What Imagination Calls For—Notes on Form
and Content in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow
A discussion with Marilyn Chin
Marilyn Chin will read her poetry at Drexel on October 16th, 2002. In the weeks preceding her visit, she and I have been conducting an e-mail exchange—she calls it "banter"—in which she has been answering questions and offering insights about her technique, themes, and overall poetic aspirations.
Specific poems referred to here are all included in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.
Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She teaches with the M.F.A. program at Sad Diego State University. Her first two books were The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, winner of the PEN Josephine Miles Award, and Dwarf Bamboo. Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Norton) is her most recent book.
Valerie Fox: Many poems in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow are narrative. Some, like "The Cock's Wife" and "The True Story of Mortar and Pestle," read like fables or traditional tales of some other kind. I'm curious about your interest in fables and folk tales. Do you set out to rewrite or recreate such stories? Do they tend to surface or develop organically in your poems?
Marilyn Chin: Fables and tales with morals are strong in the Chinese canon. My grandmother was filled with those tales. She used them as a part of her tyrannical Confucian child-rearing apparatus. I believe that they do pop up into my imagination "organically," as you put it, because I was used to hearing them as a child. However, I do love to be the "revisionist" and reinvent and revisit old tales and place them in a new political context. As you can see, I enjoy varying the forms and styles of the poems to give the reader a fulsome experience and to give my own muse some intellectual and technical stimulation.
VF: "The Cock's Wife" exploits the fable's familiar form in various ways. In so doing, it combines familiar and unfamiliar, expected and unexpected, open and closed. You "get away with," for example, having a lesson, in being didactic, because we expect this in a fable. In a subtle move, the final two lines make us reread and reassess what/who the poem is about. Can you discuss this poem, and explain the leap that occurs in the poem's closing lines?
MC: Yes, I "get away with" being didactic. For some reason, the poetry world is against didactic poems. First of all, this fable is a take off on some of those pre-renaissance cock and hen fables in the mid-1400s. This one is using the world stage—at the Hague, no doubt. It's a fable about how helpless we little chickadees are in the face of history...even if our mothers are being sacrificed. The last line is self-conscious—the fable itself is aware of its own complicity in this moral lassitude—a fable can only "paraphrase" what really happened. Does this make sense? Took me a long time to snap everything together.
VF: Yes, it's definitely clear. And also, how does "The Cock's Wife" connect up with some of your other poems, in thematic terms?
MC: Many of the poems in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow mourn my mother's passing. She was the sacrificial symbol in our family. She was all goodness and heart. We watched our father oppress her and eventually destroy her. The children feel tremendous guilt about her. Of course, as a political writer, I want the story of the self to move toward the universal. The story of my mother's sacrifice is a small part of a larger commentary about women's roles, feudalism, male domination, the uselessness of the United Nations, and the younger peevish generation with lax morals...everybody's implicated. Nobody comes out of the fable unscathed.
VF: That's interesting and important. I think it is important, for example, for us not to become self-righteous regarding issues of environment etc. In other words, just because we recycle doesn't mean we aren't responsible as human beings for the ongoing extinction of the species. Regarding the youth that you bring up…Do you feel any optimism at all regarding this "younger peevish" generation? I have noticed on campus a kind of reaction to or even an opposition to the "lax morals" you mention. Socially, for example. So…any optimism?
MC: I didn't mean to pick on this specific generation. I am very impressed with some of my young students. I believe that many of them have a social consciousness. Most of the male students are "feminized" and are very progressive. I believe that this "young" generation is very enlightened. They are brought up by feminists, environmentalists and a lot of them live in multicultural neighborhoods. Their American identity is very different from the identity of my generation. For instance, many of my blonde students in San Diego are bilingual and speak fluent Spanish, because they live on the border and in the hood. They're poor grad students and identify with the working class Latinos. Yes, I am very optimistic about this younger generation. The youthful chicks [in "The Cock's Wife"] are part of the cautionary tale—we must have convictions in this life; we must be aware of the political/social situation in the world. Generally, we must read the news and not bury our heads behind the suburban picket fence...etc.
VF: So how is the current (right now) political context influencing your writing? Is the speech Tony Blair made yesterday about Iraq's military capabilities, for instance, impacting the writing? If so, how?
MC: I'm emailing you from Marfa, Texas; I'm on a Lannan residency here and I didn't have a chance to watch Tony Blair on the telly. I don't believe in the words of any politicians at the moment. They are all liars. I just hope that there are good negotiators behind the scenes that could get us out of this mess. One should always opt for peace over war, for compassion over aggression. They should let women run the world. We would cut through the posturing...I hope that the 9/11 incident will galvanize the imaginations of all artists. Oh, I can go on about our social responsibility etc. I hate to be on that soapbox, but it's obvious that we have some important tasks in front of us.
VF: In an earlier message, one not included here, you had mentioned that you are writing prose. Is this recent foray into prose writing motivated by anything in particular? If so, what? And why does some subject matter end up as prose, and other subject matter end up as poetry?
MC: The great Tang poet Wang Wei once said, "There is poetry in my painting and painting in my poetry." I have always written little prose tales. Sometimes they appear in lines, sometimes they appear in prose blocks. They're usually very compressed, with strong images and utilize a lot of the techniques that I've learned in my long career in crafting poetry. I am a poet, first and foremost. So, don't think that I am going to write a 900-page potboiler novel any minute now. My favorite novel is Kafka's "Metamorphosis." Which most people would call a compressed tale.
VF: I enjoy poems in Rhapsody such as "Tonight while the Stars Are Shimmering" and "That Half Is Almost Gone" that very much use the page as a canvas, and as a reader I appreciate how you tell us about the Chinese characters and how "That Half" replicates them. It's fascinating.
MC: Yes, I like using the page as a "compositional field," where I could set up a poem as either an internal argument or an argument with the other. The character for "love" for instance, is such a beautiful construct that I think about that character often. I have seen it in my dreams.
VF: Do the same images that turn up in your dreams turn up in your poems, typically? Do your dreams influence your writing?
MC: The images in my dreams are often so weird and terrifying that I can't use them. I have a very active dream imagination. I wish that I could tap into them more often.
VF: The left/right composition of "Tonight while the Stars Are Shimmering" seems at first more arbitrary than in "That Half is Almost Gone"—yet, the left/right parts can be read separately, like separate columns basically, with ease. Having it both ways must have been difficult to achieve. Was your composition/arrangement based on a scheme? Was it improvised?
MC: Originally, the "staircased" lines in "Tonight" were set up to work like a tango, a lovers' argument. However, the obvious parity of the woman speaking on the left and the man speaking on the right appeared too artificial. So, I relaxed the scheme a bit. I cut that poem up many times. I finally put it all in the woman's point of view. I want the poem to sound "improvised," in a kind of formalized free verse...I want the reader to lose herself into the Southern California/Tang dynasty landscape, and let the polemics creep through the lines surreptitiously but organically. By the end of the poem, we know that it's about interracial love, but also about forgiveness and coming to terms with the guilt of the last century.
I guess we could attribute this kind of field composition/line experimentation to William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov, who was my teacher at Stanford. The three field composition poems: "That Half is Almost Gone," "Shattered Sonnets" and "Tonight while the Stars Are Shimmering"—each wants to have its own improvisational method. The muse prefers to discover the organic form for each poem and resists any set master plan. I want to think of form as a "supple" container and not as a monolithic mould. Levertov and Williams would argue that they have specific ideas that they are performing throughout the lineation process. I, on the other hand, take each poem, each stanza, each line, each phoneme, one at a time. The demands for one poem may be totally different than those for another. This is where form and content must work together harmoniously to create a near perfect masterpiece.
VF: In some of the longer poems near the end of the collection, including "Tonight while the Stars Are Shimmering" as well as the title poem, many of your themes converge: thinking of your mother, a blues ambience, oppression of women, and other themes no doubt. Are they converging especially, or intensely, near the end of the book? Or, to put it a little differently, could you comment on the shape of the book? Is there a narrative pattern or shape to the entire book? Is that important to you in your books?
MC: Yes, you're right on...You're a very good reader. I take the "integrity" of "the book" very seriously. The muse wanted to sing throughout Rhapsody, so various musical ideas and forms and rhythmic ebb and flow gave the book a feeling of cohesion. Also notice that there were no chapter breaks; I want the reader to go through the book, front to back, without interruption. Yes, you're right: my mother's death poems, the blues ambience, the larger issues of interracial love and the oppression of women work together as thematic architecture. They build into that long rhapsody in the end, which was written for my boyfriend, who died in an airplane accident in 2000. That poem was fashioned after the Han dynasty shamanistic long form, the fu. My imagination called for the past and the present, the east and the west, both sides of my literary and personal history—to sing toward closure.
It usually takes me five-six years to complete a book of poems, because I am very finicky about constructing a holistic experience for the reader. Once again, each book has its own individual personality and yearns to be presented in its own particular way that would set itself apart from the others. I guess, I could be so proud as to say that I write a very rigorous poetry and create rigorous books and hope that they can last more than those proverbial 15 minutes in the sun.
This interview originally appeared in The Drexel Online Journal (2002)
Copyright © Valerie Fox 2007 - 2008