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.

A Review of Jeffrey Ethan Lee's Identity Papers

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

This is the cover art.

A Review of Jeffrey Ethan Lee’s Identity Papers.

In a New York subway in the mid-1990s, Jeffrey Ethan Lee was attacked and almost killed in a hate crime motivated assault in a New York Subway. That experience is the foundation for Identity Papers, a moving and elegiac poetry collection that appears to a be a long meditation on the loss and reconstruction of self. In particular, Lee (or the speaker of the poetry collection) must attend to the not-so politically correct questions of investigators who attempt to discern the motivations for the attack and even think that he may have had something to do with what occurred. He must also investigate how rage and physical violence completely transform his understanding of the world around him both at the moment of the attack and afterward as he sits recuperating in the hospital. The interesting aspect of this narrative is that Lee himself offers that he is attempting to place a “memoir” voice directly into poetry, dismantling the often heralded boundary between speaking subject and the author. One of the most interesting sentiments in the poetry collection is the speaker’s encounter with his own rage at almost being killed. The speaker states:

Yet just when I think it is over
I still think in weaponries
and nothing can save me from this knowledge,
this pain that recurs eternal as the throb of blood
in every brazen day.
A fierceness roars almost like a voice that cries:
I want to kill him again and again (38).

What is immediately intriguing in this passage is the way that the speaker is split off from his “pain.” The pain is what exudes the fierceness and the voice, rather than the speaking subject, seemingly drawing from the ways in which trauma splits and fragments the self. The speaker must confront a very base response to violence, the kill-or-be-killed response. What shakes the speaker to the core is that he has never had to deal with it in such a way and this fact ultimately unmakes his world.