As you worked on the book, did your impressions of the problem of anti-Asian racism change?
We have always been excluded and erased from the dialogue about racism in this country. Vincent Chin’s case was the first federal civil rights trial for an Asian American, and this was the 1980s. My friends and I joke occasionally about [how] being Asian American is like dying by a thousand cuts, a thousand microaggressions. But I’m realizing now that’s also part of the conversation: Unfortunately, most Americans think of racism in very broad strokes, as wearing a KKK hood or [going] up to someone, [punching] them in the face, and [calling] them a racist slur. Obviously, there’s a higher priority for violent physical crime, but that does not erase the importance and complexities of microaggressions. Trauma happens, whether it’s one shocking, horrifying event or a lifetime of tiny microaggressions that add up. What I am happy about, though, is that we’re finally having this conversation and finally addressing all forms and varying degrees of racism. You cannot have one conversation about racist mass shootings and not have an equally important conversation about microaggressions. For the Asian American and Pacific Islander experience, that is what we know, and the rest of the world is now finally finding out. So I would say my one surprise is that it took me this long to have this conversation.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-05-11 16:49:002022-02-25 17:19:00An interview with Paula Yoo (Fiction ’02)
It’s the eyes slit into walls, half open lids that tricks. The lips beneath the eyes blue & frost-bitten. Corpse pose. But a crowbar jams against cut and quartered,
clicking tongues to find the jigsaw of other parts. A foot in the door, a silent wrenching turning beneath the ground. Nearing exhaustion, slit eyes with lids half closing. Half breathing.
Feeling for the one other body part, a hand, a rib, a foot, a labia at a time. Where are you, the inner thigh calls to vastus lateralis. Furrows of corpse flower, quartered and twinned yet firm against cuts & crowbar.
A jaw’s gotten free and is having dinner with the dandelions. Behind the supper party, a knee and a femur knock on the door with cracked walls, shutters half open. Let us back in.
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Whenever I got too many peaceful nights of sleep, whenever the vise grip of anxiety failed to apply the proper pressure to my skull, I could type Image of a brown recluse spider bite or How much of Antarctica has already melted? into the search engine, and that network of teeth would take care of the rest.
Whenever the season was too bright, whenever my table too bountiful, I could count on my trusty nightmare machine to produce a door in the sky or earth, and release one hairless wolf, starving and strange, to hunt me down, tear off one of my arms, and whisper something like, Your leader is a stable genius, and immediately, my nerves would light up with catastrophe and sulfur.
It doesn’t work like that anymore. Technology has evolved. The sophistication of my dread has evolved.
Today, the best nightmare machines understand the fundamental necessity of delight, the importance of good fortune. They now try to make you to cherish, at least a little, the world, before introducing its demise.
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to dance, also hidden. But he will get the girl. His featherless, out of the egg pre-wish to dance hidden too.
His hidden hidden. His pre-egg in the nest, hidden. Its yolk and white not yet yolk and white, equally hidden.
A song the lyrebird steps to and into. By heart and habit. But hidden. Ditto that wild footloose, the very thing also hidden from us, the thing famous and forlorn and ecstatic.
His mimic song, an old sound effect record from the ’50s, a camera’s click then its whirl, a braking truck, a car alarm, a chainsaw
plus twenty other birds screaming. Properly: redoes them. His sound bites, the more worldly the better to wow-woo her. Under trees. On the little mound he’s cleared
to dance. The way ahead circled by thorns and, higher up, stars.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-05-04 17:14:002022-02-25 17:18:58“The Lyrebird, Hidden. His Dance, Hidden. His Wish,” by Marianne Boruch
Space That Sees: A Posthumous/Preposthumous Dialogue between C. K. Williams and Alan Shapiro – Part 1
This is part one in a three-part essay by Alan Shapiro.
1.
The cell phone rang in the middle of a poetry workshop I was teaching at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Charlie’s name popped up on the screen. I had heard just days before that his cancer treatment had been discontinued and he’d gone into hospice. I excused myself and went outside to take the call. Though his voice was weak, almost otherworldly with fatigue, Charlie got right down to business as he always did on the phone. He was dying, he said, matter-of-fact-ly, without a trace of self-pity. He was calling to say goodbye. I tried to disguise my shock and sorrow by joking, “But you’re my reader, Charlie, my audient! Who am I going to show my poems to now?” He deadpanned, “Find a younger reader.”
2.
Since the mid-1980s, my two closest poet friends have been Charlie Williams and Tom Sleigh. In fact, in the thirty-some-odd years we’ve known each other, and until Charlie’s death in 2015, I don’t think I’ve written a single poem that Charlie and Tom haven’t helped with—that wasn’t shaped or influenced by their judgment and imagination. All poets work alone in some ways, but in other, maybe even more important, ways I was never alone when I worked, not just because I showed my early drafts to Tom and Charlie, but because I think I so internalized their different ways of looking at language and at life that I could feel them watching over my shoulder as I wrote. The process of composition was (and with Tom still is) more collaborative than solitary. But here’s the thing: the recognition I received from them (and by “recognition” I don’t mean praise, I mean the respect of serious critical attention) was so much more durable and fortifying than the ersatz recognition of a fancy publication, review, fellowship, or prize, nice as those things are, or so I’ve heard. To a significant degree, having found my ideal audience insulated me from the worst aspects of “fame envy,” which Milton calls “the last infirmity of noble mind.” The respect of their attention gave me just enough protection from the marketplace and the crippling sense of irrelevance I still experience, for instance, when I go on Facebook or when I step foot inside the great hall of the AWP book fair. While it’s hard not to feel sometimes that all we’re doing when we write is sitting in a room talking to ourselves, what a poetry friendship can do, or has done for me at any rate, is connect the practice of the art to its beginnings in a premodern, even pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer, past when agents and publicists did not exist. It has given me a kind of freedom from the expense of spirit in a waste of shame that has accompanied the art’s professionalization —and it has shown me how poetry, even while drenched in a market economy, still has its roots in older, more intimate forms of human belonging.
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The day you and your dad find out you’re both pregnant is the day the last of the leaves fall from the trees. The whole world, all of a sudden, loses its cover, the jades and emeralds of the generous seasons, the golds and vermillions of the lean ones. You emerge from the bathroom holding the pregnancy test stick with its pink plus sign at the exact time that he walks in through the front door waving a lab report with his blood cell and protein counts. Wow, what are the chances, he says, rubbing his belly, which you can see is protruding more than yesterday. You hug him, but you can’t stay, there is choir practice you have to get to at school, and you have a solo so you really can’t miss it. On the way, you’re practically skipping, not noticing the change in the world, how the newly bare branches almost immediately begin to reach for each other, locking like fingers overhead. Even higher up, the sun is nodding from side to side, a dandelion on a thin stalk of cloud.
The first few weeks are thrilling. When you’re done with all your homework, you sit with your dad on the couch in the waiting room, taking turns with his old stethoscope. First, he listens to your belly, moving the chestpiece around methodically, like he doesn’t want to miss a single note of what he calls a composition in progress. One day he swears he hears timpani. The next, an oboe. When you put the earpieces in though, all you hear is the sound the edge of the ocean makes when it’s pulling away from shore. Interesting, he says. I wonder if this is because I threw your placenta into the waves when you were born. Then he pours more of the bone broth that’s been simmered all night and spiced with ginger. It’s extremely delicious. The stethoscope is not needed for his belly. Both of you can hear the bubbling and growling in him while you sip from your bowls. Whatever it is, it’s growing fast.
Sometimes you take walks together, enjoying the muted weather now that the trees have knitted a kind of basket around the world. The wind doesn’t whip anything around anymore. The rain doesn’t drench. Light falls in chips on your faces and on the ground. The birds have quickly learned to adjust the design of their nests, making domes that hang upside down then pecking a door through so they can get in and out. You walk to the wharf, the supermarket, the library, the downtown strip with people in long, fluttering coats rushing in and out of boutique shops that display knives, pottery, shoes, lingerie, softballs, jewelry, chocolates, and small, groomed animals behind spotless windows. When you have to cross the street, he puts his hand on the back of your neck, he’s done this instead of holding your hand since you were little and still when you are taller than him and almost the age you can vote.
When the sick begins, at least you are in it together. His is always the color of sunshine. He rocks back and forth in his dotted gown until it’s all out of him. Yours doesn’t come out at all. It’s just a kind of potential lodged in the tunnel between your stomach and vocal cords. He thumps your back with his palm, but it doesn’t let go. You get used to it, but there is a consequence. You have to tell the choir director you can’t do the solo anymore. He pouts and tries to negotiate with you, pacing the forest of music stands in his bright blue suit. You explain that you’re not even that good of a singer, and now you can’t even button your jeans.
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In her room with the blackened light, what the girl sings: And the ship the black freighter disappears out to sea and on it is me then switches off from Blitzstein/Brecht to Edward Lear: And everyone cried, ‘you’ll all be drowned!’ royal blue rubber glove drowning her hand, singing now and turning poem to slow low blues. She sings when interested and happy. They called aloud ‘Our Sieve ain’t big. But we don’t care a button we don’t care a fig in a sieve we’ll go to sea.‘ What she does: slides the screen off the top of the tank. Far and few far and few are the lands where the Jumblies live slow jam slows Their heads are green and their hands are blue and they went to sea in a sieve. What Heather does: smites head at the girl’s blue finger. And mouse: spreads Heather’s maw. What glove does: when the girl flings it, hangs deflated over the trash can edge. Weather: sultry summer. Windows: up. Cat: spreads its little knives against the snake tank.
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Julia doesn’t remember the woman at the party, except that the woman was middle-aged (Julia would have thought: old), silk-shirted and pearl-necklaced (Julia would have thought: dowdy), and Julia remembers her gaze, because it was a puzzle. She couldn’t tell how much of the disapproval from the woman at the party was aimed at her (the very young woman at the party), and how much was aimed at him (the white-haired man at the party, who liked to muse, “You think I’m an old man,” as they lay naked Saturday mornings in his enormous white bed). Julia was twenty-two the night of the party. Twenty-two and wearing the lavender angora sweater the white-haired man had bought her, the slacks, the black heeled boots—the ensemble she had recently twirled in to the applause of the receptionist in the offices of the newspaper that did not pay her enough to move out of her mother’s bedroom, in the tourist town where Julia had just graduated college, an hour up the freeway from the party. An outfit Julia never forgot over the decades to come, because the receptionist cooed, “Oooh girl, looks like you’ve got yourself a sugar daddy!” and Julia stopped spinning, and the receptionist raised a long-fingernailed hand to her face and sputtered, “Oh, I’m sorry hon, I didn’t mean it like that, I swear hon, it was just a joke, sweetie,” and Julia dashed out of the office and down the stairs to the street, bracing hands against knees, sick enough to vomit right there in the clean sunshine. Because she knew that she had planned, all week, for the white-haired man to take her to the department store. And she had hoped he would set those five twenties on the nightstand (“Don’t be silly, you shouldn’t have to starve”) as she remained beneath the white sheets and he dressed. She remembered too well closing her eyes to the view of his toddler-like distended belly and his buttocks’ stretch-marked flesh and wishing that she and the man could be disembodied, and voiceless, for surely it was only his odd proportions and his nasal voice that confused her, and not the things he did and said, because he loved her, that was what he said again and again, and she was Pure of Heart, he said, and only scared. Like a lost cat. “Abandonment issues.” The money on the hotel nightstand, the clothes in the department store bag. Julia wore that lavender angora sweater as she sat across the table from the woman at the party.
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How Leonora Carrington’s Self-Portrait Helped Me Tell Her Story
When I first realized that I was going to act on the wild presumption of writing a novel based on the life of the artist and writer (and real-life genius) Leonora Carrington, I was terrified. I was in awe of her work, and the spirit with which she lived her life, and the more I discovered about her the more awestruck I felt.
She was one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, but more than that, she was a fierce individualist, feminist, mystic and shaman. She made more than two thousand works of art during her 94 years on this earth, and every chance she got she spoke up for the rights of women and the earth.
In spite of my fears—or, perhaps, because of them—I began to write about her. I was particularly fascinated by the drama and trajectory of her early adulthood, and her emergence as a fully realized artist producing her best work. When she was twenty she fell in love with the 46-year-old Surrealist artist Max Ernst and spent two years in a relationship with him, first in Paris, then in the countryside of southern France. During the Nazi invasion of France, the two were separated, and she fled for the border. In Spain, she had a breakdown and was locked in an asylum—a trial she managed not only to survive, but also to grow from, emerging with the newfound self-knowledge and strength that would enable her to access and believe in her genius.
Max Ernst and the art collector Peggy Guggenheim made their way into the story, but my protagonist was chiefly Leonora, and there was something about her I didn’t understand. I knew she left Max before she moved to Mexico, where she became one of the country’s most celebrated artists, but I didn’t know why. Had she fallen out of love? Or was there another reason she needed to break off their affair?
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Of an animal, especially a bird. A wandering species whom no seas nor places limit. A seed who survives despite the depths of hard winter. The ripple of a herring
steering her band from icy seas to warmer strands. To find the usual watering-places despite the gauze of death that shrouds our eyes
is a breathtaking feat. Do you ever wonder why we felt like happy birds brushing our feathers on the tips of leaves? How we lifted our toes
from one sandbank and landed – fingertips first – on another? Why we clutched the dumb and tiny creatures of flower and blade and sod between our budding fists?
