Cathy Song

In order to truly grasp, analyze, and appreciate the poetry of Cathy Song, it is important to realize how much the “women’s and lesbian-feminist movements of the 1970s” (Identity Poetics: [Abstract]) helped shape the theme of identity in female poetics.  A little about Cathy Song: She was born in 1955 in Honolulu, Hawai’i to her father Andrew, a second-generation Korean American, and to her mother Ella, a picture bride who came to Hawai’i from China.  Keeping in mind this important detail, it would be hard for any person not to question their identity, whether male or female.  But in spite of this, it is worth mentioning that  “Song herself resists classification as an ‘Asian American’ or ‘Hawaiian’ writer, [instead] calling herself ‘a poet who happens to be Asian American’” (Poetry Foundation).  How is it possible then to write about identity and meanwhile negate the presence of one’s identity?  I don’t expect to find an answer to this question any time soon, but; what I do know is that the strain on these contradictory statements function as the poet’s vocal chords; they are the source to her inner-lyricism.  When considering how much is at stake, each time Song jots down a line is a miracle in itself.  And with songs so utterly beautiful and forlorn, let us hope that the miracles continue.

Since 1982, when Cathy Song won that year’s Yale Series of Younger Poets Award with her collection Picture Bride, the majority of her critics wrongfully (though innocently) summed-up her poetry the way Richard Hugo did when writing the book’s foreword: “In…quietude lies her strength.  In her receptivity, passive as it seems, lies passion…expressed in deceptive quiet and even tone” (ix).  However, in her most recent collection Cloud Moving Hands, we see a side to the poet that, in the words of Mark Cox, is an “awakening…such that even the elegiac and cautionary become inexplicably pleasing…is truly felt in a fresh light.”  Cox here uses the phrase “in a fresh light” with the foreknowledge of the poet’s obsession with ‘light’ and its layered interpretations—of those being pigment (e.g. “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe,” “A Pale Arrangement of Hands”), the spiritual and emotional (e.g. “Blue Lantern,” “The Souls We Carry Hunger for Our Light,” “They Dwell in the Blue Abiding Light”), and the physically lightweight (e.g. “Spaces We Leave Empty,” “A Dream of Small Children,” “Cloud Moving Hands”).

But what is so special about ‘light’ poetry?  After all, Song is not the first—or even the millionth—person to use ‘light’ in a metaphorical, well, light.  What makes Song’s usage genuine is not how many times she uses it, but in how she uses it.  Contrary to the above, Song’s light is undefinable, devoid of category.  This is because the word ‘light’ has different contexts in different cultures, at different economic levels, for different genders and sexual-orientations, and in different eras.  In this way, all words to Song contain a vague subset of meanings for an equally vague subset of categories (e.g. Chinese, Hawaiian, Korean, American, woman, man, young, middle-aged, Christian, Buddhist, etc.).  These categories, when fully developed, blend together so finely that they are hard to distinguish.  This is not only how she views words, but how she perceives her poems.  It is also why she dismisses the categories of “Asian American writer” and “Hawaiian writer".  She is so much more than that.

But, don’t think all this ‘light’ talk means that her poems are light in content or observation.  In fact, her heavier poems obscure the line between identity, self, and culture even further until reaching its apex at the state of enigma.  A good example of this is found in the bottom-half of the poem, “Waiting for Jizo”:

In a tiny upstairs room at the De Ju Yuan Guesthouse,

careful not to leave anything behind,

we prayed for Jizo to illuminate with his luminous jewel
the way out of the ruins
for those remaining unclaimed, long after
the greedy ones had left on whatever flaming
boat they could cling to.
The little ones, forgotten in the frenzied
exodus, hid between brick and mortar,
suspended in the timelessness of these crevices,
waiting for Jizo to ferry them to the other side
where loneliness doesn’t weep through walls,
doesn’t trickle out of alleyways
like an overflowing communal latrine.

 

For those not familiar with Jizo Bosatsu from Buddhist mythology, he is the Bodhisattva of Deceased Children.  “A bodhisattva is the embodiment of bodhichitta—the compassionate wish to realize enlightenment for all beings...vow[ing] to remain in the world until all beings are enlightened and may enter Nirvana together” (O’Brien).  Because Jizo chooses to stay in the Hell Realm for the sake of others, the poet undoubtedly draws parallels between Jizo and Christ, thereby blurring the creeds between East and West.  But, as Jizo is also representative of her Chinese background and all of its connotations, both good and bad, which she addresses more directly in poems like “Lost Sister,” he is not portrayed with the same “savior” quality as Christ: Jizo has not answered their prayers instantaneously the way many Christians believe how God operates.  He can’t even save the children, but is only able to “ferry them to the other side / where loneliness doesn’t weep through walls” (37-38).  This means that his duty is not so much for the sake of the deceased children as it is for the sake of the living, assisting the children with trading in one hell for another in exchange for the continuance of traditional Chinese values such as familial piety.  Though, that’s not to say Christ is off-the-cross just yet.  In “My Mother Stares at the Picture,” the poet’s mother “wonders why he [i.e. Jesus] is taking / his sweet old time” (4-5) as she waits for death to come.  In Song’s poetry, the exotic doesn’t exist; it all blends together nicely into a unique, highly personal familiarity.

Indeed, after reading these two collections side-by-side, the word “fresh” becomes synonymous with Cathy Song.  Yet, while the poetry in Picture Bride rises to the top of the cane stalk, the collection itself is like the tight, uniform rows of cultivation found at the sugar plantation—gridlocked by a theme surrounding Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings.  Cloud Moving Hands, on the other, well, hand, is Song at her best.  Allowing her sections to name themselves (the title of each section is named after its first poem), the book moves to an ocean’s current so that when the reader flips the page, it blows the clouds away.  The lyricism is so well-crafted that the reader holds the book up to his or her face as to not look away, and fixed in this pose, appears paused in mid-turn of the T’ai Chi exercise the book is named after.  An unflinching homage to her mother, her presence is found even in its titles as demonstrated in the fourth and final section in the table of contents:

The Body Remembers Itself in Wholeness

The Body Remembers Itself in Wholeness

Out of a Dream of Blue Water

The Beautiful Beasts are Returning

They Dwell in the Blue, Abiding Light

 

A Prayer for My Mother
 
Cloud Moving Hands
The Old Old Concubine

 

Learn the basics of 'Cloud Hands'

 

Links:

Abstract of “Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory”: http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/lgarber/publications/identitypoetics.html

 Overview of the history and role of picture brides in the early 20^th century: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/hwhp/hawork/itm.picturebride.html

Additional biography and interview with the poet: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/cathy-song

Barbara Hoetsu O'Brien, a journalist and student of Zen Buddhism, explaining the meaning of bodhisattva: http://buddhism.about.com/od/abuddhistglossary/g/bodhisattvadef.htm

Barbara Hoetsu O’Brien explaining the legend of Jizo: http://buddhism.about.com/od/iconsofbuddhism/a/jizo.htm

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum: http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/natural-and-still-life-forms.html

A brief biography on Kitagawa with a few pictures: http://www.artelino.com/articles/utamaro.asp

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo’s latest volume of poetry, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001 (2002), described by Adrienne Rich as “precise, unsentimental, [and] miraculous” (Book cover), covers the entirety of human existence from beginning to end in as little as twenty-six years, or in as little as 265 pages when including the introduction and endnotes which are fundamentally part of the text.  Well, that’s not entirely true, since the poet was born in 1951, so it was written in half a century.  Well, that’s not exactly right, either, because Harjo draws much of her inspiration from her ancestors and from “the volcanic…labor contraction[s]” (Harjo 210, LeSueur) of the earth.  Instead, in her words, she is but a contributor to “the oldest story in the world” (Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit, 2) birthed from “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” when she planted the “roots…she…carried from the Sky World” (223), and demonstrating through her poems that the story is “delicate [and] changing” (Don’t Bother…2).

 

Influenced by Muscogee Creek philosophy, her concept of time is “simultaneous[,] layered…in the shape of a coiled snake or in waves like the ocean.  The inside is the outside” (224).  Coincidentally, Harjo sees poetry in the same way, “start[ing] from the inside out, then turn[ing] back into a complete movement” (xix), which provokes an interesting question: Just how do you construct an anthology that follows modern chronological order when the concept itself is disputed within your own philosophy?  Sure, you could provide many surface-level explanations: for example, perhaps the poet wanted to work in the western European/white American model of time to appease by far her largest audience, or, even worse, maybe she really doesn’t believe her people’s understanding of time—maybe it’s an act, or at the very least, an interrogation of what the concept of ‘time’ really means.  But I think a more subtle distinction harkens back to earlier words by the famous novelist and poet Meridel LeSueur when speaking to Harjo about the eruption at Mount Saint Helens, how it gave “birth to another world” (210).  This is how the text should be viewed: each collection is representative of different Joy Harjos at different times in her life, her mini-epochs.  With that in mind, then, the point of the anthology is not to offer necessarily the “best” poems from each collection and compile them into one volume, nor is it to create an anthology that fulfills the thematic obligations of the title, that is, to fully articulate “how we became human,” but rather, by using each book title as the chapter titles; the purpose is to capture the “essence” of Harjo’s developing spirit.  While the Muscogee Creeks typically perceive time as a spiral, perhaps a human life is too short to fully realize its bend.  Although, if the cycles are measured in waves of human rights violations on indigenous populations, then the poet has experienced more than her fair share.

Before delving briefly into the peculiarities of these spiritual transitions, it must be mentioned there are also similar, overarching characteristics between them.  Namely, the decision to compose without using traditionally European forms of rhyme, meter, and alliteration.  Not to say that she doesn’t incorporate these devices, but they are used almost unperceivably.  For instance, here is a short poem from Secrets from the Center of the World entitled, “Invisible Fish,” which actually happens to be one more heavily reliant upon European devices:

 

Invisible Fish
 

Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock.  Soon the fish will learn to walk.  Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the drying stone.  Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by pickup trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendents, who are going to the store (my emphasis).

Notice that I did not draw attention to the anaphoric examples, because Harjo uses these repeatedly in her work as they conform to the Muscogee notion of time.  As for the cases of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, most of these can only be detected by ears fine-tuned to cadence, or by reading the poem several times.  Even harder to catch is the malapropism “descendents” instead of “descendants,” alluding to the fall of proceeding generations.  I will discuss Secrets from the Center of the World in greater detail below.

By naming her first chapbook The Last Song, it is cause to wonder whether Harjo saw for herself a lifetime of publishing.  Perhaps still grieving over the loss of friend “Larry Casuse to the racist guns of the Gallup police” (xvii), she could only work in the ellipsis of uncertainty?  Whatever the reason may be, this is Harjo stripped to the bone—naked by her lack of punctuation.  Also, the lack of capitalization except for proper nouns suggests that every word is equally important, that is, unimportant compared to the places and people being referenced.  Here is the raw urgency to tell a people’s dying song before it is lost.  A song that is “an ancient chant / that my mother knew / came out of a history / woven from wet tall grass / in her womb” (The Last Song 11-15).

In What Moon Drove Me to This?, published in 1979, we see a Harjo torn between a new story-weaving style and the former scarcity. The poems “Someone Talking” and “Fire” are the first instances we see poetry that is not left-justified.  Here the poet is working her hardest to find her voice.  In “Crossing the Border,” we see the moment of conception regarding her future works “that could not have been written without the mentoring of Simon Ortiz” (xx).

Shortly after What Moon Drove Me to This?, the most dramatic transformation came to fruition after learning from Richard Hugo “that becoming human was the most honorable task of poetry” (xx, my emphasis).  His works and teachings were instrumental in creating Harjo’s most iconic book and poem by the same title, She Had Some Horses.  Here is realized the full power of the anaphora, embodied in this small snippet of text:

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses. (1-9).

In Secrets from the Center of the World, Harjo takes off in a new and exciting direction.  Constructed as a “collaboration with the astronomer and photographer Stephen Strom,” the poet for the first time works in the ekphrastic material—a term I’ve invented to describe the distinction between lyricizing living art and living-captured art, the former having always been her muse—and through this new medium, the work becomes “a depth measured by light-years rather than miles” (xxiii).  The poems, written in intricate prose with the titles sharing the first words to each poem, contest her earlier notions of proper nouns as portrayed in The Last Song.  Finally at last, Harjo is able to articulate the secret she knew all along: “This land is a poem…I could never write, unless paper were the sacrament of sky” (This Land is a Poem 1-2).

In Mad Love and War is definitely her most political collection.  Written as recently as 1990, Harjo saved writing about the assassination of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in 1975 until having enough distance to write about it with the sensitivity and gravity the subject deserves.  For those familiar with the controversial case, the name ‘Leonard Peltier,’ or anything about the hit coming from inside the AIM (American Indian Movement) is not mentioned.  Instead of dwelling impotently on the painful past, the conclusion of the poem is presented as a way to deal with political struggle, “to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers / entered / crazily, beautifully” (For Anna Mae…, 39-41).  What Harjo seems to say here is that the way for indigenous people to combat postcolonial America is to turn back to the culture, to turn back to their art, and to let the machine be its own undoing.  By choosing not to acknowledge Peltier’s militaristic campaign against the State, she diffuses its impact.  In Mad Love and War is a manifesto for Native Americans that overtly states “The Real Revolution is Love.

It is fair to talk about the next two sections together because they share a common thread.  The Woman Who Fell from the Sky and A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales are mainly concerned with the spiritual/religious culture of indigenous peoples, and the collections work as two sides of the same planet, the earth and sky.  It is no mistake that Harjo ends the former with the poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” allowing the white space between the sections to symbolize the void of uncertainty.  Whereas The Woman Who Fell from the Sky focuses on expressing the universality of myths, especially concerning the Flood and Creation stories in an effort not only to subvert the overbearing presence of Christian ideology but to draw inherent connections between cultures, A Map to the Next World is not just a reflection on the possibility of an afterlife, but also questions its existence.  Then, by alluding to the atrocities inflicted by the Pol Pot regime, and how “Never is the most powerful word in the English language” (The Power of Never 1), Harjo even goes as far as blaming superstitious or divine forces for the suffering of humankind.  The ambiguity between the two collections is homage to the most basic aspect of the human spirit—its uncertainty—and is solely independent from race or background.

New Poems: (1999-2001), is the final installment to the collection.  This section represents the Joy Harjo of today, the easygoing artist with the special ability to turn the foreign into the familiar.  That being the case, it's certainly the most reflective of the sections.  Here, physical boundaries are grander than we’ve seen from her except for in Secrets of the Center of the World.  But unlike Secrets, which operates on a level of abstraction, New Poems largely pertains to the concrete world, moving from Krakow, to Oklahoma, to Los Angeles, all the way out to the poet’s new home in Honolulu, Hawai’i.  Crow makes its usual appearance (the bird in animal lore viewed as being very human-like), but this time, the symbolic significance is now fully envisioned for the outsider to appreciate:


Crows mark the boarder
Between despair
And joy
They are
Poets of noise—
Needed, because the question
Is too large to fit
One city, one church,
Or one country (Faith 12-20).


In summation, New Poems are the latest songs in further developing the interconnectivity between place, gender, and ethnicity.  Joy Harjo is necessary to read when studying 21^st century women poets because where so many other poets thrive off pointing out the differences between people, and the isolation that comes with it; she does the opposite by showing us that when it rains, “The wetness saturates everything, including the perpetrators of the second overthrow / [and] We will plant songs where there are curses” (It’s Raining in Honolulu 9-10).

 

 

Links

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky creation myth: http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Wa-Z/Woman-Who-Fell-From-the-Sky.html
 
Native American mythos regarding earlier eruptions at Mount Saint Helens: http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/education/livingwmsh/hr/hrho/nam.html

About Larry Casuse: http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=3042&C=2616

Simon J. Ortiz: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/simon-j-ortiz

The Richard Hugo House: http://hugohouse.org/

Joy Harjo explaining the meaning of “She Had Some Horses” and what her tattoo means, the two questions she is asked most frequently: http://www.joyharjo.com/AskJoy.html

Wiki pages to Anna Mae Aquash and Leonard Peltier, because it is difficult to find non-bias sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Mae_Aquash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Peltier

American Independent Movement webpage: http://aimovement.org/

“A Litany for Survival” by Adrienne Rich.  Harjo claims it is one of the most influential poems for her own writing: http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/457374-the-black-unicorn-poems

Natasha Trethewey

To understand the history of Natasha Trethewey, and to better understand why this name is worth our time and energy (beside the fact that she is the new United States Poet Laureate), we need to pull back on the “earth’s green sheet” (South 27) and see what rests on the bedrock.  What we would literally find down there are the graves of slaves, black infantrymen forgotten amid the rubble, and the poet’s mother and father, that is, among the “ubiquitous and the set-aside” (Charles Wright, epigraph to Native Guard: Poems).  However, the poet is not only concerned with physical graveyards, but with the cemetery of memory (Charles Wright).  If that is the case, then it is no wonder then why a large portion of her poems are written in the “found” genre.

Concerned with history in the broadest and yet most intimate sense, Trethewey preserves it by using new verses for old songs, and traditional forms for universal concepts.  In that way, nothing goes above the reader’s head.  She’s not trying to blow your mind with lyrical tricks, instead; these poems are meant to be informative and intended to invoke what is sentimentally necessary.  This is understandably no small task, but fortunately, with her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Native Guard: Poems, and with her latest installment, Thrall, Trethewey has done most of the digging for us, leaving us to tend with “Only the landscape of her body…settling a bit each day, the way all things do” (What is Evidence 12,14).  And it is clear when reading her poetry that she is determined to settle the score, but will never settle for less.

You see, for the poet, the history of the body is a part of a larger American narrative: Born in 1966 to a black mother and a “Canadian” father (Canadian because it was illegal for white Americans to marry black Americans in 1965), Tretheway is living proof of the unspoken miscegenation pervasive in American culture since Spain’s arrival.  It isn’t until Thrall that she finally begins to unravel the complicated (and unjust) categories that Spanish landowners used to question the legitimacy of their mix-blooded children.  This absurd classification system is best exemplified in “Taxonomy.”  Written in a series of four “after a series of casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez,” (Taxonomy, epigraph), the poet titles the sections accordingly: “De Español y de India Produce Mestiso” (Of Spanish and of Indian Produce Mestiso), “De Español y Negra Produce Mulato” (Of Spanish and of Negro Produce Mulato), “De Español y Mestiza Produce Castiza,” and “The Book of Castas,” or, as she calls it, “the book of naught.”  Of course, being that the poet is comprised of the second “equation,” the book as a whole focuses more on this type of union (e.g. “Miracle of the Black Leg,” “Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or The Mulata,” “Mano Prieta,” etc.), but, it is worth drawing attention to the notion that each title bears a similar power-structure.  In every case, the Spaniard is written in the masculine form, whereas the “other” is written in the feminine form.  There are two reasons why the artist would choose to title the paintings this way.  Firstly, for practical reasons (and I use the term “practical” loosely), since it had been the male Spaniards who were raping the female Indians and Negros, not the other way around.  Secondly, describing a race of people with an effeminate form suggests weakness or inferiority.  For this reason, then, Spaniards were morally-permitted to enslave the darker-skinned races in the name of rationality and justice.  What’s more, considering that Juárez classified the first two progeny-types in the masculine form and the last two in the feminine, it further underscores their value in a two-folded way.  One, by calling their “half-blood” children Mestizo and Mulatto, the Spaniard men were capable of fearing their “shadows, dark glyphs on the wall, / bigger and stranger than we are” (Southern Gothic 19-20), and, through this danger, could continue to treat them as slaves, and two; once the Castizos and Castas reached a state of being “too white,” the feminine form kept them “in thrall to a word” (The Book of Castas, 32), or better yet, enthralled—a word used often today to mean that someone is enslaved with the affections for another.  As is apparent, the etymological significance of the word “thrall” (i.e. slave) is especially important in this context.  It is why for Trethewey, “Death [is the only] fair master” (June 1863, 14).

Given how the actual triumvirate relationship conspires between father, mother, and daughter within the poet’s own life, it is not surprising then that the strains between gender, race, love, sex, and exploitation become further entangled in her collections until obtaining the presence attributed to recurrent themes.  Her works are fascinating because she uses common poetic devises and infuses them with historical and social authority.  Take for example her use of the difference between verbal and visual alliteration in the first part of “Mythology”:

1. Nostos

Here is the dark night

of childhood—flickering

lamplight, odd shadows

on the walls—giant and flame

projected through the clear

frame of my father’s voice.

Here is the past come back
as metaphor: my father, as if

to ease me into sleep, reciting
the trials of Odysseus.  Always

he begins with the Cyclops,
light at the cave’s mouth

bright as knowledge, the pilgrim
honing a pencil-sharp stake. 


As is visually apparent, there is a lot of difference between the ‘c’ and ‘s.’  However, when it comes their sonic signature, some words (e.g. ‘voice’ and ‘past’) have the same sound.  Then, at other times the poet demonstrates that these very two letters sound vastly different (as with ‘Odysseus’ and ‘Cyclops’)—the former a unified ‘s’ sound and the latter a hybrid of the ‘s’ and hard ‘c’ sound.  Provided with the poet’s background, it is not farfetched to assume that Odysseus is her father, as he is pure white, and she is the Cyclops, a freak that is not one or the other.  At times throughout the collection, these alliterations move swimmingly together, and other times, you can hear the clash and struggle as one tries to dominate the text.  Alas, this is Trethewey’s view on race and racism: Due to history’s tainted lens, we see the difference in one another, but on the basic, most human level, we are the same—both trying to communicate our needs and desires.

It is the difference between the black and white, the difference between her mother and her father, why she is obsessed with history and poetry.  Yet, she also explains her attraction to the historical with a personal anecdote: “My birthday is April 26th, Confederate Memorial Day…I was born 100 years to the day after that holiday was invented. I don’t think I could have escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented” (NY Times).  The word ‘escape’ is laden with connotations and elucidates upon her experiences revisiting Civil War Memorials with her father—evident in her ironically-titled poem “Enlightenment”.  This is how the past is both far away and nearby in a stasis between buried and alive.  With enough passion, drive, and honesty to try to pull it all together, Tretheway writes poetry so that we may “change and rewrite ourselves” (NY Times).

Links

 NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/natasha-trethewey-is-named-poet-laureate.html

Photo and brief description of the painting “Miracle of the Black Leg”: http://www.bridgemanart.com/asset/345907/Berruguete-Pedro-c.1450-1504/Miracle-of-the-Black-Leg-oil-on-panel

More on the Louisiana Native Guards, the first all-black infantry which influenced the collection Native Guard: Poems:  http://www.historynet.com/americas-civil-war-louisiana-native-guards.htm

Self-portrait of “Juan de Pareja, 1670”—the man who was the inspiration for the poem “Thrall”: http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110002322

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