Becoming Realer: Visible

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

 

Elaine Gin Louie's "Visible" and "The Red Frame" installations, photo taken by Nicole C. Roldan

 

One of the things that my advisor likes about living in San Francisco is that there’s something for everyone. She says that no matter how weird or specific the interest seems to be, people are able to find each other. Since moving to the East Bay, I’ve joined two organizations. One is the Association of Korean Adoptees | San Francisco (AKASF) that hosted a literary reading with Lee Herrick, Jo Rankin and some authors from the new More Voices anthology in May. It’s a large group of Korean adoptees celebrating and educating others on what it means to be a KAD. The other is the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) that sponsored the A Place of Her Own art exhibition at SOMArts, also in May, with the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC) for the 14th Annual United States of Asian America Festival. Twenty-three Asian American women artists responded to the question, “If you had a place of your own, what would it be?”

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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.

Becoming Realer: Re-Claiming Asian America

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

White out
K Awareness Campaign circa 2008 | Graphics by Nina Reyes

“My [writing] is a testament to who I am and what I have lived. It is a process of becoming a student, a teacher, an activist, and an Asian American woman. I was forced to pick up the pen as a weapon and wield it in a fight against the oppression of my people, to become a voice for those of us who are unable or unwilling to speak.”

I wrote those words in the introduction to my Senior Individualized Project (SIP) at Kalamazoo College called, “Creating History and Spaces: The Making of an Asian American Woman in Zuihitsu.” That’s still what I want to do with my writing—create personal and political history , expose it, re-frame it and carve new spaces for people who have been left out or overlooked. I want my writing to make a difference in the world. It should make a statement that will reach others, even though I am ultimately writing for myself.

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Becoming Realer: “Growing Sideways”

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

Kelsay at Grandma Rothert's house in 1988

After reading Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic last semester in Contemporary Nonfiction, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of artifice in my life. Bechdel’s father spent years creating a fiction of himself as the straight, happy family man and small town English teacher, and he arranged his Gothic revivalist home into a solid, real world representation of his artifice. It’s not merely artifice in the sense of having a duplicitous nature, but also the construction and presentation of a certain image, or identity, to the world.

It’s that kind of self-construction that I relate to not only in my own identity formation, but in my writing as well. We learn early on in our writing careers that whatever “self” we put on the page is not our actual, real world self. It is a fabrication , written with specific intentions for an audience. It is, in a word, performed. But in all honesty, when I look at my actual self, I still see the artifice. In any given situation, I find myself carefully constructing my self to look or act a certain way. It’s not just vanity that causes me to never leave the house without make-up, or to sleep in pajamas that are basically clothes so I could more quickly run out in the middle of the night if I happened to get an emergency phone call saying that someone is in the hospital. Although I am vain, it goes deeper than that. It’s about actualizing the idea of myself that I have in my head (heavily influenced by pop-culture and television) every hour of every day in order to make it true.

Performance eventually becomes reality? The symbol eventually becomes truth? I readily admit that my version of symbolism comes from a conflation of the literal with the symbolic. Continue reading “Becoming Realer: “Growing Sideways”” →

Becoming Realer: Going Home

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

1854 Victorian Farmhouse – Photograph by Natalie Grumbles, Christmas 2008

The older I get, the harder it is to explain what I’m doing with my life. Thankfully, going home for the holidays is really the only time I need to. The Christmas and New Year’s parties, family friend get-togethers and annual reunions with high school and college friends are exhausting, particularly when I’m asked what I’m doing now. Getting an M.F.A. at Saint Mary’s College of California is cool but not specific enough, and writing creative nonfiction is not as self-explanatory as it sounds.

I was making Christmas gift exchanges at Caché when a colleague of my mother’s came into the store with his partner. After the general introductions and greetings, he asked what kind of writing I do. I explained that I do a cross between poetry and nonfiction. Then, he wanted to know who my favorite poet is. My answer was T.S. Eliot, though I internally debated whether to name Kimiko Hahn, Marilyn Chin, or Diane Seuss, all of whom have had a more formative impact on my writing and identity so far but are not generally well known. The brief look of bewilderment on his face or nervous silence that would inevitably follow didn’t seem worth it. For conversation’s sake, I said Eliot.

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Becoming Realer: Looking at the Real

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

Rainbow shoes

I can’t remember if I imagined Korea as a child. I must have. I put the rainbow-striped shoes that were sent with me from Busan when I was three-months old high on a shelf in my bedroom, in a place where I could look at them but not touch them. Sometimes, I would ask my mother to take down the shoes, wondering if that would be the day they’d finally fit on my feet. That day never came. They were too big each time. I’d fall down trying to walk in them. Eventually I forgot about wanting to wear them, and when I did remember they were up on that shelf again, they were so small that they pinched my feet. I used to think the moral of this story was that the shoes never fit just right. That, in the same way, Korea would never fit just right, but now I see even greater meaning in the fact that I was the one who put the shoes in a place where I could look at them, but not feel them.

That is the true moral of the story. I’m still afraid to feel Korea. It’s more comfortable in the abstract, or as a rainbow-colored shoe that will never fit, than as an actual thing that I can put my arms around or stick my feet in. It’s more comfortable as a symbol than a country, as a metaphor than a reality.

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Intro to Minh

To this day, I still remember reading Seattle poet Koon Woon’s first official book of poetry, The Truth In Rented Rooms (Kaya Press, 1998) back in Rochester, NY. As I read more of his writing it was like watching the smudgy white walls of my studio apartment turn into a kaleidoscope of possibilities. I could tell Woon’s writing came from a place of strength and hurt, truthfulness and sorrow. These were human qualities I had taken for granted all my life before I started writing poetry myself.

Woon’s writing had the wonderful ability of convincing me to peer deeper into the well of mystery and to search for my own meaning in life.  He writes in the poem “In Water Buffalo Time,”

When my little friends mocked me for my seriousness,
Our teacher, under the shade of the yung tree bursting with berries,
Told us Meng-Tse had dreamed he was a butterfly
Dreaming it was a man.
Without even knowing what a “yung tree” or who “Meng-Tse” was, I intuitively knew that as a poet of Asian descent I was on the threshold of a long literary tradition in this country I called home. I knew I had already missed much, but I soon realized that the curling waves of Asian American literature(s) populate a very large and deep body of experience, innovation and experimentation that only keeps on getting stronger.

The editors of the Lantern Review blog have asked me to review books of poetry, and I intend to employ my trusty reading skills and quirky powers of interpretation to the task of properly introducing poetic works by Asian American authors to You, the general reading audience. The kind of poetry that reels me in and makes me want to take another bite is one where the author simplifies the complex only to open me back up and engage my mind with the never-ending complexity of human experience and imagination.

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