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MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, “Joy and beauty and delight!” … I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940), Chinese-American atuhor, educator and activist
Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940), Chinese-American author, story-teller, poet, educator and activist

“Keep this day. Save this moment;
Save each scrap of moment; write it down.
Save this moment. And this one. And this.”  

Randolph College announced last month that Maxine Hong Kingston would be the sixth recipient of the college’s Pearl S. Buck Award. The ceremony will be held on April 20.

Pearl Buck and Ms. Kingston share the distinction of shining a light on Chinese culture. For Pearl Buck it was the Chinese people in their homeland and for Maxine Hong Kingston it is Chinese-Americans. Both are known for their activism and for their memoirs and fictions, Pearl Buck more for the later than the former I think.

What these women also have in common is poetry. Pearl Buck’s slender collection, Words of Love (John Day, Co., 1974), was published posthumously. Ms. Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) was the fruit of coming to terms with turning sixty-five.

As part of the two-week-long celebrations of my own birthday (61st) in 2011, the CitySon Philosopher took me to dinner one night at Cafe Barrone in Menlo Park, California. Afterward we went next door to Kepler’s Books – a favorite among family and friends, the local independent –  to hear Maxine Hong Kingston talk about what was then her new book. She is a “neighbor,” living only a few miles away in Stanford.

“Story gives form and pleasure to the chaos that’s life. By the end of the story, we have found understanding, meaning, revelation, resolution, reconciliations.” 

The book is a memoir in free verse, a long poem in effect like the old-country tradition of writing a poem on a scroll. Flowing.

“Am I pretty at 65?
What does old look like?”

Ms. Kingston immediately addressed the  issues of aging, both in her presentation and in the book itself. She talked about being superstitious and thinking that as long as she has things to write “I keep living…” She told of the origins of the title: Thoreau. It’s a line from Walden that, she says, also hangs framed over her desk.

She explained the Chinese custom of “writing poems back” and told of her dad who would write poems to her in the margins of her books. She was at that time translating these for publication, though that was never her dad’s intention. Or so I would infer. She encouraged us to write our own poems in the margins of her book.

Ms. Kingston stood in front of us, like a fragile little bird, reading excerpts from the book, delightful to hear in her voice. She is ten years older than me but we’ve lived through the same events and movements: civil rights, women’s rights, Vietnam, Iraq … and so on. She too is the child of immigrants. She sounds like a Buddhist, has the Buddhist sensibility: respect for life, for silence, for present moment.

When Ms. Kingston finished her presentation and Q & A, my son excused himself and kindly went to buy two copies for us. We stood in line with other guests, waiting for Ms. Kingston to sign our books. Every moment spent attending to writers of good conscience, talking about books and writing, is precious…even more this one, because I was with my son and the writer happened to be one with whom I share values, gender, and the context of time. She also is a mother with one child, a son.

Finally it was our turn: Ms. Kingston sat tiny and cheerful with pen in hand. She greeted us just as cordially as she had each reader throughout the long night. She wrote my name in bold sprawling black letters followed by “Joy and beauty and delight” and then signed her full name with “Hong” in hanzi (Chinese characters).

I wrote in my journal that night that “as long as we have cherished children, valued friends, conscientious authors and quality books, we have everything. Life is indeed joy and beauty and delight.”

As far as the book goes: The charm of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life is its gentle meandering. It made me think of the way books meandered before the modern preference for brevity and before computers and word processing and the ease technology brings to rewrites, cuts, and tight line-by-line editing … and perhaps needless to say, before life was so tightly packed with activity, rush and noise.

In her promising opening, Ms. Kingston is bemused in her self-awareness as she examines questions of aging, appearance, and vanity. As the book moves on, she blends nonfiction with fiction, a few references and viewpoints from characters that people her novels.

This long poetic memoir is a backward look at a time some might enjoy revisiting and others might want to learn about through the memory of one who was there. One of its strengths is the contemplation of life by a dedicated activist whose creative work helps the reader understand. I enjoyed the book, got value out of it; but I did feel rather like Ms. Kingston was putting on the unaccustomed robes of a poet and didn’t feel quite at home with this form.  Unlike other poetry books on my shelves, I suspect I’ll never pull it out for another read.

© 2016, essay and photograph of Ms. Kingston at Kepler’s Books on February 22, 2011, Jamie Dedes;  All rights reserved

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THE BeZine, Apr. 2016, Vol.2/Issue 7; Celebrating Poetry Month, Table of Contents with Links

15 April 2016
Poetry Month

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

I. The Burial of the Dead

APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten.
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.…

A tidal wave of poetry, perhaps.

Michael Dickel, Contributing Editor

While Eliot declares the cruelty of April, April also happens to be National Poetry Month in the United States and Canada. In our online, social media world, it has become an international celebration of poetry as well. To join in this celebration, we in the Bardo Group Beguines dedicate the April issue each year to poetry. Many of us who write regularly for The BeZine are poets, and we usually include poetry. So, for us, it is a happy celebration—nothing cruel about it!

And what a wide-ranging celebration we offer in the 2016 National Poetry Month The BeZine issue! W. B. Yeats is oft quoted as saying, “What can be explained is not poetry.” So I won’t explain. I will tell you that Terri Muuss’ poem, “Thirteen Levels of Heaven,” takes you far and wide in a few grains of sand. “The Other Woman,” Imen Benyoub’s heart-wrenching poem, is not who you think—but in the current global storm of conflict and national political climate, indeed, she is Other. Michael Rothenberg’s “Poem for Mitko” personalizes the news we hear by imagining its impact on our mutual friend, Macedonian poet Mitko Gogov.

What these three featured poems have in common is their ability to take the intimate, the personal, the real moments of every day life, and reflect in and from them larger issues of humanity and life. Each describes very specific, personal scenes. According to Joy Harjo, “It’s possible to understand the world from studying a leaf.” And all of these poems open our eyes wide to the world. Sharon Olds tells an interviewer about poets she admires: “Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine.” And so are the spirits and visions of the authors gathered here.

“It may also be the case that any genuine work of art generates new work,” Donald Barthelme tells us in a Paris Review interview. As you read the poems, essays, interviews, and reviews in this month’s issue, I imagine that they will generate new art for you. Whether the art of living, the art of knowing others, or “the Arts,” you will want to do more of it after reading what we offer this month.

Last year, the Second Light Network of Women Poets (SLN) collaborated with The BeZine during April to present poetry from the SLN. In this year’s issue, you can read more about the network in “SECOND LIGHT NETWORK, showcasing the ambitious poetry of ambitious women.”  Jamie Dedes’ essay “POET, TEACHER, INSPIRATION: Dilys Wood and the Latter-day Saphos” also sheds light on Dilys Wood, founder of the SLN. This year, in my dual roles of contributing editor here at The BeZine and associate editor at The Woven Tale Press, I have served as liaison in a new collaboration. The works specifically from the collaboration appear in their own section in the table of contents below.

However, the whole issue represents collaboration—not only between the two publications, but between all of the writers. We work together, as a community. In putting this all together with Jamie Dedes and my Bardo Group Beguines and Woven Tale Press colleagues, I came to realize how many of the poets here I know personally—separately from these two publications. We all come from an organic online writing community. By organic, I mean through no organized effort or special social website.

After years of knowing Michael Rothenberg through email and Facebook, I only finally met him in person this past summer. Terri Muuss and I met at Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, also years ago, where her husband, Matt Pasca (who also has appeared in The BeZine), Adeena Karasick, and I performed one lovely evening. All four of us keep in touch through Facebook now. I met gary lundy a long time ago and have spent time together, including road trips and as roommates for a few months. However, most of our friendship has been sustained and maintained by email and online connections—dating back to before any of us had heard of Facebook. UK poet Reuven Woolley, Romanian poet Liliana Negoi, Natasha Head, as well as Jamie Dedes and the rest of the Bardo Group Beguines, I only know “virtually.” Until a few months ago, the same was true for The Woven Tale Press publisher and editor-in-chief, Sandra Tyler.

Today, the world of poetry, as with everything else, has transformed under the influences of technology and social media. Last year, I spoke to a graduate-student seminar about social media, poetry, and the latest wave of “democratization of poetry.” That discussion evolved into the foreword of The Art of Being Human, Vol. 14, which you can read in this issue as “(Social) Media(ted) (Democratic) Poetry.”

I won’t try to count how many waves of “democratic” trends in poetry have washed up on the beach. A couple of centuries ago, poets were concerned “just anybody” might write poetry, and they didn’t think that was such a good idea. Some probably still don’t. Free verse and the Beats in the mid-Twentieth Century have been associated with the idea, for better or worse, depending on who made the association.

Today, poetry slams usually involve actual voting, as do many online sites. Self-publishing has become easy and cheap, so anyone could have a book who wants to, now. As a result of all of this, editors—such as those putting together a special poetry issue—serve much more as curators than as the gate-keepers of old. So, we may be in one of the greatest ever waves of “democratic” poetry.

A tidal wave of poetry, perhaps.

Don’t worry. While it will wash over you and change you, you won’t drown. Enjoy the poetry, writing about poetry, and other work presented here for your celebratory pleasure!

“There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.”
― Sharon Olds

Table of Contents

Featured

POEMS

ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS

WOVEN TALE PRESS COLLABORATION

SECOND LIGHT NETWORK

IMG_9671CONNECT WITH US

Beguine Again, Spirtual Community and Practice

Facebook, The Bardo Group Beguines

Twitter, The Bardo Group Beguines

Access to the biographies of our core team contributing writers and guest writers is in the blogroll to your left along with archived issues of The BeZine, our Mission Statement and Submission Guidelines.

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CELEBRATING AMERICAN SHE-POETS (12): Sharon Frye, Last Chance for Rain

SharonSharon Gariepy Frye – a.k.a. Sharon Frye -is a photographer as well as a poet with one chapbook published, Last Chance for Rain (White Knights Press, 2014) and a new collection, Red Dashboard (Elizabeth Dillon, 51T8-CyhKSL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_2016) to be published later this year, the exact date to be announced.

Last Chance for Rain offers us twenty poems. Each presents a compassionate look at the complex architecture of everyday lives – occasionally her own – with all their bays and battlements, their facades and their niches. Understanding comes with small intimate descriptions like this one of an elderly gentleman:

“She noticed his wrist, a small pear stone,
silver hair planted, bloomed over stone.”

excerpt from the Last Chance for Rain, the poem that lends its name to the book

When I first encountered Sharon’s poetry, I was impressed with the detail, the sense of a spiritual journey, and with her compassionate imagination, which is both her strength and her distinction. No surprise that Sharon was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for Poetry and most recently made the shortlist for the 2016 Blackwater International Poetry Festival.

JAMIE: Congratulations on making the Blackwater shortlist. It was so pleasant to see the announcement go up. I think it’s not the only award you’ve received. Bravo!

It seems to me your interests are as eclectic as most of us who read and/or are featured here: art and photography, music and dance, literature and poetry. I think I’m not alone in enjoying your nature photography. With the wealth of your interests, how and why did you come to focus on poetry?

SHARON: Thanks for the warm regards on making the Blackwater shortlist. I was a little surprised myself.

From an early age poetry dazzled me. I remember my first anthology of poetry was called Reflections on a Gift of Watemelon Pickle. I was mesmerized by the play and dance of words across the pages. I have been hooked ever since.

I began writing more as my children moved into adulthood, one by one. Now that I have an empty nest, I have more time to follow the muse. I have to say I am pleasantly surprised where it has taken me, from reading to FDNY firefighters, to Ireland and Sacramento…to various stops along Route 66.

JAMIE: This is a question people think is reserved for women, but I ask it of everyone I interview: How do you do it? How do produce a fair amount of poetry, well-crafted and well-considered, and juggle all your interests, your job with the U.S. Postal Service and your family responsibilities?

SHARON: It’s not easy, all this juggling… and I get frustrated. I try to be a good daughter to my aging parents, a good parent and an active grandmother. I also work full time as a rural mail carrier and am an active member of a local writing club. I think the experience and interaction with what has become my focus is also what inspires and serves as a catalyst to express – or record – some of my feelings and observations that result from these experiences.

I once wrote about the Asian man who was giving me a pedicure. I felt my heart expand as I considered what his life and history might have been. It’s a good practice, trying to perceive the worldview of those you come into contact with throughout the day. It gives the gift of empathy, which then always circles back to gratitude, always.

JAMIE: Do you find inspiration in the landscapes of Wyoming, where you come from, and Oklahoma, where you live now?

Jamie, you are a keen observer. I do love the landscape of my birthplace Wyoming and now those in my home of Oklahoma. There is just as much beauty in an Oklahoma sunset as there is on a snow-capped range nestled in the pines. I have learned to love Oklahoma’s red-dirt roads and often meander on a Sunday afternoon, taking pictures of abandoned farms and rusted Studebakers, forgotten in fields.

JAMIE: If I’m not mistaken, you have a strong affinity with what is probably your ancestral country, Ireland. You come honestly then by your love of and gift for poetry. Who is your favorite Irish poet and why?

SHARON: You are right, my maternal grandmother’s family hailed from Kilkenny. Of the Irish poets, I love Seamus Heaney, the earthiness of his words. You spoke of landscape: Heaney seemed to meld the inner landscape with the outer world in a mystical way. I also like some of Yeat’s work…The Stolen Child and A Prayer for my Daughter.

JAMIE: Tell us about Writing Knights and Equador Das Coisas.

SHARON: Writing Knights Press is an independent publishing company in Ohio. They publish many aspiring poets’s chapbooks, as they did my book, Last Chance for Rain. I was pleased that the publisher, Azriel Johnson, nominated one of my poems, Dollar Store Princess for a Pushcart Prize in 2015.

O Equador Das Coisas (the equator of things!) is a lovely journal of art and literature from Brazil. Editors Carol Piva and Germano Xavier have invited me to be a regular contributing poet, with my own page in the journal. Carol translates my poems from English to Portuguese for this endeavor… Oh, sometimes the world is so wonderfully small, you know? 😊

Poverty Line

It started with my back tooth,
much cheaper to extract wisdom.
Now tongue swirls in dark abyss
around black cavity, nothingness.

I feel unbalanced as I walk
one molar gone, orthodontic
shift in class, the have­-not caste,
one millstone followed by another.

How much grinding bore holes
in enamel, uprooting the bed?
Babies sucked from natal stream
drained the marrow, shriveled the bone.

Frayed blue collar underscores
my lopsided, one­-less­-tooth smile
while white starched collars
curl below rows of faultless teeth.

—Sharon Frye

Here is a slide show of Sharon’s photography ~

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You’ll find some of Sharon’s poems in past issues of The BeZine. (Just type her name into the search feature.) We are sharing some of Sharon’s poems in the April issue – due out on the 15th – which celebrates poetry month.

© 2016, poem, words and photographs, Sharon Frye, All rights reserved

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THE TRAGIC HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS’S CAT and other cat-poesies for literate felines and their literary humans

Grandkitty Dahlia reads The Efinitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse
Grandkitty Dahlia reads The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse

“Was this the puss that munched a thousand mice
And napped atop the towers of Ilium? ….”
excerpt from Mephistopheles by Christopher Marlow’s Cat

In Xanadu did Kubla Kat A splendid sofa-bed decree With silken cushions soft and fat A perfect feline habitat

“In Xanadu did Kubla Kat
A splendid sofa-bed decree
With silken cushions soft and fat
A perfect feline habitat…”
excerpt from Kula Kat by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Cat

Henry Beard’s Poetry for Cats, The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse, is a must for literate cats and their humans, especially if said humans love cats as much as they love poetry. Beard does a fine job with his parodies, keeping the meter and rhyme of original poem and capturing the idiosyncrasies of cats in the way that only someone who lives with them and loves them could. The book is dedicated to Serafina – “il miglior gatto” – the best cat. That says it all, doesn’t it?

“And though your human sweetly calls his pet
Or rants and raves until his face is blue,
do not go peaceable to that damn vet,
Hide, hide, when your appointment time is set.”
excerpt from Do Not Go Peaceable to That Damn Vet by Dylan Thomas’s Cat

The book includes some forty parodies of poems by poets of renown including Chaucer, Donne, Blake, Shelley, Kilmer, Ransom, Nash and Ginsberg and three she-poets: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickenson and Gertrude Stein.

The elders among us will remember American humorist Henry Beard (b. 1945) as one of the founders of National Lampoon.  His other cat-books include French for Cats, A Cat’s Night Before Christmas and Zen for Cats. More recent books are Encyclopedia Paranoiaca (great satire) with Christopher Cerf, a book on golf, and The Dick Cheney Code.

Poetry for Cats is well-crafted and just plain fun, relief in a world that is forever dishing up strife and stress. No spewing hairballs on this one. Dahlia gave it a paws-up and her humans – my son and daughter-in-law – loved it too. It makes a sweet gift, which it was in this case.

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Thanks to Embarcadero Jack for photographing Dahlia reading.