Poems: Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu Pai
(Seattle Review of Books)

Back in 2008, the multi-talented Shin Yu Pai published a book of collected poems entitled Sightings: Poems 2000-2005 with 1913 Press. Comprising a range of formal, material and textual experiments, it also showed her to be both an artist at heart and in her practice. The poems were mostly brief, political, playful, and never repetitive, marking her out as as someone not following the main experimental crowds. After reading Sightings, I added her to my list of poets to follow, and I have, including blogging her poetry several times, once for her baseball poems in 2011 (scroll past the break), and once for a very witty still life poem in 2012. She has since published several more full collections of poems, including AUX ARCS (La Alameda, 2013) and Adamantine (White Pine, 2010), two of whose poems I quote below, as well as limited edition artist books, works on paper, photography, and collaborative projects of various kinds.

In 2015, the poet and scholar Michael Leong curated a collection of poems about visual art, "Lines of Sight," by nine Asian American writers for the Asian American Writers Workshop's The Margins journal. One of the poets he included was Shin Yu Pai, and when I remembered that she was one of the poets--the others were Christine Wong Yap, Debora Kuan, Eileen Tabios, Jennifer Hayashida, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (whom I highlighted earlier this month), Walter K. Lew, O Woomi Chang, and John Yau (whose work will close out the month--I said that I would have to include her here. (Please do check out the entire portfolio.)

Michael featured four of Pai's poems, but to whet readers' interests and encourage that you head over to AAWW's website I'm only going to feature two, both from Adamantine. The first is entitled "Lunch Poem," which immediately made me think of Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) and his eponymous, beloved collection, but when you the photograph her poem is in conversation with, her poem's title becomes clearer, shaking off (a bit) the New York School avatar's influence. Instead, we are exploring Indian artist Subodh Gupta's hanging sculpture, a shiny excrescence whose surface appears to be both bumpy--all those fissures between the pails--and, from a short distance, a silvery, pulsating button.

In this poem, Pai plays with the lunch pails and boxes the image invokes, the vast world those pail carriers index, opening with a statistic about how rare it is that they "[go] missing." It is brief enough to be a poem she might have thought up and mulled over during a lunch-time exploration of it, whether it hung in an art museum or a wall near wherever she was spending any time. The poem itself bells like a vessel--a bit plumper here than on The Margins site because of my lack of kerning tools--that has been filled, or, by its end, by author and reader, like the lunchtime diner, emptied.

LUNCH POEM

by Shin Yu Pai

(after Subodh Gupta)

                     6,000,000

             to one: the delivery that

        goes missing – a lunch pail that fails

        to arrive @ its destination; domestic

       articles bear homemade offerings produced

    by housewives & dadi jis for their men-folk –

        fleet-footed dabbawallas dispatch, carry,

    & collect steel boxes by the thousands packed

         lunch boys sport starched cotton nehru

         caps pilot familiar passages – the son

       of a railway guard solders stainless-steel

              tiffin carriers a new class

                     of metalwork

Subodh Gupta. Untitled, 2008,
Stainless steel, Houston Museum of Art.
(Photo: Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe.)

The second poem is entitled "Bell(e)," and speaks to an actual ornamental bell, by the late Japanese-American artist Toshiko Takaezu, produced in 1997, and one of many she produced during her career. Pai's title injects a bit of polysemy through that final "e," making the word French as well as English, and highlighting the beauty inherent in Takaezu's sculpture, with its patinated surface color and graceful, parabolic form. That silent "e" also embodies the silence and latent sound to be released, once the bell sounds...its beautiful sounds.

"Bell(e)" tells in swift strokes about how such a bell might have been handled "in centuries / past," but now it hangs in what looks like a greenhouse, "a museum / of curative plants." Where the poem goes is beyond description to an evocation of the bell(e)'s potentiality, as I note above, showing the reader its anticipation--and ours--of its "stillness & / gathering before / the shudder / of first sound," that is, when it finally is rung or struck, how it dreams of the sounds within sounds that will come, or that reappear, as part of and after that reverberation, like the poem itself.

Here is a short paragraph about Takaezu from Wikipedia (linked above):

Takaezu treated life with a sense of wholesomeness and oneness with nature; everything she did was to improve and discover herself. She believed that ceramics involved self-revelation, once commenting, "In my life I see no difference between making pots, cooking and growing vegetables... there is need for me to work in clay... it gives me answers for my life."[5] When she developed her signature “closed form” after sealing her pots, she found her identity as an artist. The ceramic forms resembled human hearts and torsos, closed cylindrical forms, and huge spheres she called “moons.”

The bell pictured below is an "open" ceramic forms, but its capacity for "self-revelation," and its connection to nature are both aspects that Pai discerns in her poem.

BELL(E)




After Toshiko Takaezu




 

in centuries
past, sunk
beneath soil

to draw earth’s
vital force, inert
vessel of

sound + light,
conserved

in a museum
of curative plants
the moment of

stillness &
gathering before
the shudder

of first sound

dreaming
the shake of chime
hum &

g o n g

Toshiko Takaezu. Bell (1997). Seattle’s Volunteer Park
Conservatory. (Photo courtesy Myra/Flickr.)

Both poems, Copyright © Shin Yu Pai, from Adamantine, White Pine Press. Buffalo, NY 2010. All rights reserved.

Poem: Shin Yu Pai

Here's a delightful little poem by Shin Yu Pai, a poet with whom I share a publisher (1913 Press, which has all kinds of great new books out). She works not only in a range of forms but across media. She is an artist in every sense, and knows how to draw profundity out of simplicity. Here's her little poem about conversation between artists that is a poem about visual art, poetry, and thus art itself. Enjoy.

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN HUIDOBRO AND BRAQUE

Is a poem a poem? 
And isn’t an orange just an orange,
and not an apple?

Yet next to each other, the orange 
ceases to be orange
the apple ceases to be apple,
and together the two 
become fruit.

Copyright © Shin Yu Pai. First published in Gastronomica and later published Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003).

Poem: May Swenson

Baseball season has officially begun, and I haven't blogged about it at all, not just because I've been busy, but because, to a degree surprising to me, I find myself less interested than in the past. I've been feeling this way with all professional sports, but whereas I could point to specific reasons (the strikes, the lockouts, the greed of the owners and many players, the misuse of public dollars to underwrite stadiums for millionaires and billionaires with little beyond ephemeral emotional and psychological benefits for the majority of people) for my waning interest in the NBA, NFL, the NHL (I still haven't gotten over their owner-labor crisis years ago), with baseball it feels as though it's struck suddenly. Perhaps it's maturity or just growing old.

Perhaps it's a deeper sense that rather than taking comfort in this pastime as the country and world fall apart, I find it more of a distraction than anything. Perhaps it was the refusal of superstar Albert Pujols, to accept a contract of somewhere around $200 million for 8 years, allegedly with an ownership stake in the team once he required.  This sort of contract would have been par for the course in the 1990s or even the money-crazy early 2000s, but since the economic crash? Not that someone already as rich as Pujols (who received a $100 million contract in 2004) or many of his peers would notice.

But--a little flame still catches for baseball. I have, in fact, glanced at the box scores of the Cardinals, Yankees, Cubs, and a few other teams. I have the free version of MLB Baseball on my phone. And I hope that the Cardinals, rather than the Cubs, can come back with a deal--say, one leg of the Saint Louis Arch?--to persuade their superstar to sign up again before a rival team snatches him. That is, if the rival team has the money to lavish on him as well.

Here then is a baseball poem, titled "Analysis of Baseball," by May Swenson (1913-1989, photo above by Laverne Harrell Clark © Arizona State University). Swenson was one the prolific 20th century American poets and a true original. An editor at New Directions until 1966, she later went on to serve as a writer in residence at a number of universities (this was the era before writers entered or even looked to the academy as a chief place of employment), conducted workshops at many different venues, and published 17 books of her own poetry and translations of other poets, as well as works for children, plays, and critical essays. Among her awards was the Bollingen Prize from Yale University Press. When I was younger she was very widely known and read, though I don't know if she's on minds and tongues as much these days, though she ought to be. Here then is her baseball poem, and yours.

ANALYSIS OF BASEBALL

It’s about the ball, the bat, and the mitt. Ball hits bat, or it hits mitt. Bat doesn’t hit ball, bat meets it. Ball bounces off bat, flies air, or thuds ground (dud) or it fits mitt. Bat waits for ball to mate. Ball hates to take bat’s bait. Ball flirts, bat’s late, don’t keep the date. Ball goes in (thwack) to mitt, and goes out (thwack) back to mitt.

Ball fits mitt, but not all the time. Sometimes ball gets hit (pow) when bat meets it, and sails to a place where mitt has to quit in disgrace. That’s about the bases loaded, about 40,000 fans exploded. It’s about the ball, the bat, the mitt, the bases and the fans. It’s done on a diamond, and for fun. It’s about home, and it’s about run.

May Swenson, “Analysis of Baseball” from New and Selected Things Taking Place (Boston: Atlantic/Little Brown, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by May Swenson. All rights reserved.

Unemployment Benefits Cut + Baseball's Back + Poems: Shin Yu Pai

I hate to start on a down note, but today 400,000 Americans will lose their unemployment insurance, because members of the Senate GOP--first Kentucky's former baseball player Jim Bunning (see below), and now Oklahoma's gift to the country, Tom Coburn, MD, who reportedly committed Medicaid fraud and also reportedly performed a tubal ligation on a woman against her will--see fit to play games with their lives. Their hobbyhorse, never once raised during the votes for the unfunded Bush tax cuts, which destroyed the surplus President Bill Clinton left and added over $1 trillion to the deficit, or the rush to send troops to raze and occupy Iraq, or blow money on Medicare Advantage, a multibillion-dollar boondoggle, is that any spending must be "paid for."

As anyone who has ever been unemployed and relies on unemployment insurance knows, this little bit of money can be the only thing keeping a roof over your head, food in your stomach, and your lights on. But to Tom Coburn, Jim Bunning, and others in the GOP, the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, including their children and elderly relatives, who'll also suffer, doesn't matter.

Won't you join me and urge others in calling Tom Coburn to let him know that he is playing games with people's lives, and you don't like it?

Phones:
Washington: Main: 202-224-5754
Tulsa: 918-581-7651
Oklahoma City: 405-231-4941

And if you have a Democratic Senator or two, why not call them and tell them to stop whining and take drastic action to stop the suffering of fellow Americans. They can give tax cuts to the richest people at the drop of a hat, but can only cry and rend their garments and complain about the the terrible GOP when people really need help--and the money that's due them. And you can always call GOP Senators, if they represent you, to urge them to put pressure on Coburn to stop his dangerous, cruel games.

***

Bunning's mention, acrid though it is, provokes another, more pleasant thought: baseball's back. Yes, the national and now an international pastime began last night with the Boston Red Sox--of all teams--defeating the defending World Series Champion New York Yankees 9-7.  Ugh!  I won't read the Red Sox victory as a (bad) omen, especially for the Yankees, who stayed right in the thick of the game, but rather as the stats suggest, as a breakdown by middle-reliever and former starter Chan Ho Park. 161 more games to go, guys, it can only get better.