 that year and had the world on a string.

Happy birthday, Uncle Harold -- DL

On Being Set to Music [by Lloyd Schwartz]

My professional life for nearly four decades has consisted mainly of veering back and forth between poetry and music. In 1994, when I received a big award for my writing about classical music, I told an interviewer that I hoped that as a result more people would read my poems. That probably hasn’t happened. But over the years, my association with musicians has indeed led to some of them asking to set some of my poems, with always interesting if not always expected results. As a lover of classical vocal music—songs, lieder, chansons—I enjoy the way composers (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Strauss, Debussy, Wolf, Carter) present their own take on poetry, sometimes even making the poems sound better than they read. And since no two composers have the same take, each musical setting expands our understanding of the poems. So I’m always pleased when a composer wants to set one of my poems, and curious about what my poem is going to sound like when music is added.

One early poem of mine, a dramatic monologue called “Hannah,” in the voice of a rare book librarian looking back over her life, was actually set by two different composers. Jeanne Singer’s setting was a kind of musical snuff-box, a lovely, tender image of an elegant person living in a refined, quasi-Mozartean past. On the other hand, Rodney Lister’s setting was a microtonal vision of a soul in torment, dissatisfied with and pained by the pressures of her repression, the strictures of refinement and elegance. I like both of these settings. They expand my own view of my poem, though neither one quite captured my own idea of Hannah’s strength and austerity, the self-abnegation that made her, in my mind, almost a character out of Henry James. Both were expressively sung by one of my favorite singers, mezzo-soprano Jane Struss. What if those two diametrically opposite settings could have been performed simultaneously?…

Maybe more directly on target, in 1996, composer and music professor David Patterson, my colleague at UMass Boston, set my poem “Dead-Battery Blues.” This was a poem I’d always explicitly hoped would eventually have music. I wanted it to be sung. And I thought Patterson caught both its irony and jazzy “tunefulness.” Like Jeanne Singer’s settings (To Stir a Dream, Cambria Records), it too found a home on CD (Saving Daylight Time, Albany Records), with a naughty-little-girl vocal and edgy syncopation by mezzo-soprano Valerie Anastasios.

In the summer of 2008, as I reported in these Best American Poetry pages , I got the irresistible invitation to participate in an educational project at Tanglewood, in which the six compositions fellows were each asked to choose one of my poems (one of my shorter ones!) to set to music—songs that would be sung and accompanied by Tanglewood vocal and instrumental fellows at a recital a few weeks later in the Tanglewood Chamber Music Hall. I would be serving as a source of information, an “expert” on the poetry, an almost literal sounding board, whose feedback could help them make decisions about their musical settings. My poems—some short lyrics as well as monologues and dialogues not strictly in a traditional lyric vein—would be challenging and (everyone hoped) exciting for the fellows.

There was a wide array of responses. Some settings, I thought, really got the poems, a couple completely ignored my own intentions (a very short sestina using only one word to a line—in the form of an argument—became a kind of demented monologue). One setting interwove one of my poems with a Shakespeare sonnet. It was all very rushed and very intense, and utterly exhilarating. It was illuminating to sit in on the coaching sessions. The singers and accompanists were getting the scores piecemeal, a page at a time. One impressive young bass came to a rehearsal with a new page of his song and paused and stumbled and backtracked after every note, trying to get the microtonal pitches right. One of the coaches was the beloved soprano Dawn Upshaw who told him what every poet wants to hear: “Concentrate on the poetry! The pitches will come eventually, but you need to focus on what the words themselves convey.”

A year later, on another happy occasion, a fund-raising concert for Boston’s Emmanuel Music at the Boston jazz club Scullers, there was an evening of songs by the Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Grant-winning composer John Harbison, who in his earlier days had composed a bunch of pop songs unknown to most of the admirers of his “serious” music. Harbison’s idiomatic familiarity with jazz and pop music played an important role in his most ambitious opera, The Great Gatsby, with its multi-layered party sequences (think Don Giovanni in the 1920s). I had even tried to write a song lyric inspired by his fox-trotting Remembering Gatsby, a concert piece that became the overture to the opera.

So when Harbison asked two of his poet friends to contribute lyrics for a couple of new songs he would write for the occasion, I was already prepared. I sent him the lyric I originally wrote with Gatsby in mind. But instead of a fox-trot, Harbison turned it into a gorgeous, seductive beguine—utterly different from what I had imagined, though he had to leave out a couple of lines that didn’t fit the new rhythm. The other new song was a raucous country-and-western number called “Stand By Your Grievance,” to an uninhibited lyric by Louise Glück. I hope these get recorded someday. In the meantime, Harbison has set two more of my short poems (including a new version of one that one of the Tanglewood fellows had set). The one I’ve heard, “In the Mist,” sung by mezzo-soprano LynnTorgove, is hauntingly evocative, and though I’ve seen the score of the other, I haven’t heard it yet and can’t wait.

The most ambitious setting of my poems is a new sequence by the 30-year-old Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz, who—like Harbison and several other American composers I particularly admire (Elliott Carter, Yehudi Wyner)—is, as he describes himself, “obsessed with text.” Fairouz has set eleventh-century homoerotic Arabic poems as well as poems by Rudyard Kipling, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, and a number of younger contemporary poets. On a CD called Follow, Poet, released on Deutsche Grammophon last year, Paul Muldoon reads Heaney’s “Audenesqe”—sung by the inspired Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey—and Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

I’d been impressed with Fairouz’s music, and was pleased and curious when he requested to set some poems of mine. His first choice was a translation I did of one of the Brazilian poet Affonso Romano Sant’Anna’s poems about visiting Iran during the Green Movement uprising of 2009 (“On the Rooftops of Iran”). Fairouz used it as one movement, a moment of calm, in his ferocious epic piece Furia.

Then he turned to a quieter subject. When his beloved grandmother died in 2009, he looked to the poems I wrote about my late mother in my book Cairo Traffic, and chose three of them for an intimate song cycle for voice (happily, Kate Lindsey) and cello (Adrian Daurov), which was his grandmother’s favorite instrument.

As my mother began to lose her memory, incidents from her past kept bubbling up with startling vividness. One such memory came from her early childhood in a Russian shtetl. Her father was a harness maker and she was watching his horses in the river when their reins got caught around a pole. The horses might have drowned had she not run to fetch her father. I wanted to write a poem in which she tells that story in her own voice. And when I told her about my poem-in-progress, that conversation, one of our most tender, inspired its own poem. “He Tells His Mother What He’s Working On” comes closer than anything else I’ve written to suggest what our relationship was like: loving, playful, how she was always a kind of muse (and maybe knew that), and how much my poems have tried to preserve her sensibility. My first title for this poem was “Ars Poetica.”

My mother’s moments of greatest lucidity always left me with an anguished hope that more of her mind might be restored; that, like Orpheus, I could help bring her back from a Land of the Dead. But of course I was no Orpheus, and I never overcame my bewilderment about how hard I should try to help her—or force her—to regain her memory. Her identity. Who was she if she had no past? And if she had no past, what could be her future? Of course, there was no solution. Yet once again, my mother was inspiring me to write. And once again, this new poem, “No Orpheus,” is filled with some of the uncanny things—the poetry—of what she actually said: “I’m a stranger to myself”; “I’m an unstationary pedestal”; “My marbles are slowly rolling away.” And because Fairouz is a composer creating the music for these words, he called the whole cycle No Orpheus.

Finally, in “Her Waltz,” the third poem Fairouz chose to set, my mother is confiding to me her dream—a dream that both frightens and delights her, and allows her to laugh at herself (even at her most lost she was never less than self-aware). Her natural elegance, a kind of innate aristocracy, manifests itself especially in her final words—her oddly comical and poignantly formal farewell: “And now I shall bid you goodnight.”

In uniting these three poems for his song cycle, Mohammed Fairouz created a distilled narrative within the narrative—a portrait of my mother at her most charming and lucid, and of her son at his most amused and most desperate, and allowing her the last sibylline word. In the first song, the natural and colloquial dialogue in the poem becomes a kind of recitative, attuned to the inflections of the conversation (I’m particularly tickled by the ominous plunge into the lower register when my mother recalls that one of her cousins fell down a well—“a deep well”). In the middle song, the central song (Fairouz calls it an aria), it feels as if the composer has entered my subconscious mind, emphasizing—even revealing—my underlying desperation and urgency. And the last song is (what else?) a waltz, with wonderful extended melismas on the words “waltz” and “waltzing.” Here is my mother being taken seriously by someone who never knew her, a composer who captures her warmth and honesty, her slyness and directness.

The world premiere of No Orpheus, with Kate Lindsey, was at New York’s Tenri Center, in June 2010, and it has received a number of performances since then. Now there’s an exciting new development. Naxos Records decided to produce an album of Fairouz’s vocal music, with Kate Lindsey singing No Orpheus as the centerpiece—the album to be called No Orpheus (another possible title was Refugee Blues, referring to Fairouz’s setting of Auden, but everyone seemed to agree that No Orpheus would be the more intriguing title for an album of vocal music). The other musical settings include texts by Poe (“Annabel Lee”), Yeats (“The Stolen Child”), Wordsworth (“We Are Seven”—another poem about childhood), Alma Mahler (excerpts from her journals), Wayne Koestenbaum’s “oblique and eccentric” (his words) “German Romantic Song,” and erotic poems by two medieval Arabic writers, Ibn Shuhayd and Ibn Khafajah.

Part of the process of making the recording became, for me, one of the most extraordinary experiences—the phone conversations I had with Kate Lindsey about my poems. Let me say how especially delighted I was that she was going to be the singer for No Orpheus. That notable summer of 2008 at Tanglewood, one of the major events was the centennial celebration of Elliott Carter (with the celebrated centenarian actually present). Lindsey was singing Carter’s latest vocal cycle, In the Distances of Sleep, with poems by Wallace Stevens (he’d already set Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and had a scintillating cycle featuring major 20^th-century Italian poets). I thought this Stevens group was Carter’s most overtly personal text setting, putting to music poems that were themselves looking back over a long life. And Lindsey blew me away with how vividly she conveyed Carter’s piercing nostalgia, with what transparency she allowed the Stevens poems to become both literally and emotionally accessible to the audience.

So it didn’t surprise me that before committing her performance to an immutable posterity, she wanted to make sure she had not just the literal meaning of my lines but the nuances of the poems firmly in place. Like me, she wanted to avoid melodrama and sentimentality, but she also wanted to convey real feelings (would that more opera singers took the words they were singing with such scrupulous seriousness!). So Kate (we were now on a first-name basis) sent me recordings of rehearsals and I gave her feedback on little details, often questions of emphasis where the musical annotations were ambiguous. I read her my poems, and she read them back to me. I was already impressed with how much she was able to accomplish in rehearsal, but the final recording is even more impressive. She really worked on this piece in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible. I’m thrilled with what’s on the recording.

(As I write this, I’m looking forward to coming down to New York on February 17 to join the delightful Wayne Koestenbaum, the superb soprano Rebecca Ringle and baritone Chrispher Burchett, cellist Adrian Daurov, pianist Geoffrey Burleson, saxophonist Michael Couper, and composer Mohammed Fairouz for a concert and poetry reading celebrating the release of the No Orpheus CD at (le) poisson rouge, 158 Bleeker Street.)

V. To China: Books from the Sky [by Sarah Howe]

a small jar of night      a thousand frontiers carrying him

the sky of old age continues the firing in the kiln

continues arranging this pot plant     lamplight

a glazed hand refines a blue cough

in his flesh he embroiders the fragile whiteness of posterity

     –Yang Lian, ‘Father’s Blue & White Porcelain’, trans. Bill Herbert

 

My posts this week have been ‘To China’: part return, part letter, to a land that will always be just over the horizon. In my last blog, I’d like to bring us full circle, back to the imaginary China of Cathy Song’s poem with which I began: ‘That blue flower on the map’. In Chinese, the word for the type of decorated porcelain we call ‘blue and white ware’, prized in Europe ever since it was first imported in the early seventeenth century, means literally, ‘blue flowers’ (青花 qing hua). The word ‘China’ is not in fact a native Chinese one: the Chinese’s own name for their country is 中国 (Zhongguo, Middle Kingdom). The name ‘chinni’ was used elsewhere in Asia in various forms (it is found in Sanskrit for example) to describe the land which the English came to identify by name with its imported ceramics. The word passed through East Asia, via India, along the same trade routes as the porcelain goods themselves.

‘Father’s Blue & White Porcelain’ by the Chinese poet Yang Lian (who has lived in exile in London since he was blacklisted in the wake of 1989’s Tiananmen protests) is a poem I first encountered in Bill Herbert’s translation, and have since re-read many times. One thing that struck me is how different the symbolic freight borne by its china vessel is from the traditional poetic associations of porcelain, in the west at least. This is partly a question of gender. Take Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712), where Belinda is surrounded by the bric-a-brac associated with her decorative brand of femininity, her precious maidenhead compared to ‘some frail China Jar’ which might ‘receive a Flaw.’ All painted surface, she takes on the hollow and fragile character of the porcelain tea sets she prizes:

 

Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav’n are cast,

When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last,

Or when rich China Vessels, fal’n from high,

In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie.

 

Here the china tea cup’s translucent shell denotes a person without depth. By contrast, in Yang Lian’s poem, the porcelain surface becomes a ‘frontier’ onto untold vistas, one of which is death. Turning space inside out, the little vessel contains not just tea, but the entire universe – ‘a small jar of night’ (which in the second stanza becomes ‘a cup of darkness tea’). The white-as-porcelain skin of traditional female beauty becomes, for Yang Lian, ‘the fragile whiteness of posterity’, glimpsed in the pallor of an elderly father. (In Chinese culture, white not black is the colour of mourning.) The white surfaces of porcelain wait to be inscribed with a culture’s notions about gender, selfhood, and memory. The blue and white china’s ‘posterity’ resides in the fact that it is at once more breakable than a human body and more durable, more capable of lasting. 

Late last summer, my husband and I retraced the northward path through China of the Italian Jesuit Missionary, Matteo Ricci, who for historians has come to symbolize the beginning of modern relations between China and the West. On the sideleg of our journey which took us to the grim northeastern town of Jingdezhen, we were following not Ricci, but his fellow Italian and long-time companion on the China Mission, Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607). Jingdezhen is often called the ‘porcelain capital of China’, since for centuries it was the centre of the country’s porcelain production, an expertise that continues to this today. Ruggieri and his companions arrived at Jingdezhen by boat, in their ongoing quest to forge north and reach Beijing. The sight that would have greeted them as they walked up the bankside was a hill-surrounded wooden town darkening the sky with the smoke from a thousand kilns.

Today Jingdezhen is no postcard. Our short flight landed in the small hours of the morning, leaving us to be scalped for a ride to our hotel. Jingdezhen is the only city I’ve been to in China in recent times where many back streets are lined with refuse heaps a couple of feet deep, containing food scraps, plastic packaging, muddled with broken porcelain fragments of all colours – waste that that people don’t even bother to tie in bags before they dump it across the path from the back door. So unhurried at rubbish collection is the local government that the grounds outside one plate factory, which went bankrupt years ago, are still surreally piled with stacks – in some places six feet high – of white dinnerplates, greyed with a scrim of rained-on smog, grass growing up between their half-toppled towers. Ruggieri didn’t have much to say about the place, save for noting that the china wares were cheaper at source than back in Guangzhou, the port from which shiploads were already beginning to set sail for Europe.

  

Once you start to look behind its buildings’ low-rise concrete shells, Jingdezhen’s street level geography can be divided up according to areas of specialised activity. One street is populated solely by families expert in sticking the royal blue decal transfers of dragons and intertwining flowers onto plain white pots. In the glazers’ row, the ground floor shops contain stacked tub after tub of pastel-pale liquid, whose jewel-like intensity would emerge only after firing. The corridor of an abandoned train track is forested by the slipcasters’ drying urns, released from and sat atop their moulds, like a graveyard’s monuments. Heading up the hills out of town, you hear a thunk, thunk, thunk, even before you reach the hamlet dedicated to pounding, with ten-foot long wooden hammers set into pits, the crushed raw earth that will be transported to the clay mixing factories closer to town. Wander around Jingdezhen for long enough, and you will see every stage of the porcelain-making process unfold before you.

The buildings in Jingdezhen all have names like ‘Big Pot Factory no. 4’. (The Big Pot Factory’s tallest vases reached an incredible fifteen feet or so, destined for swanky hotel lobbies elsewhere in the country.) The English word ‘factory’ which they use to translate the Chinese signs is an interesting misnomer, suggesting as it does the kind of dehumanising mechanised production line conjured in Marx. In fact, the majority of enterprises in Jingdezhen are family-run, with a workshop on the ground floor while the family live above – a father might crouch outside throwing clay on his wheel, cigarette balanced in the corner of his mouth, while a toddler sits on a plastic chair next to him eating a bowl of instant noodles. At most such workshops-cum-homes, we hovered outside the threshold not wanting to intrude, our interest bemusedly tolerated. The only factory that seemed at all keen to sell us anything (from their shop floor of glass cases with hovering assistants) was one of the larger ones, dedicated to producing fine reproductions of antique vases. The most arresting room was the one occupied by the tables and tables of fine-work painters, mostly youngish women, who would sit all day under the white light of special bulbs to keep the colours they were seeing pure. They were painstakingly copying, from printed-out photographs set on the table beside them, the patterns of decoration from many models of precious vase, dating from several dynasties, whose originals are now in museums in Shanghai and Beijing. This particular factory’s wares are on sale in the Beijing museum’s gift shop – I recognised the name when we went there a couple of weeks later – so that you too can take a Ming vase home with you. Some of the more eye-watering price tags suggest the peculiar status of these reproductions, which are copycat but also artefacts in their own right.

Over the course of weeks, a vase’s initially blank body would progress from one end of the room to the other. One woman would paint on with the finest of brushes the outlines, first in freehand pink then firmed up in dark blue. The next would fill in all the pale yellow segments of pattern, before passing it on to another who would fill in the cerise, and so on. The work was so time consuming that it struck me that the value of these objects stems not only from the skill that goes into their making, but from time – whose passing, in the form of sheer labour, they so conspicuously mark. The work was indeed highly skilled, and by the standards of provincial Chinese cities paid well; so much so that the artisans would bring in their children after school to pass on their knowledge to the next generation, just as many of them had been taught by their mothers. We saw one little girl, about ten, tasked with a brush and a practice plate in the corner. It was clear that this was the most important homework she could do.

While complexly geometric, the patterns on the pots were also reminiscent of the natural world – the scales of a fish, the curls of a cloud. The Chinese word for written language or script, 文 (wen), also means pattern (it is a pictograph of interlocking lines). According to myth, the inventor of Chinese writing was a demigod called Cangjie, who was instructed by the Yellow Emperor to discover a better way of recording information. Struggling with the commission, Cangjie retreated to the riverbank to seek inspiration. It didn’t come until, one day, a phoenix cruising in the sky above him let go something from its beak, which dropped to earth. It turned out to be an animal, which Cangjie didn’t see, but which left its hoofprint in the mud before bounding away. Cangjie discovered that the hoofprint belonged to a Pixiu, or hybrid winged lion, whose foot’s characteristic outline set it apart from all other creatures’ prints. In this way, Cangjie worked out the key to his task: he must try to discern the essential character of all things in nature and create patterns that corresponded to them. Having created the first pictographs, Cangjie then began combining them into compounds, mating one with another, to create a hybrid language capable of abstract reference, and not tied to simply pointing at things in the world. The legend of Cangjie does actually correspond quite closely to what philologists imagine were the origins of the Chinese writing system, from an initial pictographic stage to its subsequent development.

This step onward from the pure image is what is crucially missing from the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1918), celebrated because of its passing through the hands of Ezra Pound. Pound’s emphasis on the pictographic nature of Chinese characters is especially visible in the Cantos, with their brushed hanzi running down the right-hand margin. As with so much about Pound’s engagement with Chinese culture, the message gets a bit distorted in the retelling. In writing Cathay, Pound famously worked from the notes of a deceased American scholar, Fenollosa, who in turn had gleaned what he could about ancient Chinese poetry from two Japanese academics – which explains why Li Bai appears throughout Pound’s oeuvre in the guise of Rihaku, his Japanese name. It is a wonder the Cathay poems’ oft-noted departures from their originals are not more numerous, given this impressive chain of scholarly Chinese whispers. In his introduction to Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, the anthology from which my epigraph comes, Yang Lian describes delightfully how Pound’s vision of China changed direction (‘like a modern import-export business’) to influence, in turn, the Chinese poets of the later twentieth century.

Athanasius Kircher (1601/02-1680) was the Jesuit who sat at home in Rome collating the accounts of China reaching him from the members of his order dispatched to convert the Orient. The resulting encyclopedic volume, China Illustrata (1667), displays Kircher’s belief that Chinese characters descended, via hieroglyphics, from the perfect tongue spoken by Adam in the garden of Eden. Kircher’s plates suggest fanciful etymologies for various Chinese characters – the one for 江 (jiang), river, features fish suspended in a river, lining up like synchronised swimmers to trace the character’s contours. One of Kircher’s full-page plates depicts a Chinese man engaged in calligraphy. It also features a monkey on the floor in the foreground who seems, paper in paw, to be imitating the calligrapher’s actions. Scholars have suggested that this was Kircher’s way of underlining his argument that Chinese characters ‘ape’ nature – that their pictographs are a direct, if slightly simplified, imitation of the natural world. But Kircher’s print of the mimicking ape also uncannily prefigures the widespread perception in later centuries of the Chinese as incorrigible imitators. Long before the age of knockoff iPhones, the Spanish friar, Domingo Navarrete (c.1610–1689), one of Ricci’s successors in China, noted in his journal, ‘The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation. They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe. In the province of Canton they have counterfeited several things so exactly, that they sell them Inland for Goods brought out from Europe.’

 

There is a certain irony to be uncovered if you google this English translation of Navarette’s passage. It appears in many, if not most articles – presumably all descended from some distant ancestor – produced by Western journalists on the topic of the Chinese knockoff economy and the need for crackdowns. If these economic journalists have read Navarrete’s journals, they will be familiar with some of his other gems: his belief that tofu, so easily produced and nutritious enough to support a civilization, is a miracle food; or his conviction that the way Chinese fishermen could persuade a cormorant to give up its catch into their baskets showed the wondrous organisation of the Chinese polity. In the stratified hierarchy from peasant to emperor, even the animals understood their place.

One more irony stems from the fact that, in the early modern history of the Sino-European porcelain trade, it was the Europeans who were desperate to learn how accurately to copy Chinese goods. At around the same time China began to produce for the export market ceramics painted to European tastes and specifications, European potters were trying to work out what secret combination of minerals would create the clarity and fineness – Matteo Ricci called it ‘the most beautiful and crystalline thing in the world’ – that distinguished porcelain from earthenware. The secret ingredient was kaolin, which vitrifies at a higher temperature than normal clays: the mineral so abundant in the hills above Jingdezhen. When beds of kaolin were discovered in Cornwall in 1754, the result was Wedgwood, who produced the first ceramic material fired within England to actually resemble Chinese porcelain in texture. What was Wedgwood Chinoiserie if not an attempt to copycat a foreign market’s high-end goods? 

When I first started learning to write Chinese characters, it was about copying, copying, copying. Writing each one as many times as you could stand. On the first day of class, my teacher had explained, jotting on the board, that the mark-making involved in setting down hanzi was, whatever Europeans might think, writing not drawing. Derrida would probably not agree with her distinction, but I thought it was an interesting starting point. The evidence she summoned for this position was something called ‘stroke order’ – the traditional rules governing the order and direction in which a character’s strokes must be laid on the page. She told us how she had, a while back, tasked her young son to copy out the character 中 (the ‘middle’ of Middle Kingdom) at the beginning of his own hanzi studies. Oblivious to the established stroke order (which is shown in the diagram below), the little boy began at the top of the ‘stick’, then worked his pencil clockwise around the character’s perimeter, before finally crossing through the middle. According to his mother, he was not writing, but drawing a picture of what writing looks like.

 

 

At school in Hong Kong in the 1950s, my mother was taught to write not with a pen or pencil, but with brush and ink. While I tend to sentimentalize the idea, she mostly complains about the experience. She hardly ever has cause to write in Chinese now, but when she does, the biro tip hovers for several seconds at the beginning, a millimetre above the paper, as though waiting for her to summon the necessary characters from deep storage – to re-see them on a blackboard in a childhood classroom. Even if she writes with just a blue biro, her strokes taper delicately with the hand’s varying pressure, much like a calligrapher’s brush. After a year’s study, I still write Chinese in pencil (never in ink) so that I can always go back a step. My characters’ heavy-pressed lines – no tapering here – smack of an illiterate’s halting X (which in China by the way is an O). Not writing, but a drawing of writing.

The earliest European-produced imitations of Chinese porcelain often feature in their decoration what art historians have dubbed ‘pseudo-Chinese characters’. That is, an idea of Chinese writing concocted by an artisan who has a loose graphic grasp of what it looks like, but doesn’t understand the semantic principles involved. This heart-shaped dish, which originated in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century is tin-glazed earthenware rather than porcelain, but is instantly recognisable as Chinoiserie blue and white. The geometric markings contained within the rim’s four squares represent a Dutch artisan’s imagination of Chinese writing, without actually being writing. You could say they work a little like the mangled Ciceronian Latin of the Lorem ipsum... placeholder text used in design projects to demonstrate the graphic effect of writing, in the supposed absence of meaningful content. Some other eighteenth-century European designers managed to approach the ‘feel’ of Chinese characters and their structure more closely than the Dutch dish’s anonymous artist, but still without producing characters that would be legible to a Chinese reader. The pseudo-Chinese seals, like hallmarks, painted onto the base of many Chinoiserie vases are a good example of this. I’m not sure art historians would think about these pseudo-characters like this, but it seems to me they are not a million miles from Hong Kong’s RLOEX watches, or the interlocking Cs of the CHUNEL towel seat covers I keep seeing in Chinese taxis. 

To end this meditation on word and image, genuine and fake, sense and nonsense, I’d like to leave you with an artwork by the Chongqing-born artist Xu Bing. To create his 天书 (Tianshu), or A Book from the Sky (1991), he spent four years carving out of pear-wood – in reverse – a set of 4000 moveable type
characters. The pages of the book he printed with them look, from afar, like they contain Chinese characters, but on coming closer turn out to be nonsensical. They are written in no legible human language. Unfolding in this spurious tongue, the book’s early chapters are set out as prose, the third chapter segues into the varying line lengths of verse, while the end of the volume mimics the typographic layout of notes and glossary. Of course, a viewer who does not know Chinese would not even necessarily realise without being told that the book is unreadable. For the literate native speaker the effect is quite different, while also kind of the same, implanting in them the niggling feeling that there is meaning to be had here, but that it is always just around the corner. Perhaps it transports them back to the portion of childhood before they learned to read. What Tianshu reminds me of is, as a child, dragging my mother’s copy of 300 Tang Poems and others off the shelf, flicking through their pages, pretending to myself that I could read. It took Xu Bing four years to carve and print his pear-wood blocks. If nothing else, his Book from the Sky records the passage – and conspicuous wastage? – of his time and labour.

The work’s original title was the less snappy, An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century, but Xu Bing renamed it after audiences started referring to it as tianshu, A Book from the Sky. The Chinese idiom tianshu, ‘天书’ (which might also be translated ‘a book from heaven’ or ‘celestial script’) is used to refer to any unknown and indecipherable system of writing, right down to a doctor’s untidy scrawl. The entry for 天书 in my Chinese dictionary offers up by way of English translation that old quasi-xenophobic phrase, ‘It’s all Greek to me’. Guess how Greeks express the same sentiment (something I had always idly wondered): Αυτά μου φαίνονται κινέζικα! This seems like Chinese to me! In the Chinese version of the idiom, confusion is directed not towards the babble of other nations, but towards the heavens: the idea is that the tianshu’s written language is so alien it seems to have come from the gods. Writing that fell out of the sky, like the cargo from a passing phoenix’s beak.

 

–Sarah Howe (August 19, 2013)

IV. To China: Possession Point [by Sarah Howe]

 

                                            ...The sour

 

 tear-like orange was there like a clove

of garlic melting in my mouth. It wasn’t

 

a time for complaints and nobody

murmured a word of discomfort. It was

 

the silence of refugees longing for an identity

foreign to this tiny, floating, motherless city.

                                      –Kit Fan, ‘BN(O)’

 

A fortnight ago, a story about rumour’s power to fuel a whirlwind of nationalistic indignation, stoked online and then as quickly averted, played across the news channels in China. The trigger was a photo circulating on the Chinese-language internet, which seemed to show an act of recent vandalism. In a piece of iconoclastic violence uncannily reminiscent of the faceless Buddhas in the Mogao Caves, the heads had been knocked from several of the mustard-coloured Buddhas sitting in teal niches on the glazed exterior of the Hall of the Sea of Wisdom, one of the most treasured buildings in Beijing’s Summer Palace. Was this the work of mindless vandals?

A couple of months earlier, another furore had broken out among Chinese netizens when a photo emerged of a carved stone relief inside the famous Luxor temple in Egypt: one of the 3,500 year old statues had been defaced across its torso by a Chinese tourist’s incised graffiti, sparking a hunt to shame the person responsible for so tarnishing China’s global reputation. The perpetrator had made the rookie mistake of scratching out his full name, and before long the crowd-sourced force of one of China’s increasingly notorious Human Flesh Search Engines had tracked him, a fifteen-year-old boy, to his home in Nanjing.

It looked like it was all happening again, this time on Chinese soil, until the Summer Palace’s curators came forward to explain that no modern vandals were involved. The restorer’s glue responsible for re-affixing the reconstructed heads onto the Buddhas’ necks, expanding and contracting with the seasonal temperatures, had caused them to fall off again. In fact, the ceramic heads had been smashed over a century earlier, in 1900, when an army of allied foreign forces marched into Beijing to respond to the Boxer rebellion.

The story was not, it turned out, about modern morals at all, but rather was part of a historical narrative about China’s ‘century of humiliation’ familiar to all Chinese school children from their history textbooks. The ruins of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, ransacked by British and French soldiers during the Second Opium War, are a symbol of foreign imperialist aggression which the Communist government are keen to keep fresh in people’s minds. As Julia Lovell explains in the opening pages of her recent history of The Opium War, tales of China’s past sufferings under feudalism on the one hand and foreign imperialism on the other are a crucial part of the current regime’s narrative of its own rise to power, and thus its legitimacy. What English school children learn about Beijing’s looted Old Summer Palace, reduced to marble rubble by British troops? For the Chinese authorities, those Beijing ruins are an important spur to patriotic feeling – a reminder of the nineteenth-century wrongs against the Chinese nation that were only symbolically put right when Hong Kong finally returned from British control in 1997.

I only partly understood it then, but I spent the first eight years of my life, in Hong Kong, living in the shadow of a countdown. The Joint Declaration of 1984 – the agreement between Beijing and London that started the clock on Hong Kong’s eventual return to China – was signed when I was a year old. That number, 1997, loomed everywhere – was the subject of so many of the adult conversations I listened to half-comprehendingly from below. Many Hong Kong Chinese started looking for an exit strategy, especially the middle-class, which my father had watched grow so numerous in the decades since he first arrived in the colony in the ’60s. In the years leading up to the ‘Handover’ of 1997, three quarters of a million people emigrated from Hong Kong (some unofficial reports suggested even higher numbers), out of a population of six million. These people’s fears tell us something about colonialism’s paradoxical legacy in Hong Kong. Would the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ approach to the island’s gradual reintegration into China end up eroding the freedoms put in place by the British?

In his poem, ‘BN(O)’, from his first collection, Paper Scissors Stone, the Hong Kong-raised poet Kit Fan who now lives in the UK, looks back on a curious phenomenon of the pre-handover years: the British National (Overseas). The class of BN(O) was created in response to the question of what would happen to the people of Hong Kong after the return to China, but actually spoke more to British anxieties about immigration from their former colonies. Not the same thing as citizenship, BN(O) status didn’t grant right of abode in the UK, and needed specifically to be applied for. In the poem, Fan recalls standing, in 1987, in the long queue to register in front of the British Consulate, ‘at the junction of Supreme Court Road / and Justice Drive’. His grandmother peels and segments an orange, handing him the pieces one by one as they creep forward in line. The fruit’s sourness in the mouth is a taste the speaker indelibly associates, in later years, with the feeling of being ‘abandoned / by two countries, between two continents.’

My family left Hong Kong in 1991, with six years to spare, but a Chinese friend whose family stayed on a few years more, before leaving for Australia, recalled the empty desks that would appear each week in his primary school classroom, every empty chair marking another emigrated family. When Chris Pattern, Robin Cook, Tony Blair and a mournful looking Prince Charles lined up on the red podium at the exhibition centre in Wan Chai on the night of 30^th June 1997, my parents watched the ceremony not in real time but on the VCR in the lounge. The video player is long gone, but I think the tape is still in a box in the garage.

I watched that footage again for the first time this April, on a writing trip to Hong Kong. In the Hong Kong Museum of History, although there are one or two displays covering post-1997 events, the last room before the exit is a twilit cinema where you sit to watch the film of the Handover ceremony on a loop. I was there at the tail end of the day, just before closing, and I so was alone when I sat down to watch it. Stray details struck me: Prince Charles’ lugubrious ears; the strangeness of the fact that the Prime Minister we sent was Tony Blair, who somehow feels like a figure from too recent memory to have been involved. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the experience, less by the video than by the news clippings from all over the world covering the event, which had been pasted onto the cinema’s walls. In the screen’s half light, I got up and padded around to glance through articles and editorials from The Times, The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, and many others I don’t recall. I suddenly had a feeling of how momentous that night in 1997 had been – as, among other things, a symbolic end to the British Empire. That was my history, my origin, my explanation. I blinked to stave off silly tears.

Wandering round the history museum’s exhibits, I spotted a white sign next to a wooden crate which had been used to store black balls of raw opium as they sailed from the fields of British India towards China’s southern ports. It described the morning when British troops first planted their flag at a place on the island’s coast which came to be called Possession Point. On 26^th January 1841, Sir Commodore James Bremer, rear-admiral of the Royal Navy during the First Opium War, took over Hong Kong island, though The Treaty of Nanking did not formally incorporate the territory into the British Empire until the year after. As the Union Jack was hoisted at 8.15am, a gun salute from the harboured war ships rang around the otherwise empty bay. Away from the lines of royal marines and a few visitors from the mainland, the ceremony was observed by a handful of hawkers: the island was almost uninhabited at the time.

I was staying in Sheung Wan, an area on the northwest of the island. It was not on my mental map of the Hong Kong of my childhood, and perhaps I never went there then. I had chosen it because it was quite central, and because there were some good deals to be found on short-term sublets. The roads in Sheung Wan wound in parallel along the hillside, which climbed eventually up towards the Peak, meaning that if you wanted to cross from one hill-hugging road to another you had to walk down a ‘ladder street’ made up of a multitude of narrow steps. Some days before my trip to the museum, on one of my late afternoon walks, I had noticed a sign that read ‘Possession Street’, and mentally filed it as something to look into. It turned out that the front door of the block of flats I’d been staying in on Hollywood Road was about twenty feet from Possession Point – or at least where historians now suspect it lies. A small area of greenery crossed by pebbled paths called Hollywood Road Park now marks the site. Because of the land reclamation which has crept the coastline further and further into the harbour, Possession Point is now marooned, lying several hundred metres away from the current seafront. When I asked my mum what she knew about Possession Point, she said she had read about it in a history before I was born, but it seemed to her nobody was ever really interested. She made an effort to find the place – in those days there was no salmon pink signboard marking its location – and when she eventually tracked it down, further inland than she’d first thought, it was the site of a public lavatory.

During my Easter on Hollywood Road, I would go and sit on a bench in the park overlooking the fishpond, which reflected a red-columned pagoda capped by a tapering green roof that looked like the stem cut off an aubergine. The orange carp seemed happy enough, but the pond’s population of terrapins was struggling, as the park’s designers hadn’t incorporated any little islands or rocky outcrops for them to sit on. When they wanted to emerge into the dry, they had to arduously clamber up twenty centimetres of green plastic mesh protruding vertically from the water, designed to hold in the water lilies. When they made it to the top, the terrapins had to balance, without falling off, so that their ventral shells seesawed on the top edge. I watched one terrapin the size of a makeup compact heave himself up a few inches and then plop back several times over the course of ten minutes. When he finally made it to the summit, a heavier, soup-bowl sized companion bounced onto the plastic net nearby, flinging the little one back into the water. This was the place where it had all started, the hundred and fifty year history of British Hong Kong.

Reading about the Opium Wars that Easter, I would come across details that seemed to reach forward into my life. The two Scottish magnates of the nineteenth-century opium trade, William Jardine and James Matheson, secured a prominent role in the histories with their canny trading. I had heard their names as a child under the guise of Jardine Matheson & Co., a powerful Far Eastern trading house, or ‘Hong’, which grew up around the two Scots’ opium profits. Having expanded out of opium into a variety of trading areas, including insurance, Jardine was the company my father came to work for when he first moved to Hong Kong in the ’60s.

Or there was Yin Je, who would come to our Midlevels flat to cook during the day, and from whom I learnt whatever smatterings of Cantonese I had as a child (Fi di sic la! Hurry up and eat your dinner!). She would turn up each morning in an amah’s sam fu, or pressed uniform of starched white tunic and black trousers. It was only years later I discovered she had sewn those clothes herself: when she was first sent to Hong Kong, aged eleven, to live with an aunt, she had earned money by doing piece work with a sewing machine. At that time they lived in one of the many tin hut shantytowns that pressed the Hong Kong hillsides. It was only later, after she had started work as a cook for an ex-pat family, that they were moved to one of the new resettlement estates – blocks of flats built by the government after a series of devastating fires spread through the ramshackle hillside shelters, killing many of the recent immigrants who squatted there.

Yin Je had been sent to Hong Kong, my mother told me, because her family had fallen on hard times. Her father had been the son of the head of the village, and so their family was the richest in the area. But one year, when times got hard, the villagers resorted to growing poppy. In Yin Je’s village, men and women all laboured in the fields. But Yin Je’s father, knowing how to read and write, was deemed unsuitable for physical labour, and so his appointed part in the venture was to do the numbers. It also fell to him, as an educated man, to test the village’s product. He got hooked (my mother’s word) and finally sold his fields and house to feed his habit. When I came back to Hong Kong for the first time, for a fortnight, aged 17, my mother and I met Yin Je at a food hall deep in a part of Kowloon I didn’t know, where the hills outside were covered in lush green ferns. She had forgotten whatever small English she used to know, and I had done the same with my scraps of Cantonese, so the two of us couldn’t really communicate any more. Her black curls had silvered in the intervening years, and she suddenly looked very small. I felt bad when, smiling, she handed us a round blue tin of those sugared Danish biscuits you used to get in the ’90s. We hadn’t brought anything.

 

 'Low Price Shop, Hollywood Road, circa 1999'

Hong Kong’s Hollywood Road has nothing to do with California, and in fact predates the settlement of the American Hollywood. The first road ever to be constructed in the nascent colony, in 1844, it seems it was named by the Governor after his family estate back in England. The many antique and curio shops that still line it had their origins when Hollywood Road was still on the coast. Foreign sailors would try to hawk the artefacts they’d picked up in China before sailing back to Europe. Until I asked her about Possession Point, I never knew that my mother had lived near this area of the island when she was small, and would walk along Hollywood Road on her way to school when she was five or so, playing hop skip jump on the many concrete flights of stairs that wind off the main drag. She remembered the antique shops, some of whose windows now display prancing terracotta horses and rare carved jades excavated from mainland tombs, with a price tag only for tycoons. My mum also remembered the various coffinmakers who still have workshops there today. I had never seen a Chinese coffin before I peered in under the garage-like metal shutters, where the light-wood coffins, clover-shaped at each end, would park while the craftsmen were still carving or lacquering them.

My stay on Hollywood Road happened to coincide with the Qingming Festival (Chingming in Cantonese). Also known as the Tomb Sweeping Festival, or the Day of Clear Brightness, it is the day when Chinese families go to their ancestors’ tombs to care for the grave, pulling its weeds and adding fresh flowers and offerings. On the pavement outside the buildings, people had set up blackened metal tins or little braziers, orange flames licking up from inside. They would stand by, feeding offerings into the fire, including Hell money in vast denominations (‘Bank of Hell, $100,000,000’) for their ancestors to spend in the afterlife. (The currency of the Underworld usually strikes foreigners as resembling the notes from a monopoly set.) In the narrow backstreets of Sheung Wan, I came across several shops selling paper votives. Their wares ranged from basic necessities (socks, polo shirts, baskets of dim sum) to modern luxuries (iphones, speed boats, Ferraris), and even a four-storey mansion resembling a paper Barbie house. All were constructed in three dimensions from printed and folded card or tissue. I couldn’t help chuckling to myself when I spotted a lifesized gold watch that read ‘RLOEX’ across the dial. Perhaps the afterlife has its copyright enforcers too.

 

Dim sum paper votives hanging in a shop in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

That day on Hollywood Road you could see the whole history of Chinese funeral offerings – from an emperor’s tomb-stowed terracotta horse in the antique shop window, to the 3D paper roast suckling pig a waitress or taxi driver might burn for a hungering relative. Walking through the streets on Qingming, passing the smoking braziers converting a descendant’s proffered love to ash, I felt very much an observer to these rites. I have never fed a wad of banknotes into a can of fire, or left a saucer of apples in front of a joss-sticked shrine.

 

...foreign to this tiny, floating, motherless city.

 

My mother’s abandonment as a baby means that, other than her, I have no Chinese family, no ancestors to whom I might give sacrifice. She told me once how, when she was very small, her adoptive mother had sublet for them a room in a flat rented out by another family. Her mother slept in the tiny room, while she was put out in the corridor, to curl up in the opened trunk that held the other family’s winter clothes. She fell asleep each night seeing, in the darkness, the smoldering orange tips of the joss-sticks bedded in the sand of the other family’s ancestral shrine. In a world where your ancestors deserve worship like gods, what happens to people who have none?

 

–Sarah Howe (August 16, 2013(

III.To China: The Library Cave [by Sarah Howe]

[My apologies – after a gruelling flight from London to Beijing yesterday (a journey I’d made in the opposite direction a few days before, coming home for a dear friend’s wedding), I found myself feeling somewhat discombobulated by my ping ponging of time zones. And so I’m running a day behind (or ahead?) with these posts which, appropriately enough, have just acted out the very West-East transit they describe.]

 

            At the turn of the twentieth century,

the monk appointed by himself caretaker

            of the sacred rubbish was persuaded

by Aurel Stein that the explorer should be able

            to load up his ponies and

‘Don’t miss me too much today’

 

            two years later the cave was empty.

                   –Caleb Klaces, ‘The cave is woken up’

 

At the close of my second post, I left you with Li Bai’s famous poem, ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’, which imagines how the wind which beats at the battlements of the Yumen Pass in Gansu has already scoured a thousand miles of desert before it reaches that point. The elements have eroded the four-feet deep ochre brick walls of today’s Yumen Pass to a dilapidated softness – as though destined to collapse back into the surrounding sands – which it can’t have possessed in Li Bai’s day, when it bristled with soldiers guarding China from westward hordes. Stretching away on either side of the pass are distant, marooned fragments of the Han Dynasty (206-220 BC) Great Wall, now just a few feet high. Built from tamped earth and reeds in the absence of a resilient local stone, they are a thousand years older than the crenellated bulwarks of the Ming Dynasty wall tourists saunter along near Beijing. On the afternoon, two weeks ago now, we filed through the squat doorway that broaches the Yumen Gate, jostled by a stream of eager Chinese tourists, the air hung unbearably still – the desert’s oven-like expanse relieved by no wind. But when the wind does blow in that corridor of the Gobi, it blows from the West. In other words, the winds noted by Li Bai follow the same route across Central Asia from the Middle East as the eastbound caravans of 2000 years ago, which would have had to pass through that very juncture, where we were stood, on their way to Xi’an and other Chinese cities to trade in silk and precious goods.

 

The Yumen Pass, near Dunhuang

 

A stretch of the Han Dynasty Great Wall, near the Yumen Pass

We had originally planned to track further back along this stretch of the Silk Road, from Gansu on to Xinjiang province. Xinjiang, whose name means ‘new border’, is the furthest west of China’s provinces and also the largest – its vast reaches of desert account for almost 20 percent of the country’s total area. Despite a recent and growing influx of Han Chinese, its inhabitants are mostly members of the Uighur ethnic minority, whose Turkic descent and Islamic faith mean they have more in common with the peoples of Central Asia than the Chinese heartland. We were interested in the city of Turpan because of its importance as a stopover on the Silk Road, but modernity intruded (as it does) by way of a reminder that the troubles facing China’s western border regions in Li Bai’s poem are still very much a present concern. In July this year violence once again broke out in Turpan’s streets, partly in remembrance of the Xinjiang riots of July 2009, in which hundreds were killed. In an effort to quell the ethnic unrest, the central government cut off communications and the internet in an effort to stay the flow of information in and out. As July wore on, we scoured the internet back in England, noting the trickle of photos showing tanks and troop-bearing vehicles lining the roads, which had made it out via twitter and a few news outlets, pondering whether it might still be possible to go to Xinjiang. That is, until our domestic flight into Turpan was cancelled a few days before we were due to travel, barred along with all other routes in to the region. That decided that.

On the long drive from Dunhuang out to the Yumen Pass, we whisked by an ‘Ethnic Minority Cultural Park’. From the photo-heavy signage, it seemed to offer Han tourists, there for the Silk Road sites, the chance to stop by and watch specimens of the westernmost few of China’s famous ‘55 recognized minority peoples’ engage in traditional cultural activities, from dancing and sporting colourful costumes to playing typical instruments and carving folk handicrafts. We had already encountered something of this that morning, when we found the route out of our Dunhuang hotel’s front entrance flanked on both sides by twenty pretty local girls wearing elaborate jingling headdresses and skimpy turquoise bikini-and-harem-pant-type outfits. They all adopted wafty poses and smiled (no teeth) while a besuited tourist-trade delegation padded past them into the carpark. By the time we passed between their ranks a few minutes later, they had already gone slack, looking rather bored. Our driver said that you could see Mongols and Kazakh immigrants, among others, in the Dunhuang ‘Ethnic Minority Cultural Park’, but when I asked if there were any Uighurs inside, he was distracted by an overturned motorbike that had clearly skidded to the roadside some minutes earlier. After that, I didn’t have the heart to ask him again.

The main reason for making the trek to Dunhuang (which really is in the middle of nowhere) is to see the Mogao Caves. The Mogao area’s several hundred individual temple-grottoes, which are decorated from floor to ceiling with painted murals, have also earned it the name ‘Caves of a Thousand Buddhas.’ Along with the material goods transported along the Silk Road, another foreign import to China that arrived along those continent-spanning routes was, of course, Buddhism. The Mogao Grottoes are not the only such painted caves in the region: various sites survive where monks and merchants, adopting the practice from Indian Buddhism, sponsored as an act of piety a cave to be cut out of the cliff face and painted with scenes brought to life from the written sutras.

What makes the Mogao site unique, however, is the sensational rediscovery in 1900 of its so-called ‘Library Cave’. A smallish cave (you can only peer in through a grille, as the guide’s torch wavers through the gloom), it had remained sealed for centuries, filled to the roof with thousands of manuscripts on paper, silk, hemp and bamboo, all hidden behind a carefully repainted wall. The manuscripts’ ‘discovery’ is usually credited to the British explorer Aurel Stein, who hearing rumours of their existence, rushed there to purchase thousands of the scrolls, shipping them back to the British Museum in London. But in fact it was a Taoist priest named Wang Yuanlu – he had arrived at the caves while wandering through a famine and appointed himself their caretaker, sweeping out the in-blown sand each night – who helped pull down the patch of wall another monk had noticed rung hollowly under his tapping pipe. Amongst the batch of manuscripts wending their slow way to London was a volume called The Diamond Sutra, which would later be identified as the oldest printed book ever found. It was the unfortunate Wang who presided over their sale to Stein and the succession of foreign collectors who arrived in his wake – a fact which continues to grate upon Chinese patriotic sensibilities, as was clear from the wire of emotion in our guide’s voice as she pointed her frail torch into the Library Cave’s hollow dark. Stein conducted the negotiations in broken Chinese and could not, in fact, read the scrolls he was acquiring.

...two years later the cave was empty.

The story of the Library Cave makes up one strand in a sequence called ‘16 Airs’ from the first collection, Bottled Air, of British poet Caleb Klaces. (Klaces might be known to American readers because of his role as curator of Like Starlings, an online space for collaboration between US and British poets, whose conversations often have a transatlantic flavour.) Bottled Air is a book of poems whose brilliance and variousness makes me regret the need to pick out here just one small tile from their mosaic. Describing the origins of these poems in an interview, Klaces stressed that he has never been to China. His imaginations of Mogao were mediated entirely through Aurel Stein’s journals and the other books on the subject he could find in the Texas university library where he went to work at the time. I find this so interesting – the question of what it means to summon a place in the mind solely from one’s read experience of it. The same thought occurred to me as I processed along the Mogao cliff-face, filing behind the other tourists to pass in and out of one cave after another, eyes dazzling in the desert sun after the accustomed gloom – Bottled Air in my rucksack all the way.  

Klaces’ poem, ‘The cave is woken up’, opens by comparing ‘Waking cut into managable pieces / by the snooze button’ – its troughs and hikes of consciousness – to the lookout towers spaced along the Great Wall. Intercut with the narrative of Mogao’s rediscovery, the poem’s other overt subject is a long distance relationship – a Skype call (‘Don’t miss me too much today’) across the Atlantic between the speaker and a girlfriend who is ‘always finding secret caves / in metaphors’. Klaces’ oxymoron, ‘sacred rubbish’, in the passage from my epigraph, at once reveres and dismisses the Library Cave’s contents. It is entirely characteristic of the book, whose tone is at once laconic, flat, and intriguingly multilayered. Whose words are these? Is the colour we’re getting here (‘sacred rubbish’) an ironic insight of the speaker’s – voiced with a century’s distance from the colonial unconcern of the European collectors? Or does ‘sacred rubbish’ subtly focalise the thoughts of one of the historical figures in the poem? Aurel Stein, who purchases the trove for a mere four horseshoes of silver? Wang Yuanlu, who allows the treasures to leave China for a song? Or could it be the monks who sealed the cave a millennium before? Their motives are still not understood, but it is thought they closed off the cave either to protect its precious cargo from Muslim invaders riding from the West, or alternatively because the Library Cave’s contents were fragments, useless scraps of sutras, which were only stowed away because they couldn’t bring themselves to burn them.

So preciously vulnerable are the Mogao Caves that tourists cannot be trusted to wander them alone. You must join a tour, so that your guide can unlock the climate-controlling metal shutter doors (donated in the seventies, our guide said, by a rich Hong Kong businessman) and check the carbon dioxide detector dial just inside the lintel to see if excessive touristic breathing is today at risk of mouldering the frescoes to oblivion. Only then will she gesture for you to shuffle through the threshold. When Aurel Stein saw them, the caves’ cliff-face exterior had partially collapsed, leaving their precious statue-sentried vestibules exposed to the elements, with ladders the only means of communication between each hole. My husband Marc and I were part of the only English-language tour group that day, and found ourselves tagging along behind a modest busload of twenty or so middle-aged Israelis. (Even though his Hebrew no longer stretches much further than his Bar mitzvah portion, Marc takes a certain professional pleasure in identifying Israeli tourists when we happen upon them abroad.)

Our guide spoke rapid English straight into our earpieces, which startled because of its frequent invocation of a highly specialised theological and art historical vocabulary (Asparas, Bodhisattvas, lapis lazuli, oxidization), which sat strangely with her lack of basic fluency elsewhere. She would preface all of these choice terms by giving the word in Chinese, then would say, several times over, ‘Do you know...Bodhisattvas?’, or ‘Do you know...oxidization?’ The effect of her repeated ‘Do you know...’, ‘Do you know...’, was to make my idling mind begin to imagine that Oxidization, like the various members of the Buddhist pantheon, was a personified entity whose acquaintance one might hope to make. As it turned out, her strategy was an effective one, and no doubt learned from hard experience, because many of the Israelis hadn't met Oxidization. So there would follow a period of susurration in which the more fluent English speakers would try to translate for their companions what was going on. This pleasant Babel lingered especially long after the guide explained why so many of the seated Buddhas and other painted figures appear to have black skin: the lead white pigment, ground by the original craftsmen so many centuries ago, had oxidised on prolonged exposure to the air and gradually darkened to black.

I thought I knew what was coming when one lady finally asked the guide whether part of the Buddhist community of Mogao had come from Africa. Perhaps she had in the back of her mind the Ethiopian Jews famously evacuated to Israel in the ’70s and ’80s. In many ways it was a fair question, given the trans-continentally cosmopolitan variety of peoples who passed through Dunhuang on the Silk Road. Among the manuscripts in the Library Cave were discovered not only Buddhist scriptures, but writings in many different languages and from several different religions – Daoism, Manichaeism, even Nestorian Christianity. Several leaves of prayers written in Hebrew found in the Library Cave have allowed scholars to conclude that Jews were among the many groups who traded along the much-trodden road via Dunhuang. In fact, Marc and I had gone to seek out the still-surviving descendants of these Silk Road Jewish traders the summer before, when we took a detour from following the route through China of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Missionary, Matteo Ricci, to stop at the city of Kaifeng. Kaifeng lies right across the other side of the country from Dunhuang, at the Eastern end of the Silk Road – and was even the capital of China for a time. Ricci never visited Kaifeng himself, but in 1605 received an emissary from the head Rabbi of their small community – previously unknown to Europeans – who wanted to negotiate with him towards their conversion to Christianity. Otherwise, he feared the dying out of their non-Chinese traditions.

After many generations of intermarriage, the Kaifeng Jews looked Chinese in appearance, but still practised many customs (sometimes without quite remembering why), such as the avoidance of pork, which marked them out from the rest of the Chinese population. Searching the dusty alleys behind one of Kaifeng’s many mosques, we eventually stumbled upon ‘Teaching Torah Lane’. A lady about my age and who self-identified as Jewish, Guo Yan, welcomed us into a side room in the house she inherited from her grandparents, which happens to sit on the site of the synagogue built there in 1163 (the synagogue’s footprint is now largely covered by Kaifeng’s city Hospital no. 1). The room serves as makeshift shrine to the place’s Jewish past, its back wall bearing a painted scroll mapping the lost synagogue’s various courtyards – to my eye, its architecture of red wood columns surmounted by colourfully tiled roofs looked like a Chinese Buddhist temple. Guo Yan’s dream was to raise enough money to have the synagogue reconstructed, not as an active place of worship – she didn’t believe the government would allow that – but as a kind of garden-cum-museum with live demonstrations (‘Ethnic Minority Cultural Park’?) of the city’s Jewish past. We bought a leaflet from her for a few pounds. In 1851, European missionaries in Kaifeng purchased a Hebrew Torah scroll, one of the fifteen thought to have originated in the city – the remaining Jewish descendents were happy to sell it to the foreigners as no one could read it anymore. It now resides in London, in the British Library.

One of the most extraordinary things about the Mogao frescoes, oxidization aside, is the continuing brightness of their pigments – the intactness that came from being so long forgotten by the outside world. And so the examples of their deliberate defacement, when you come upon them, are all the more striking. In 1921 the Dunhuang local authorities were confronted with a flood of incoming Russian soldiers, fleeing the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. They decided to house them temporarily in the Mogao Caves:

 

The emigrants wrote their names all over the statue,

        carved genitals into its mouth

and cut out its eyes. “The kind of shit people do

        to find out where they are”

                        (Caleb Klaces, ‘Emigrants deface the caves’; you can read an earlier version of the poem, which differs only by a few words, online here) 

 

In one of the caves we entered, decorated with thousands and thousands of two-inch high Buddhas, crosslegged in their painted niches (the pattern reminded me of English wallpaper), the Russian refugees had used their nails, or perhaps knives, to scratch out the faces of all of the tiny figures they could reach. Our guide explained that they were after the gold leaf that once shimmered over those thumbprint-sized visages. I wasn’t sure about this explanation; I wasn’t sure one could so confidently infer the motives of such iconoclasts. In my academic work as a scholar of Renaissance English literature, I’ve been interested for some time in the history of Reformation iconoclasm – the waves of destruction of Church art, in the 1530s and after, that followed on from England’s conversion to Protestantism. A host of little churches in Norfolk contain painted rood screens of Christian saints sporting exactly the same type of damage as the Buddhas in Dunhuang: whole faces, or sometimes just eyes, scratched out with a neatness of outline (like a kind of reverse colouring-in) that seems to belie the passion involved in such a destructive act. The paradox is, of course, that the iconoclasts seem to believe that the pattern of pigment on the panel before them holds forth an eye, a face, which could suffer hurt, even as they seek to demonstrate the image has no hold over them. Sacred rubbish.

The final stanza of Klaces’ last Mogao poem, ‘Emigrants deface the caves’, switches scene entirely, leaving behind the desert of Dunhuang for what I think must be the South American waterfall that starred in Werner Herzog’s 2004 film, The White Diamond:

 

Nobody had ever seen the cave behind the water.

        “Please don’t show it in your film”,

requested the elder tribesman. “We would rather not pry

        where the swifts go. It is their place,

not ours”.

 

The cave behind the water. Herzog’s water-veiled cave is that of Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls. But the segue here reminded me of the Water Curtain Cave (Shuǐlián Dòng) from the Chinese novel Journey to the West, the thought of whose secret space used to enthrall me as my mum read to my six-year-old self about the Monkey King’s early days, happy in the cave behind the waterfall. Journey to the West ultimately tells, of course, the legend of how the Buddhist Scriptures were brought eastward from India into China. In The White Diamond, Herzog puts his camera behind the sacred falls and watches the footage himself, but does not show it to the viewer:

 

But how could he not take a camera

        through the falls, just once, to turn

on himself, to star in what wasn’t really there?

 

When the Jesuits arrived in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they considered paintings of the Virgin and child to be among their most powerful tools in the quest for converts. (The Crucifixion – the execution of a lowly slave – seemed to go down less well with the Chinese audience.) But it wasn’t so much the content of the paintings as their style – endowed with all the ‘realism’ Western linear perspective and chiaroscuro could afford – in which they placed their faith. The technical devices of European painting demonstrated its clear superiority to the unshaded flatness and misshapenly proportioned figures the Jesuits saw in Chinese painting – and thus couldn’t help but capture the minds of Chinese converts with its awesome verisimilitude. And yet this idea of depth – of penetrating through the painted surface into the receding world of the work of art behind – is enshrined in the famous legend of the artist Wu Daozi. On finishing a spectacular mural for the emperor’s palace, the Tang dynasty painter clapped his hands and disappeared into a cave within his picture, whose mouth sealed itself behind him before the emperor could follow. Scratching away at the murals’ gilded surface, perhaps Mogao’s Russian guests were trying to emulate Wu Daozi – to open up a hole in the painted surface and follow him through.

 

–Sarah Howe (August 15, 2013)

II. To China: Du Fu’s Cottage [by Sarah Howe]

If I could get a mansion with a thousand, ten thousand rooms,

A great shelter for all the world’s scholars, together in joy,

Solid as a mountain, the elements could not move it.

Oh! If I could see this house before me,

I’d happily freeze to death in my broken hut!

            –Du Fu, ‘My Thatched Cottage was Torn Apart By Autumn Winds’,

trans. Mark Alexander

 

Just over a week ago I found myself in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, standing in front of the thatched cottage of Du Fu. Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770), along with Li Bai 李白 (701-762), is of course the most celebrated of Tang dynasty poets. Looking over the vaguely Disneyish contours of his Chengdu cottage, with its low eaves and hummocked thatch, it’s hard not to think of the famous poem of his that begins with an Autumn gale stripping the straw from its roof, to leave his children rained on in their beds. Written when Du Fu was 50 years old, that poem builds up to a final vision picturing a mansion of ten thousand rooms in which (depending on how the translator deals with 士 shì) all the world’s scholars, or all the world’s poor, might shelter together. So impoverished was Du Fu around this period of his life that one of those children died of starvation. His official position had, scholars suspect, fallen foul of one outspokenly critical poem too many. After the Tang dynasty found itself riven by rebellion, Du Fu had fled the then capital of Xi’an, wandering across a devastated country until, weak and sickening, he reached the southwestern city of Chengdu in autumn 759, then spent the next year working to build his simple thatched hut by a stream.

According to the signs, what you now see tucked among the delightful gardens of Flower Rinsing Creek is actually a Qing Dynasty reconstruction of Du Fu’s cottage. (But given that the Qing ruled from 1644 to 1912, I wasn’t clear whether the current bui
lding’s vintage is closer to Milton’s Paradise Lost or Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’.) The poem about the autumn gale and ruined thatch only underlines the basic fact that all traditional Chinese wooden structures are, in some sense, ephemeral, even as they endure. This Ship of Theseus-like paradox struck me on my first visit to mainland China in 2004. One section of the Forbidden City had been sequestered behind blue metal hoardings. On the other side, conservationists weren’t swabbing surfaces with cotton wool; rather, workmen were sawing and hefting out wholesale the more cracked and flaking of the red-painted wooden pillars. (The sign read: ‘The ancient building is renovating. Excuse me for bringing trouble to you.’) If every single pillar, beam, and tile in the Forbidden City has been replaced at least once, is it still the Forbidden City? That question probably only occurs to us because our way of thinking has been shaped by Athenians (who might or might not have a ship belonging to Theseus).

Since I joined my current Cambridge college, Caius, as a Research Fellow a couple of years ago, I’ve had to get used to calling the figure known to the wider poetry world as J.H. Prynne, ‘Jeremy’, and to sitting near him at lunch. Despite the cavernously high ceilings in college hall, dinners there can get uncomfortably hot, and you will often see Jeremy at high table, wafting a silk fan painted with a Chinese poem, whose author and title have sadly escaped me since I last asked. This was not many months after I arrived at Caius, and Jeremy replied that many of the fan poem’s more obscure characters had once been printed in his memory, but had since faded. (Having in recent times been trying to grapple with a hundred or more new hanzi a week, I now know how this feels.) He then went on to tell the most wonderful anecdote about his College Tutor at Jesus, the man who had first begun teaching him Chinese, Laurence Picken. As Jeremy told it, Picken had been a biologist and had published a tome on the structure of the cell. But when Watson and Crick published the DNA paper in 1953, he saw the writing on the wall for his particular niche. He decided to turn fulltime to what had previously been a hobby – oriental musicology.

The most important discovery of Picken’s musicology career was his ‘rediscovery’ of Tang court music, which had once been thought lost because it survived only in scraps of documentation. In his search for the lost Tang music, Picken’s instincts led him to Japan – whose highly conservative culture has preserved so many aspects of ancient China – and then to Japan’s remaining ancient temples. One day, he had a flash of inspiration: what if he took the recordings he had been making of the monks’ chants and sped them up? What he found was that the monks’ austere drones transformed, when played back at double speed, into a lively rhythm that might furnish the dancing of an evening at the Tang court. When he compared this living musical relic to the scraps of Tang notation, they appeared to match. And so the Tang music once thought extinct, Picken managed to reconstruct to the point where it could be performed again.

This delightful fable of accidental preservation and unexpected recovery stayed with me. So when I came to read Prynne’s 2012 introduction to the Chinese translation of his Selected Poems – a talk reprinted in Cambridge Quarterly’s issue on China and the Cambridge English Faculty – I recognised it immediately. Within the prefatory talk, Picken’s is not only a story about history’s losses and gains; it’s a parable to take into the difficult process of translating a poem from one language into another, which involves its own tallying of gains and losses.

A few weeks ago I went home to visit my parents, so that I would get to see them before my next long stretch of travelling. Later that night, the house quiet except for the hum of the fridge, my mum brought down two books from upstairs – one was her secondary school Chinese poetry textbook, the other was a Hong Kong-printed copy of the 300 Tang Poems, which she had bought a few years later. I needed to trace the eye-scrunchingly small characters down the page with my index finger, working across from right to left in the old way. She would pause to help me with the characters I didn’t yet know, or where I couldn’t recognise the traditional equivalent of a simplified one. And so we read together – her reading the words in their Cantonese pronunciation, me sounding them out in my English-stilted Mandarin. My Chinese studies have not yet stretched to Cantonese, whose eight or so tones make it a more musical language than Mandarin, but also an even more fiendishly difficult one to learn. I read somewhere that Cantonese is likely closer than modern Mandarin is to the ancient pronunciation of Du Fu and Li Bai. The sonic effect of that midnight reading was lovely in its own right, as the sounds in the two different dialects crossed paths, sometimes almost overlapping, only to diverge again, as if harmonising with one another. 

I’ve seen those two books on the shelf as long as I remember, so it moved me to be able to pick them up and read from them, albeit haltingly and with much help. Because of their place in my mother’s early life, the books themselves already feel like precious survivors. But during that reading session, two further relics emerged from the tanned pages of the 300 Tang Poems. When the book was new, my mum had fashioned it an impromptu dustjacket from a cheap inkwash print bought off a stall, by now an interesting piece of ephemera in its own right. I had looked at its design of grey ducklings on a reed-edged pond many times, pulling it off the shelf as a child – it was the only thing in the whole volume I could understand. But that night, for the first time, I noticed a folded, much-yellowed rectangle of paper tucked into the dustjacket’s inside edge. When I pulled it out an opened it, it turned out to be a form, neatly filled in blue ink, which my mother had needed to submit, aged 11, to apply for her Hong Kong ID card. The over-neat, childlike English script wasn’t my mother’s handwriting, but apparently that of a ‘cousin’ – not a real cousin, but a granddaughter of the old woman she’d been left to lodge with at that time while her adoptive mother went out to work.

The second relic I recognised immediately as of my doing. It fell out when I flicked through the poems: a serrated-edged leaf of about two inches, pressed to an unnatural flatness, and desiccated to a purplish brown. I’d gone though a phase in Hong Kong of picking samples of the local flora when taken for walks, to stow in selected books around the flat. I think I had got the idea that this was the sort of thing little girls in England did. My parents eventually put a stop to it when it was discovered I had ruined an encyclopedia of the animal kingdom – whose colour prints of tapirs and whale sharks had filled my rainy afternoons – by crushing inside it a particularly large and succulent tropical bloom picked up outside our block. The deep pink nectar had seeped through several pages on either side, cementing them together. When I started at my primary school in England, they liked to have us learn classic poems off by heart. I’m not sure if the teacher thought she was being a wit when she assigned me – a recent arrival from the tropics – Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’. As it was, the poem’s warnings about the ‘gaudy melon-flower’, and its inferiority to restrained English blossoms, had come too late for this particular colonial child.

Where the purplish serrated leaf had sat undisturbed, for what could have been twenty years, between the pages in my mother’s copy of 300 Tang Poems, it had left a mottled ghost of itself. Before closing the book that night, I slotted the folded yellow form into its dustjacket niche, then placed the leaf carefully back on top of its printed shadow.

That day in Chengdu, when we had finished looking round Du Fu’s cottage, and I had photographed his supposedly replica desk, we strolled onward to another of the city’s famous parks. At that hour of the afternoon it was full of Chengdu’s elderly, seated with thermoses of green tea at the outdoor tables within the sprawling precincts of the park’s teahouse. Most were playing Mahjong, their quiet chat periodically punctuated by a fevered clacking as a table ‘washed the tiles’ (xi pai), all hands digging in to shuffle the plastic pieces around the centre of the table. As we followed the park’s bamboo-arched avenues, we came across an old man who was using one section of flagged path as a giant piece of paper for ‘ground calligraphy’, or dishu. Dipping his outsized brush – it was somewhere between brush and mop – into an old can filled with water, he used that ‘ink’ to trace out characters onto the path. Their scale turned the act of writing into a movement involving not only the hand, but the whole body, like a kind of dance.

I had heard about this ephemeral art of ‘ground calligraphy’, but had never seen it. It apparently had its origins in the public parks of Beijing in the early ’90s. One might read too much into that putative date and place of origin, but it made me think of the theme of transience and disappearance that runs through Chinese contemporary art of that decade. The work of one artist, Song Dong, sprang to mind particularly. He had begun as a painter at an early age, but after the trauma of events in Tiananmen in 1989, he ceased work for some years, before returning as a purely conceptual artist. In 1995 (perhaps inspired by the old men in the Beijing parks?) Song began to keep a daily journal, which he would write out in water on a large flat stone. Their putative record vanished faster than the days themselves. The following year, on a freezing New Year’s Eve night, Song performed a piece called ‘Breathing’. He lay down in a totally deserted Tiananmen square, face to the ground, so that his lips almost touched the pavement. Over the next 40 minutes his clouded breath played over the concrete flag, its vapour cumulatively freezing into a thin sheen of ice, which lasted for a few hours but was gone by morning.

Almost at the same time as we discovered the elderly Chengdu calligrapher, a posse of student physiotherapists out on a team-building exercise had already engaged him respectfully in conversation. He teased them about their difficulty understanding the traditional script, or fantizi, of his artwork.  Their generation, unlike his, had grown up only ever knowing the Mainland’s simplified Chinese script, first introduced by Mao in 1956. Eventually he handed over his brush-mop to one of the girls, who giggled and tried to refuse. The whole group laughed as she tried, jaggedly, to write out her name’s three characters with the unfamiliar instrument, which suddenly seemed as clunky in her hands as it had been deft in his.

In the midst of this intergenerational exchange, I asked the old man whether the lines he had written were those of a poem. He replied that it was a very famous poem by Li Bai – but in the old man’s thick Sichuan accent (which for me was verging on incomprehensible) it sounded more like Li Bei. When I got back that night, I identified the poem as Li Bai’s 關山月 (guan shan yue), ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’. The old man had only managed to get to the fifth line before being distracted:

 

The bright moon lifts from the Mountain of Heaven

In an infinite haze of cloud and sea,

And the wind, that has come a thousand miles,

Beats at the Jade Pass battlements….

China marches its men down Baideng Road

While Tartar troops peer across blue waters of the bay….

And since not one battle famous in history

Sent all its fighters back again,

The soldiers turn round, looking toward the border,

And think of home, with wistful eyes,

And of those tonight in the upper chambers

Who toss and sigh and cannot rest.

 

(Li Bai, ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’)

 

Written at a time when the Tang dynasty was at war with Tibet, this poem’s terrain is the Chinese empire’s vulnerable Western borders. Many of the place names it invokes are not, relatively speaking, that far from Chengdu, in neighbouring provinces at the country’s western edge. By utter coincidence, the ‘Jade Pass’ Li Bai describes as beaten by the thousand-mile wind is in fact the Yumen Pass in Gansu province, which we had visited just days before. A fortress guarding a gap in the Great Wall outside the city of Dunhuang, it served as a vital conduit for trade on the Silk Road. And so, a few days before we met the calligrapher in the Chengdu park, we had stood sweltering inside the shell of Li Bai’s ‘Jade Pass’, trying to imagine what it must have been like for the ancient soldiers to be stationed inside that hellhole of heat and dust.

In a further little twist, googling this Li Bai poem on the English language internet mainly brings up results associated with Chow Yun-fat’s role as a suspiciously Orientalist pirate captain in Pirates of the Caribbean 3, who recites (in Cantonese) its last four lines during the film. But the reason English language newspapers were so interested was because the poem was cut from the version of the film screened in China itself, along with almost half of Chow Yun-fat’s 20-minutes of screen time. Hollywood films are regularly censored in China for sex and violence, but it seems likely that the Chinese government takes special exception to what they perceive as retrograde Hollywood representations of Chineseness.  I was tickled to read that the scene, towards the start of Men in Black 3, where Will Smith ‘neuralizes’ the gathered crowd of Chinese onlookers to the chaos in New York Chinatown was also cut in China, possibly because it was taken as an allegory of Chinese government censorship as an attempt to induce mass amnesia. If the scriptwriters had really been that on top of their covert political allegorizing, it might have been a better film!

I didn’t get the chance to quiz the old calligrapher any further about the poem, because we had a date later that afternoon with a two-week-old baby panda called Hesheng, in whose company I shall leave you now...

 

 

–Sarah Howe  (August 13, 2013)