Marillyn Chin's Rhapsody in Plain Yellow

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to read more poetry even though most of it is just Greek to me.



Bits and pieces of Marilyn Chin's Rhapsody in Plain Yellow caught my attention. In some poems, for example in "To Pursue the Limitless," Chin plays with some of the difficulties and subtle betrayals of translation:

To (二) err is human
To (五) woo is woman

In order to get the puns and homonymic (though definitionally-incorrect) translations in these lines, you would have to understand that the parenthetical Chinese characters represent, respectively, the numbers two and five, pronounced like the English words that follow them. Because language is the substance of poetry (or is it sound?), this necessary bilingualism is very provocative.

In the title poem, "Rhapsody in Plain Yellow," the following lines surface as an explicit reflection on poetry's promise or failure:

Say: A scentless camellia bush bloodied the afternoon.
   Fuck this line, can you really believe this?
When did I become the master of suburban bliss?
   With whose tongue were we born?
The language of the masters is the language of the aggressors.
   We've studied their cadence carefully--
enrolled in a class to improve our accent.
   Meanwhile, they hover over, waiting for us to stumble . . .
to drop an article, mispronounce an R.
   Say: softly, softly, the silent gunboats glide.
O onerous sibilants, O onomatopoetic glibness.
   Say:
How could we write poetry in a time like this?
   A discipline that makes much ado about so little?
Willfully laconic, deceptively disguised as a love poem.

The power of poetry, these lines suggest, lies in deception and in the mode of love -- perhaps a politics of subversion.

Many of the poems also address interracial romances, waffling between celebrations and indictments of such couplings. Again from the title poem:

Say:
Your engorging dict-
atorial flesh
grazed mine.
 
Would you have loved me more if I were black?
   Would I have loved you more if you were white?
And you, relentless Sinophile,
   holding my long hair, my frayed dreams.

More than providing any solutions, the various incarnations of interracial romance in the poems point to different configurations of power in such relationships but also refuse to pin down such power absolutely, leaving agency available to the lovers.

Comments

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

Damn. That's awesome. I should get this for the Intro. class I'm TA-ing this fall. Do you think it would be good for beginning writers?

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I dunno. Is this an intro to poetry writing class? Or an intro poetry reading class? There are definitely lots of things to think about in the collection. Many ways to think about language and stuff...

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

Technically it's Intro. to Creative Writing, but the syllabus actually is more like an Intro. to poetry writing class. We have a few weeks of micro-fiction and autobiographical prose, and the rest is different forms of poetry writing. I'll look into this Marilyn Chin book though. It sounds great!

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

So I found this when trying to find Skirt Full of Black, and I forgot to tell you how much I loved Chin's Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. I bought it after reading your review, and it's brilliant! It reminded me a lot of my poetry prof at K, and I recommended it to her as well. She also loved it, and is now teaching it in Intermediate Poetry. She's also teaching Kimiko Hahn's zuihitsus as a form, which is exciting. Given the lack of Asian American Studies and texts taught at K, I'm so glad that one prof. in the dept. is listening to me!

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

That's awesome that your prof is teaching things you've introduced her to! sa_am and I got to meet Chin at a conference in December. It was cool. :)