{"id":1693,"date":"2010-05-12T10:00:22","date_gmt":"2010-05-12T15:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=1693"},"modified":"2010-05-12T11:37:59","modified_gmt":"2010-05-12T16:37:59","slug":"process-profile-jason-koo-discusses-man-on-extremely-small-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/12\/process-profile-jason-koo-discusses-man-on-extremely-small-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Jason Koo Discusses “Man on Extremely Small Island”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Jason Koo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jason Koo<\/a> is the author of <\/em>Man on Extremely Small Island<\/a>, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize (C&R Press, 2009) and a Finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Ohio State University Press\/<\/em>The Journal Award in Poetry. He was born in New York City and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston, and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. The winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals<\/em>, including<\/em> The Yale Review,<\/em> North American Review and<\/em> The Missouri Review. He teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of <\/em>Low Rent. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Django.<\/em><\/p>\n

In our Process Profiles series, young contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication.\u00a0 Here, Jason discusses the eponymous poem from his first collection, <\/strong><\/em>Man on Extremely Small Island<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

* * *
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

I originally wrote this poem for a workshop on ekphrastic poetry led by Scott Cairns at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I\u2019d written the first poem for that workshop on a Hopper painting, which was predictable\u2014so many poets have written poems about Hopper paintings. I myself had already written three poems about Hopper paintings.<\/p>\n

So I went to Acorn Books, one of the used bookstores near campus, and started browsing through art books, looking for something I hadn\u2019t seen before. I wanted to get away from the high tradition of Western art and do something unorthodox. After looking through shelves and shelves of books, I stumbled across The Collected Cartoons of Mordillo<\/em>, a book of black and white cartoon drawings by this Argentine artist I\u2019d never heard of before. His cartoons were hilarious, featuring little men and women with huge noses in various island and urban situations; they read like parables about modern life and relationships. I was drawn by his ability to tell whole narratives in just a few frames with no words. His sensibility spoke to me immediately.<\/p>\n

One cartoon in particular struck me as something I could write about: a man sitting alone on a tiny island\u2014about the size of a pitcher\u2019s mound\u2014imagining it was the kneecap of gigantic woman lying on the sea-floor below him with one leg folded in. The man on the island was at the bottom of the frame; the woman was in the huge thought bubble above his head. I\u2019d been writing a lot of (failed) dramatic monologues at the time and figured I could do something in his voice, a kind of message-in-a-bottle poem. (Hence the underlinings you see in the poem; originally I had these underlined words in italics, but halfway through the poem I realized a guy writing a message on a piece of shirt wouldn\u2019t be able to put words in italics.) I wanted to write a poem like Bishop\u2019s \u201cCrusoe in England,\u201d a poem I\u2019ve always loved for its mixture of humor and despair.<\/p>\n

The first draft of the poem was much longer than the final version\u2014there was a totally different opening, one in which the speaker went on and on about the island as a pitcher\u2019s mound. Here are the original opening lines:<\/p>\n

I live on an extremely small\u2014I
\nwas going to say \u201cisland,\u201d but I\u2019m not
\neven sure you can call it that,
\nsince I only have room to sit down.
\nMore of a hump than an island.
\nLike a pitcher\u2019s mound\u2014but steeper.
\nSometimes I stand and appraise the horizon
\nas if looking toward home
\nfor the sign, cutting out a strike zone
\nof sky and sea; I go into my wind-up,
\ntilting back for a curve sharp
\nenough to plummet over the horizon-
\nline and scud the surface back\u2014but
\nthe mound wobbles, and I come out
\nof my wind-up without following through
\n\u2014sit as still as possible, politely
\ntouching knees to chest, hoping not
\nto disturb whatever underwater god
\nthis hump belongs to. Because I\u2019m certain
\nthis can\u2019t be land<\/span> I\u2019m sitting on\u2014
\ntoo smooth, too white, too\u2026bony.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice how in twenty-one lines the speaker still hasn\u2019t mentioned the woman; there\u2019s too much set-up. Nicky Beer\u2014who was in the workshop with me\u2014suggested I cut all of this and begin with the next line: \u201cI think I must be sitting on the kneecap \/ of a gigantic woman.\u201d Workshop is much maligned in our culture, and I\u2019ve bitched about workshop as much as anyone else; but the comments I got on this particular poem were incredibly helpful to me. I couldn\u2019t see the real beginning of the poem by myself. And my workshop mates also told me to throw out the title, which was originally \u201cMessage from Mordillo.\u201d Yeah, terrible. Of course I couldn\u2019t think of anything better for a long time, so eventually, out of exhaustion, I just slapped on a topical title: \u201cMan on Extremely Small Island.\u201d I thought the bluntness of the title was funny. Little did I know this title would eventually become the title of my whole first book.<\/p>\n

Below is the final version of \u201cMan on Extremely Small Island,\u201d as it appears in Jason\u2019s collection of the same name:<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Man on Extremely Small Island<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

after a Mordillo cartoon<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

I think I must be sitting on the kneecap
\nof a gigantic woman: stretched out
\non the sea floor, one long leg folded in,
\ntriangulating heavenward, her knee
\njust breaches the surface enough to make
\nmy seat. How she came to be here, how
\nI happened to wash up on her kneecap
\nshore, why she never puts her leg down<\/span>\u2014
\nthese are questions I do not pursue.
\nInstead, I try to picture the woman\u2019s face:
\neyes lidded, mouth upturned in sleepy
\npleasure, she can just bear<\/span> the tickling
\nmy body gives her; naturally, I\u2019m afraid
\nthat if I move too much a giant hand
\nwill come whalebursting out of the water
\nto thwop me like a golf ball into the sea.
\nSo, still as possible. Once, I did an experiment:
\nI got down on my belly\u2014gingerly<\/span>\u2014
\nseal-wagged my upper body down
\nthe eastern slope of the knee, and sent
\nmy hands snorkeling\u2014a distinct shudder.
\nWas that her thigh? That shudder
\nnearly broke my ribs, so I\u2019ve never tried
\nthe opposite slope for shin. Sometimes,
\nas is my way, I begin to feel ungrateful:
\nwhy couldn\u2019t it have been a breast
\ninstead of a knee? I could lie down,
\nfeel cared for, sleep. I could relax\u2026
\nThe irony, of course, is that from the sky
\nthe knee probably looks<\/span> like a breast,
\nwith me as a nipple, so, when you notify
\nthe Coast Guard about my situation,
\nbe sure to warn them of the resemblance.
\nNot that I expect anyone to find me.
\nBy the time you get this message\u2014if
\nyou get it\u2014I\u2019ll have been swallowed up
\nby a storm; the fact that I haven\u2019t been
\nalready I would<\/span> call a \u201cmiracle,\u201d but
\nwhen you throw yourself off a ship, lose
\nconsciousness, and come to on a kneecap,
\ncan anything else go by that name?<\/p>\n

Miracle. And all those years I asked
\nfor a smaller nose. I said to God, Just
\ngive me a chance. This isn\u2019t a nose\u2014
\nit\u2019s a melon. Just make it a little<\/span> smaller,
\nsomething a woman can convince herself
\nto live with if I am a good enough man\u2026<\/p>\n

When I came to that first strange morning
\nI thought I\u2019d washed up on a giant nose.
\nI said to God, Very funny, very very funny.
\nHilarious. I\u2019m dying here. You kill me.
\nThen I put my nose into my hands and wept.
\nBut now I think kneecap\u2014I won\u2019t give God
\nthat satisfaction. And my sea-goddess,
\nshe has no nose. Just a space where mine
\ncan fit.
\nI\u2019m running out of shirt.<\/span>
\nYou might be wondering where I got
\nthis bottle\u2014someone must have thrown it off
\nthe ship. There was another message inside.
\nI\u2019m alone, it said. Find me, find me.
\nI threw it in the water.
\nStrange<\/span>\u2014<\/span> <\/span>
\nI used to hate sitting in my apartment,
\nnight after night, hearing murmurings
\nin the apartments around me; now
\nI stare at the endless, sunshot blue
\nand try to imagine walls.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jason’s book, <\/em>Man on Extremely Small Island, can be purchased through SPD, here<\/a>.\u00a0 He can be found online at his web site, jasonkoopoetry.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Koo is the author of Man on Extremely Small Island, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize (C&R Press, 2009) and a Finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Ohio State University Press\/The Journal Award in Poetry. He was born in New York City and grew up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[318],"tags":[319,320,321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1693"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1715,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693\/revisions\/1715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}