(The following is my "Poet and Tanka" essay, which was first published in Ribbons, 12:2, Spring/Summer 2016)
The Journey Itself Is Home
After
more than ten years of struggling towards a new life vision and
preparing for a major change in my field of study (computer science to
cultural studies), in the summer of 2002 I emigrated to Canada to pursue
a PhD and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto.
flying above
the light and murmur
of Formosa
the airplane carries
my immigrant dream
Haiku Canada Review, 9:1, February 2015
(In 1544, a Portuguese ship sighted the main island of Taiwan and named it "Ilha Formosa," which means “Beautiful Island")
Toronto settles
into a nocturnal rhythm ...
face to face
in the attic room
with my Chinese self
Haiku Canada Review, 9:1, February 2015
After
arriving in Canada, I was frustrated by the lack of in-depth and
wide-ranging classroom discussions and, most importantly, I was stressed
by the financial burden. I quit my studies and started to write essays
in an adopted language, English. After two years of striving, I
published three essays but got little attention from the scholars in
those fields. Furthermore, I was disappointed by my inability to master
English quickly. My pent-up emotions began spilling over onto pieces of
scrap paper in the form of free verse. The more I wrote, the more I
thought about becoming a poet.
I try out
the English word writer
in my Chinese mouth
several times ...
this bittersweet taste
Whispers, October 11, 2014
After
a year of striving to write free verse poetry without much success, I
came across three books of tanka poetry by Takuboku: Poems to Eat, A Handful of Sand, and Romaji Diary and Sad Toys.
The emotional strength, socio-political sensibilities, and colloquial
language of Takuboku’s tanka, a kind of poetry in the moment, appealed
to me. For Takuboku, writing tanka was more like the emotional outburst
of a mind agonized by the inner struggle and external events that shaped
his life and identity. In some aspects, Takuboku’s conception of “poems
to eat” is similar to that of Dionne Brand: “Poetry is here, just here.
Something wrestling with how we live, something dangerous, something
honest” (Bread Out of Stone, p. 113). Since encountering
Takuboku’s heartfelt and poignant work, I came to view tanka as a poetic
diary that could be employed to record the changes in my immigrant
life, a newly-racialized life of struggle with transition and
translation.
bare maple tree
standing on the front lawn…
with no one around
I speak to it
in my mother tongue
2011 Best of the Best Poetry Award (Tanka Category), Lyrical Passion Poetry
I used to be...
from an immigrant's mouth
stretches his story --
the pin-drop silence
fills an ESL classroom
Gusts, 16, Fall/Winter 2012
(ESL stands for English as a Second Language)
old-age home
in winter twilight
I listen
to his Hockey Night stories
for minimum wage
Atlas Poetica, 15, 2013
behind my back
they whisper slanted eyes ...
in a dream
I unzip my skin,
put on another
Highly Commended, 2014 Kokako Tanka Competition
when being shouted at
go back where you came from
the gray wings
of the Canada goose
skim my heart
Atlas Poetica, 5, Spring 2010
mid-autumn night…
the wind whispers to me
Chinese words
that offer me a home
in the shape of a moon
Tanka First Place, 2011 San Francisco International Competition Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay
Tanka
is a short form poetry, and it requires the poet to have acute
observation skills and a set of literary techniques to distill his/her
feeling, thought, or experience to its essence. In his study of Masaoka
Shiki's life and work, The Winter Sun Shines In, Donald Keene makes a similar point: “A haiku or a tanka without rhetoric was likely to be no more than a brief observation without poetic tension or illumination" (p. 57).
In
my early days of writing tanka as an English learner, I put more effort
into choosing the right words/phrases to depict a scene or an
experience in concrete imagery and to structure it into two parts that
formed a resonant relationship to spark the reader’s emotions and
reflection.
after surgery
both of us said nothing...
her red bra
in the corner of my mind
begins to change color
Second Place, the 60th Pennsylvania Poetry Society Annual Contest
A
year later, when I felt more confident in writing tanka, I started
applying some literary techniques to the poem in order to expand or
deepen its meaning:
Punctuation
marks to thematically and emotionally highlight the two contrasting
parts (outer world versus inner thought) of the poem to offer more
dreaming room for the reader’s imagination.
I open windows
(another day no poem
written down,
only blocks of dead words)
and let the spring breeze in
Gusts, 20, Fall/Winter 2014
Wordplay to bring together the two disparate images to evoke racial-cultural associations that have sociopolitical impacts.
white flight, white fright ...
my Chinese roommate
practices "l" and "r"
before the window
as the moonlight slips in
VerseWrights, March, 2014
(Chinese-English
learners, especially adult learners, have great difficulty pronouncing
“l” and “r” clearly and distinctly; “white flight” is a term that
originated in the United States and starting in the mid-20th century)
The rhetorical device of defamiliarization to effectively convey the speaker's sense of estrangement or displacement.
black coffee
and Chinese fried dough ...
in my mouth
a foreign tongue
licking these lips
NeverEnding Story, February 1, 2015
(For
most Chinese people, this food combination of "black coffee/and Chinese
fried dough" is weird/westernized; usually, a typical Chinese breakfast
includes soybean milk or a bowl of congee and Chinese fried dough)
Syntactic parallelism
to reinforce the poem's message by setting up patterns and adding
balance and rhythm to the lines to give the poem a smoother flow.
we were all
someone and something once ...
this migrant
sees himself in me
seeing myself in him
VerseWrights, March, 2014
Symbols to open up a different cultural and mental space and transport the reader’s imagination.
the muse rising
from a sea of words
covers her breasts ...
I am pregnant
with verses of longing
Atlas Poetica, 18, 2014
Classical allusion to create novel contrasts that layer the poem with multiple meanings
putting the corpse
of loneliness around my neck
I jump
into the darkness
of a spring day
Back Cover Tanka, Ribbons, 6:3, Fall 2010
(“…
In a vivid flash of five lines, Liu’s poem brings the famous Coleridge
work ["The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"] immediately to mind. In the
tanka, the concrete is replaced with the abstract… Loneliness, is an
abstraction given power and life by use of the corpse metaphor...
Spring, typically associated with rebirth, sunlight, and joy, here takes
on the opposite qualities with the simple alliterative combination of
“darkness” and “spring day.” Dave Bacharach, “The Back Cover,” p.1)
As one who has long been interested in cinema, Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Shuji Terayam, greatly appealed to me because Terayama’s cinematic fiction tanka not
only dismantled my hard-learned ideas about what the tanka is, but also
interwove the narrative threads of personal mythology, trauma, cultural
memories, socio-political events and surreal imagination.
a child of O'Keeffe
I've made words my ladder
to the moon --
critics cannot stop
cracking their knuckles
A Hundred Gourds, 3:2, March 2014
wolf moon
standing high in the sky
I hear it
howl in my blood ...
eyes upon the dripping
Opening Tanka, "Ein Fremdes Land," a tanka sequence for Georg Trakl
Lynx, 25:2, June, 2010
In a 2010 prose poem, titled “Why believe you can write verse in English?,” I wrote of my faltering confidence in writing:
“To
write verse in English is not like growing ideograms inside your heart,
reaping the sentences matured by the muse of desire, taking your
clothes off with words, and exposing yourself in the rhythm of the
stanzas so that you can hold your passport and cross the borders of
linguistic solitudes, emigrating from the ideographic to the
alphabetic..."
in English
I try to delineate
the contours
of my Chinese longing ...
this misty winter morning
Bright Stars, VI, 2014
I’ve
been writing tanka for almost seven years. It has been and still is a
wrenching process of heart and mind. For me to write tanka in English
now is to make a run at something without knowing whether I am going to
succeed. It points a way for me to function with relative freedom in an
unfamiliar world of the alphabet, and to make myself up from moment to
moment. On this tanka journey, I sometimes feel at home with myself when
using exact English words to depict my Chinese feeling, thought, or
experience in evocative imagery.
I skip
a stone of words
across the lake
of another time
another place
Lynx, 26:2, June 2011
