The Best American Poetry

A Couple of Swells out for a Stroll on a Sunday in NYC

Richard Howard and David Lehman. Sunday, February 7, 2015, 8th Street between 5th & MacDougal. photo (c) Stacey Harwood-Lehman

I. To China: That Blue Flower on the Map [by Sarah Howe]

The Savage is flying back home from the New Country

in native-style dress with a baggage of sensibility

to gaze on the ancestral plains with the myths thought up

and dreamed in her kitchens as guides.

        –Denise Riley, ‘A Note on Sex and “The Reclaiming of Language”’ 

 

This Easter I spent five weeks or so living and writing in Hong Kong. It was only the third time I had been back since my family left for England in 1991, when I was almost eight. That childhood migration didn’t surprise me or, I think, my Chinese mother (though my little brother was tearful for days after it was announced, believing he would have to leave all his toys behind). My father had swapped East London for the Far East thirty years earlier, but had always encouraged us to think of England – a country we had scarcely visited – as ‘home’. I had it marked with a toothpick Union Jack on the world map in my childhood bedroom. But two decades later, it was Hong Kong that had come to feel for me like a place in the imagination.

People often ask me how much I can remember of it – and the answer is, surprisingly, a lot. But of course they’re a small child’s memories. The yellow-crested cranes in the enclosure at the park. The banyans hung with fishing-line hairs that sentried my walk down the hill to the school bus. The neon-silver vista of the skyscrapered harbour, peered at through the kumquat trees that lined our living room window. But I had no residual sense of the island’s geography, of how those memories would relate to each other plotted on a map. So this year, in what turned out to be an unusually wet and sultry April even by Hong Kong standards, I went on long walks, trying to knit together the places I could remember, or at least could remember being told about – sometimes a bit of both.

My hope was that all this would seed new poems, but what I didn’t expect was the unintended fact checking of older poems I fell into. Unintended, because it hadn’t really occurred to me I might have got things wrong – or that it would matter if I had – in the handful of poems about Hong Kong I’d already written over the past few years. One long poem, ‘A loop of jade’, which interleaves my early memories with my mother’s childhood in ’50s Hong Kong, proved especially problematic. Some errors were simply factual – retelling a Chinese fable, and embroidering one particular scene, I’d placed the draped bride at the ‘head’ of her wedding procession rather than in its midst. If I hadn’t stumbled on a traditional bridal sedan (plus explanatory plaque) in the history museum, I would still be oblivious of that modest howler. With its smoothed dark wood carry-poles, it looked much too small to fit a person inside.

Other errors were more to do with visualisation – details that were slightly off. I’d written how worshippers casting their fortunes at the temple would ‘shake out a fan / of red-tipped / sticks’ from the cylindrical box, then pick one to entreat their fate. Yet when I stood in the courtyard at Wong Tai Sin, watching the rows and rows of people before the altar alternately bowing and rattling out their quivers of bamboo staves, I found I’d remembered the exact sound the sticks made when shaken (like clackier maracas), but that my mental picture, though vivid, was completely wrong. The sticks didn’t ‘fan’ out at all – I must have conflated them with the way playing cards spread – but rather sheared forward until, after several low bows on the supplicant’s part, one scarlet-painted tip would come to the fore. After some pondering of alternatives (bundle? box?) I finally deleted ‘fan’ and typed in ‘sheaf’, resolving that that was the best I was going to get out of one syllable.

Conflated memory was certainly the issue a few stanzas away, where I’d described the temple’s ‘fluttering, tree-tied pleas’. Many times in temple precincts on the Chinese mainland I’d seen these extraordinary wish-festooned trees – their every reachable branch tied round with torn strips of red cloth, like Rambo’s headband, onto which thousands of supplicants had permanent-markered their hopes. The idea of these trees made such an impression, I guess, that I edited them in to my mental summoning of Hong Kong’s temples. During Easter, in all the temples I walked around, I never saw any sign of this particular practice – the closest thing was the way people at Wong Tai Sin had clipped shiny-beaded lucky knots onto a patch of chainlink perimeter fence. 

Yet all these fact checking endeavours were complicated by the fact that the temple scene described in the poem was set 30 years ago: it was not something I or even my mother had witnessed directly, but part of her own adoptive mother’s experience. This old woman, who I never really knew, had taken in, somewhere in Guangdong province, the abandoned girl baby that would become my mother. Within a year of the adoption, by 1949, the Communists came to power and they fled, together with so many others, across the water to Hong Kong. When I was a newborn, my mother’s mother had gone to the temple to have blessed for me a jade bracelet sized for a baby’s wrist, and to have my future told. I asked my mum, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen any red-ribbon ‘fluttering, tree-tied pleas’ around and about such scenes. ‘There aren’t many trees left in Hong Kong,’ she ventured. ‘I don’t think people would want to risk hurting them.’ My adoptive grandmother seemingly never told what exactly the fortune-teller said that day. I wonder if he got it right.

These details might seem trifling, but cumulatively they made me think hard about what it means to tell the truth in a poem. Although descriptive precision has always been important to me, this more ‘documentary’ sense of truth is not a quality I’ve ever particularly sought out as a reader of poems. So it seemed strange to suddenly be getting het up about it. With a bit of thought, I became aware of all the small untruths I’d glossed over in previous poems, which had gone into making them feel right, artistically shaped. One example was the way I’d omitted the presence of my then boyfriend (now husband) from one or two poems based on our past travels in China. It just seemed more right – more true – to be wandering lonely as a cloud, especially when there was some kind of lyric quest at stake. I don’t think Marc minds being airbrushed...

The literary critic part of me suspects this is a naive set of questions to be asking – except that the literary expectations revolving around autobiography and ‘authenticity’ (I’m thinking now via Graham Huggan’s important book, The Postcolonial Exotic) seem particularly charged when (female) minority writers are concerned. What I had written in my latter years away from Hong Kong, was it – like the ancestral plains imagined by Denise Riley’s homebound Savage – so many ‘myths thought up / and dreamed’? My flurry of Hong Kong fact checking had, in fact, exposed the clash between a place in the imagination – the backdrop for one’s self-mythologizing – and a place where you might sublet a studio flat for five weeks.

That tension between reality and projection is one I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months. I’m coming towards the end of my year’s tenure in the Harper-Wood Studentship from St John’s College, Cambridge. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s not far off heaven – a year’s grace in which to travel and write poems. I’ve used my time to learn Mandarin and to spend a substantial time in China and Hong Kong, writing poems on the way. I’ve been trying to work out how you might use poems to explore the historical encounter, broadly conceived, between China and the West (not least because I’m one product of that cultural encounter, albeit pretty far down the line). I’d like to spend the rest of my posts this week musing on a few highlights from my travels, which have stretched from Hong Kong in the East to the Silk Road in the far West. Perhaps the most enjoyable path I followed was in tracking, late last summer, the northward progress from Macau up to Beijing of the first and most famous of early modern Jesuit missionaries to China, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). I managed in four weeks of buses, high-speed trains and internal flights a journey that took Ricci twenty-eight years.

But even as I trekked across China, I found myself still fascinated by Western accounts and imaginings of the country I was seeing – partly because I know I can’t escape the European cast to own my vision. The kind of willow pattern fantasizing you get in Chinoiserie is a mode that fascinates me, not least when it turns up in English language poetry. I recently stumbled across a moving example in a poem by the American poet Cathy Song:

 

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China.

Think of it—a Chinese heaven   

where, except for his blond hair,   

the part that belongs to his father,   

everyone will look like him.

China, that blue flower on the map,   

bluer than the sea

his hand must span like a bridge   

to reach it.

An octave away.

                         (Cathy Song, ‘Heaven’)

 

Rather as I spent my first seven years staring at a tiny Union Jack blutacked to the pink triangle of England on my bedroom wall, the speaker’s son imagines China’s ‘blue flower on the map’ (like the blue flower gracing a porcelain bowl?) as the place where he will perfectly belong. I’ve experienced that same elated sentimental fiction of belonging all three times I’ve walked off the plane into Hong Kong airport – it even smells like home! That is, until I get a bit further down the arrivals corridor and realise that, though I might, from behind, for a second, mistake one of the older women for my mum because of the way her hair falls along her chin, they would never make the same mistake with me. On a flight from Lanzhou to Chengdu last week, the very nice stewardess asked me where I was from (‘Oh, Engelan!’), and then told me I looked like Lady Mary from Downton Abbey – a programme I’ve never watched, but know enough about to know I don’t look very much like Lady Mary. Maybe Downton Abbey stands to England as blue-white painted willows stand to China.

I have to say, I’m more comfortable with these lines of Cathy Song’s than I’ve ever quite been with a poem like Derek Mahon’s ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’:

 

While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein

Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong

The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant

Stands at the door as if the world were young,

Watching the first yacht hoist a sail

– An ideogram on sea-cloud – and the light

Of heaven upon the mountains of Donegal;

And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.

            (Derek Mahon, ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’)

 

The proprietor of the Northern Irish seaside town’s (one?) Chinese restaurant ‘whistles a little tune, dreaming of home’ – a home we’re meant to imagine corresponds to the ‘framed photograph of Hong Kong’ hanging above the speaker’s chow mein laded table. I know that Mahon is quite conscious of the way what looks at first like empathy here is actually, on closer inspection, a kind of overwriting – but then that kind of representational imposition is hardly alien to Ireland’s own colonial history. Of course the idea is that both men are equally outsiders, and usually I find Mahon compelling on place and home and exile and homelessness. (‘What's the difference between an exile and an expatriate?’ he jokes in one interview. ‘It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.’) Maybe it’s just ‘little tune’ that grates with me. Perhaps unfairly, I can’t help hearing that diminutive slip from qualifying the tune to qualifying its whistler. 

 

Plate with a view of Burghley House. Qianlong period (c.1745-1760). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

 

I’d like to leave you with one other, to my mind, charming example of the problems involved in conceiving (let alone representing) otherness. This eighteenth-century Chinese plate is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and was produced to order for a British market hungry for Chinoiserie. The ceramic dish is decorated traditionally in blue and white, yet looks at first glance rather odd – it features a linear rendering of the Elizabethan facade of Burghley House, perhaps copied from an English print. But what makes the object so fascinating is the way its two artistic vocabularies, Western and Eastern – one might even say ‘realistic’ and ‘fanciful’, while noting the terms’ Orientalizing charge – sit in it side by side. That is to say, the backdrop the Chinese artist has imagined for this Lincolnshire pile is, to our eyes, the realm of fantasy. The house is set among a stand of twisting Chinese mountain pines, as a phoenix flies past in the glaze of sky.

 

–Sarah Howe (August 12, 2013)

 

Sarah Howe, Guest Author February 8-12

Photo credit: Marc Lixenberg

To celebrate Sarah Howe's T. S. Eliot award for her debut collection Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), we are pleased to share a series of her posts that first appeared here in 2013. Loop of Jade also received the The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Sarah studied at Cambridge and later as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. Sarah has been the recipient of a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Hawthornden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry. She is a 2015-2016 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. Find out more about Sarah here.

Congratulations, Sarah.

-- sdh

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Adam Deutsch and Christine Bryant Cohen of Cooper Dillon Books

DD: Robert Frost said, “My definition of literature would be just this: words that have become deeds.” Cooper Dillon Books is building an impressive catalogue of authors ranging from the re-issue of William Matthews first book, Ruining the New Road, to Jill Alexander Essbaum’s chapbook length poem, “The Devastation.” When you look at the books that Cooper Dillon has published, what definition of literature comes to your mind?

AD: I probably default to the Robert Lowell idea of the poem as an event, which is to say that we’re pulled into a place where we stay, even if only for a moment. The books we’ve published each bring the reader into a place that (I hope) we want to return to over and over again. There are lots of great pieces of writing, but a poetry we come to call “literature” is a work that is always resonating, and for different reasons at different times.

CBC: Our hope as a press, however nano-sized of a small poetry press we are, is to bring timeless poetry into our cultural conversation. Timelessness is a very lofty goal for a book or a press, but that resonance in rereading that Adam mentions is what I mean, too. The Devastation is timeless to me because Jill's lines ring in my head, as do Rick Pierce's poems in The Book of Mankey. I suppose that literary publishing could be thought of, in a literal sense, as words becoming deeds, if Frost meant words becoming an entity that can affect us. Cooper Dillon aims to publish poetry that affects us, that we want to be affected by over a span of time.

DD: How did Cooper Dillon Books come into being?

AD: Colleen Ryor, after founding and operating Black Lawrence and Adirondack Review, wanted to create an entity that was dedicated to poetry. She took me on to help with a couple of projects at Black Lawrence, but then she ran the idea by me, and we ran with it. She had/has young children, and I took it over promising I wouldn’t change the mission we’d created. The resolve to regard the values that make poems timeless has always been at the center of our being.

CBC: Adam invited me on as assistant editor in spring 2014, so the press has existed without me for a long time. But as for me, I love being part of poetry publishing again. The core of Cooper Dillon is those books of poems that keep us coming back, and I’m delighted to have a hand in shepherding those poems into our cultural conversation.

DD: Cooper Dillon Books has published six chapbooks and four full length collections, with two more full-length collections coming soon. How many books do you publish in an average year? Do you have plans to expand?

AD: We only do one or two books per year, and it’s a really pleasant pace. It means that we’re never spread thin, and we can give the attention that our readers and writers need. Max, our art-man, asks about expansion also, so it’s on the mind. As much as I’d love to put out more books per year, I think that would demand resources that aren’t realistically there. On the other hand, as long as we’re keeping it small, we get to maintain a quality and integrity that’s really key to running a solid small press.

I worked in beer for a few years, and I live in San Diego (where there are over 110 breweries) and I see a small press somewhat like a small brewery. When it’s small, everything putts along smoothly—the customers know they really matter when they know they can relax and enjoy without feeling pressure or rushed. When a brewery starts to grow too much, a layer of the personal tends to get scrapped. Things get more “businessy,” and the labor of love just starts to feel much more like work. If a press is the same way, I’d prefer to keep the love. That being said, if we sell more books, and we find more manuscripts to love, we’ll do everything we can to give those poems a home.

DD: The Dead in Daylight by Melody S. Gee and Shore by Clay Matthews are forthcoming in 2016? Can you tell us about these books?

AD: These books are awesome. When The Dead in Daylight came in, I lost my mind, and felt like we needed it. As Eduardo Coral wrote for the back, it’s “beautifully strange and intimate,” and that’s clear from the first poem, which has the title “I Cannot Make a Torch of Green Branches,” (which appeared in Town Creek Poetry). Before we even start, we’re presented with a voice in conflict with the natural world, and the living branches resisting their own destruction by fire. The tension that comes with that carries and builds in the manuscript, and I hope everyone loves it when it comes out!

Shore is a book-length poem in parts, built from a lengthy bibliography of flood stories, swirled together in this way that Clay Matthews just nails. Clay’s earlier book Pretty, Rooster is one of our most popular titles, and I think it’s because the poems have all the wonderful qualities of the writer: a raw humility, and a vernacular we seem to connect with (especially after tiring work in the sun, at the moment of a first sip of beer). Shannon Tharp says that he “thinks through and sounds out the stories that need telling,” and that intimate urgency is there.

CBC: It’s worth mentioning that Shore is in print and shipping right now, and it is excellent and will suck you into its world of floods and water and bodies and love:

The end of the story
is that everything drowned

together. The shadow sang
Listen: nothing
is quiet as water.

 

As for The Dead in Daylight, I can verify that Adam read the manuscript and lost his mind. He called me immediately, which is how it starts with each book we’ve published together. I read it and had no doubts. It’s very exciting to have Melody Gee’s collection with our press’s name attached, because I feel certain that her book will be read for a long, long time. I’m so pleased we grabbed it first.

DD: Cooper Dillon Books accepts submissions of chapbooks and full-length collections year round. This must make for a mountain of submissions. How many submissions do you receive a year? Also, can you talk about the Cooper Dillon’s rationale for keeping the submissions doorway always so hospitably ajar?

Who Said It? [by David Lehman]

Remember when the Sunday Times Book Review, frankly middlebrow and proud of it, used to run author's queries ("for a biography of Maxwell Anderson I would be grateful . . .") and legitimate questions from college grads who wanted to track down a favorite quotation (was it Scott Fitzgerald who said "live fast, die young, and have a handsome corpse?") In that spirit I offer you this cocktail party line that would have beguiled Flo Bear.

"If the Kennedy White House was decadent; the Clinton White House was sordid." Who said it? I have asked a lot of smart people, to no avail, and would be grateful for any leads. Meanwhile, my friend Burt Hooton proposes this multiple choice list of possible candidates:

1) Jane Fonda
2) Arthur Schlesinger
3) Diana Trilling
4) Pat Lawford
5) Jacques Barzun
6) Lawrence P. Berra

I'm not convinced by any of Burt's suggestions, though the terms of the distinction do sound as though they could have come from #3 or #5, and I appreciate the convention observed in #6.

You get extra points (which you will need this Sunday) if you can say what Ava Gardner is doing in this post or if you can make a convincing case in favor of Oliver Stone's theory of JFK's assassination. -- DL

Caution: Writer at Work [ by Charles Coe ]

Yesterday while I sat at my computer writing I could hear through the floor, in the basement, two giant gladiator robots pummeling each other with sledgehammers.

Actually, what I heard was a couple of plumbers replacing my landlords' ferkatka water heater. The noise wasn’t constant but every once in awhile so loud I felt vibrations through my feet. I could have de-camped—taken a laptop to the library or a coffee shop—but the beating and banging didn’t actually bother me that much. Some writers are hyper sensitive to extraneous noise; they flinch when dust motes hit a shag carpet. But I was cool with the robots. What I can’t tolerate when I’m trying to write is people talking. I know a writer who listens to National Public Radio while she works, and that would distract me to the point of madness.

It’s always interesting to find out what writers and poets consider the ideal work environment. Some of us need complete isolation in a room quiet as a church. Others can put up with—or even prefer—noise and activity around them. Western novelist Louis L’Amour once said, “I’m not picky when I write. I could be happy at a desk in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard at noon.” Maya Angelou couldn’t write in a fancy, well-appointed space. She preferred ratty hotel rooms. Eighteenth-century German poet Friedrich Schiller found inspiration from the smell of rotting apples in his desk drawer. Whenever the wife tossed his current crop he'd grab a new batch from someone’s trash.

Some writers require absolute silence; others need music to set a mood. I have one friend (who might be reading this) who listens to Chopin piano etudes; he never listens to anything else when he’s writing and he never listens to them any other time. He’s a husband and father with a full-time teaching gig, so when he manages to carve out an hour or two to write he can't mess around checking email or watching cute emu videos or googling vacations spots in Costa Rica. He’s setting up a Pavlovian response; when his brain hears Chopin it says, “Okay, time to get to work.”

Since retiring from my full-time job I love writing at home in my cozy, messy office off the kitchen. And I need music, but I’m picky; it needs to be instrumental and melodic: early Miles Davis, Mozart, Erik Satie solo piano, classical guitar, Ben Webster sax…a pretty long list, but nothing loud and frenetic. (I save the head-banging rock and funk for when I’m doing housework.) But it can’t be TOO mellow: no “soft jazz” or goopy New Age California hot tub music.

According to Virginia Woolf, “A room of one’s own” is the writer’s most important tool. We all need that sacred space—whether it’s a desk in the living room or a “lucky cubicle” in a quiet corner of the library. We might have very different needs for our work environment, but the one thing we all have in common is that we keep at it—keep plowing ahead through the moments of boredom or disappointment, through the crises of confidence and the skepticism of non writers who don’t understand what we do or why we do it.

Hall-of-Fame basketball player Julius Erving once said, ”A professional is a person who does what he loves on the days he doesn’t feel like doing it.” This writer won't even try to say it better than that...

 

Charles Coe is author of two books of poetry: “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents” and “Picnic on the Moon,” both published by Leapfrog Press. His poetry has appeared in a number of literary reviews and anthologies, including Poesis, The Mom Egg, Solstice Literary Review, and Urban Nature. His novella, "Spin Cycles," was published in November, 2014 by Gemma Media. He is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Charles’s poems have been set by a number of composers, including Beth Denisch, Julia Carey and Robert Moran. A short film based on his poem “Fortress” is currently in production by filmmaker Roberto Mighty. Charles is co-chair of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union for freelance writers. He was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light for 2014.” He is currently an artist fellow at the St. Botolph Club of Boston.

 

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