After reading my piece Monday on Holly Iglesias’ Boxing inside the Box, François Luong sent me the following interview with Kimiko Hahn, which originally appeared in the newsletter eBao. I found (find) it fascinating and asked if I could reprint it here.
At the Intersection of Murasaki Shikibu and Rapunzel:
the Poet Kimiko Hahn
The poet Kimiko Hahn is a member of the growing generation of Asian-American poets receiving the spotlight in the contemporary American poetry scene, along with Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, C. Dale Young, Li-Young Lee and Rick Noguchi. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Artist’s Daughter (W.W. Norton, 2002), Mosquito and Ant (W.W. Norton, 2000) and the forthcoming The Narrow Road to the Interior. She has received an American Book Award and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, among other awards. She will join the faculty of the prestigious Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston this fall, after having taught at Queens College/CUNY in New York City.
François Luong: When she addressed the American Poetry Society, Marilyn Chin said: “I am a Chinese-American poet, born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. My poetry both laments and celebrates my ‘hyphenated’ identity.” Like Chin’s use of the Chinese quatrain, you reappropriate Japanese traditional form of the zuihitsu with “The Downpour,” and acknowledge the tanka in “Chekov’s Diner,” but you also use the Chinese form of nu shu with “Mosquito and Ant.” In this movement, is there an experience that is shared by all Asian-Americans and that is not exclusive to Chinese-Americans or Japanese-Americans?
Kimiko Hahn: If by ‘movement’ you are referring to a trend that Marilyn and I are a part of—I would hesitate to call it that; and I would really hesitate to speak for other Asian Americans. Having said so, I do believe this reappropriation is a recurring interest—as a way of tending to roots—even as subject matter.
Or perhaps you are referring to a movement within my work? In Mosquito and Ant my interest in nu shu has more to do with a shared experience among women—rather than Asian Americans; i.e., the notion that women need to speak to one another and sometimes in a language of their own. I am always amazed that although women’s education historically works against communication, it sometimes works for the making of an exquisite correspondence. (Hence my preoccupation with Heian literature.) At the time of writing this sequence, I felt I needed to return to the flat Chinese and Japanese image and although I did not use a Chinese form, I did draw inspiration from the idea of nu shu.
FL: For the poem “Tissue,” you cite Adrienne Rich’s line “The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry” as your triggering line. But while Rich’s poem becomes a meditation on femininity and motherhood, your poem expands on this trope to become a meditation on language and disjunction as well. How does being a Japanese-American influence your writing?
KH: As the grandchild of immigrants (my issei grandparents [Note: issei refers to a first-generation Japanese immigrant] on Maui spoke almost no English; my mother spoke English, Japanese and pidgin) I sometimes feel that I am not going to say what I mean. That there is a deficiency. However, I am self-possessed enough to also feel that I will not be silenced or stopped—even by myself—and that I can push toward clarity. In writing, one can revise. And play very freely.
Also, like other grandchildren of immigrants, I did not learn their language with real fluency. But I did learn that my mother could say things using different words. “Peach” was also “momo.” This is an important awareness. I guess you could say I was emotionally bilingual—which is a way of bridging “disjunction.”
On the other hand—my experience of disjunction is not limited thematically to language or even the subject of identity. (I guess it is the most obvious given that I am Eurasian.)
As you pointed out, traditional East Asian aesthetics and forms have influenced my work. When I studied Japanese literature in college, the works by Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, and others were essential to my development. I think (I hope) I have approached these writings from the point of view of a Japanese-American woman, rather than a Western tourist. I hope I bring to the readings a possession of this culture. I hope I bring—what? a cheekiness for even thinking my usage may differ from a Caucasian Westerner?
Returning for a moment to your first question: one shared experience I often see in Asian-American (and in other immigrant) work is this kind of anxiety with English as well as with one’s “mother’s tongue.” We see this in Marilyn’s poetry as well as Li-Young Lee’s. One is never quite “at home” in either language—but is also tenaciously possessive. And determined to get it—in both senses of the phrase.
And, language, itself, (English and Japanese in particular) is a concern in my poetry—so that what may be “postmodern” to one poet, is a means of exploring my relationship to Western and Eastern cultures, these various roots.
FL: As we mentioned earlier, you reappropriate traditional Asian poetic forms, but use them in a contemporary context, such as in your poem “Lady Rokujo Hails a Taxi.” We also find you writing in the poem “Orchid Root,” “I need to return to the Chinese women poets. / The flat language / of pine and orchid.” Do you see this reappropriation as an attempt to confront the “Asian” tradition and try to “make it new”?
KH: I should be so lucky. Honestly—I do not know what East Asian writers are currently doing so I have no way of knowing if my efforts are an inroad. Sure—I would love to be a part of some kind of front.
What I do know is that very few writers are acquainted with the zuihitsu. My next book, The Narrow Road to the Interior (title stolen from Bashō), is a collection of these prose pieces with tanka threaded throughout. There is also an essay on this “poetic miscellany”—as it has been called.
Strictly speaking, there is no Western equivalent although I see similarities in [modernist poet William Carlos] Williams’ Paterson, Michelle Cliff’s and Charles Simic’s prose—even Melville’s Moby Dick. I hope that my version of these Asian forms add something new (to use your word) to the poetry scene and to the discourse on what is fiction and nonfiction. (The Japanese reader does not expect everything in a diary to be factual—artfulness is more important, more Truthful.)
The reappropriation finally is a way to make it mine. For it to belong to me; and me, then the tradition.
FL: When you write in “Mosquito and Ant”
She
Shi in Japanese: four, poem, death.
In Chinese?
In mosquito and ant script?
(Yes in Chinese, yes)
and later, in “Responding to Light”:
SOAR
SORE
SOEUR
SOUR
SUR
SURE
we find you play with homophony. Similarly, you also play with polynimy in your poem “Orchid Root,” when you write:
PINE 杉
MAGPIE 鵲
CLOUD 雲
How does meaning change with this shift in tongues?
KH: The homophony creates a different kind of juxtaposition in the reader’s imagination, an aural one. Let’s have some fun here: “aural” as in pertaining to the ear AND to an aura! Like an image—it is up to the reader’s imagination and unconscious. Yes?
For those unacquainted with Chinese characters, I hope that my word play produces something startling and bewildering and beautiful. For those who are familiar, I hope my usage is a playful validation of non-Western culture inside American poetry (which of course is far from new).
FL: Your focus changes in your latest book, The Artist’s Daughter. While remaining within the realm of womanhood and motherhood, your point of view shifts from Asian-centric to a more European-centric point of view. You explore, for example, the European fairy tale of Rapunzel. Similarly, your recent poems in the literary journal Gulf Coast, “Research” and “The Blob,” eschew this feminist and confessional aesthetic to center more around science. How do you explain those various aesthetic shifts?
KH: First —I do not view these shifts as aesthetic. I hope that readers have felt and continue to experience my own pleasure with diction because I am enamored of language. Whether it is the language of one grandmother (momo) or the other grandmother (peach). Whether the words relate to a kimono pattern, Marxism, —or entomology.
These shifts have more to do with focus. I was hoping to “get under the skin” of my earlier themes.
While I was working on the poems that would become The Artist’s Daughter I was thinking about how I felt like the designated family monster when I was growing up. I decided to research (something else I like to do) historical monsters and to reread fairy tales. So I hope that the poems in this collection resonate with the kind of sex and violence I heard in the stories my mother read to me—both Grimm’s and Asian folk tales; from such stories, a child knows that when she closes her eyes to sleep, she is safe from cannibals and necrophiles. What a child would just call a monster. It is important stuff. I love [former U.S. Poet Laureate] Louise Glück’s lines: “We view the world once./The rest is memory.”
In my new work (inspired by articles from The New York Times’ science section), I continue my attraction to scientific language—which is quite exotic to my ear. The poems are not “identity” poems nor are they “about” my Asian-American background; nor are they, finally, “about” science. I imagine the sequence will continue earlier themes—whether disjunction or loss. Or anxiety with language—and the adoration of it. These poems also signal an attention to other influences such as Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore. But I am never far from, say, Princess Shikishi and her body of work.
Thank you for asking.
