{"id":5967,"date":"2012-07-09T08:00:13","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5967"},"modified":"2012-07-09T13:33:04","modified_gmt":"2012-07-09T17:33:04","slug":"review-karen-an-hwei-lees-phyla-of-joy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/09\/review-karen-an-hwei-lees-phyla-of-joy\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Karen An-Hwei Lee’s PHYLA OF JOY"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"PHYLA<\/a>
Karen An-Hwei Lee’s PHYLA OF JOY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Guest Post by Eugenia Leigh<\/strong><\/p>\n

Phyla of Joy<\/a>\u00a0by Karen An-Hwei Lee | Tupelo Press 2012 | $16.95<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Eugenia<\/a>
Eugenia Leigh<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When entering Karen An-hwei Lee\u2019s mysterious world of silver eucalyptus groves and Holy Spirits, the temptation is to dissociate. To keep that ethereal realm separate from the mud-and-waste Earth most of us know. But Lee\u2019s power lies in her ability to unite both worlds. Instead of distancing the Divine from cigarettes and kitchen fires, Lee welcomes the one into the other. But the startling result isn\u2019t a third world tangled with dichotomies. The result is Phyla of Joy<\/em>, a portrait of the world we live in, but reclaimed through gracious eyes that somehow inject light into everything from famine to girls born with cleft palates.<\/p>\n

Lee prepares her reader for this new world with her epigraphs, the first of which comes from a Davidic psalm: \u201cFor with You is the fountain of life; \/ in Your light we see light.\u201d Immediately, the following formula is established: to find light on Earth, Lee\u2019s poems\u2014and we readers\u2014will need to rely on the light of the divine \u201cYou.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201cformula\u201d seems simple enough, but how much effort does it really take for our generally afflicted human selves to seek out that otherworldly light? Lee addresses that tension between being human and craving something beyond-human in the book\u2019s first poem, \u201cYingri.\u201d In the Tupelo Press reader\u2019s companion to Phyla of Joy<\/em>, she notes that yingri<\/em> is a Chinese word composed of two characters. While Lee tells us that the second character translates to \u201csun,\u201d she allows the meaning of the first character to remain ambiguous in its multiple possible translations: \u201cshadow,\u201d \u201ceagle,\u201d \u201cto reflect.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s two stanzas add to our understanding of yingri<\/em>\u2019s duality. The first stanza, representative of earth and ying <\/em>with its many meanings, reads:<\/p>\n

Inside me is a bridge, or the beams of a house,
\nand an old ground swell beneath a garden boat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The speaker\u2019s observations in this stanza reflect the multiple meanings of ying<\/em> with the word \u201cor,\u201d which reveals both the speaker\u2019s uncertain sense of her human self and also the possibility of additional manmade constructions buried within her.<\/p>\n

The second stanza constitutes ri<\/em>\u2014the sun and its associations with divinity:<\/p>\n

Outside, on an acre of snow,
\na winter sun, blinding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What appears to be a small, four-line opening poem speaks volumes when pitted against the rest of the collection. We asked earlier how people can invite supernatural light into a worldly existence. And here is the answer: by blinding<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In order to see, we must first be blind, insists Lee. And sure enough, after a number of poems that refer to blindness, we meet a blind woman \u201ctyp[ing] out letters twice\u201d in \u201cSweet Glossolalia.\u201d The blind woman suddenly takes control of the poem\u2019s narrative, as each image begins to reflect her experience. The setting, for example, is perforated with punctuation-related diction, which draws us into a backdrop that melds the woman\u2019s typing with the scenery: \u201cBravura of light, one apostrophe. \/ Red flowers or commas in a square.\u201d Strong sounds also overpower the poem\u2019s images as if to communicate the blind woman\u2019s heightened sense of hearing. The punching assonance of \u201cHot at two o\u2019clock. \/ Potted tea sun\u201d is chased by the slicing assonance of \u201cat the sink, thin as new hat pins \/ or tin silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the final three lines of this 29-line poem, Lee steers us in a surprising direction by introducing a first-person speaker. The \u201cI\u201d simply \u201copen[s] a letter,\u201d and although we readers might be alarmed by her unexpected appearance, the blind woman does not flinch. Instead, she speaks her first words of the book\u2014a command\u2014directed toward this speaker whose presence hardly stirs her: \u201cOpen quietly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The blind woman\u2019s firm directive suggests that she is a person of authority, and the aura of her authority only grows as she becomes a recurring character in Phyla of Joy<\/em>. In a number of subsequent poems, most of which appear in the book\u2019s second section, we follow her through her world and learn to \u2018see\u2019 as she sees. We tag along as the \u201cblind woman presses scriptural flowers into street hands.\u201d We\u2019re privy to her thoughts as she \u201cconsider[s] the inverted thinness of cigarette paper, almost fish skin or petal.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the prose poem \u201cOunce of Camphor,\u201d the blind woman even begins to interact with the omniscient voice that narrates Lee\u2019s poems, although the overarching \u201cspeaker\u201d of this poem is not identified in the first person. The blind woman once again co-opts the narrator\u2019s voice, similarly to the way she asserts authority over the \u201cI\u201d in \u201cSweet Glossolalia.\u201d The speaker of \u201cOunce of Camphor\u201d first unravels layers of observations: \u201ca three-stringed balalaika is tuned in fourths. A man with a bleeding face jumps into a truck and drives away.\u201d But when the voice, touching on the surreal in a language that is quintessential to Lee\u2019s inventive images, declares, \u201cInvisible blue lines embrace the world, sightless meridians,\u201d\u00a0 the blind woman stops her. She questions the integrity of the statement, asking, \u201cIf they\u2019re invisible, how do you know they\u2019re blue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of the lack of a first-person \u201cI\u201d in this poem, we\u2019re led to believe that the blind woman is not only questioning an amorphous, anonymous speaker, but also questioning the poet herself. In a striking act of humility, Lee yields control of her poem to this character, only for her to point back at the poet and critique her words.<\/p>\n

The blind woman\u2019s display of increasing power also leads us to wonder whether she is serving as an incarnation of the \u201cYou\u201d from the book\u2019s epigraph: the \u201cYou\u201d in whose light we see light.<\/p>\n

Even when the blind woman is absent, Lee\u2019s poems are shaped by an ability to \u201csee\u201d beyond what can be processed with eyesight. For example, in \u201cPrayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine,\u201d Lee addresses a famine that occurs in parts of India every 50 years because of the flowering of bamboo, which triggers a plague of rats that destroy the region\u2019s crops. But instead of reporting the facts of this famine, Lee rejects the famine\u2019s power by visualizing and claiming an alternate, unseen<\/em> reality in which the bamboo and the rats do not harm the land.<\/p>\n

While the blind woman teaches us to \u2018see\u2019 beyond what our eyes catch, here Lee\u2019s poet-as-speaker teaches us what to do with our newfound ability of otherworldly sight\u2014summon our prophetic visions into reality through prayer:<\/p>\n

May we blossom every fifty years
\nwithout afflicting the people.
\n. . .
\nMay our shoots
\npray a silent vision of healing,
\n. . .
\nLet us bless our fruit and multiply.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The word \u201cmay\u201d\u2014as it is used in an imperative statement instead of in a question\u2014contains an authoritative power. The strength of these pronouncements, piled one on top of the other, give the sense that this idealized world of non-destructive bamboo flowers can transcend hope to become reality. Lee\u2019s prayer-poem is one that introduces hope not as \u201cwish,\u201d but as \u201ccertainty.\u201d Her syntax, climaxing in a final command-like last line\u2014\u201cLet us bless our fruit and multiply\u201d\u2014reveals that the speaker believes she possesses the power necessary to create this new world by speaking it into being through prayer. She does not pray to her deity with timid requests. She issues imperative statements.<\/p>\n

If Lee intends to allude to this power of creation, then the ramifications of this message reach beyond the poem and into the social context of our contemporary era of tumult and impermanence. In \u201cPrayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine,\u201d Lee embodies the voice of the bamboo in the plural first person, which allows us to interpret the prayer\/invocation as a metaphor for a reality that belongs not only to bamboo, but also to people. In doing so, she passes on the vision that the blind woman has passed on to her. She encourages us to \u201csee\u201d beyond present circumstances and into the possibility of a redemptive world created through the declaration of truths that can be spoken into being through prayers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Phyla of Joy<\/em> is an invitation, and that invitation is two-fold in process. First, Lee introduces us to the world of the blind woman, who \u201csees\u201d what sighted people otherwise might not catch. But the magic in these poems comes from the second invitation: for us not only to observe, but also to partake in the blind woman\u2019s sight. To set aside our eyes. To walk into willing blindness. And receive the light that comes when we are able to envision the possibilities beyond our present \u201cvisible\u201d situations, and harness our words to cement those possibilities in reality.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Eugenia Leigh is a Kundiman fellow and the author of a forthcoming collection of poetry,\u00a0<\/em>Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows\u00a0(Four Way Books, 2014), which was a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in New York City, where she believes in miracles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Guest Post by Eugenia Leigh Phyla of Joy\u00a0by Karen An-Hwei Lee | Tupelo Press 2012 | $16.95 When entering Karen An-hwei Lee\u2019s mysterious world of silver eucalyptus groves and Holy Spirits, the temptation is to dissociate. To keep that ethereal realm separate from the mud-and-waste Earth most of us know. But Lee\u2019s power lies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"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":[3,892,20,4],"tags":[1056,211,891],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5967"}],"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\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5967"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5999,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5967\/revisions\/5999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}