Song of a Reformed Headhunter

PN Review has just published my Pillow Book in Issue 198 . Reading it on the train, while lugging home my birthday present from my sister, a George Foreman Stainless Steel Open Grill, I was hit by a sharp nostalgia for Singapore, which is my past. Here parade its people: my parents, of course; Lawrence, my scout patrol leader, and a girl guide called Samantha; Elsa who sang beautifully; Yisheng who wrote The Last Boy ; the army warrant office who still cannot be named; Thomas, the willing enlistee; my first students; the critic Gwee Li Sui; Margaret. Its places also return to the mind's eye: Radin Mas Primary School; Raffles Institution, Mount Faber; my old bedroom; the Botanic Gardens; the columbarium; the weddings in Chinese restaurants; the interview room of the Public Service Commission; the passport office. The piece was suggested by Michael Schmidt, who asked me a few years ago to write a prose work about my poetry for the journal. I tried but could not write the required ...

Toxic flora. Poisonous fauna. Welcome, world. *

Last night, under the auspices of the Academy of the American Poets, three different poets read to a standing-room-only crowd. I did not know who Ed Sanders was till Gordon Gilbert explained to me the significance of rock band The Fugs. Sanders introduced himself as younger than the Beats and older than the hippies. The poems he read revolved around the Beats. One was about what he called the grand humanity of Allen Ginsberg when the latter helped, a la the Good Samaritan, a man beaten and left to die on an Indian road. Would Ginsberg have squirmed in his grave to be cast as Mother Theresa? I heard Kimiko Hahn read before but that reading did not make much of an impression on me. Perhaps I am being trained by her workshop now to hear better the movement of her Japanese-inspired poetry. This time, I was really impressed by her reading. A wide-ranging and probing intelligence dressed in a spare elegance. The endings of the poems were particularly strong. Her forthcoming book Toxic Flor...

In teaching the tanka, Kimiko drew our attention to the niceties of translating Japanese poetry into English. From Sato 1999 Symposium on translating Asian languages (see Manoa 11/2): Finally, to state the obvious, syllabic value differs from language to language. Japanese is a polysyllabic, vowel-laden tongue; English isn't. English can express, on average, twenty to twenty-five percent more than Japanese can with the same number of syllables. You can guess what happens when the 5- and 7-syllable formations are applied in translating traditional tanka and haiku: the result usually says more than the original does. Well, does all this matter? After all, Japanese and English are so different. Because the languages are different, shouldn't the assumption be that forms can't be transferred? Japanese poets may regard tanka and haiku as one-line poems, but it's highly doubtful that they have any notion of the "line" in the Western sense and, anyhow, one-line po...

So the first class was on Tuesday, as will be the second, third, fourth etc. But I've been trying to write one of these damn zuihitsus, and so have not blogged about the class. We read four examples from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon , Heian period 794-1185, translated by Ivan Morris. They look like list-poems, except that each item can be as long as a paragraph or a page. In "In Spring It Is the Dawn"Sei Shonagon describes her favorite time of the day in each season. In spring it is the dawn. In summer the nights. In autumn the evenings. In winter the early mornings. Another zuihitsu is on Elegant Things, a list which includes the surprising item of duck eggs. Of all the Things that Give a Hot Feeling, the Captain in attendance at the Imperial Games is, to me, the hottest. Sei Shonagon, a young children-hating aristocrat herself, bitches about the common people, the elderly, and pregnant women in Unsuitable Things. Here is a slice of her scorn: A woman with ugly ha...

Wheeeee! I have been accepted for an 8-week workshop with Kimiko Hahn on Japanese poetic forms such as the haiku and zuihitsu. Cave Canem offers it free for African and Asian American poets. Hahn's bio from the website: Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Toxic Flora , forthcoming from W. W. Norton in May 2010; The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006); The Artist's Daughter (2002); Mosquito and Ant (1999); Volatile (1998); and The Unbearable Heart  (1995), which received an American Book Award. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. She is a Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Queens College/CUNY. About her own work and its place in Asian American writing, she has sa...

"Fever Fragments" is written in response to Idra Novey's "As in Cincinnati," which in turn responds to Kimiko Hahn's "these toys." This extending wire of communication, branching out into others, will be published online next summer as Telephone Project, edited by Jonathan Farmer, poetry editor of At Length . Fever Fragments Can you forget what happened before? —Sappho, “Six Fragments for Atthis” The picture is still so clear to me I cannot imagine you cannot see. The fire’s marks are red, and burn; I turn and turn for your return. Then I see what I did not see: you see a different part in me that when the cold and dark return the fire in you will burn and burn. * All smoke now, the white stars, the stupid wax that crouched too fast under the hooded heat. No stub of toe, no crust of tears, no sex but dissipating wisp, finished, incomplete. * I would make accusation a form of love except it has been done before. * ...