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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

Donna Hilbert, Threnody

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THRENODY: POEMS, Donna Hilbert. Moon Tide Press, 6709 Whittier, CA 90608, 2022, 102 pages, $15 paper, www.moontidepress.com.

ESSAYS ONE, Lydia Davis. Picador, 120 Broadway, New York 10271, 2019, 528 pages, $30 paper, picadorusa.com.

While reading poems this month, and blogging each day, I have also been reading Lydia Davis’s Essays One, a gift from a friend. She said, “You must read ‘Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,” so I did, and now I am reading the whole fat book from the beginning. This week, I am stuck at Davis’s essay, “Fragmentary or Unfinished: Barthes, Joubert, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Flaubert.”

Of course, any book, and any piece of writing, is already part of a cooperative. It is, in itself as printed on the page, incomplete. It requires a reader to complete it. But the reader may also misunderstand it, distort it in favor of another idea, forget large parts of it, misremember it, create something different in misremembering it, etc. All these responses are perfectly legitimate parts of the cooperative act. (Davis, p. 204)

It strikes me that all poems are, by definition, fragmented. Too densely written, too explanatory, they tip over into prose. (One of my own dangers, in writing narrative poems.) While reading Donna Hilbert’s poetry, Davis’s words have hung over me and made me wonder where I’m not being equal to the task. Consider this, the shortest poem in the book:

Grief

In the dishwasher,
nothing but spoons.

—Donna Hilbert

And consider Davis’s insight into uses of the fragment, the fragmented:

…when I think of the fragment, old or new—it is a text that works with silence, ellipsis, abbreviation, suggesting that something is missing, but that has the effect of a complete experience. (Davis, p. 208)

Hilbert has a big job, writing about grief. Again, I think of Lydia Davis. In this passage she  quotes Barthes: “incoherence is preferable to a distorting order” (p. 220), then continues to comment on Mallarmé’s book after the death of his son, A Tomb for Anatole:

The notes become the most immediate expression, the closest mirroring, of the writer’s emotion at the inspiring subject, the writer’s stutter, and the reader, witnessing the writer’s stutter, is witness not only to his grief but also to his process, to the workings of his mind, closer to what we might think of as the origins of his writing. (Davis, p.221)

This is what I think Hilbert is doing throughout Threnody, deliberately conveying a fragmenting experience. I first caught sight of this book on the publisher’s website, and both the title and cover leapt out at me, threnody, meaning lament. As I was trying to cobble together a book of poems about my childhood, and the loss of my parents, I felt Hilbert’s book would be of help.

It turns out that Hilbert is lamenting many things (as are we all), and though her husband’s death looms (“looms” is the wrong verb), she is also writing about the pandemic, about a stand of trees that shelter a heronry, about children leaving home, about her (our) own inevitable aging. A few of the poems are longer, and, on a first reading, had more of an impact on me. But when I began rereading the poems this morning, the shorter poems got their due. Here is another example:

Gratitude

For the brown pelican
diving into morning ocean,
I thank you, Rachel Carson.

—Donna Hilbert

If you encounter this poem all on its own, it seems true, of course (don’t we agree?), but … it’s hardly enough. In the context of this particular book, however, where things and people are lost who will never come back, where birds weave in and out of many of the poems, it fits like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and helps create the whole. Or, do I mean “the whole”? Words fail me. It takes a sympathetic reader to fill in the gaps. I think that’s the point. 

I have been trying to write this review all day, and it (certainly) is not enough. Let me leave you with one of Hilbert’s longer poems.

Walking the Palo Alto Marshes in My Red Coat

Say mud flat, salt marsh, bittern, egret.
Say egret without thinking regret
one letter away.

Say morning is a gift.
Say the mud flat is a silver tray.
Say birds sing like an orchestra tuning.

I am looking for a prayer.
I am walking for the saving incantation.
I am working at metaphor.

Say blackbird.
Say red wings like epaulets of blood.
Say heart: red four-chambered room.

Say womb, breast, cradle, boat.
Say desire.
Say desire: dark and fathomless,

the iris of an eye, your eye, the sea.
Say desire,
which is the boat.

I am wearing my red coat against the cold.

—Donna Hilbert

In short, the first time I read Threnody, several months ago, it didn’t have much impact. My re-reading of it, today, felt much different, and I’m grateful I decided to circle back to it.

Donna Hilbert has several books, and is the subject of a documentary about her work and life, Grief Becomes Her: A Love Story. To read about Donna Hilbert, check out her personal website. You can listen to a poem from one of her previous books on The Writer’s Almanac, here.

Ted Kooser, A Man with a Rake

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A MAN WITH A RAKE, Ted Kooser. Pulley Press (an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing), Seattle / Washington D. C., 2022, 32 pages, $14 paper, https://www.clydehillpublishing.com/pulleypress.

I admit I am phoning it in this morning, but who can resist a chapbook of poems by Ted Kooser? I saw this copy at Edmonds Bookshop, and, even though I already own most of his books, I grabbed it up.

Or, I thought I owned most of his books, until I reread his list of books this morning.

Anyway, I doubt any of my readers are new to Kooser. His Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets ought to already be in your home library. (Even if you’re not a poet.) He is a former United States Poet Laureate, won a Pulitzer Prize for Delights and Shadows, etc. Anytime I’m told, “if you lived back east, you’d be better connected,” I think of Kooser, living in the midwest, writing about farms and farmers and farmhouses, working as an insurance agent for much of his career (!), and still here, still writing.

I loved these lines—from Kooser himself—in his biography at Poetry Foundation:

“I write for other people with the hope that I can help them to see the wonderful things within their everyday experiences. In short, I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay attention.”

This poem struck me as appropriate, maybe, for Easter Sunday:

A Fox

for Dan Gerber

I saw a red fox stepping in and out
of the shadows of tall granite stones
in a cemetery’s oldest section, fur
flaring as she entered each patch
of sun, though her feet and the tip
of her tail were too darkened by dew
to be set alight. She was quite small
but in her presence the stones forgot
their names. Above her the canopy
was respectfully opening oak by oak
to light her way, though she offered
no sign that she expected any less.
I couldn’t move for fear she’d stop
and fix me with those eyes that had
already stopped everything there,
the headstones, the plastic flowers,
I, too, now breathless as I watched
her pass along that long, long hall,
a flame reflected in its many doors.

—Ted Kooser

If you need to know more about Kooser, visit his page at Poetry Foundation or https://www.tedkooser.net.