Poems for Monday Mornings: Sun Yung Shin’s “Until the Twenty-Second Century” at From the Fishouse

Throughout the months of April and May, we’ve been posting on Monday mornings to share audio recordings of poems that have moved, challenged, or stuck with us each week.  Today, for the final installment of this series, we’re featuring a recording of Sun Yung Shin’s “Until the Twenty-Second Century” (from her book Skirt Full of Black).  This is a poem about markers of time’s passage (which seems appropriate for both the end of APIA Month and the turn of the seasons from spring to fall), and I love the way that the imagery in it knits together points of turning—seams, horizons, borders, crossings, passings.  The mapping of routes, from one century to the next, is evoked through the image of Hansel’s leaving of crumbs throughout the forest—a serially impermanent gesture—and yet is transformed and darkly transmuted in the course of telling: crumbs become rocks, which, in turn, are what the birds consume:

I laid my motherhood along the beginning of the skyline of the twenty-first century
Like Hansel’s pebbles
They will balance on the sky’s uneven floor
Until I retrace and pick them up, lining my pockets
Or they, as rocks have done, are mistaken for food

And yet there is a transcendent timelessness that ultimately comes to the surface of the poem. Shin’s speaker makes a pact to meet the “you” in one hundred years, after she has “consign[ed her] bones to a place / That is neither trail nor time,”  and the last few stanzas see the speaker’s making a sort of post-mortem marriage vow on on her own, gender-bending terms: she invites the “you” with the promise of a ring (a rather grisly one carved from her own flesh, no less—perhaps an ironic comment upon the consumable nature of Hansel’s body in the fairytale?); she creates a map and tells the “you” to wait while she charts his or her course—she who is, who has been, Hansel, mapmaker and leader of the quest.  By poem’s end, the speaker’s voice has become feathered over, layered thickly (if unevenly) with the wisdom of the ages; it becomes sage-like, almost omniscient.  We exit the poem with a sense that each new point of turning may, in fact, not be so different from the last: routes and maps will always be imperfect, truncated, in need of constant re-projection; borders will always be translucent (though physically impermeable) seams at which we must shed one layer of ourselves in order to step across and don a new skin on the other side.

Sun Yung Shin reads “Until the Twenty-Second Century” (via the From the Fishouse archives).

To listen to the recording, click through and then hit “play” on the grey bar next to the ear icon at the top of the page.

Thanks for sticking with us for this series during the past couple of months.

Happy Monday, Happy Memorial Day, and Happy [unofficial beginning of] Summer!

– Iris & Mia

Poems for Monday Mornings: Lee Herrick’s “Salvation” at From the Fishhouse

This morning, we’re continuing the Monday Morning series that we began last month in celebration of National Poetry and API Heritage Months.  Each week, we will be sharing an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us.

In this week’s selection, from Lee Herrick’s book This Many Miles from Desire (via From the Fishhouse, once again), the poet wrestles with memory, grief, and absence as he imagines his birth mother.  “The blues,” says the speaker, “is what mothers do not tell their sons.”

Indeed, the speaker’s blues is a blues of not-knowing, of what is hidden, and of what may never be revealed:  it is the question of who his birth mother was, of whether she remembers him, of why he was left at five months; it is the tears he sheds upon remembering that his Korean (presumably birth) name means “bright light”; it is the shreds of things known which he holds onto in the night, the trying on of layers of shimmering imagination like screens across the holes of memory:   “Who can really say?” He says, “Sometimes all we have is the blues.”

For those we have lost, for the shreds of lyric and verse that we weave against the poverty of memory, across and through the still ravines of grief:

Yes. Salvation can lie in “the spirit’s wreckage, / examined and damaged but whole again.”

Today, all we have is the blues.

Lee Herrick reads “Salvation” (via the From the Fishouse archives).

To listen to the recording, click through and then hit “play” on the grey bar next to the ear icon at the top of the page.

Happy Monday,

Iris & Mia.

Poems for Monday Mornings: Myung Mi Kim reads from DURA (“Chart”)

This morning, we’re continuing the Monday Morning series that we began last month in celebration of National Poetry and API Heritage Months.  Each week, we will be sharing an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us.

This week’s selection is one of Mia’s again: Myung Mi Kim reads from the section “Chart” (in her book Dura) for Wave Books’ PoetryPolitic Blog (via PennSound):

Myung Mi Kim reads from Dura

To listen via streaming audio, click the link above, which will take you to Kim’s page on PennSound, and then scroll down to the recording (under the heading “From Wave Books’ PoetryPolitic Blog, 2008”).

Or, to retrieve and open the file directly on your computer’s media player software, click here.

Happy Monday!

– Mia & Iris

Poems for Monday Mornings: Kazim Ali’s “Source” at From the Fishouse

This morning, we’re continuing the Monday Morning series that we began last month in celebration of National Poetry and API Heritage Months.  Each week, we will be sharing an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us.

This week’s poem is Kazim Ali’s “Source.”  I’d initially picked it because I like the way that it invites the reader to reflect upon space, and to think of the act of return to the source of one’s creative or critical inspiration as a kind of quiet discipline, a contemplative sampling enacted in the sealing and unsealing of messages . . . but how much more relevant it seems today, in the midst of the wild furor and frenzy (and the many jumbled thoughts and feelings) that have accompanied last night’s breaking news.

I love the space and light within “Source,” the way it draws me to a place of quietness, in which contemplation and stillness is at the fore.  The way it lets the world be the world without being drawn into the madness of its current.  The way it collects its forebears to itself, gently, in the act of listening (I love the image of pausing by Emily Dickinson’s door).  This is the kind of space in which I choose to carve out my response to the news: in listening, first, and in  processing and considering.  In seeking refuge in the Word and in the words of those before me.  In grappling, in allowing the poem to gather its walls around me.  And only then, to let it out into the world.  To think, to listen, with open heart and mind.  To act with responsibility and with compassion.  And from there, to write in hope, in passion, and humility.

Kazim Ali reads “Source” (via the From the Fishouse archives).

To listen to the recording, click through and then hit “play” on the grey bar next to the ear icon at the top of the page.

Happy Monday,

Iris

Poems for Monday Mornings: M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong 19”

In celebration of National Poetry Month and APIA Heritage Month this year, we have started a two-month Monday Morning series in which we will be sharing an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us each week.

Today’s Monday Morning Poem is one of Mia’s picks, an excerpt of M. NourbeSe Philip’s book Zong! (Wesleyan U Press, 2008), which takes on, and writes against,  the injustice inherent in the [true] story of a slave ship whose captain—in November of 1781—ordered that 150 Africans be drowned so that the owners could collect insurance money.   Philip’s masterful control of sound, space, and pause; and the piercing understated-ness of her oral delivery make this recording (and the rest of the “Zong” poems that are documented in PennSound‘s archives) softly chilling and magnetically resonant.

M. NourbeSe Philip reads “Zong 19”

To listen via streaming audio, click the link above, which will take you to Philip’s page on PennSound, and then scroll down to the recording (#17 under the “Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club”).

Or, to retrieve and open the file directly on your computer’s media player software, click here.

Enjoy, and Happy [Easter] Monday!

– Mia & Iris

Poems for Monday Mornings: Aryanil Mukherjee’s “honeycomb scriptures :: world granulated” at PennSound

In celebration of National Poetry Month and APIA Heritage Month this year, we have started a two-month Monday Morning series in which we will be sharing an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us each week.

Today’s Monday Morning Poem features a version of a piece that actually appeared in Issue 2 of Lantern ReviewAryanil Mukherjee reads from his series “honeycomb scriptures,” beginning with the poem “honeycomb scriptures :: world granulated,” which later appeared in LR. (Via PennSound‘s archives).

Mia and I both love the ‘rubbly’ translucence and impermanence of the images in “world granulated,” so we were excited to run across this recording, in which we get to hear the poem contextualized within the series to which it belongs.  We hope you enjoy it, too:

Aryanil Mukherjee reads from “honeycomb scriptures” at the Cincinnati Public Library

To listen via streaming audio, click the link above, which will take you to Mukherjee’s page on PennSound, and then scroll down to the recording (the second one listed under “Poetry in the Garden at the Cincinnati Public Library”).

Or, to retrieve and open the file directly on your computer’s media player software, click here.

If you’d like to follow along as you listen, the version of “world granulated” that appeared in LR can be found here.

Happy Monday!

– Iris & Mia

 

Poems for Monday Mornings: Juliana Spahr’s “Gathering Palolo Stream” at PennSound

In celebration of National Poetry Month and APIA Heritage Month this year, we have started a two-month Monday Morning series in which we will be sharing an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us each week.

Today’s Monday Morning Poem is one of Mia’s recommendations, a fantastic live recording that comes from PennSound‘s vast archives:

Juliana Spahr’s “Gathering Palolo Stream” (from Fuck You – Aloha – I Love You).

To listen via streaming audio, click the link above, which will take you to Spahr’s page on PennSound, and then scroll down to the recording (listed under “Reading at SUNY Buffalo, November 14, 2001”).

Or, to retrieve and open the file directly on your computer’s media player software, click here.

Happy Monday!

– Iris & Mia

Poems for Monday Mornings: Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade with a Book and a Rattle from a String of Pearls” at From the Fishouse

Surprise!  Here’s a brand new blog series to start off your Monday morning.  In celebration of National Poetry Month and APIA Heritage Month this year, we (the editors) hope to be able to lead you to an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us each Monday morning, for the duration of April and May.  A little something to listen to while you’re brushing your teeth, eating breakfast, or checking your email.  A poem to start off the week.  We hope to simultaneously expose you to the wealth of multimedia performances of poems that are available on the web, and to share with you the delight of hearing poems that you might, hitherto, have only experienced on the page.

Today’s Monday Morning Poem is a recording taken from the wonderful archives at From the Fishhouse:

Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade with a Book and a Rattle from a String of Pearls.”

This is an elegy, an achingly beautiful one that has haunted me (Iris) since I first heard the poet read it in Chicago at AWP 2010.  The tenderness with which de la Paz handles his subject is deeply moving to me (particularly as I continue to reflect on the loved ones whom I have lost this past year), and, in combination with the resonance of his sonics and the spareness of his tone and syntax, paints a rich portrait of a woman that is at once ferocious and yet gentle, quiet and yet somehow audaciously brave.

To listen to the recording, click through and then hit “play” on the grey bar next to the ear icon at the top of the page.

Henry Leung’s interview with Mr. de la Paz will appear on the blog later this week.

Happy Monday!