Monday, May 31, 2021

Poem About My Life by Cece

by Cece

Aimed high 
reached low too many times
I am self critical 
in countless ways 

Lack luster 
simple solutions
Fight myself 
every moment of my day 

Introspect 
fearlessly and endlessly 
Making a magician 
blow his mind
How I land 
on my lyrics

Hours go by 
molding letters and words 
stringing my heart's accordion 
Gravity shifts 
deeper into my core 
stunning myself of possibilities of 
human brain

_____________________________________

Cece is a nonspeaking autistic and my 28-year-old daughter. She wrote this poem using a controversial technique called "Facilitated Communication." I was a skeptic at first. When I carefully observed Cece in tandem with a fine facilitator, I became convinced that FC can, if done properly, work to help some autistics communicate in language. In FC, facilitators hold the arm or hand of an autistic people to steady them so that they can type, usually on an I-pad. Cece's first sentence was "I no my letters."

The controversy first. Unfortunately, Facilitated Communication has resulted in some people being wrongly accused of sexual improprieties. This, obviously, can ruin people's lives and is downright horrible. I assume it stemmed from a parent or support person worried about a nonspeaking person's vulnerability. I always worry about someone hurting Cece and her being unable to report it. When they start typing, you want to ask, "Is anyone hurting you?" The problem with doing so, based on my limited experience with Cece and FC, is that some autistics new to expressive language use it in unconventional ways. What they take "hurt" to mean may not be what a neurotypical does. We need to be careful with FC and what comes out of its applications.

While using FC, Cece had a strange and compelling metaphoricity going on that I never fully understood. And then she grew tired of FC, and now rarely does it. The above poem was her first, and, in my estimation, her only publishable one. She has given me permission to post it here, knowing full well some of her former teachers and friends of her parents will enjoy it. She was a real artist when she wrote it, if I am a real artist, because she felt the process come to closure, just as I do. After fixing up a few lines, she suddenly started to flap her hands and make intense gleeful sounds: she was happy. Why? She knew she completed her first poem!

Why do I think FC can work? Many, many reasons. The following story is the most compelling. My ex-wife asked Cece, "Who are your friends?" Cece and the facilitator got to work, and then the facilitator reported that she typed absolute gibberish. My ex-wife asked her to spell it out. She did: "a-m-i-g-o-s." The facilitator knew absolutely no Spanish. I assume Cece learned the Spanish word for "friends" at her place of work for so-called "disabled" people. 

This is just one of many examples of Cece showing real understanding independent of the facilitator. Later, Cece grew anxious about FC. My guess is that coming into expressive language at age 26, which she was at the time, was too much. Perhaps we exaggerate the importance of language. For me, this is the lesson Cece is teaching. We can get by without language. There are other things to focus on.

Cece also paints in an abstract expressionist style. Some pictures of her paintings will appear in a post tomorrow. 

A big thanks to her generous facilitator. I assume she is reading this.

______________________________

In the Twin Cities, the connection for poetry and autism is Unrestricted Interest.

Nationally, the connection is Syracuse University.

See also the movies Wretches and Jabberers and Deej.

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Kerri Pullo 8

 The following two movies show asemic writer Kerri Pullo at work. This concludes over a week at the blog focusing on the work of Kerri Pullo. There are seven posts before this one that display her asemic work.



___________________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 


Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.




Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Kerri Pullo 7

 (Click on image to make it appear in a field of black.)





___________________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 


Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.





Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Kerri Pullo 6

 (Click on an image to isolate it in a field of black.)




_________________________________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 


Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.





Monday, May 24, 2021

Kerri Pullo 5

(Click on images to set them on a background.)





____________________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 


Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.



Sunday, May 23, 2021

Kerri Pullo 4

 (Click on images to set them on a background.)




______________________________________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 


Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.


Saturday, May 22, 2021

Kerri Pullo 3

 (Click on images to set them on a background.)





_______________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 


Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.

Friday, May 21, 2021

Kerri Pullo 2

(Click on images to set them on a background.)




_________________________________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 


Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Kerri Pullo 1

 Kerri Pullo's asemic work has appeared on this blog nine times. This post is the first in seven that will feature more of her work, including two videos of her "drawing" asemic letters. Thank you to Kerri for generously participating in this context over the years, and thank you to her for adding, complexly, to the beauty of this world. (Click on the painting to isolate it in a field of black.)



_________________________________________________

Kerri Pullo is a former psychologist born in the American Midwest. She is an asemic writing artist and visual poet who currently resides in Tucson, AZ, USA. Kerri describes her work as calligraphic nonverbal written expression and rhythmic writing. Her work reflects the study of thought without language and the psychological effects of both creating and perceiving asemic written art forms. 

Materials: Most often I create works using ink on paper. I use all different types of writing instruments such as traditional pens, paint markers, gel ink pens, inktense pencils, and sharpies. The paper I use also varies widely including painted recycled paper, watercolor paper, and basic copy paper. I also enjoy experimenting with a combination of acrylic paints, inks, markers, and found collage materials on larger canvas or board. I also consider music to be an important material in my process.

Monday, May 17, 2021

The Casual Abandon of a Particular Dandelion

 by Jefferson Hansen

written on a picnic table at a solo picnic

"Thus are the world’s troubles due to the love of knowledge.” Chuang tzu

The scent of Cutter
insect repellant. A chittering,
the sound, I guess,
of some insect.
Someone with a degree, somewhere,
knows. But that person isn't here,
now.
The state of the world
hangs in the balance
over insects. This I believe
though I can't prove it
in a formal kind
of way. But it's here,
now. Because things often
seem stitched together
by the smallest things,
the particulars. The insects
hold everything we call "everything"
together. I push them
away with repellent. Farmers
kill them with pesticides,
not unlike bombing the
microfauna of the gut
with antibiotics. A bird
titters; I can't identify.
My knowledge has splattered
onto the grass, beneath
the picnic table, and lies there
as pointless as it has
always been. After days
of looking through search engines
for an article by an academic
who could support and aid
credence to an insight I had,
I found the trail starting at 
Wikipedia. She makes the same
argument I do, but with
a credentialed oomph. Yeah,
we need that sometimes.
Her book is on the way.
The insects are repelled or killed.
The birds twitter because
they twitter. And I write for
I write. I once described it
as akin to breathing, for me.
I would say, "screw the system,"
but the system isn't worth the effort.
There's a wide river nearby.
I hiked four hours this morning.
Some larger force, perhaps larger
meanings, I don't know, propels
all of this in myriad directions, 
and it is not close to human—
some magic dance we participate in
well beyond our possible ken.
And the insects will die.
And the fabric will tear.
And it all won't matter
to ahuman meanings, that
went on before us, that
go on beyond us, moving
from insect to insect, from
alpha centauri to a single
blade of grass, from the bleeding
moon to a plastic bag
rolling across the asphalt in
the breeze. It is all so
much beyond us, all of us.
I surrender all my knowledge
to the meaning inherent in
a single dandelion, announcing
its yellow with a casual
abandon.

____________________________


Friday, May 14, 2021

Tea Party? For Real?

A cake of white tea

A gong fu tea set, according to what I was told




So we had a tea party on May 11, 2021! I was excited because I am a tea nut and during the COVID lockdown, I had nobody to share my green and oolong and Pu'er with. It bummed me out. But my friends came over today, and we drank tea and read poems for each other. Since I'm such a ham, I videotaped my reading of one poem. Given that it was a tea party, I was, of course, appropriate. The poem is delicate, witty, and, oh, so civilized. It is called "Your Majesty the Motherfucker." Hang on tight! —Jeff

If you're new to the blog and wonder who this ragamuffin is, my website is below. I would describe myself as a wayward and off-the-wall writer-intellectual, and I have the rather bizarre and conflicting credentials to prove it. I hold a Ph.D.—having studied with major poets and a leading philosopher—and have, essentially, been employed in working class jobs in the human services field for the last 10 years. All people's lives are absurd to a certain degree, but I do sense that mine is especially absurd. I choose to embrace the absurdity and ride it all the way to what could be called home, like a surfer on a great wave. That's the existential place where the ironies contained in the very title of the above poem reside. 

I read widely and write in a variety of forums, some under an assumed name. I use the assumed name not for aesthetic reasons, but for eminently practical ones. I like writing essays, some very wild and some quite straightforward, and examples of them are on this blog. For more on me, see JeffersonHansen.com. Text of “Your Majesty the Motherfucker” below.

Your Majesty the Motherfucker

 

by Jefferson Hansen

 

For carissa who, sadly, heard me come up with the line


design of detriment & vehicle turning at sharp corners to whistle around the last loop of lions loosened from the zoo's hold—do you wish you had your mommy tonight?

 

        being accosted

    on the corner by

             Christians trying to save you

                 & you go on a

               lecture about how

if there is a God

   He is the God

                   of Job

              of cruelty

                  who plays with us as

tumbling dice

 

you call yourself

          "Your Majesty

   the Motherfucker"

      and recite a poem

          about facing down the red

 eyes of death

& explain you would

      rather live knowing

         death is the end

             making all this

   so much more

                than mere preparation

 

malingering mitigation running the risk of misaligned priorities & attempts to scale a parallel universe that only might exist because we are what we forgot we were

 

      they ask if you,

 Your Majesty, believe

         in sin and you

      ask if a master

    raping a slave

             is sin

        and when they say, "yes"

  you say, "Then

      Abraham is

 a sinner by your

    Good Book's

          own account."

 

You ask if

   setting up a friend

      to die

     in order to steal

  his wife is a

          sin

     & say into their

 startled eyes,

"If so, then

       King David is a sinner."

 

excoriated renditions running down the night of intrepid violations and witchcraft revelry when lions go wild because suppression and repression lead only to life as skipped & skimped, weakened & wizened, haunted by shadows of what could have been

 

     they say,

 "you need saving"

you ask "from what

 a God cruel enough

       to kill Job's kids

   just to mess

       with him so

             that he might

        prove a point to

    Satan? It's in

  your Good Book"

 

  they ask if

you love Jesus

        and you counter not

      if he denies

    loving

        if Christ hates loving

  I would rather

be anywhere 

  than with him even

 hell itself

 

haunted by the passing of the pauses and a pristine juggernaut as untimely meditations about the sideswipe and the cranked craft tripped at just this angle to move you where you didn't go

 

         the Christians ask

    that you read

the Good Book

 & you say

     "I already read

  the stupid

thing three 

      times & I have

  no desire

        to get saved

on its terms"

 

          you walk on in the

    night cracked

urban sidewalks

 blaze white

     a man pours Pepsi

   onto his hand

            could it be

         an antiseptic?

 

the moon the man child the missive of darkness demanding of you a stance posture that gives into the tension of passing taut as tiger skin supple as peppered leather

 

down the street

   dust blows

          into the teeth

      of breeze

  leaves swirl

up and around

     and reattach

    to branches

 other leaves roll

   down the street

 rustling silently

 

      skin pricks

to voice of man

   graveled

        over electric guitar

    crude battery amp

 squeaky sounds

seems to know 

   about four songs

 

sideways through skinny door in ether another place where balloons pop inward & food is ingested through pores of skin where gravity goes parallel & you whistle from belly button

 

     you dive into

hole-in-wall

 saloon where

        first time ever

     you hear Captain

   Beefheart over bar

speakers 

     chunky beat slashing

    atonal guitars

   bass clarinet

         squirming as snake

 

      obscure Doc at

 the Radar Station

   album “She’s a

       hothead/Sizzle

 on a spit/

tsssssssssss”

     goes Captain & I

 peck at beer

thinking of 

    spastic

         dandelions

 

living where you don’t & trying where you can’t growing where you shrink & the downward trend of upwards say the stocks will ripple their profit through this night only tonight & the crowds on the street dance to the beat of the ticker whether or not they care to notice

 

      “genetically mean”

 says the Captain

     & you turn to

   the woman washing

  dishes behind

         bar ask if

you can entertain

     while she works

 

  tell her of

the story of

   the Christians

identify yourself as

    “Your Majesty

the Motherfucker”

  she turns purple as

      the dishsoap

     and swirls into

 disappearing

 

if the cry considers the alternate crash the way out of the attic cramp the basement banter insisting on its rasping voice with the Captain himself “best batch yet”

 

    bed beckons

after beer

  & you wander home

        fall onto mattress

 on floor

        to dream of the

  whistle of whiskey

fog of

        forgotten

    identity

 the key to “freedom”

 

 

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Office Sorrow

 by Christy Merry

Grief gets heavier each time around
as if it invokes the combined losses of your lifetime.
Too many hits and you are under brick weight.
Movement, joy, seem improbable occurrences.

I return to the dance of the scanner.
I think of you, my cousin.
I think of your husband who left the earth
last week, in an automobile accident.

I think,
there is probably not enough tape for this.

_________________________________

This poem is part of Christy's chapbook Before Cancer Comes For Me. Christy writes, "As for buying the book, the details are at www.christymerry.com/books - basically, if anyone donates $10 or more to Jessa Roquet’s gofundme or her Venmo so that she can pay her medical bills to fight her liver cancer, and forwards the email confirmation of that gift along with their name and physical address to me, I will send them the book. I published the book to be used as a fundraiser."



Saturday, May 8, 2021

The Bennett—Hansen—Cassidy Multi-Genre Dialogue

by John M. Bennett, Jefferson Hansen, Tom Cassidy

Well, we have a little writing, a little visual art, a little disability rights, a little asemia, a little Rip Van Winkle-style sleeping, and some weird, weird, weird wolves. While viewing and listening to three movies of Jefferson Hansen reading poems, Tom Cassidy (a.k.a. Musicmaster) created art over some pieces sent to him by John M. Bennett. Movies and drawings below. Engage. Tell us what you think. Keep the dialogue going!















________________________________

For more on the artists see:

(As of now, Tom's being a little shy.)



Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Wang Ping's MY NAME IS IMMIGRANT

by Jefferson Hansen 


[The font gets funky at one point in this review, and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. Sorry. --Jeff]

Wang Ping's 2020 poetry volume My Name is Immigrant  (Hanging Loose) presents some new poems by her along with, at times, radical reconfigurations of previously published work. I am thinking specifically of the long poem "Ten Thousand Waves," which appeared in and was the title poem of her 2014 collection. Here, it is renamed "The Cocklepickers." The poem gives voice to the 23 Chinese immigrants to England who died on February 5, 2004, when the tide came up too fast while they were working as cockle collectors. They drowned.

In My Name is Immigrant, the short sections of this poem, in the voice of various named victims, are placed throughout the book as a sort of musical refrain. What's more, Ping adds two prose sections that explain the genesis of the poem. (I refer to her as "Ping," which in English would be what we call her first name, because I know her personally.) She seems to have mixed feelings about it. Isaac Julien invited her to Morecombe Bay to write a poem for a film he was making about the tragedy. Ping writes: "So the tragedy of the cockle pickers is the tragedy of every immigrant, also mine. Their desire, their death and hope is also mine...Our story must be told and heard, through ten thousand waves" (12).

As we readers make our way through the various poems in this book, which address Hakka miners in China, Black victims of police violence in the U.S., and Central American refugees coming to the U.S., the short poems of "Cockle Pickers" keep appearing. Then comes the kicker. A prose piece entitled "Ten Thousand Waves" addresses the class and racial issues behind cultural productions. She describes the film showing at MOMA, in New York: "As the spectacle woos and wows the audience, as the filmmaker floats on Cloud Nine in full glory, twenty-three souls still linger on the floor of the Irish Sea, waiting to go home" (90).

Then Ping takes on the voice of the drowned:

Upon our hands your art is made
Upon our eyes your fame is established
Upon our feet you travel the world in luxury (91)

She ends the poem by asking "Look at us...See our shadows, flickering / in the deep of your conscience" (91)

When reading this, I was surprised by this analysis, and a little sickened. There is a whole cultural industry that makes prestige and money out of other people's suffering. Ping seems to be concerned that, in this instance, the cultural game erased the human tragedy. Certainly, as an award-winning, jet setting cultural worker herself, Ping couldn't be completely disavowing the cultural industry. But she is pointing out that, even in the telling of the stories of the dispossessed, they can be dispossessed again. What is Ping asking us to do? I think she is asking us not to be heedless of each other in our ambition. She is also asserting that her main identity is immigrant—the title of the book reveals this—more than prestigious cultural worker.

Ping gives voice not only to Chinese immigrants, but to other immigrants, as well. At one point, she seems a bit defiant about taking on the voice of a Honduras asylum seeker:

I don't have a choice. The voice chooses me, as a conduit, to feel, cry, breathe, write, so I can live, so we can live.

Call me appropriator, call me possessed, call me fraud...as long as my heart is in the right place, my voice anchored to the earth, the story will rise to the stars where all elements are connected (50)

 I take it from this passage that Ping thinks we can be too precious about our differences. If we proceed with an open heart, empathy is possible. Indeed, in the poem that begins the book she writes "we came from the same mother in Africa / we're your children, sisters and brothers, father and mother" (7) The "we" here is immigrants the world over, and the implication is that we are all immigrants, and all, ultimately, from Africa, where humanity emerged in the evolutionary past. Are all humans united by our connection to earth, by our connection to Africa? 

On a personal note, this book reminded me of many of my fellow workers in group homes, many of whom were African immigrants to Minnesota. From 2012 to 2017 I worked in three group homes—two for developmentally disabled adults and one for mentally ill adults. A couple of my fellow workers put in 16 hours a day: after working the evening shift with me, they went to another group home to put in an awake night shift. Five days a week. While I worried for their health, both of them were invariably cheerful. One was nearing 60 years old. In poem after poem, Ping gives voice to the desperation and pain of having to work so much.

But I also thought of another African immigrant I know. She came to the U.S. as a teenager knowing almost no English. She now has a Master's degree and runs her own business, with employees. She's my therapist. This part of immigration is addressed in Ping's book in a couple places. One is the back cover, where her many awards are mentioned, and where Gary Snyder, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, provides a generous blurb. Ping is a tremendous success, who came to America with only $28 dollars in her pocket, earned a Ph.D., and is a respected writer.

The second place she addresses success is when she says this is not enough for some in power:

        I refuse to believe this powdered lie—

            "Not good enough, will never be good enough"

                Because of our accent, our immigrant hands and feet (81)

This poem obliquely addresses some employment issues Ping has dealt with over the past decade.  While a lot of people, including myself, have suffered employment woes, they take on a harsher and more biting form when race and otherness is part of the equation. 

And this happens even within China. In a poem I have been familiar with for a decade, "Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth Metal," Ping tells the story of a minority Hakka man working a dangerous mining job so that the privileged the world over can have batteries for their computers and cars. One of those privileged is his boss, who drives a battery-powered Prius: "Mongolia, / Our origin, now a rare earth pit for the world" (19).

Ping in several places asks us to look at immigrants and other dispossessed people, and see them in their full humanity. In "Blind Sight, Hidden Brain," she complicates this admonition. This wonderful poem demonstrates what poetry can do that journalism and history cannot: by using metaphor and contextualization, current and historical events are shown to depend on how we see. And this seeing has to do with not only the nervous system, but attitude and bias. Seeing, Ping shows, is relative: a dragonfly has "thirty thousand images in each eye" (87). What does this relativity mean? We choose what to see. Seeing is, therefore, an ethical choice. Do we choose to see a 12-year-old Black male playing with a BB gun as a dangerous threat? Do we choose to see a shaking submarine as grounds for nuclear war? Ping addresses these life-and-death issues in this poem, and shows how profoundly we need to attend to the structure of our seeing.

Reading this book and Ping's Ten Thousand Waves has taught me a lot about immigration and economics. Hers is a cosmopolitan world where we humans are all connected economically, ecologically, and spiritually. But we often don't see this connection because we are heedless of each other in our greed and ambition. Heedlessness leads to unneeded suffering. Ping writes, "My ex said I carry the weight of the world on my back" (50). By doing so, she is able to remind us to notice each other, particularly the forgotten and dispossessed, both in our neighborhood and in the world at large.

___________________________

In 2014 my review of Ping's 2014 book Ten Thousand Waves (Wings Press) appeared in the now defunct AlteredScale journal, which this blog accompanied. I reprint it below. Ping does tell me the book is out of print, but you may be able to find it used. Enjoy.

Ten Thousand Waves by Wang Ping


review by Jefferson Hansen




It is a truism that the luxuries and privileges of the few are often paid for by the sufferings of the many. Someone has to work in the factory to produce a board game that diverts the lucky for a few moments. Journalists, social scientists, and novelists have all addressed this relationship. Wang Ping, a Chinese-American poet, in her latest collection, Ten Thousand Waves, offers a variety of specifically poetic approaches to the issue. She uses precisely selected, usually one- to three-syllable words, to bear witness to and document the lives of Chinese and Chinese immigrant workers worldwide. She skillfully uses line breaks and prose poems that read like flash fiction to approach the issue from a variety of angles.

            The “waves” of the title refers to literal waves of water in the title poem, to the waves of migrants within and immigrants from China, to the complex stasis of waves, the way they manage to move and not move at the same time. All is fluid, but all also stays the same.

            The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Bargain,” explores the trade-offs made either for modern privilege or to simply survive difficulties. She shows the suffering behind our conveniences and wealth. In the second section, “The Price of a Finger,” she specifically addresses violence in factories, toward artists, and from various state apparati world wide. The final section, “Crossing the Line,” addresses the immigrant experience from the perspective of workers.

            The book’s opening poem, “A Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth in South China,” which also appeared as a broadside published by TheAlteredScalePress, documents the lives of the miners who collect the materials that go into batteries. They are Hakka, nomads from Mongolia, who use ancient methods to leech metals from the “neon soil” that “the world/Wants—‘vitamins’ for I-pods/Plasma TVs, wind turbines, guided missiles” (5). The greatest irony occurs when the “boss” appears in “his Prius, powered by the sludge/That chokes my eyes, ears, nose.” The toxic chemicals the workers are exposed to allow the boss to oversee them in a car powered by a battery which uses the very chemicals they mine.

            Meanwhile, the lives of the miners remain primitive. They use a fire stove while the metals and minerals that power modern conveniences invade their skin and organs. Wang documents the suffering necessary for the very existence of our modern conveniences. I-Pads, and those who use them, cause people to feel as if they are “Slaves on this earth.”

            This poem serves as an emblem for much of this book. In most of the poems Wang returns to the theme of the suffering that underlies modern convenience and luxury. She does not, however, absolve herself from complicity. In “Bargain,” the second poem and also the name of the first section of poems, Wang herself bargains down a street vendor who is selling “homemade shoes/Awkward and lovely like the maiden behind the stand.” Not until Wang is home in Minneapolis (she lives in the Twin Cities), does she consider the full impact of what she did, “ ‘You saved a dime, fool, but lost your soul’” (11). In another poem, “Young Monk at Debating Court, Wang herself bargains with a young monk so she can take photographs (and most cameras use batteries, to return us to “A Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth in South China.”) This poem is written in prose (as with seven other poems in the section), and shares with flash fiction an economical plot, few characters, and a precise focus on an specific interaction full of implications.

            The book is not simply a downer. Wang, more often than not, speaks through characters—young, old, male, female, but always Chinese or of Chinese descent. They are almost always of the working class, but they sometimes retain hope, if not for themselves, for their children—“A peasant’s belief is as stubborn as a mule’s in the grass” (25). The junk collector in one tells us that he will never get rich but he

            

            sends our son

            to a good school

            . . .

 

            And he laughs, showing

            All his teeth, browned

            By cheap cigarettes.

 

While the focus of the poem is certainly the main character, Wang makes him come alive with her precise attention to poetics. In the full stanza quoted above, she does not stop the lines with the punctuation mark. By doing so, she isolates the key words “showing” and “browned” at the end of the line. This characterizes the laughing man by emphasizing the very colors of his complicated hopefulness. His body decays, but his laughter, grounded in hope for his son, remains.

            In one of the book’s most gorgeous poems, “Wild Pheasant,” Wang gives voice to a sex worker—“pheasant,” we learn in the notes, is a slang term for prostitutes. In this ballad-like poem a young man leaves his bride to find work. She never stops loving him, but to support herself and their five-year-old, whom he never sees, she becomes “a pheasant, or a spittoon filled with cigarette butts/My flesh rots beneath powder and rouge” (46). Through imagery, repetition, a powerful vaguely iambic line, and occasional off-rhyme Wang produces beautiful lyric cadences: “Dewdrops of faith bejeweling its upturned eaves” (46). 

            This poem concludes the section entitled “Bargain”: it is the ultimate bargain. In order to feed their son and do right by her absent love, she must “love” strangers for money. The lyric cadence helps to create this complex irony: there is great love and beauty in this painful story, a beauty at one with the very sound of the verse. As with many of Wang’s poems, the short words and seeming directness contain multitudes. This poem rivals the great ballads in its power.

            The title poem of the second section, “The Price of a Finger,” is its centerpiece. A long collage poem, we learn in the notes that there is, indeed, a price put on fingers lost in factory accidents. A worker who loses any finger past a joint is awarded six months salary. The poem is divided into two columns, and combines quotations from factory workers, owners and advertisements with stark facts about what these factories produce. We learn about high-pressure hammers. We learn what it takes to make fake eyelashes. We learn about farmworkers who watch the trucks from the factories rush by on the highway. We learn about both the monetary and human costs of all of this. And we learn about the material success of the factory owners. Wang presents these facts and quotations without comment. The blocks of texts, staggered down the page, invites us to fill in the blank space, to draw conclusions and insights on our own, without the explicit help of the poet. 

            The centerpiece of the third, and last, section of the book addresses the tragedy of Chinese immigrant workers drowned while picking cockles (edible clams) from Morecombe Bay in England. It is the title poem of the book. Wang divides the it into 19 short sections, 18 of which are narrated by an immigrant—occasionally two immigrants—killed that day, and the 19th by a chorus of the ghosts. Ironically, the deaths occurred on the night of the Lantern Festival, traditionally a Chinese holiday. But these people had to work.

            Wang orders the monologues so as to tell the story. The first one, by Xie Xiou Wen, begins “On the night of the Lantern Festival/We stream into the sea” (74). This creates the setting. Later poems address the problem: “we can’t make out the sea/No stars point our path to shore” (75). The storm confuses the immigrants and leaves every one drowned. Their job was to pick sea food for others.

            Desire marks most of these monologues: for home, for the food of home, for the fruit of  Fujian province, where most of the immigrants were from. Wang develops the irony of their dying on a Chinese holiday by placing so much emphasis on their desire for native food. They pick luxury food while pining away, during a cold death, for the simple fruits of their homeland that can be cut off a tree.

            As we move toward the conclusion of the poem, many of the dying people apologize for leaving their families alone—forced to work and live without their help. I’m not sure what they apologize for: for immigrating, for taking this job, for the unforgiving sea itself. The reason is not given; the heartache is.

            “We move with the sea/Plankton, eels, turtles” (81). In the end, the immigrants become mere fodder in the sea, material floating and ebbing. Or do they? This poem becomes their voices; this poem displays the cruelty of their death; Wang Ping gives them an afterlife, makes them more than mere corpses. No, they are ghosts, with spirit: “Our blood boils with longing” (82).

            The book ends with “My Name Is Suni,” a poem that invokes the shamans of “the Nuosu or Yi people, an ethnic group of about eight million people who live primarily in the rural, mountainous areas of Vietnam, Thailand, and China” (notes 98). But it is in the voice of a beautiful young woman who commits suicide. The poem ends

 

            My arms cardle eagles, ghosts and autumn weeds

 

            In the soil

            Potatoes await the thunder

            To grow wings (91)

 

This book is about growing wings. It is about transforming the worst suffering, through the craft of poetry, into a crystalline beauty, one that makes us determined to do something about this pain. But the wings remain, the beauty remains, in the struggle, and in the making of it into art.

 

 

 

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