{"id":1887,"date":"2010-05-27T12:17:48","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T16:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=1887"},"modified":"2010-05-28T12:32:45","modified_gmt":"2010-05-28T16:32:45","slug":"process-profile-r-a-villanueva-discusses-in-memory-of-xiong-huang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/27\/process-profile-r-a-villanueva-discusses-in-memory-of-xiong-huang\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: R.A. Villanueva Discusses “In Memory of Xiong Huang”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
R. A. Villanueva<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

R.A. Villanueva lives in Brooklyn. Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as<\/em> Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, McSweeney\u2019s Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, The Literary Review, and<\/em> The Collagist. A Kundiman fellow, he is currently a Language Lecturer at New York University.<\/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. Here, R.A. Villanueva discusses his poem “In Memory of Xiong Huang<\/a>,” which first appeared in the Winter 2009 Issue of<\/strong><\/em> Virginia Quarterly Review.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

Ars Poetica with Illuminated Bodies <\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

At the heart of Michael Paterniti\u2019s \u201cThe Most Dangerous Beauty\u201d is a description of the <\/em>Topographische Anatomie des Menschen<\/em><\/em> <\/em>that is, by turns, lyrical and grotesque. Truth be told, Paterniti\u2019s cluster of renderings and pivots is less a \u201cdescription\u201d of Eduard Pernkopf\u2019s<\/a> life work and more a walking tour of his Anschluss abbatoir-made-studio.<\/p>\n

Paterniti offers an unfurling litany, a conjuring of Pernkopf\u2019s Anatomy<\/a> that reckons with how \u201cpage by page\u201d these medical illustrations grow increasingly \u201cstunning, bombastic, surreal.\u201d He affirms that it is \u201cbone-and-muscle evidence, the animal reality of who we are beneath the skin\u201d before doubling-back: \u201cwhat if a number of these paintings have been signed with swastikas, what then?…Do the secrets revealed in the Book count less than the secrets kept by it?\u201d<\/p>\n

What starts as an unveiling of an atlas of the body thus becomes for us a visceral interrogation of how we reconcile our ethics with our want to see, our need to know. By essay\u2019s close, beauty is everywhere cut with casualty and grief.<\/p>\n

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

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

2.<\/p>\n

Without much thought, I suggested that my cousins and I make the last stop on their sightseeing trip South Street Seaport. We could walk the perimeter of the island, come around on the Battery, and up the East Side, take photos of the museum ships and their moorings, the Brooklyn waterfront, Olafur Eliasson\u2019s \u201cWaterfalls\u201d<\/a> from the esplanade. That way you have things both permanent and temporary<\/em>, I said.<\/p>\n

That summer, it felt as though every double-decker bus, every subway banner, and every taxi ad in the city promised tourists cadavers split down the middle, a carnival of Mercurochrome-stained biceps and hearts that would teach us how our insides worked. You couldn\u2019t evade the signs\u2014couldn\u2019t outrun them if you tried\u2014and so none of us was surprised when we found ourselves following the towpaths\u2019 posters and arrows into the dark of an exhibition space.<\/p>\n

Here is what I remember most about that afternoon: a couple at the coat check knotting together shopping bags, changing batteries in their camera; the words \u201climited engagement only\u201d in white, sans-serif; latticework of veins in solution, contour of a torso preserved as a system of vessels and pipettes; lit from below, wombs glossed and translucent, lungs flayed and lacquered; that the docent\u2019s measured answer was \u201cfrom donations, mostly;\u201d how even though the bodies before us posed without names or stories, I knew from just their eyes and lips where they came from.<\/p>\n

3.<\/p>\n

I started what was initially called \u201cThese nameless muscles\u201d that same fall, for a craft seminar at NYU led by Kimiko Hahn. Our focus was the reinvigoration of inherited forms (the sestina, the sonnet, the villanelle, et al.) and the fourth exercise of the term called on us to write an elegy that could test the permeable line between lament and praise song.<\/p>\n

The first draft of my response was a little more than a list, really\u2014a catalogue of images recorded during that disconcerting visit to the Seaport. The title of that early version announces as much and what follows that phrase is an insistent sequence of colors, dissections, and apprehensions loosely reassembled. I had wanted to vivify and reclaim a cadaver\u2019s forgotten life and instead I was writing about myself.<\/p>\n

I tried to leave the assignment. I searched for \u201cbodies\u201d and \u201cNew York City,\u201d \u201ctestimony\u201d and \u201cprotest.\u201d I read investigative profiles<\/a> and apologia. I found interviews with anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens<\/a> wherein he defends his exhibit\u2019s \u201ceducational aims\u201d<\/a> and the patent art of Animal and vegetal tissues permanently preserved by synthetic resin impregnation<\/a>.<\/em> I listened to his spokesman rationalize \u201chuman specimens\u201d for study harvested through \u201cnormal processes.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Echo soon delivered echo. Von Hagen\u2019s mechanism for \u201cplastination\u201d became bound with language like \u201cunclaimed\u201d and \u201cunidentified,\u201d<\/a> alternative splicings which brought to light Wanqing Huang<\/a> and his younger brother\u2019s act of selflessness:<\/p>\n

\u2026as a boy Xiong once went grocery shopping with his grandmother. On the walk home, Xiong complained so strongly about how hard his grandmother had bargained with the peasant for their vegetables that she was forced to return with little Xiong and pay more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is this gentle, sorrowed invocation which gives pulse to the poem.<\/p>\n

In Memory of Xiong Huang<\/strong>
\nwho disappeared from Shanghai and whose body, his brother believes,
\nis now on display in New York City in an exhibition of plastinated cadavers<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

In some province a hemisphere from here
\nyou tapped at your grandmother\u2019s kneecap, her elbow
\ncrooked in bags of bok choy, bamboo shoots,
\nand rapeseed oils. You shouldered her skins
\nof bean curd all the way back to market,
\noffered coins from your pocket up
\ntowards a farmhand she paltered for bargains.<\/p>\n

Of you and that day, your brother remembers this most:
\nhow your diaphragm shook as if sorry
\nfor the quick of her tongue. How each capillary
\nand joint grieved the reach of her teeth. And he swears<\/p>\n

he sees your red wince in the subway ads,
\nthis bus stop poster where you have become a mannequin
\nof tendons, a mock Thinker<\/em> pumped with tinctures
\nand phosphorescent balms, cured,<\/p>\n

desiccated in silicon gas. Your flayed fist
\nagainst a mandible, your brother lays hands
\non your knuckles. He traces aloud
\nthe syllables of your given name. Imagines
\nthe sound of a boy\u2019s now ossified heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R.A. Villanueva lives in Brooklyn. Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, McSweeney\u2019s Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, The Literary Review, and The Collagist. A Kundiman fellow, he is currently a Language Lecturer at New York University. In our Process Profiles series, young contemporary Asian American poets […]<\/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},"categories":[318],"tags":[321,294],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887"}],"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=1887"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1950,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions\/1950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}