Jane Wong, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

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HOW TO NOT BE AFRAID OF EVERYTHING, Jane Wong. Alice James Books, 60 Pineland Drive, Auburn Hall, Ste. 206, New Gloucester, ME 04260, 79 pages, $17.95 paper, https://www.alicejamesbooks.org.

Jane Wong dedicates this book of poems to her grandparents “and those lost during the Great Leap Forward.” I looked up the Great Leap Forward and learned that it was a 5-year campaign (1958-1962) to transform China from an agrarian economy into a communist society, which resulted in a famine costing 36 million lives (this, from the long poem “When You Died”; see Wikipedia on “The Great Leap Forward” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward).

This is a book haunted by ghosts, and by food. Understanding the Great Leap Forward helped me to better understand these obsessions. Some of the poems are from a granddaughter to grandparents; others are spoken by grandparents; sometimes it’s hard to tell which voice is whose. The themes are slightly broader: the life left behind, the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States, the wide-eyed (and fists curled) experience of the child taking everything in, hungrily, greedily. All of it.

Consider these lines, from a prose section at the end of “When You Died”:

I read about taro scrubbing, about villagers accused of stealing. To come clean, officials took turns beating them. How it all sounds like a game: ring around the roses, scrubbing skin to ashes, to all fall down. I falter on the page. What should be yours and wasn’t? What was swallowed whole? What roots, what ground to hold?

The review in Ploughshares called How Not to be Afraid of Everything:

“a triumph of formal ingenuity and in the hallucinatory intensity of the imagery throughout. All the more impressive is Wong’s fusing of that ingenuity with her exploration of her identity. … Wong’s new book compels us to remember that behind the broad designation “Asian American” is an infinite range of specific, distinct historical experiences.”

I found myself reading this book of poems as if it were a gripping novella, letting it wash over  and scour me with its brilliance. The metaphors astound: “I break open, / hot cantaloupe in winter” (“The Frontier”); Judgment cuts through me / like a magician sawing // a woman in half” (“Wrong June”); “The nightly news clings to the wall like mold” (“Notes for the Interior”); “limbs loosened like an old garden hose” (“The Long Labors”); “Deep fry a cloud so it tastes like / bitter gourd or your father leaving—the exhaust of / his car, charred” (“After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly”).

Here is one poem, admittedly more conventional than most. It’s really a book you have to hold in your hands and see for yourself.

I Put on My Fur Coat

And leave a bit of ankle to show.
I take off my shoes and make myself
comfortable. I defrost a chicken
and chew on the bone. In public
I smile as wide as I can and everyone
shields their eyes from my light.
At night, I knock down nests off
telephone poles and feel no regret.
I greet spiders rising from underneath
the floorboards, one by one. Hello,
hello. Outside, the garden roars
with ice. I want to shine as bright
as a miner’s cap in the dirt dark,
to glimmer as if washed in fish scales.
Instead, I become a balm and salve
my daughter, my son, the cold mice
in the garage. Instead, I take the garbage
out at midnight. I move furniture away
from the wall to find what we hide.
I stand in the center of every room
and ask: am I the only animal here?

—Jane Wong

Somewhere I came across the idea of looking at the opening line of a book of poems (or one’s poetry manuscript) and the closing line. I’m not sure what Wong’s lines opening/closing lines do, except that they seem to catch the poet—or her persona—in the headlights:

Opening line: “Jane, deceived by _____ time and again, should not _____but she_____and slept with curled fists.”

Ending line: “Tell us, little girl, are you / hungry, awake,             astonished enough?”

This is a prize-winning book, and if you look you’ll find all sorts of praise for it. You might start by visiting Jane Wong’s website, or the Poetry Foundation.

 

Serhiy Zhadan, What We Live For, What We Die For

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WHAT WE LIVE FOR, WHAT WE DIE FOR, Serhiy Zhadan. Trans. from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2019, 160 pages, $18 paper, https://yalebooks.yale.edu.

I have spent large chunks of the last three days reading this book, and researching both Ukraine and Serhiy Zhadan. He is, as Bob Holman writes in the foreword,

a “Rock-Star poet,” “poet laureate of Eastern Ukraine,” Ukraine’s “most famous counterculture writer,” as labeled by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books.

In addition to being a poet, novelist, essayist, and front man for the punk band Zhadan and the Dogs, Zhadan is also  a 2022 recipient of the German Peace Prize:

Zhadan, who’s been doing poetry readings in a Kharkiv bomb shelter has said, quite rightly, that, “A person cannot live only with war. It is very important for them to hear a word, to be able to sing along, to be able to express a certain emotion.” But aside from reckoning with the human cost of Russian aggression (which began in 2014) in his poetry and fiction, Zhadan has also been organizing humanitarian aid in Kharkiv, doing everything he can to see his community through this awful war. (Jonny Diamond, Lithub)

I became aware of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when it broke into American television, a little over a year ago. These poems are from earlier, 2001-2015, and I worried that I should work harder to pick up a more recent book. (On order, by the way). But what I found is that What We Live For, What We Die For has forced me to see that the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is much older than western television coverage suggests. Centuries old.  These poems are immediate and raw. “a Canterbury Tales of Ukrainian common people” (Bob Holman).

Consider these opening lines of  “Take Only What Is Most Important” (from  Life of Maria 2015):

Take only what is most important. Take the letters.
Take only what you can carry.
Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver,
Take the wooden crucifix and the golden replicas.

Take some bread, the vegetables from the garden, then leave.

And if you’re not already overburdened, here are the ending lines of the poem:

There will be blood on women’s heels,
tired guards on borderlands covered with snow,

a postman with empty bags shot down,
a priest with a hapless smile hung by his ribs,
the quiet of a cemetery, the noise of a command post,
and unedited lists of the dead,

so long that there won’t be enough time
to check them for your own name.

—Serhiy Zhadan, excerpt of  “Take Only What Is Most Important”

I have been talking with my writing group about sentences, and maybe that’s why the ending of “Noncommercial

from “Noncommercial Film” (2003)

Film” (from “History of Culture at the End of this Century,” 2003) stuck with me. I’m adding it as a photo, so you can see the typically long lines included in most of these poems.

It was hard to choose just one poem to share. I know the line breaks in this one will not appear right on your device, but the images would make a great short art film:

 

Oceans

Suddenly, it feels like there’s a lot of water
maybe because each snow drifts and smells like the ocean,
then the presence of something great appears in your life;
everything was created counting on your heartbeats,
no wonder these waves, unseen and unheard,
turn toward people.

They can’t be confined to their assigned
territories, so at some point for a moment they run
into our dreams, like children running into their parents’ bedroom.
And even if you can’t see them, this does not mean
that they cannot be seen.

That part of living
which we call life
could never contain that many sounds.
You say, silence, knowing that silence is exactly
what you cannot hear.

There are basements,
there are roofs,
and somewhere in between the ocean is hidden; and all you see—
the wet winter trees, rivers,
and grass—
is in its own world like
joy or parting is in ours.

So sometime near dawn,
they start rolling but stop just short,
like someone pulling out a knife next to your face
or like a printing press punching out
letters with warm blood
on the other side of wrapping paper,
and in the window a bird flies so slowly,
that I can see it
as I write these necessary words
and then cross them out.

—Serhiy Zhadan

 

I’m ashamed that I didn’t already know of Zhadan’s work and influence. Trust me, I have given you only the slightest taste. If you search Zhadan’s name you’ll make numerous discoveries for yourself; he is all over the Internet. Here are a few more resources:

You can find more recent work in English translation by Zhadan at Idaho’s Lost Horse Press.

You can read the entire foreword of What We Live For, What We Die For, by Bob Holman, via this link: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300223361/what-we-live-for-what-we-die-for/

And—this is a “must watch”—I searched for a video of Zhadan reading his poetry in Ukrainian, but found instead this news clip from the BBC. It’s short, and Zhadan is featured in the second half, walking through the ruins of Kharkiv:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0B7nHbqoLg

Poetry Month Happenings

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In lieu of a poetry book for today’s blogpost (I am reading a “Selected” and didn’t get through it — skipping long story about why), here are two links to today’s events.

One is my poem, “It Is Made of Broken Parts,” posted this morning at One Art.

 

The other is the amazing Rexville Grange Art Show, running until April 16th, and, today from 1:30-2:30, hosting my writing group reading poetry and prose. Click on this link to go to their website:

https://rexvillegrangeartshow.com.

And a head’s up: next week, I’ll be reading alongside two other poets at Edmonds Book Shop, Thursday, April 20, 6:30-7:30. For information, click on this link (or visit Rose Alley Press): https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org/event/third-thursday-art-walk-poetry-night-2023.

Tito Titus, I Can Still Smile Like Errol Flynn

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I CAN STILL SMILE LIKE ERROL FLYNN, Tito Titus. Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington, 2015, 100 pages, $15 paper, www.emptybowl.org.

I had heard about Tito Titus, had maybe bumped elbows with him at Litfuse in Tieton some years past; sometime, somewhere, someone had given me his book of poems. On Saturday at the launch of I Sing the Salmon Home, he said hello and introduced himself. Today, I rummaged through my bookshelves, found his book, and read it all the way through, even the end notes (which are sort of a poem, themselves).

These words, from Titus’s website, capture the experience:

In I can still smile like Errol Flynn Tito Titus interrogates life, aging, and death with a delicate blow torch. These poems adore the beauty of youth and memory, fluently articulate the melancholy and nostalgia delivered by loss; and, with irreverence and awe, dicker with Death. It’s wry, wistful, fierce, searing, erotic, humorous, regretful, brave, and lonely.

“A delicate blowtorch.” Exactly. The poems are also, at least part of time, quite charming.

Someone’s darling daughter

approached me today
with a bag of weed
at a good price,
even for Hilo,
and I said yes
because the plumeria
tattoo peeking above
her low slung sarong
told me pleasure
lasts only a while.

—Tito Titus

In these poems the body gets all the attention it craves. Nose hairs, penises, “the old bastard’s feet,” bellies. And so much music that you begin to picture the writer with a guitar in his hands.

As Joannie Stangeland remarks in her cover blurb, the book also “reaches further back to childhood, facing the past’s violence and the silence after, its bruises and scars.” In the last section, we’re introduced to a cast of characters just as they’re leaving life’s stage. You’d think it would be too heartbreaking to read, but Titus uses a conversational tone that drew me in.

Here’s a poem, so you can make up your own mind. I love the long title.

The evening of the day after things changed like they’d never changed before

He wanted to sit on the front porch
watching no one pass on the empty street,
but it was cold, wet, and windy,
so he sat in the darkened room
watching the telephone. It rang once
earlier in the day. A wrong number.
He thought to engage the caller
in conversation but let it pass. Perhaps
someone else would call. Or maybe not.
Or probably not. Or not at all.
The radio played songs he didn’t know
by performers he didn’t know.
The newspaper still lay by the front door.
He cleaned the refrigerator. It contained so little.
He forgot to turn on the furnace,
put his hands in his pockets and shivered.
At last he reached for the bookshelf.
Sometimes he felt a little bit Leonard Cohen,
but he felt like Bukowski tonight.

—Tito Titus

The spareness, bawdiness, and understated (often macabre) humor that runs through this book reminded me a lot of the school of Charles Bukowski. If you, too, would like to know more about Tito Titus, visit his website, particularly the scrapbook page: https://www.poetfire.com/scrapbook.