A LETTER FROM VICTORIA CHANG

Well, what a pleasant surprise today... an e-mail from Victoria Chang, in response to the posts below. I asked for -- and got -- permission from her to publish it here... so here it is.

Brian,

This is Victoria Chang. AD Thomas pointed me out to your blog posting about my book and I just wanted to drop you a quick note to tell you I really appreciate your careful analysis of my book, in particular your constructive criticism of the weaker poems. I too struggled with the exact poems (and many more) within the book, as they are such old poems, but ultimately decided they were central to the book's arc (I still agree with you, however :-) and that's why I never read those poems during readings! Anyway, thanks again for purchasing the book, reading it, and giving it your attention.

Hope you're doing well in Canada!

Victoria

SYNECDOCHE & VICTORIA CHANG

As I was reading through Victoria Chang's Circle, a half-forgotten term from my U of T English Literature years -- my god! it's twenty-five years ago -- kept nudging its way persistently into consciousness: Synecdoche. My allergic reaction to the overly systematic use of terms like synecdoche, repetend, hypallage -- all part and parcel of the jargon-filled structuralist (it wasn't yet post-s.) criticism so much the academic rage in those days -- was one of a number of reasons I decided not to persue a post-graduate degree in English literature. Now, for all I care, synecdoche and its little brother, metonymy, could be wingers on the Czech Republic hockey team. (I can just hear it: Synecdoche, he passes the puck to Metonymy, back to Synecdoche, he shoots, he SCORES!) But here I kept thinking as I read Victoria Chang's poetry: "synecdoche".... "good synecdoche"... hmm.

How weird, I thought.

Here's a simple example, from a simple poem (well, not so simple!) that I very much enjoy. I copied it from her website.

MORNING PORRIDGE

Before the pork buns steamed
in the pot, moisture in their

white folds, before the dried tofu
was trimmed into thin strips,

my father raked long-grain rice
out of the mesh bag, poured a bowl

of porridge, spread dried pork
shreds and salted peanuts into

a heap on top. Each morning
my grandmother listened for steam

rising up the stairs. She reclined
on her bed with the blue hydrangea

pattern I wanted. I handed her
the tray, glanced at the expanding

brown mass on her face. Day
after day, my father told me not to

wear white in my hair, not to leave
chopsticks vertical in a bowl of rice.

I did it anyway. One by one, the raisins
I stole from the box on her bedside table.

Don't you love that image of the vertical chopsticks in a bowl of rice? They stick persistantly into memory -- as I made dinner this evening (and it wasn't even rice), I thought of them. As I went to bed last night (no, I wasn't thinking about sex...), I thought of them. That they would be interpreted as bad, rude, whatever, and that she would be told not to leave them that way, but that she persisted in doing so anyway... isn't that emblematic of venerable Chinese custom, of restriction, of her nascent rebellion? And what of those little raisins she keeps stealing, "one by one"? The atmosphere -- her father's role is so deftly described, her grandmother, the expectations, the restraint, the self-regard.... The only thing that gives me pause (in a doubtful way) is the "expanding brown mass on her face". What is that? A smile? A cancer of some kind? I suppose the porridge...

But those chopsticks. Those raisins. Morning porridge -- morning being the beginning of life, + the pabulum we are all fed with... so emblematic! Yet so limpid, so simple...

Synecdoche. Synecdoche...

Because I am rusty on my rhetorical terminology I actually looked up synecdoche in my yellowing (and yes, dust-covered) Holman's Handbook to Literature, to see if I was remembering right. I am sure that many of you are also rusty -- or perhaps virgins to the intellectual rape that is hard-core structuralist criticism (please allow me the luxury of hard-won prejudices) -- so here, at the risk of being charged with a major offence, it is:

Synechdoche: A form of METAPHOR which in mentioning a part signifies the whole or the whole signifies the part. In order to be clear, a good synecdoche must be based on an important part of the whole and not a minor part and, usually, the part selected to stand for the whole must be the part most directly associated with the subject under discussion. Thus under the first restriction we say motor for automobile (rather than tire), and under the second we speak of infantry on the march as foot rather than as hands just as we use hands rather than foot for men who are at work at manual labor.

So I was right. More or less.

Question : how the can one critically apply this stuff every day, have it uppermost in mind, and still write passionate, groundbreaking poetry?

Nope. Still not obvious to me. After all these years.

Answer that one for me if you can...

A PLUG FOR CIRCLE

Victoria Chang's Circle is one book I just had to order as soon as it came out. I just had to get to know the poetry of/within/behind that extraordinary poet blogger so many of us enjoyed and admired.

I finally got it last week, and finished a first read-through yesterday. (Seems it was delayed... so was another book in the same order, Janet Frame's Angel at My Table, which still hasn't arrived at this table...)

Anyway, it's nice to report that this is one book I'm really glad I did order. Every poem was engaging -- the standout poems, the OK poems, even the poems I felt could have been better realized. Each offered rewards. V Chang definitely offers significant things to learn from a poem-making point of view.

Certain poets make one feel the force of their mastery of one or two elements or strategems common to much good poetry, but which are particularly salient in theirs. Robyn Sarah, as I was saying a few weeks back, makes one feel the force of her concision, of her precise control of conversational language;Victoria Chang makes one feel the mastery of another element: the laying out intelligent clues.

The strongest poems in the collection -- excellent poems by any standard -- were, for me, Yang Gui Fe, Eva Braun at Bershtesgarden, Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer, and Lantern Festival. In these a whole life or lives seemed to hang on an image or line, and in almost any given poem, a sequence of deftly placed lines or images outline a deliberate "story" or subtext.

If there are weaker poems in the collection, it seems to me that the clues provided are meagre, arbitary; they don't connect with a sufficiently strong necessity to satisfy me. "The Laws of the Garden" is one; "The Goal" and "Majority Rules" are two others. However, the poem that first appeared in Slate, Holiday Parties, struck me in an annoying way as one of these, but a careful re-reading reveals it to be a remarkable depiction of the social pressures faced by a young woman coming of age in a Chinese American family in the incongruous context of socially-disconnected North America. So at this point word is out on a number of these "insufficient" poems; for me, perhaps, all they deserve is a careful re-reading.

Anyway, I'll leave this as a sketch of a review -- a review in process, if you will, if I ever follow through. Clearly, though, Circle is well worth reading, and re-reading... & Victoria Chang a talented poet worth watching...

FINAL LINES

Final lines have been accosting me lately. In a long-distance conversation with Adze, my own most careful and dedicated critic (lately we've been mailing poems back and forth and critiquing…) he was saying that that final line has to be the most crucial - and most difficult to pull off -- in any poem. It may not be difficult to come up with something approximately right in a first draft, but it's often very hard to get it right on, in a clear, wholly satisfying way. (Sometimes, of course, one can be right on right off …but as Sheryl Crow said about songwriting, "Inspiration's great, but knowing the craft will save your ass!" This little post is about craft…)

I have a tendency to sum up or round off poems with a cryptic or mysterious statement, or return to the beginning in a kind of "refrain" or circular movement repeating earlier elements or variations of one of the first lines (if not the first line). As methods for arriving at final lines go, the "circular method" is certainly the easiest and perhaps the most common. … but there are other ways to finish that are far more ingenious, can have more impact, or resonate more deeply. Ending with surprising image, one that somehow sums up the poem although it hasn't appeared before, is one way. Having a concluding image or idea that the whole previous poem "leads up to" is a related , probably rarer way. Victoria Chang's poem, Yang Gui-Fe, which recently appeared in the New England Review, is a superb example of a final concluding line that the whole poem leads up to and that encapsulates the whole thing. Or think of the final lines of Hughes' Thought Fox.

Adze was also telling me that in my own recent poems (or rather, drafts of poems) some of my concluding lines might be best deleted so as to allow that deeper kind of resonance to happen. I think he's right here … I don't pretend to be immune at times to final line deficiencies. For instance, one rather lengthy draft called Emblem, I end with

lines bars binds of thought blending into colours curves hues
memories time and now on a shelf
this picture, twenty-three years later, me smiling with you --
I had put the camera on the rock and set the timer, we had to do it
a few times to "get it right" --
around it stones and twigs we had picked from the shore, embedded with dust,
emblems selected from that day

(NB: because Blogpspot protocol doesn't recognize internal spacing and pushes all lines to the left, the lines quoted above end up being rather more compressed than I'd like ... to see them more faithfully reproduced, click on my blog-city link …)

Adze suggested, take out the final "summing up" line, and let it end with "embedded with dust", a final image which packs much more symbolic resonance… Emblem too becomes a more interesting title: because it is a word that no longer in the poem, and therefore sheds a more singular light on the poem (more about titles later). This tendency to "talk about" and "sum up" with a line like "emblems selected from this day" is a habit taken from literary analysis, he thinks… I tend to think though that it's just crude expression of our need for symmetry…

(For some of our correspondance, see Blog City, June to August. )

After this conversation, I looked up Mark Strand on Poetry Connection (that was just before the Strand reading I attended). What did I see?

Mark Strand - Lines For Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

This is one excellent poem about dying… right up to that final line. Hate to say it … that line is terribly trite. Certainly unworthy of Strand. "Tell yourself that you love what you are" ... did Oprah take over? What a shame!

Staring at the poem with this god-awful line as if it were one of my own, I thought, hey, maybe it could end something like this:

tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you will go on
that you are.

This is of course is following the common "final line" method: Going back, repeating a major element in a kind of refrain or circular return.

Maybe, though, there's a better way. A more cunning, ingenious way…an encapsulating image, perhaps… can anyone out there come up with one? (It's fun to test our editorial skills this way…)

RETHINKING THE BLOG THING

Well, folks -- or rather folk, since I've only had one consistent vistor on this fledgling blogspot site, and we both who know he is! -- I've decided to rethink this blog thing. Basically, my girlfriend has accused me of being an internet addict -- and I think she may be right. I haven't been writing with the amazing energy of a Victoria Chang, but I've been reading a lot, spending many, many hours with my eyes glued to a screen, keeping up with two blog communities, etc. So, basically I've decided to limit my online activity for the next few weeks (two hours a week? four hours a week max?), just to see if I have withdrawl symptoms. Maybe I'll do little one-liners like one million footnotes or Lyn Hejinian, blogrolled to the left....check them out, they're fascinating!!! (CR Jenson pointed them out. If you want to see his excellent blog, go through my links at http://www.briancampbell.blog-city.com... or his comment posted below)