Fiona Tinwei Lam

Here’s a book I very much enjoyed this summer: Enter the Chrysanthemum by Vancouver poet Fiona Tinwei Lam. Her poems express powerful, simple emotions with extraordinary clarity and restraint; at times they are written with an almost oriental sense of delicacy, betraying the author’s Chinese-Canadian upbringing (although there is a twist: she was born in Scotland.) Lam handles family and childhood very well; her style and sensibility put me in mind of Li-Young Lee.

Actually, there’s a personal connection with this writer. I met her at the League of Canadian Poet’s Conference/Fest in Vancouver last June, where she was also launching her book. I was immediately impressed by what she read; we later traded books, and have been corresponding. About the relation of her verse with that of Li-Young Lee, she writes,

I love Li-Young Lee's lyrical voice, and his work is a real inspiration. His tone, his style of remembrance differ from mine in that I probably "twist the screw" so to speak in my last lines in a way he doesn't--a different path to insight perhaps. I'd say his poems are more formally "beautiful", and that he makes different use of rhythm and repetition. I probably tend to be more direct, using a super- distilled version of ordinary or even conversational speech, rather than elevated speech.

Below are three favourite poems from Chrysanthemum, posted with her permission.


RAPUNZEL

I want to say Make love to me
but instead, I mention the weather—
after weeks of damp, the air
is as mild as spring’s, the skies
swept clear of cloud.
I’m restless, tired of my tower
of virtue, this higher ground.

I want to say Climb up.
These nights alone,
I’ve made my hands yours,
the gaze of your palms
upon the gaze of my flesh.
You’ve opened me. I’m here,
waiting. Enter
what I’ve let no man enter:
Let us become
first woman, first man
in the garden of our limbs.
I’m eager for your body’s salt.
My hair flows down.


CALL

These days, every hour or less,
a phone call from my mother.

She flails and clutches at me through the line.
Help me. But I can’t drag her out.

I say, it’s alright, it’s alright.
But it’s not and I can’t
stop the dark as it pushes her in.

What’s left of her memory,
a skim of debris
that disintegrates while she flounders.

Words have no arms.
I love you saves no one
and soon I’ll cry too
from what’s gouged away
beneath the soothe and lull
of my voice.

I’ll coax out a blanket of sleep
and tuck it around her,
make her forget the forgetting.

Until the numbers too begin drifting
just out of grasp. Just like the daughter
I will no longer be.


SHOWER

Those mornings we’re together, the three of us
stand in the spray of soft diamonds—sunlight
through glass, and everything sparkling.
You hold our son high in your arms
while I lather him up. Our little otter,
he’s as sleek and slick as when he slid
from my womb. Then I lather you,
foot to thigh, chest to back—the heft and sinew
of what I have loved. You and he both
turn in the warm rain, my universe
of king and prince rinsed to glisten.
When you soap my skin, I live,
become brief silk in your hands, as luscious
as when your desire flowed. Only water
will love me when you are gone.

Li-Young Lee

Here's an interview with Li Young-Lee that I particularly enjoyed. Thanks to Pris for pointing this one out. Li Young-Lee is one of my favorites. The whole interview I found fascinating, but this part particularly leapt out at me:

Chang: I notice that in your new book you ask a lot of questions. For instance, you say: "What does my death weigh?" "When will I be born?" "What have I done with my God?" To whom do you think these questions are addressed?

Lee: I don't know. There's the poet, the audience, and the poet's—I'll call it daemon, but I mean that in the strict Greek sense. I think they meant something like divinization; the gods could demonize or possess you. And it seems to me that the poems and poets that I love all participate in this tri-axial relationship with the audience, the poet, and this third party. In Emily Dickinson, it would be the Master. Rilke's angels. Lorca's duende. Whitman's America. Ginsberg's mother. With the ancient T'ang Dynasty poets it would be the Universe. Then there's the poet; then there's the audience. If any of that relationship is missing, it seems to me that the poems are less rich. I don't know who's talking to whom. The service that poetry renders is that it manifests or demonstrates demonization. Divinization, let's use that word. I think that's the greatest service that a work of art can do.

It's a transcendent relationship finally. But you're alienated by your transcendence. I was recently talking about the duende, and everyone was talking about how nice it is—how wonderful and rich—forgetting that when Lorca talks about the duende, he talks about how you wrestle in it and that it kills you. And we know that, historically, all encounters with the divine leave you, on the one hand, enlarged—expanded, enhanced—and on the other hand, crippled. Like the story in the Old Testament. When Jacob wrestles God, he goes from being Jacob—which is the name of a person—to being Israel, which is the name of a multitude. He becomes enhanced and enlarged. But God cripples him. And In the Eastern tradition, there are always these things about getting your head cut off because a god visited you. Rilke says, "Every angel is terrifying." The human countenance is threatened or even shattered by the divine countenance, but at the same time, the divine countenance makes us more fully who we are.

Li-Young Lee on Poetry

The Summer 2004 issue of Rattle contains a wonderful interview with Li-Young Lee. Among the gems is this passage about wholeness:

...what I really love when I read a poem is the visceral experience of a sense of wholeness ... every poem is a portrait of the speaker, right? So if my experience of that speaker is a kind of integrated, a deeply integrated but at the same time highly differentiated psyche ... then I get a real sense of satisfaction, a sense somehow that in the poem the intellectual function is informed of the emotional function and they are both informed of the erotic function and the erotic function is informed of the spiritual function. Sometimes I have a problem when I read a poem that's just the mental function, it seems uninformed of the physical functions or the emotional functions or the spiritual functions. Or even a poem that is just the spiritual function working overtime but uninformed of the other functions. So what I love is a poem that somehow posits, proposes, a condition of wholeness.

I too subscribe to a notion that a poem ought to express as much as possible a poet's entire being, but seriously doubt I could articulate that notion better than Li-Young Lee does here. Thanks to Robert Peake for sharing this. I love Li-Young Lee's poetry. For more on him in this blog (inc. links to poems and interviews), click on the label below.

Dutrope; Me; Li-Young Lee

Thanks to C. Dale Young (who learned about it from another blogger), I've discovered Duotrope, extraordinary site listing lit mags, response times, etc. As CDY was saying, it's more searchable that Jeff Baher's compilation. It's also more international (it has quite a few Canadian magazines), links to websites, etc. I think I'll put it on top of my magazines list.

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I've lined up a gig at Noches de Poesia, which has fast become Montreal's premier multicultural poetry venue, and one Montreal's premier poetry venues period. (Well, there are only about three or four of them.) I'll be reading along with four others (as well as performing some music) on Wed., Nov. 1 starting at 6:30. Further details here.

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This weekend I read through Li-Young Lee's Rose, which I recently received in the mail along with a batch of other books. I love this poet's emotional warmth and depth, his disarming ease and innocence of expression. Poignant works about childhood and father -- a kind of looming (yet disturbing) hero-figure -- blend into beautiful poems about his own fatherhood, woven together by such elemental motifs as hair, blossoms, fruit -- and despite what that descrption may suggest, nary a word trite or precious (tho he he does verge at a couple of points. Good for him, I say.)

The reason I ordered Rose is that about a year ago in The Sun I came across some damned good poems from that book. Here's one of them. (And here's an exerpt of the interview with Lee in that same issue -- and I see now that Ilya Kaminsky is one of the interviewers. Interesting.)

Of course, it's often best to read first books first: that's where so many poets quite definitively define themselves, and from what I had read of Lee, I wanted to see that. Now I'm inclined to order his latest, perhaps, and work backwards.

P.S. I see also now that there's an interview with Li-Young Lee in the current issue of Rock Salt Plum Review. Very interesting. I'll have to read it when I have a free moment. My essay is also there, but funny, it didn't leap out at me that Lee was featured in the same issue perhaps because I hadn't read much of him yet.