Page Turner: The Asian American Literary Festival

The Asian American Writers' Workshop expanded its annual awards ceremony into a literary festival. The one-day event took place yesterday at the Powerhouse Arena, in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Two separate readings took place at every hour from 11 AM to 6 PM. I attended the 4 PM session "Sex and the Cities: Stories of Love & the Metropolis" with readings by Hari Kunzru, Monique Truong and Mort Baharloo. From where we sat we could hear the other reading, and so it was hard to concentrate, especially during the mic-wrecked question-and-answer that followed.

The day ended with a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main reason why six students, who studied her work last year, came with me. This was my third time hearing her read, and she continued to wow me with her thoughtful poise. When someone from the audience asked an obnoxious question, she declined firmly but gracefully to give an answer. In her replies to her interviewer, she did not try to say more than she meant. One answer stayed with me. Writing, for her, is a place where she does not have to meet others' expectations. She has only to please herself.

A Tribute to Marie Ponsot

I took a year long manuscript course with Marie at 92Y last year. In class she would ask us to describe a workshopped poem instead of judging it immediately, and we discovered that description is also a form of judgment, but keener-eyed. Last Thursday, the New School Writing program, where Marie teaches, and Pen American Center sponsored an evening's tribute to her. It also launched her new book, with the wonderful title, Easy.

The large Tishman auditorium was less than half filled. I felt a little sad about that. She has won all kinds of awards but I've always felt that she is in danger of being under-appreciated. The story most often told of her life is that of a poet who published a first book when young and then her second thirty years later. In that interval of apparent silence, she was raising seven children and spending a few minutes each day writing. The moral for young poets, which a number of readers that night rehearsed, is not to rush into publication. It is a noble lesson, but not a glamorous one. Marie attracts respect but not devotion. I don't think it bothers her.

The poems I remember from Springing: The Bird Catcher, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, are intricate timepieces. They exude a Swiss luxury. These kinds of poems reappear in Easy, poems like "Walking Home from the Museum," an inverted sonnet, and "Thank Gerard," a prayer of thanksgiving. But there are many more poems that are relaxed, carefree and even mischievous. The diction in them is simple. The rhyme scheme, if they have one, is playful. They are spoken in the voice of a cocky Head Turkey, a self-effacing middle sister of Peter Rabbit or one Grimm Brother to the Other.  Marie read a blues poem that she said she would not have put in a collection earlier because she would have thought it lacked gravitas. It was liberating to see a poet breaking free of poetic decorum.

The new poems are not just fun, but their freedom captures, paradoxically, something of the world's ineffability. One of the strongest poems in this collection is "This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo." It is a response to Blake who proclaims in the poem's epigraph, "In a time of dearth bring forth number, weight & measure." A stirring line, but Marie would have none of it. She looks to cloud, instead, for a bridge, for "This dawns on me: no cloud is measurable."

The clarity of cloud is in its edgelessness,
its each instant of edge involving
in formal invention, always
at liberty, at it, incessantly altering.

"Each instant of edge" is very fine, the lines themselves illustrating through linked sounds what they say. The poem ends with an invocation:

Come to mind, cloud.
Come to cloud, mind.

The religious strain is strong in the new book, as in the others. It is governed by a consideration for others, and stimulated by an awareness that there is something bigger out there than us. Call it language, as Marie so often does.

Poem: "The Old Wallet"

The Old Wallet

he cannot see from the surface

of a wealth he cannot keep

--Eavan Boland, “Making Money”

Pocket of pockets, my old wallet keeps

the likenesses of long dead Presidents,

credit card, coins, stamps, memberships,

but not a photograph of love. My reason?

I thought that the mind is a fitter place

for images of illimitable grace.

The old wallet will do for society

but soul resides not in skin but in me.

Yet now I see the mind exchanges love

so easily for venom and forgets

the daily accumulation of its debts

and bad seasons it is a veteran of.

So I am asking for a photograph,

Love, on love’s behalf.—

*

Poem: "A Whole History"

A Whole History

In the morning they were both found dead

     Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

--Eavan Boland, “Quarantine”

The floor is cold with the coming winter.

     I pull on white socks

and sit down before the blackout window

to think about our separation closing in.

We have a history longer than the two years

     that fitted like a shirt.

You learned a long time ago to enjoy ironing.

I always had someone ironing shirts for me.

But we go further back than birth, to furtive

     park encounters,

coded glances, tapping on bathroom walls,

ways of staying warm and white in winter.

Yesterday a young friend said it’s wrong

     to expose children

to a gay wedding. The chill hit me again.

Rage spread like blood over my clean shirt.

I cannot wash it off. You are no longer willing.

     In the closet the shirt,

part reminder of love, part reminder of rage,

is held up by its shoulders on thin twisted wire.

*

Still Blue: Writing by (for or about) Working Class Queers

Wendell Ricketts, the editor of this online publication, calls for more fiction, essays, poems, memoirs by (for and about) working class queers. Read the villanelle by Colm Toibin and Maura Dooley. Submit, submit.

Poem: "Attribution"

Attribution

I speak with the forked tongue of colony.

--Eavan Boland, “The Mother Tongue”

My grandfather said life was better under the British.

He was a man who begrudged his words but he did say this.

I was born after the British left.

They left an alphabet book in my house, the same one they left at school.

I was good in English.

I was the only one in class who knew “bedridden” does not mean lazy.

I was so good in English they sent me to England

where I proved my grandfather right

until I was almost sent down for plagiarism I knew was wrong

and did not know was wrong, since where I came from everyone plagiarized.

I learned to attribute everything I wrote.

It is not easy.

Sometimes I cannot find out who first wrote the words I wrote.

Sometimes I think I wrote the words I wrote with such delight.

Often the words I write have confusing origins

and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me.

*

Poem: "What the River Says"

What the River Says

The body is a source. Nothing more.

--Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffey”

I too compare my life frequently to a river,

small hidden beginning, final dissolution,

body charged with a name but always changing.

It is a place to live by, to keep a few chickens

or raise a city famous for its graceful bridges,

if one cares for good eating or reaching across.

On mornings when the rear courtyard is stony,

how enjoyable to walk to the water and hear

its gossip about the young lovers parting upriver.

The annual swelling is a power for great evil

but also a pregnancy. It carries boats and people.

For explorers, there is a chance of a waterfall.

Sinners, those hybrid creatures, like centaurs,

may drive their reluctant horses into the flood

and experience total absolution in an instant.

So, if my body is a river, I won’t dismiss it

as a source and nothing more. It is a source

of my voice but it is also my voice: that is

what the river says on its way to the sea.

*