Don Mee Choi

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Don Mee Choi is a citizen of our troubled world. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, lived in Hong Kong, and now lives in the United States, in Seattle, Washington. Reading her newest book, DMZ Colony, challenged me to throw out my lens on the crises in global politics, particularly immigration, and try on a new perspective. The Academy of American Poets site addresses her multi-form, surprising art by quoting Craig Santos Perez:  “Choi translates feminist politics into an experimental poetry that demilitarizes, deconstructs, and decolonizes any master narrative.” It is hard for me to say more.

I am reading DMZ Colony for a Hugo House class this spring. All by itself, it is an education in global politics. It was published by WAVE books (2020), and is the 2020 winner of the National Book Award for poetry. The NBA judges hailed DMZ Colony as a “tour de force” of personal reckoning, and also wrote of this moving interweaving of poetic forms and translation:

Don Mee Choi’s urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all “victims of History,” so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.

“Migratory latticework” and “bricolage” do much to help us imagine this book. And do explore the Poetry Foundation and other sites. But much of DMZ Colony is in images, and you really have to hold it in your hands to experience it.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to one section:

One starless night, I was stranded….I decided to translate the stories of eight girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, which took place in Gyeongsangnam-do, a southern province of South Korea, in 1951. My decision to translate the girls’ stories wasn’t entirely mine alone. It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving. So it’s most likely that the decision, seemingly all mine, was already made years ago by someone else, which is to say, language — that is to say, — translation — always arises from collective consciousness.

And here’s one poem (printed in white lettering on a black page):

We too were born under the bridge. Every night, we listened to the whispers of the angels bathing in the river. They too cried and sang, Sky, sky, sky. Our lullaby. They didn’t blame our nations. Migrating from pole to pole they watched our falling stars, our failing planet. They too were hungry. They too were homesick. We the fatherless watched the angels depart. Our farewell. In reality, we were all motherless.

 

 

Ted Kooser

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Such a delight this morning to once again open this slim, familiar book.

The Wheeling Year: a Poet’s Field Book by Ted Kooser (2014) feels like an older book than it is, something from another time and place. When I read the entries, I’m transported to that place, too.

I have to admit that this was another of those impulsive purchases — fairly leaping off the shelf into my hands while I browsed at Open Books — and not even poetry, but this strange collection of short prose pieces, arranged by month, like diary entries, or (as he explains in a prefatory note) like an artist’s field notes: “sketches and landscape studies made out of words…[along with] a few observations about life.” On a video on his website, Ted explains that he has been writing every day for 50 years — that’s how you get good at something, pitching horseshoes or writing poems.

The book doesn’t have 365 entries (more’s the pity), but there’s a generous handful of them for each month, a sampling of what is no doubt a daily habit.

In April, for instance:

Month of my birth. What record do we poets leave? Not on stone tablets, but in books like leaves that have matted together under the snows of indifference. That we were fretful, mostly, but that now and then we looked up and glimpsed something wonderful passing away.

Often the pieces are about the natural world, particularly about Kooser’s midwest:

Imagine this bluestem as salt grass, and these crows as a species of gull, and you will know what it’s like to live on the coast of the sky, waves of light slapping the barns, splashing the windows with a blue that has come all the way from the other side. [March]

And because I saw my 21-year-old daughter and her boyfriend on Sunday, and have been feeling my own version of blue, this piece was a balm to rediscover:

For a girl pouring water into the cappuccino machine from a spotted carafe at the Quik Stop at eight in the evening, an old man is as difficult to look at as a page of homework. On the counter next to the register, her geometry book lies heavy, brown, and unopened. Her notebook has numbers scribbled all over the cover. What’s the point in learning to be old, she is thinking, when that is something she will never have to use? [April]

A student once said to me: “In my family we never feel guilty about buying food, fabric, or books.” But buying this book made me feel a little guilty (hardback!) and I told myself I would give it away.

But, no. This is a book that needs to be reread every so often. It needs to be taken down and browsed through. Ted himself seems to say the same: “Keeping the original for myself, of course, I now offer a copy to you.”

 

 

Nancy Canyon

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[featured image is “Pond Lily” by Canyon]

Nancy Canyon’s Saltwater (Independent Writers’ Studio Press, 2014, 2019) maps a life’s trajectory from childhood abuse and loss to healing. Though the chronology is from childhood to womanhood, the poems also march from a closed, inner space, claustrophobic, smothering — to an openness where even “skin to skin” contact evokes “meeting in the wilds, / running in meadows.” On the back cover, Mary Gillilan describes how Canyon “bares her soul in order to free it in poems told with white-knuckle honesty” — concluding, “Saltwater delivers the life of a woman from the inside out.”

I emailed Nancy with a few questions and she emailed back, generously sharing her publishing history (a novel, Celia’s Heaven, and an ebook of short-short fiction, Dark Forest, a memoir, forthcoming) and her influences:

I have put together a number of poetry books that I haven’t published yet. They sit on my computer, waiting I guess for a big collection of my poems, since I have over 150 poems in just one file. Many poems I’ve written during February Peace Poem month, April poetry month & August postcard month. Most of the poems I have published are in anthologies, such as Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, This Uncommon Solitude, and For the Love of Orcas. I favor World Enough Writers and the work Lana Hetchman Ayers does. I have a poem in her anthology Ice Cream Poems titled “Outdoor Theater Church.” And another poem, “The Thing He Secreted,” in Last Call. And I do love Crab Creek Review, where I was a fiction editor back in 2007. The journal was then run by some of my good friends Kelli Russell Agodon & Annette Spaulding-Convey. Kelli and I went to graduate school together at PLU. She is the person who got me started writing poetry. Writing poems helped my fiction, and it gave me a reprieve from writing long documents.
Nancy is also an accomplished artist (see her website to learn more) — no surprise as you can see both the arc and the artistry in the poems: some quite short, some in blocks of prose, some in shapes, but always with an artist’s deft touch  (“eyes vacant / as flat primer”). I asked Nancy about how she ordered Saltwater and she confirmed my suspicions: “As for ordering poems…I like connecting the story, color, theme or image within a poem to those elements in the next poem.” When I went back to the book, I could see this pattern everywhere. One poem, “Outdoor Theater Church” includes lines of a new father’s commands; the next poem, “Housekeeping,” begins “Father says: Clean your bedroom.” In later poems a twist of green in one poem leads to a raven’s whirling dance in the next.
It was a challenge to choose just one poem, but I think this one. It’s a late poem in the book, but the “sleeping children” carried at the end took me straight back to the opening:

Night Dance

A raven danced on my roof tonight.
He whirled beneath a silvery moon
dangling from an invisible thread in the sky.

Raven’s black eyes darted, lustrous wings
unfurled, feathers ripped through chill
of night air, gathering me into an embrace.

Like a coin flicked by a child, we spun at the peak,
burning a smoke signal of gratitude to Great Spirit
for carrying sleeping children in His arms.

—Nancy Canyon

 

I once traveled to Litfuse with Nancy and shared a house with her and two other poets. This morning I feel as though I just spent several hours talking about our childhoods and reading poems aloud, sipping coffee on the back porch like old friends. Next we’ll be breaking out the Merlot and putting our feet up.

Julio Cortázar

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I purchased a copy of Julio Cortázar’s Save Twilight (City Lights Books, 1984) years and years ago. I remember that I was trying not to spend any money at the time, but I told myself I would give the book to my friend Paul as a birthday gift. Almost every year, I think, “Aren’t you going to give this to Paul?” And then I reread it. And I keep it.

Cortázar was born in 1914, to Argentinian parents, and spent his childhood and youth in Argentina. He is primarily known as a novelist and was a revered and early influencer among Spanish-speaking writers. He died in 1984, and if I had known he was buried in Montparnasse, I would have visited in 2019 when I was in Paris. Once again, I pick up the book and it works its magic (“my loves, my drinks, my smokes….little black book for the late hours” [87]).

The City Lights edition of Save Twilight offers the Spanish first, and then the English translation. The poems are interspersed with prose reflections (advised not to, he reflects, “I carry on stubbornly convinced that poetry and prose reciprocally empower each other and that alternating readings won’t do any harm” [25]).

After Such Pleasures

Tonight, seeking your mouth in another mouth,
almost believing it, because that’s how blind this river is
that throws me into some woman and submerges me in her eyes,
and it’s sad to swim finally to the shore of sleep
knowing pleasure is that lowlife slave
who accepts counterfeit coins and circulates them, smiling.

Forgotten purity, how could I hope to recover
that ache of Buenos Aires, that ceaseless, hopeless expectation.
Alone in my open mouth above the port
to begin being in love with you again,
to meet you again over the morning coffee
with nothing that can’t be forgiven
having occurred.
And without my having to remember this oblivion that rises
to no purpose, to erase your squiggles from the blackboard
and leave me nothing more than a starless window.

–Julio Cortázar