A Review of Adrienne Su’s Middle Kingdom.

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

A Review of Adrienne Su’s Middle Kingdom. 

A very useful biography of Adrienne Su appears here:
http://users.dickinson.edu/~sua/

I’ve excerpted the portion most relevant to this review:
“Su is the author of these books of poems: Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D Press, forthcoming in January 2009). In 2007 she received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Virginia, Su has had residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the summer of 2003, she was the resident poet at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, the house where Robert Frost wrote many of his early poems.” 

Most notably, Su has a forthcoming poetry collection, which is always welcome news!  The title of Su’s Middle Kingdom clearly references China and connects to the ways in which her ethnic heritage appears as a focal point within many of her poems.  Generally, the poems invite the reader into small portraits of intimate moments, like a elderly woman lying in a hospital bed accompanied by her son.  It is this ability to carve out the personal and the familial that makes Middle Kingdom so successful. 

Middle Kingdom opens with a poem that reflects the general thematic ethnicity and race as a grounding theme for the collection:

“Address”

There are many ways of saying Chinese
in American. One means restaurant.
Others mean comprador, coolie, green army.

I've been practicing
how to walk and talk,
how to dress, what to do in a silk shop.

How to talk. America: Meiguo,
second tone and third.
The beautiful country.

In second grade we watched films
on King in Atlanta.
How our nation was mistaken:

They said we had hidden the Japanese
in California.
Everyone apologized to me.

But I am from Eldorado Drive
in the suburbs. Sara Lee's
pound cake thaws in the heart

of the home, the parakeet bobs on a dowel,
night doesn't move. The slumber party
teems in its spot in the dark

summer; the swimming pool gleams.
Somewhere an inherited teapot is smashed
by a baseball. There may be spaces

in the wrong parts of the face,
but America bursts with things it was never meant
to have: the intent to outlast

the centerless acres,
the wedding cake tiered to heaven.
Every season a new crop of names,

like mine. It's different
because it fits on a typewriter,
because it's first in its line,

because it is Adrienne.
It's French.
It means artful (3).

The structure is this poem invites the reader to first think of the various ways that Chinese Americans have been racialized and/or stereotyped.  Of course, by the sixth stanza, Su presents an important turn that considers the quite pedestrian ways in which the lyric speaker might see herself and how she might define her life beyond elements of race and/or ethnicity.  In this respect, the poem does not rehearse the ethnic food trope as a way to define the individual as it is “Sara Lee pound cake” which can be found in the “heart of the home.”  The most interesting line of the poem appears when the lyric speaker divulges that “America bursts with things it never meant to have,” the amazing diversity and abundance it possesses, the continual ability for the country to expand in a variety of directions.  The lyric speaker considers the importance of the self-address, that is of her name, and what it means.  She is both Chinese American and she is artful, the poem seems to suggest.  And yet, the issue with race and ethnicity is not so easily pushed aside in these private moments.  In “At Seven I Mistake a Documentary on the Internment Camp for an Announcement to All Asians in America,” Su’s Middle Kingdom continues the mobilize the disorienting nature of Otherness:

What will Marsy do when she wants to go roller skating?
Who will look out for Kadar, who can’t bark?

Mom says Disneyland is in California.  So is Hollywood.
Maybe they’ll let us go, for good behavior.

The man behind the barbed wire is talking in subtitles.
He points to the white flag.  He says the red spot

is the blood of the Japanese people.  Everything he says
sounds like the two words I know: arigato, sayonara.

We’ll need to know more than that.  We’ll have to ask
for food, and everyone will laugh at us (11). 

This poem, like “Address,” functions within a general lyric form.  Whereas “Address” is characterized by three line stanzas of a relatively short length, “At Seven I Mistake a Documentary on the Internment Camp for an Announcement to All Asians in America” employs two line stanzas of uniform, but larger length.  The poem explores the ways in which the speaker identifies herself with Japanese American internees as a child, thus situating a more broadly conceived Asian American panethnicity.  At the same time, the child’s inability to fully comprehend that which she is watching is rendered spectacularly in her reductive reasoning, whether it be through the possibility of leaving camp Disneyland or Hollywood based on good behavior or that the speaker conflates the words being spoken in Japanese, letting them run together. 

Su’s Middle Kingdom is also very notable for its usage of form.  I was particularly pleased with the inclusion of the “sestina” which I haven’t seen employed too often or in ways that seem to fit the form’s repetitive nature.  I’ve printed two excerpts below from poems in which the “sestina” form is used.

Elegy

You said the last word with your last
breath and I was not there to bury
it.  You spent your life writing
the note and intended
to go alone; you knew what
to say but poof! you were out (31). 

Shanghai ‘87

I follow a man and a thin woman up the stairs
of my mother’s house.  They are the first-floor family.
From a door on the second, a diminished woman
in a cotton gown watches.  Hers is the room
my aunts slept in before they joined the traffic
racing south, before the country shook its unbearable (62). 

The sestina contains six six-line stanzas with a concluding stanza of three sets and the poem is most structured around the concluding word of the lines of the first stanza.  In “Elegy,” for instance, these words are “last,” “bury,” “writing,” “intended”, “what,” and “out.”  These words are repeated at the conclusion of each lines in the following stanzas but in a particular order.  This cascading form has a definite hypnotic quality so the form relies upon the inventive ways in which the poet can make the repeating lines work dynamically.  “Elegy” is mobilized through the mourning of a lost friend, but what is important to note in terms of Su’s choice in the word selection is the varied ways in which they can be employed.   Whereas “intended” seems like the most rigid word of the six, “last” might be employed as a verb or an adjective in multiple iterations.  Su capitalizes on such variance within “Elegy” continually energizing the poem forward.  Interestingly, Su relies mostly on nouns for the repeated words in “Shanghai ’87.”  Whereas “Elegy” is much more abstract in quality and tone, one can see how this abstraction can be situated on the repetitive word phrases.  “Shanghai ‘87” is considerably more imagistic, providing the readers a sense of modern China’s move toward urbanization.  The repeated word emphasize both space and density and populations and thus augment the poem’s overall content and theme. 

I conclude this review with “China,” a poem that epitomizes Su’s effectively tangible lyrics:

You are all strange and what am I doing
without a plan?

Nothing along the train tracks.
Too much sugar in the lotus-root pudding—

My personal Narnia
is not personal at all.

After dinner we slurp noodles
and a boiled egg

so everyone will live forever
like the shining idea

of the other hand, blessed
by the one good spirit

whose breath
rustles the fine crop—

like the people everywhere wishing,
as they enter sleep,

to sway in those long fields
far away, without season (64). 

To Purchase the Book, or receive more information about it:
http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/middle_kingdom.html
http://www.amazon.com/Middle-Kingdom-Adrienne-Su/dp/1882295153/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220248354&sr=8-3