Category: Poetry & Life

Last night, I wrote a new poem in my dream. I haven’t written new poems in a long time.  The subject of this poem wasn’t extraordinary: a rust-colored horse with long hair.  It was a slender poem of tercets, a concatenation of little trios.

Alas, after waking, I couldn’t remember a single word from the poem!  New poems are rare nowadays, but there are seasons… hundreds of old poems sitting in a writing box, old poems aging like autumn leaves… yet they don’t lose their resilience and go brittle.

Or more like old honey deep in the tree, age-darkened.  Is the word hygroscopic or hydrophilic for water-loving?  Honey is miscible with water. I heard something happens, a mysterious chemistry as honey ages, loses water, distills….like poetry in a way.

You go back to the old dark honey, harvest it, refine it, and pour the honey into jars.  Or, if you’re impatient, you pour the raw honey into jars and put the jars on the kitchen sill where the morning light burns red, amber, gold, all the shades of autumn. 

Somewhere, a horse with long hair shakes out the early chill.

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prayer postscript: Seasons of writing, seasons of words… other seasons, the rain falls but never touches the earth, and we’re still grateful.

second prayer postscript: Lost poems don’t always return… but we may rejoice in the gift of reminscence.

A week or so ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with Colette, the director of the Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine.  She’s the author of a collection of poems published the University of Chicago Press, and she co-founded the Casa Romantica Poetry Reading Series, where I read a few years ago, thanks to the hospitality of Michelle Mitchell-Foust and her friends. 

The Casa is located in oceanside San Clemente, not far from San Juan Capistrano of the famous mission swallows.  Sand-swept streets slope down to the Pacific with views of the ocean at every azure turn.  In the mission-style Casa, a chandelier portico opens onto a black-and-silver moonlit sea at night … an upside-down mirror… or the unsilvered reverse side called “tain.” 

With the archivist-historian at my side in the darkness (or was I blinded by the floodlights over the back garden?), I walked onto the portico at the Casa, where the glistening nocturnal surf mingled with invisible shore wind in the palm trees.  I can’t remember whether the Santa Ana winds were blowing then….I think Joan Didion said the Santa Ana winds gave the sea a glossy, surreal – feverish – appearance.

Anyway, as I was walking on the U. C. Irvine campus, the sound of wind in their tall eucalyptus reminded me of (1) the sound of rain like dry lima beans stirred in a bowl, and (2) the nocturnal surf mingled with wind in unseen leaves.

There’s a diminutive Maya Lin sculpture – black polished granite water scupture, very beautiful – I visited before, and enjoy returning to observe.  Thin sheets of water emerge from Lin’s delicate hand-drawn curve in the stone with a lyric, calming effect… transparencies in poetry.  

“To fly, we need resistance,” Maya Lin once wrote.    

Colette and I were delighted to meet each other, and I was sorry to have missed poet Jericho Brown’s reading a few days prior.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, distinguished professor & Kenyan  novelist, is on sabbatical this year.  I think Claudia Rankine also read as a part of their series recently.  

Colette is featuring my poetry in her publication, Zócalo Public Square.  Zócalo refers to the old historic heart of Mexico City ~ I love this!

At a nearby university ~ a campus with lovely bottle trees, one named after Gwendolyn Brooks outside the English department ~ I visited the Guggenheim Gallery Exhibit on the art of the page, which included digital art, hand-illustrated books, art books, furniture made out of paper, and hand-printed postcards.

I was also a guest at a dinner honoring Marjorie Perloff, who is donating her personal library to this university… what an impressive gift to avant-garde poets and literary critics alike!

I thoroughly enjoyed the lively panel session and, of course, Marjorie Perloff’s brilliant lecture on Futurism.

The dinner menu was marvelous:

Watercress & Citrus Salad with Endive, Sliced Red Onions and Orange Ginger Vinaigrette

Rosemary Garlic Marinated Chicken with Mushroom Parmesan Polenta & Steamed Asparagus Spears

New York Cheesecake with Fresh Berries (Strawberries and Blueberries)

During one of the receptions, I passed a splendid array of Argentinian wines in elegant dark glass bottles, but I don’t drink alcohol, so my generous hosts served me French Sparkling Limonade.

What sparkling, collegial hosts ~ some whom I’ll look forward to seeing, once again, at AWP Denver.

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postscript inklings: An interview avec moi…

This is a leap of faith… I am jumping into the poet-blogging
world!  My first post is an excerpt from the Reader’s Companion
for my second collection, Ardor (Tupelo 2008).

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My Name: an-hwei

     From time to time, when I am asked about my middle name, An-hwei, it’s usually one of two questions or both: “What is it?” and “What does it mean?” An-hwei is Mandarin Chinese for peace (“an” is pronounced the way it looks) and fragrant orchid (“hwei” is pronounced as the PRC’s pinyin “hui,” sounding like “hway”), specifically, the Coumarouna odorata; related phrases are huiyu or jade orchid and jinghui or serene orchid.

     So, my name is Karen Peace Fragrant Orchid Lee.

     I value peace, but frankly, as a girl I sometimes felt ambivalent about being named after a pretty flower, implying one is fragrant, delicate, herbal, and easily trampled. Sometimes I wished my middle name meant “woman who is pure dynamite – watch out!” or “woman who leads revolutions – salute her!” Or how about “woman who utters earth-shaking prophecy in a world that considers her, alas, a fragrant plant – huzzah!”

        However, a professor in college once reassured me that serenity is a revolution in itself. And what’s wrong with fragrant orchids, after all, with their various healing or medicinal properties? Additionally, the “hwei” in my middle name comes from the “hwei” in my grandmother’s name. My grandmother’s ideogram hwei is favor, graciousness, or a gift from above. A location in our ancestral Fujian province is called hwei an, the same an I have and hwei my grandmother has in her name. My mother added crosses over my grandmother’s ideogram to signify a female root, so I am proud to inherit hwei in addition to peace. Orchids, besides, can thrive under adverse conditions, and are in fact quite strong.

        I also discovered in my adult years that the Coumarouna odorata is also known as the tonka or tonqua bean tree – bearing wrinkled black-skinned pods with an intense vanilla perfume — which grows in South America. Moreover, it is no wee plant. It can grow to over a hundred feet high; the bean pods may grow to over two feet long. Terrible misfortune to be knocked on the head with a giant pod while one is passing casually underneath the tree! I have no idea how the etymology of my name hopscotched from orchids to tonka bean trees, but I consulted several dictionaries which confirmed these definitions, citing either species of fragrant orchid or Coumarouna odorata.

       Is the tonka bean tree a type of orchid? Vanilla, after all, is a genus of orchid. Mischievously, I rather enjoy the idea of a hundred-foot tall orchid with giant black-skinned pods big enough to conk unsuspecting folks on the head, like rolling pins or mailing tubes falling out of the sky.

        One fourth of my name remains a mystery perhaps you will unravel. (Dear reader, I will also say to you, sotto voce: What Karen means, with its etymological Greek root Aikaterina, if you will, is a whole other story, and I’ll save Lee for a rainy day.)