Essay: Critical & Craft

Sometimes, the closest sense of wholeness comes from holding the pieces loosely. Perhaps the failure, and beauty, of language, the world, is this: that meaning is found in its recesses.

This list, then, culled to ten entries, is a history of care and tenderness these past several months. It traces a web of connections against the distances of the moment.

In these long blocks of lyrical prose, I was following an instinct I didn’t fully comprehend. I felt each address open up a wide field that could contain all the disparate yet overlapping emotions, atmospheres, and histories I had been wanting to hold in one hand. It was like drawing a boundary around a grouping of stars or cupping some water from the sea. The blocks of text didn’t try to parse the entanglements; they allowed the tension between sentences to carry all the absences, ambiguities, and silences I could never before say—how knowledge in an immigrant household so often comes in tides that approach and recede, how there are always gaps and missing ghosts, how all the fear and protection and silence and love comes so mixed together it would be a falsehood to separate them.

Persona poetry is often compared to wearing a mask, but to me it is like speaking into a shell. A shell hides and holds, yet it is also a vessel with an opening through which air cycles and escapes. The opening is small, spiraled, folded in upon itself. Sometimes the only way to say the thing is to begin half-hidden, half-covered, a hushed circling of air. Some things can only be said when you turn out the lights and turn toward a small corner.

refract : disrupt : interrupt : modulate : shatter : disperse

"In renaming the world anew, poets and artists engage in acts of ‘translation’ that are intentionally askew. What truths and beauties are revealed in such blurry distortions of our world, and what is at stake in this moment of refraction for poets and artists from the margins? … I take the study of refraction further by examining how oblique renderings of status-quo notions urge the audience to inhabit non-dominant spaces of perception that challenge the terms of their reality. These artists demonstrate how refractive poetries invoke alternative or marginal perspectives, constructing new meaning by moving beyond normalized ways of experiencing the world.”

Instead, I began with a haunting. Every night, a return. To keep time by lunar light is to iterate in the ebb and flow of shadows. Iteration: the repetition of a process or utterance. In other words: the earth’s orbit, the sun rising and setting, the annular return of springtime peonies. To wake every morning is an iteration we barely recall, but the utterance blurs from there. It is not an exact replication that I want, a recurrence of clones, but rather a rhythm of grounding that allows for ghosts in the margins, fog on the horizon, unsaid hours, a vagrant echo between tidal encroachments.

Does the poem change in meaning and value when it is written by a person of color versus a white person? In addressing this question, I am interested in exploring some complexity, to consider if and how a reader in our society might legitimately find the content of a poem to be more valuable when written by a person of color.

Hundreds of thousands of students, many secondary-school-aged, marching, singing, holding seminars, blocking roads (but allowing ambulances through), withstanding tear gas, withstanding fear, sleeping in the streets, cleaning up trash, organizing first aid stations, collecting supplies, encouraging peace and calm and civil disobedience…all to voice a heartfelt desire for true democracy, instead of a fraud election where candidates are vetted by Beijing.

Reviews/Tributes

  • “Notes Toward A Review of PRE— by Barbara Tomash.” Adroit Journal. Feb 23, 2021.

  • “Tribute to Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge,” #Actual Asian Poets. Lit Hub. Oct 8, 2015.

  • “Review of American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang.” Narrative Magazine. Fall 2010.

  • “Review of Narrow Road to the Interior by Matsuo Basho.” Narrative Magazine. Winter 2010.

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