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Cathy Song MEGA-POST!
Aug. 4th, 2008 11:46 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
stephenhongsohn.livejournal.comA Review of Cathy Song’s School Figures (1994), Land of Bliss (2001), and Cloud Moving Hands (2007)
Cathy Song is the author of five poetry collections, including most famously, Picture Bride (1983), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poet Awards, immediately establishing Song as one of the foremost Asian American Poets. Her poem, “The Youngest Daughter,” was widely anthologized from this work. The title of that collection referred most specifically to her grandmother who traveled to Hawaii as a “picture bride.” Her second poetry collection was Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988), published by Norton. My review focuses on Song’s lesser critiqued works, her last three poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: School Figures (1994), Land of Bliss (2001), and Cloud Moving Hands (2007). Connecting these three poems together are the intense autobiographical nature of the lyrics in relation to the family and morality, death and life, suffering and release, especially for those closest to her. In this respect, her poetry seems to derive inspiration from the Confessional Poets, especially as she delves into the strange personal and even morally ambiguous reactions that one can have in moments of despair or loss. Over time, Song’s poetry had included more and more references to Buddhism, where this trend reaches its culmination in her latest collection. Song, born in 1955, is a biethnic Asian American and was raised in Hawaii. Her father was a second generation Korean American, while her mother was herself a Chinese picture bride. She attended Wellesley as an undergraduate and later completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Boston University. She is in many respects a regional poet, drawing upon Hawaiian culture through the use of pidgin dialect and slang phrases. She is also more largely very aware that her poetry derives out of and finds inspiration through its connection to other Asian American writers, many of whom share a common Hawaiian background. She has devoted poems to Gary Pak, Wing Tek Lum, Wakako Yamauchi, Juliet S. Kono, Darrell Lum, Eric Chock, among others.
The recurrent motif that Song’s poetry seems to draw out over the course of the three poems revolve around mortality. In “Journey” (from School Figures), the lyric speaker begins with: “My father is looking at the end of his life/ and it looks like the end of the world to him. There is no one left from his town to say good-bye. His childhood friends are saying good-bye to their own lives” (50). In “Sunworshippers,” the lyric speaker is warned against staying out too long outside due to the possibilities that the sun might darken her skin, but desire and caution do not always traffic in the same circles.
In “The Valley Boat” (from Land of Bliss), Song will turn the gaze upon her mother:
I lost my mother once
to sadness
but she returned
and I became her daughter again
My family and I rejoiced at the sound
of her laughter in the kitchen
….
When sadness rained
a year later,
I knew before she did
that she was going away,
that she would be leaving
us and all
we could do
was make her comfortable,
ease the passage
back into the dark
waters of herself
What is immediately apparent about Song’s poetry is its clarity. Especially rendered here, the lyrics aren’t intended to obfuscate in any form, nor do they contain particularly problematic or troubling metaphors. Instead, the poem is almost universalizable in its consideration of the loss of the parent. However, certain ethnic signifiers do provide “The Valley Boat” with particular as the lyric speaker divulges, “The broth grew strength/ from the oxtail” (36). The line breaks in “The Valley Boat” are reminiscent to many of the poems in School Figures in terms of their general length and meter, but in Land of Bliss, Song experiments with form and shape of her poems, by choosing to extend some poems out further a la Whitmanian free verse, while others are much more staccato in their delivery. For instance, two of her early poems, “Pokanini Girl” and “Stink Eye” both employ pidgin dialect as an ordering linguistic mechanism. As such, the form attempts to mimic the dynamism and musicality of pidgin. “Pokinini Girl” begins as such: “Pokinini girl, she so skinny!/ Pokanini girl,/ wear size two bikini” (3). In “The Girl Can Run,” the first lines read as “The girl can run./ We marvel/ at her tongue./ As fast as her little/ legs can carry her/ she suns” (7). In poems where Song chooses to use longer lines and meter, they carry much more obvious narrative weight as in “Pineapple Fields” and “The Slow Upheaval of Mist.” Buddhist tropes of emptiness and cyclical suffering appear in Land of Bliss, especially in the title poem’s appearance at the conclusion: “The Pure Land is empty./ There’s nobody here” (122).
The quality most apparent in all of Cathy Song’s poetry is its accessibility. Her work can easily be taught in general poetry classes and more specifically in Asian American poetry classes. There aren’t always clear examples of “racialization” or ethnic tropes in all of her collections, so the question of how to define her work is always apparent. While her poetry does not have the experimental impulses or avant-garde nature of Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, or John Yau, Song charts a direct path toward philosophical inquiries of life and death, a style in which she obviously excels. In many ways, Song’s poetic oeuvre reminds me of the melancholic nature of Kimiko Hahn’s The Unbearable Heart. She consistently finds a way in which to transform loss and death into poetic inspiration. In this respect, there is an amazingly intimate nature to her poetry, especially one that appears in Cloud Moving Hands (2007) where Song’s poems deal very much with the aftermath of her mother’s death. In “My Mother’s Last Gift,” she reconsiders the productivity related to her mother’s deteriorating state:
Into dementia she slipped,
became brighter.
She lost the defenselessness
she maintained in health,
the core of her becoming
more real than the one
that fended off disappointments,
a husband’s unhappy harangue,
the chiming insults of children.
. . . .
We wanted her back
in her old form,
the one we counted on
as a receptacle for our scorn,
our stubbornness, our imaginary heroics,
unable to be grateful
for what was transpiring
what we did not deserve.
. . . .
Not fully of this world,
she floated above the body,
taken up with the concentration such art required.
In her presence we became more real
to ourselves than we had ever been (41).
Interestingly, this dementia provides a way into a new relationship between mother and children, something not quite expected, nor at first, something that the family members understand. However, ultimately, this change becomes a “gift” precisely because the family members must also let go of old prejudices that have soured their relationships.
One of the most moving poems, “My Beautiful Daughter Calls to Tell Me It’s Snowing,” recalls the cycles of communication between mothers and daughters. The speaker’s daughter as the title lets us know has called her mother and tells her that’s the snow is “beautiful, she says, and a little sad” (34). This poem is narratively driven in that it tells the story of how the speaker’s daughter cannot or will not be able to understand how different it was for her to complete her education at a time when her relationship with her own mother was so much more stilted. The poem clearly evokes the problematics of class as the speaker relays her challenges struggling to fit into a university culture where old money loomed all around her. The speaker calls the university experience for her, at first, one of exile. Her letters home to her mother (in contrast to her daughter’s PHONE call to her) are initially filled with wants and anxieties, but later:
At some point the letters changed, a gradual
easing of mind, like soil turned over in a garden bed.
Rather than my usual complaints,
one letter in particular described opening
a book of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe,
picked off the library shelf of new arrivals.
The presence of light, suffusing each plate,
rose out of the book itself,
like a formless intelligence,
gathering force over distance
to funnel into a single transmittal
words that sparked skin to metal.
Hours passed, or minutes—
when I looked up, outside the wall of glass,
it was snowing (36).
So wonderfully lucid in its aesthetic of exile and adaptation, the lyric speaker comes to view the world around her in a different manner. Whereas the lyric speaker did not at first find her life in college one of joy or exuberance, this last sequence extends a two-fold reconsideration of her experiences. First, there is the transformative quality found in books, one that is rendered through the ability of paintings to become animated. Second, the very strangeness of the college location is re-considered. Perhaps, the poem seems to suggest, there might be a way to find a home.
Cathy Song is the author of five poetry collections, including most famously, Picture Bride (1983), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poet Awards, immediately establishing Song as one of the foremost Asian American Poets. Her poem, “The Youngest Daughter,” was widely anthologized from this work. The title of that collection referred most specifically to her grandmother who traveled to Hawaii as a “picture bride.” Her second poetry collection was Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988), published by Norton. My review focuses on Song’s lesser critiqued works, her last three poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: School Figures (1994), Land of Bliss (2001), and Cloud Moving Hands (2007). Connecting these three poems together are the intense autobiographical nature of the lyrics in relation to the family and morality, death and life, suffering and release, especially for those closest to her. In this respect, her poetry seems to derive inspiration from the Confessional Poets, especially as she delves into the strange personal and even morally ambiguous reactions that one can have in moments of despair or loss. Over time, Song’s poetry had included more and more references to Buddhism, where this trend reaches its culmination in her latest collection. Song, born in 1955, is a biethnic Asian American and was raised in Hawaii. Her father was a second generation Korean American, while her mother was herself a Chinese picture bride. She attended Wellesley as an undergraduate and later completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Boston University. She is in many respects a regional poet, drawing upon Hawaiian culture through the use of pidgin dialect and slang phrases. She is also more largely very aware that her poetry derives out of and finds inspiration through its connection to other Asian American writers, many of whom share a common Hawaiian background. She has devoted poems to Gary Pak, Wing Tek Lum, Wakako Yamauchi, Juliet S. Kono, Darrell Lum, Eric Chock, among others.
The recurrent motif that Song’s poetry seems to draw out over the course of the three poems revolve around mortality. In “Journey” (from School Figures), the lyric speaker begins with: “My father is looking at the end of his life/ and it looks like the end of the world to him. There is no one left from his town to say good-bye. His childhood friends are saying good-bye to their own lives” (50). In “Sunworshippers,” the lyric speaker is warned against staying out too long outside due to the possibilities that the sun might darken her skin, but desire and caution do not always traffic in the same circles.
In “The Valley Boat” (from Land of Bliss), Song will turn the gaze upon her mother:
I lost my mother once
to sadness
but she returned
and I became her daughter again
My family and I rejoiced at the sound
of her laughter in the kitchen
….
When sadness rained
a year later,
I knew before she did
that she was going away,
that she would be leaving
us and all
we could do
was make her comfortable,
ease the passage
back into the dark
waters of herself
What is immediately apparent about Song’s poetry is its clarity. Especially rendered here, the lyrics aren’t intended to obfuscate in any form, nor do they contain particularly problematic or troubling metaphors. Instead, the poem is almost universalizable in its consideration of the loss of the parent. However, certain ethnic signifiers do provide “The Valley Boat” with particular as the lyric speaker divulges, “The broth grew strength/ from the oxtail” (36). The line breaks in “The Valley Boat” are reminiscent to many of the poems in School Figures in terms of their general length and meter, but in Land of Bliss, Song experiments with form and shape of her poems, by choosing to extend some poems out further a la Whitmanian free verse, while others are much more staccato in their delivery. For instance, two of her early poems, “Pokanini Girl” and “Stink Eye” both employ pidgin dialect as an ordering linguistic mechanism. As such, the form attempts to mimic the dynamism and musicality of pidgin. “Pokinini Girl” begins as such: “Pokinini girl, she so skinny!/ Pokanini girl,/ wear size two bikini” (3). In “The Girl Can Run,” the first lines read as “The girl can run./ We marvel/ at her tongue./ As fast as her little/ legs can carry her/ she suns” (7). In poems where Song chooses to use longer lines and meter, they carry much more obvious narrative weight as in “Pineapple Fields” and “The Slow Upheaval of Mist.” Buddhist tropes of emptiness and cyclical suffering appear in Land of Bliss, especially in the title poem’s appearance at the conclusion: “The Pure Land is empty./ There’s nobody here” (122).
The quality most apparent in all of Cathy Song’s poetry is its accessibility. Her work can easily be taught in general poetry classes and more specifically in Asian American poetry classes. There aren’t always clear examples of “racialization” or ethnic tropes in all of her collections, so the question of how to define her work is always apparent. While her poetry does not have the experimental impulses or avant-garde nature of Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, or John Yau, Song charts a direct path toward philosophical inquiries of life and death, a style in which she obviously excels. In many ways, Song’s poetic oeuvre reminds me of the melancholic nature of Kimiko Hahn’s The Unbearable Heart. She consistently finds a way in which to transform loss and death into poetic inspiration. In this respect, there is an amazingly intimate nature to her poetry, especially one that appears in Cloud Moving Hands (2007) where Song’s poems deal very much with the aftermath of her mother’s death. In “My Mother’s Last Gift,” she reconsiders the productivity related to her mother’s deteriorating state:
Into dementia she slipped,
became brighter.
She lost the defenselessness
she maintained in health,
the core of her becoming
more real than the one
that fended off disappointments,
a husband’s unhappy harangue,
the chiming insults of children.
. . . .
We wanted her back
in her old form,
the one we counted on
as a receptacle for our scorn,
our stubbornness, our imaginary heroics,
unable to be grateful
for what was transpiring
what we did not deserve.
. . . .
Not fully of this world,
she floated above the body,
taken up with the concentration such art required.
In her presence we became more real
to ourselves than we had ever been (41).
Interestingly, this dementia provides a way into a new relationship between mother and children, something not quite expected, nor at first, something that the family members understand. However, ultimately, this change becomes a “gift” precisely because the family members must also let go of old prejudices that have soured their relationships.
One of the most moving poems, “My Beautiful Daughter Calls to Tell Me It’s Snowing,” recalls the cycles of communication between mothers and daughters. The speaker’s daughter as the title lets us know has called her mother and tells her that’s the snow is “beautiful, she says, and a little sad” (34). This poem is narratively driven in that it tells the story of how the speaker’s daughter cannot or will not be able to understand how different it was for her to complete her education at a time when her relationship with her own mother was so much more stilted. The poem clearly evokes the problematics of class as the speaker relays her challenges struggling to fit into a university culture where old money loomed all around her. The speaker calls the university experience for her, at first, one of exile. Her letters home to her mother (in contrast to her daughter’s PHONE call to her) are initially filled with wants and anxieties, but later:
At some point the letters changed, a gradual
easing of mind, like soil turned over in a garden bed.
Rather than my usual complaints,
one letter in particular described opening
a book of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe,
picked off the library shelf of new arrivals.
The presence of light, suffusing each plate,
rose out of the book itself,
like a formless intelligence,
gathering force over distance
to funnel into a single transmittal
words that sparked skin to metal.
Hours passed, or minutes—
when I looked up, outside the wall of glass,
it was snowing (36).
So wonderfully lucid in its aesthetic of exile and adaptation, the lyric speaker comes to view the world around her in a different manner. Whereas the lyric speaker did not at first find her life in college one of joy or exuberance, this last sequence extends a two-fold reconsideration of her experiences. First, there is the transformative quality found in books, one that is rendered through the ability of paintings to become animated. Second, the very strangeness of the college location is re-considered. Perhaps, the poem seems to suggest, there might be a way to find a home.
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