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