Wang Ping Interview
Wang Ping A Chinese Immigrant in America Seeks to ‘Create a Wave’ and, Ultimately, a Tsunami
Wang Ping, 47, is the author of several books of fiction, non –fiction, and poetry. Her writing has won the Eugene Kaden Award, the Asian –American Studies Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. Born in Shanghai, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Beijing University, her master’s degree in English literature from Long Island University, and her doctorate in comparative literature from New York University. The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board, among others, Ping is also a translator, photographer, and teacher. She is a professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The following telephone interview was conducted, in English, by Timothy Gillis on March 13, 2014.
TG: You’ve been in the United States since 1986, when you came to New York to get your master’s degree from Long Island University at age 19. Tell us about those early days in that new setting.
WP: The first year was really hard. I spoke English, but the cultural shock was tremendous. Having only $22 in my pocket didn’t help. People said “UPS” and I said, “I have no idea. What is that?” And the next day, I was working there. So I started working right away and was fired three days later because I didn’t really know anything. I had grown up in the late Cultural Revolution. I was a farmer. Then I went to college. Then I taught. Then I came to the United States. It was basically [during] the Communism regime. Material-wise, I basically had one of everything — one pen, one jacket, one shirt. I did speak some English, but it was a total transformation.
TG: Talk about your literary influences. Who were the writers that moved you toward writing and writing poetry?
WP: I grew up in China, and classic Chinese poetry is in my blood — poets like Li Po, Du Pu. We didn’t really have that much Western culture or poetry because it was forbidden, until I came to the United States. The second year [here], I came to Long Island University and I studied American and English literature. What really impacted me first was the day I walked into the wrong classroom. I thought it was literary criticism, but it was a writing workshop. Lewis Warsh was the professor. [ED. NOTE: Warsh was co-founder with Anne Waldman of Angel Hair magazine and books.] It was pretty funny. When I discovered it was the wrong classroom, it was already too late. One assignment was to write about my first [political] experience. I wrote about the Cultural Revolution. This was what I’d wanted to do all my life.
TG: What was your next poetic step?
WP: Lewis introduced me to Allen Ginsberg, who was organizing the first American-Chinese cultural festival, and he was bringing all these people to New York, and they were going to travel across America to give poetry readings, and Allen Ginsberg needed a translator. Lewis asked me if I was willing to do that and I said, “Of course!” That’s how I started working with Allen Ginsberg, and we traveled all over the country with John Ashberry, Gary Snyder, Bob Creeley. That’s how I became friends with all those people. We became quite close. Pretty soon after that, I met Xue Di in New York. Actually before I met him, Keith Waldrup wrote to me asking me if I would collaborate with him on a translation. And I said yes. After translating all these poets, through this process I started writing poetry. It’s a natural process. After that poetry festival, I started doing more translations which resulted in the book, New Generations: Poems from China Today, a very cool and intimate collaboration with poets like Anne Waldman and Ron Padgett.
TG: I see you have a new work out that’s fiction. And in your previous work, 10,000 Waves, there are poems with dialogues from workers. In the title piece, you take on the voices of 18 of the 21 people who died at Morecambe Bay, England, on February 5, 2004. The Chinese laborers were collecting cockles late in the evening when they were caught by an incoming tide. You did some journalistic research for that, correct? It reads like Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, your own watery epitaphs to the dead. You also tried to give a voice to the three unidentified people who died.
WP: At that time, there were three missing people. It seemed somewhat symbolic to have the chorus in the poem perhaps stand for those missing voices. As I did my research and travel, I heard all the stories, all the voices. From the very beginning, as a writer and a poet, I always questioned myself. After writing about myself and my own position in the world — which is one of your duties as a writer — I ask: Do I only talk about myself or do I have this ability to speak for others? And if I do, what gives me the authority and the right? That’s the true question.
TG: How does one acquire that authority, that right to create a poetic voice for others?
WP: It started with an earlier poem. I was living in New York at the time, hanging out with Ai Wei Wei and others. I wanted to write a poem for this big reading at the Poetry Project. I was scheduled to read with Allen Ginsberg, who was going to read from “Howl.” And I thought, “How can anyone perform with Ginsberg’s “Howl” and not be completely faded?” At that time, the Golden Venture ship was very much on our minds. [ED. NOTE: The Golden Venture was a cargo ship that ran aground at Rockaway Beach in Queens. The ship held 286 undocumented workers, ten of whom drowned trying to flee the stranded ship.] I decided to write a poem about the accident. I researched it.I tried to visit the cemetery in New Jersey. I spent a lot of time learning about what happened. Adrienne Rich later selected it for The Best American Poetry collection. “10,000 Waves” was a continuation of that [type of] poem, and also my interest in answering the questions about whom I write for and what gives me the authenticity. My experience in China and my experience as an immigrant in America allow me to build that bridge.
TG: Tell us about your writing process. Do you typically pursue a topic by researching it, as you did with “10,000 Waves,” or do you let the muse come to you?
WP: I do not have the luxury of not having to work. I’ve always worked, several jobs at the same time. So writing for me is more of a discipline. Every day I must put in some time and energy, either to sit down and write, or think about it — when I walk, or work in the garden, or while cooking. Not while teaching. That takes too much energy. It takes discipline to be ready to write, to remain vulnerable and open, instead of building a wall. In terms of craft, my first two books of poetry were more intuitive. 10,000 Waves is much more conscious. Some of my poems are more narrative because the content requires me to use the story-telling form, and I always try to make sure the music and cadence is there. I believe I have internal music. Music is everywhere. Music is about rhythm, the consonance and dissonance. I’m a dancer — modern dance and the flamenco. I’m a martial artist. I do fencing and yoga. I’m a big mover. I teach full time. I write. I travel. And I sing. I’m a single mother with two children. So how do I do all these things? There are only 24 hours in a day. It’s the rhythm. I’m tapped into my inner rhythm. I synch my internal rhythm with the universal rhythm. So I get rest and am revitalized through doing different things that feed me. I create a wave, and wave after wave creates a tsunami.
Wesley McNair Interview
Interview with Wesley McNair On Personal Poems, Teaching Poetry, and Life as Maine Poet Laureate
The following interview with Wesley McNair was conducted by Timothy Gillis on September 24, 2014. McNair is the author of 20 books, including, My Brother Running, which connects his brother’s fatal heart attack with the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, and The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry, which delves into the personal hardships he endured: his father abandoning the family on a Christmas eve, an abusive stepfather, and the difficulties of raising his own family while finding his poetic voice. In addition to his poetry, he has also edited seven anthologies, three of which celebrate the renaissance in Maine writing in the last 20 years.
McNair’s latest work, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, was inspired by the impending death of his mother. His grief and the need to reconcile with her led him to a series of poems about her homeplace in the Ozarks of southern Missouri. He writes in The Words I Chose that his mother “caused me much pain and suffering in my childhood and youth,” adding that she was nonetheless “an ally in my development as a writer,” who typed up his early poems and stories and saved them all.
The current poet laureate of Maine, McNair is now finishing up the fourth year of his five-year term. In one of his first official acts, he got rid of the term “Poetry Tea” that had been used for the annual poetry celebration at the Blaine House, disliking the elitist image the term conveyed. “It didn’t really match my general goal of bringing poetry to the people,” he says.
McNair lives in Mercer, Maine and has a camp on Drury Pond in Temple, where he creates in his writing cabin, accompanied by his dogs Gus and Rosie, “who crash while I write early in the morning.” After a mid-morning breakfast, McNair swims with the dogs, thinking about the poem he’s been working on. “That’s where the poem gets its second life,” he said. “It comes back into my mind during the rhythm of our swim, and I try to puzzle out where I am in it and where I might go next. The idea is to find a source of anticipation that will carry me into my next writing session. Whether I go in that new direction or not isn’t so important as the feeling of hope I have for the poem.”
McNair has twice been invited by the Library of Congress to read his poetry and has received prizes from Poetry and Poetry Northwest magazines, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Fellowships, and two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, he was selected for a $50,000 United States Artist Fellowship.
TG: Tell us about your new work, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, and where these poems originate.
WM: Let me talk first about the book’s extended middle section, the largest part of the book, in which I describe the people in my mother’s homeplace of the Ozarks. Some of the poems in that section come totally from my imagination, but in many other ones, I blend what really happened with what could have happened and what should have happened, as one tends to do in poetry. To put it another way, I mix real life with the sort of lying that leads to a deeper truth. For instance, I use my mother’s real name, Ruth, in the section, not because everything she does actually took place, but because I catch the contours of her life and attitude and personality. The same approach applies to the Ozark family in the book — that is, they are fictional, but at the same time, they resemble my mother’s actual family and share their story. Her family lived on a hardscrabble farm in the poverty and the hardship of the Dust Bowl period during the Depression. That life was especially hard on the kids, especially the older ones, who worked from dawn to dusk right along with their parents. They were kids who had no chance to be kids — who lost their childhood. As the oldest child, my mother probably had it the worst. Have a look at Ruth in the book’s title poem, who calls herself “the lost child,” and you’ll see just under her comic surface the sadder woman I’m speaking of.
Reprint of, “The Lost Child,” follows the interview.
TG: I found the poems very powerful, and I appreciated the non-fictional bookends of part I and part III — the first part describing your mother’s time in the acute care hospital, and the third part describing her death and the spreading of her ashes in the Ozarks. In part I, “When She Wouldn’t,” Ruth is in her hospital room surrounded by family members, who are trying to talk her into going into a nursing home. Did writing about that real-life event lead you to write the rest of the book?
WM: You’re absolutely right. That poem is crucial to the book because it starts the cycle of grief that inspired all the poems of the middle section. I don’t say in the poem exactly what led my mother to be hospitalized but it had to do with stubbing her big toe. My mother had no circulation in her right leg, so when she stubbed her toe and the wound began to fester, she didn’t feel it happening. Of course, she never told anyone about the problem, either, toughing it out the way she and her siblings learned to do. But eventually she had to be admitted at an acute care center, and by then the infection was life threatening, and we didn’t know if she’d ever come out. That was when the three remaining elderly siblings, the ones in my poem, came from Missouri to be with her.
TG: So the poems of part II came out of your encounter with them?
WM: Exactly. As we talked together about what to do with my mother, what the next step would be, the air was thick with emotion. I bonded with them in a way I didn’t predict. So in the ensuing June, I went to a family reunion in the Ozarks, and when I got back to Maine I began to write poems derived from that visit with my Missouri relatives, in what I see now as an attempt to reach out to my mother. My mother was a difficult person, and I felt the need through these poems to understand her in a different way before she died. When I was maybe two-thirds of the way through the book, she did die. At that point, I wrote also to remember her. So you see the book has a background in grief and reconciliation. Now that the collection is finished, I have to say I’m still a little stunned by it — I think because it took me so deep into the feeling life, which is the heart of poetry.
TG: It’s impressive that you were able to put your feelings into words, especially in the midst of all you must have been going through in this period. The character Harlan Wesley Sykes, “the preacher, who started this clan in Mount Zion” — is that a sly self-reference in the sense that you created these characters by writing this book?
WM: That’s very insightful of you, Tim. As you probably noticed, I refer to myself elsewhere in the book as well. In a couple of poems I write of Ruth’s second or middle son, though I never name that son. And I have to add that I think of myself as a lost child, too. As the two final poems in part III show, I had my own struggles growing up.
TG: In some of the poems in part II, I felt you were not only describing the region of the Ozarks, but America itself. Was this by intention?
WM: As I wrote, I began to think about Colin Woodard’s book, American Nations, which shows how national politics are influenced by regional culture. And I thought especially about the Appalachian migration and its influence. According to Woodard, that migration covered an enormous area of the United States, spreading westward across the top section of the Deep South, through West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee all the way to Missouri and Oklahoma and Arkansas and north Texas. So when you’re writing about the Ozarks and the values and attitudes of its people, you’re also writing about the values of a significant part of this country — maybe even about the real America.
TG: What would you say some of these values are?
WM: Anti-government politics, fundamentalist religion, the insistence on a traditional family, the linking of patriotism with the military. The Lost Child includes all of these things, which are both regional and American, even though they might make us Puritan New Englanders wring our hands. It was exciting for me as a New England poet to work with materials like these. Robert Frost once spoke of the freedom of your material, and the freedom I felt was the chance to deal with this other America. But I never really lose my New England self in The Lost Child — what I would call the ironic self. So when I write about that patriarchal figure you mention, John Wesley Sykes, in the poem “The American Flag Cake,” my intentions are ironical. As you know, he’s the one who’s accepted by the Sykeses as their moral guide, the evidence that they’re a chosen people. And yet the contrary evidence of their selfishness and vulgarity is plain for any reader to see.
TG: But you identify with them in some way. In The Lost Child, you seem to create characters that could be held up to criticism or praise in equal measure.
WM: I like that way of seeing it, Tim. On the one hand, I’m discovering myself as a hillbilly, and accepting the people I write about as my people, but on the other hand, as a New Englander, I’m standing back and observing them. Which is why you sense those two impulses you speak of. Working on the poems of the middle section, I sometimes felt that I was embedded in the Ozarks, participating, yet reporting — which explains the ironic edge some of the poems have. But I think that in the end readers of The Lost Child, like you, won’t have trouble finding my sympathy for them — and a sense they have an importance that transcends their limitations.
TG: Many of the poems are not specifically about your mother, but she’s often present, in some way.
WM: True. As you’d expect from a book that was inspired by my grief for her and my need to reconcile with her, my mother is woven all through the book, either through poems that feature her, or poems that include her, or poems that are haunted by the book’s main theme, which is my gradual rediscovery of her as I create the book. So the poem called “Gratitude” shows an older man rediscovering his mother — a stand-in, in his way, for me.
TG: You’ve taught poetry writing for years, and you’ve written a lot of essays about writing poetry. What has your experience shown you about how poets develop?
WM: I’m not exactly the one to ask, because I have an old-fashioned notion about this. My model comes from my relationship with the older poet, Donald Hall, who read my poems and liked them, confirming my choice to become a poet. It’s a model I’d describe as the laying on of hands, one experienced poet welcoming a beginner into this special society. I don’t deny there are other ways of becoming a poet. Poets develop in lots of ways. The prevailing method today is the MFA program, which imitates the older model I’m talking about, the permission to make poems given by the professor who assesses the results in a workshop. That system works, and it has produced some good poets. On the other hand, it is now a full-scale industry that depends on grading and the academy and the banks, and I don’t entirely trust it. Still, that whole issue is moot, because before I retired, I always taught undergraduates, most of whom would never become poets at all. So I was free to pursue a broader mission — that is, to explore poetry as a means of expressing the truth as they knew it.
TG: Could you say more about that exploration and poetry’s truth?
WM: As Hayden Carruth once put it, any American kid who’s reached college age knows that we live in a culture where language is used by the advertisers and the politicians to lie. Poetry, of course, wants nothing to do with that language. At the University of Maine at Farmington, where I did most of my college teaching, in rooms where the furniture didn’t always match, I sometimes felt I was in the catacombs of the culture, and we had gathered together to have a conversation about this new and revolutionary use of words that poetry made possible.
David Meltzer Interview
by Steve Luttrell & Timothy Gillis
May 14, 2014 via telephone
David Meltzer was born in Rochester, New York, & raised in Brooklyn. He began his literary career during the San Francisco Beat & Berkeley Renaissance period in North Beach, California, & his work was included in the anthology, “The New American Poetry 1945–1960.” At the age of 20, he recorded his poetry with jazz musicians in Los Angeles & also became a singer-songwriter & guitarist for several bands during the 1960s, including The Serpent Power. He is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, including Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957–1992, No Eyes: Lester Young (2000), Beat Thing (2004), & David’s Copy (2005).
TG: Do you write for the eye or the ear?
DM: That’s curious. I suppose both. You can’t really segment that process. I guess usually if it’s really happening, all senses are operating & no one (sense) overlaps the other. You’re depending on all the help you can get. Yes, sound is important, but also the shape of the poem. All these things you think about when you’re doing it.
SL: Your parents were musicians. To what degree is your love of music influenced by them?
DM: You’ve answered the question. When the first thing you hear, after your mother’s heartbeat, is the sound of somebody playing the piano or a cello or a string quartet in the living room, that’s kind of a present. Especially when you haven’t developed any categories or genre or opinions, you’re pretty open & receptive. My dad, who was a classical cellist, liked all kinds of music. Those were the days of the 78s. The bottom shelf of the living room bookcase was stuffed with single 78s in sleeves & clunky albums in no particular order or categories. I was given permission to use the Ainsley-Crosley console Victrola to play whatever I wanted. No ingrained perceptions or divisions, it was all music to me. At a certain point of puberty, you’re trying to create a certain selfhood — & music is something you glom on to. When I was 11 or 12, my music became bebop in the postwar gloom of Brooklyn.
SL: Discuss modal free jazz & spontaneous bop prosody. You seemingly were influenced quite a bit by that.
DM: Modal free jazz — outside of Lennie Tristano’s ’50s sessions for Capitol (notably “Intuition”) — didn’t really fully emerge until the ’60s. Kerouac’s concept came out of the ’50s & his inspiration was via bebop. As I said, I was a precocious kid from Brooklyn & started going to the bop clubs like The Royal Roost & Birdland — sometimes with my dad, other times by myself. Because of the licensing policies of the clubs in Manhattan, kids underage could go to these clubs as long as they sat in this isolated pen & drank overpricey Cokes. We could actually hear, be in the presence of, so many of these now legends, then just these guys.
SL: A lot of that comes out in “No Eyes,” the great poem for Lester Young.
DM: Young lived in the Arvin Hotel on Broadway. He could look across the street to the entrance of Birdland. I heard him there. But in the time frame of the book, Young is mostly inactive & drinking himself to death in his room listening to records on a portable phonograph, especially Jo Stafford. Very strange & poignant, haunted, beautiful man, the musician. As a kid, what do you know? It was all amazing. Charlie Parker was amazing. Bud Powell was amazing. Charles Mingus was amazing. Nobody wasn’t amazing. But that was because I was 11, 12 years old. That was my music. That was the point. & puberty is sort of attached to the music. & if anyone else doesn’t like it, they are outlawed from your little stain of ego.
SL: Tell us about your experience with Wallace Berman & Semina, when you first moved to Los Angeles. For those of us in small poetry, he had an amazing influence on us.
DM: I was maybe 15, & came with my father from the east coast. He was looking for work for the medium that was going to dominate — television. He had been a radio writer &, at a certain point in middle age, that whole thing was turned upside down by the new technology. & with the new technology, as today, young people are extremely comfortable in that framework. He was a person who wrote for you to hear, whereas with television you wrote for people to see. It cut down the potential for wordplay & literacy. I had already been a dissolute school-goer, being raised up in Brooklyn. I was put through these accelerated classes because I had a high IQ. I sort of drifted around, & did meet Wallace & a whole bunch of wonderful mentors & crazoids. When you’re living in the margins, it’s good to have friends.
TG: City Lights published “When I was a Poet” in 2011. Why the past tense in the title? Don’t you still think of yourself as a poet?
DM: Why not? You know how poets are. It’s really about the subjects: Age, Time, Mortality, Was, Is, & also making fun of the concept & at the same time taking it very seriously. I’m still writing.
TG: Discuss your writing process (morning or night? each day or when the inspiration hits? music while you write? what music?) How do you know when a poem is finished? Is it ever?
DM: I have no plan, after all of these decades, unless I’m onto something. No kind of aerobics poetry writing. I admire, & know, many poets who get up & write poems for a couple of hours & go out & feed the dogs. I stopped doing that when I was in my 30’s or 40’s. I started (writing) when I was a kid. I’m not book-driven unless I am. I’m more interested in an idea, & then try to run with it & play it out as much as I can.
SL: Do you feel that the “Beat” label has been good or limiting for you?
DM: Early on, I’d say, “I’m too young to be officially in these ranks.” & I’m too old to be a hippie. What is going to happen to me? I’m doomed.
SL: The word “poet” works real well.
TG: You wrote last year for Harriet (Poetry magazine’s blog), & you’re teaching a poetry course online. Can you tell us more about that, & how technology has changed writing?
DM: As soon as I figure it out. (laughs) Based on my prior teaching experience, a course would be 15 weeks, & it would be three hours, & it would be both talking & discussing. It gave everyone a lot of room in class. This (new course) is something that’s not interactive. I’ve outlined 10 classes, a basic intro to poetry & poetics. I’m working through — apparently it’s the oldest online site for writers. Each successive cadre of kids who come in is even more frivolous. They don’t read. They specialize in distraction, in the fragmentary contact. Don’t get me started.
TG: Has technology changed for the good, in some ways?
DM: My first great defeat was having to give up my manual Olympia office typewriter, because of arthritis, & from then on it was downhill. But I do see technology’s advantages as a form of personal expression.
SL: Who was Donald Schenker? & how did you come to collaborate with him on one of your first books?
DM: I was maybe 19 or 20. Don was one of the people who worked at the bagel shop, the counter man, & we started talking. We both self-identified as poets. He & his wife who lived up in this area had inherited Weldon Kees’ press. & it was one of these, “Let’s do a book.” It was my first half-book.
TG: How important is humor to you, in your life & poetry.
DM: It’s a stabilizing factor. It’s like a hiccup or a burp or a fart. The moment you experience it, you’re not there. Just for the moment. All the complex mental working, to “get it” & when you get it, you’re not there.
SL: You’ve said Lew Welch taught you about “Poetry & Torment.”
DM: He would know.
SL: Do you think he had a sense of humor?
DM: Are you kidding? Reading with Lew, being on a platform with Lew, just watching him go, for me anyway, was just a great joy. He’d amble on stage like some minor league pitcher, & he would bring in the audience immediately.
SL: I remember Charles Olson telling him “You’ve got a few good poems, here, Lew, but you really need to read more.”
DM: I was there that night, a couple blocks away, preparing for the after-party.
SL: Do you think we write one poem in our lifetime & that all of our poems are fragments of that one poem?
DM: Well, it’s all one life. How many poems are there? That’s always been a good question. Why are poems made? Why are canons foddered?
TG: Wayne Atherton, from The Café Review, said folk singer-songwriter Eric Andersen references you to some degree in his spoken word piece on the “Beat Avenue” CD, in the context of walking the streets in a daze on the day JFK was assassinated. Can you talk about those days? Are you still political? Who will you support in the next presidential election?
DM: I’ve always believed all art practices resist domination. To me, every notable arts movement could be called a resistance
movement. The fine line between resistance & acceptance intrigues me. But you’d have to pay me for endorsements. (laughs)
SL: I wanted to compliment you & your wife, Julie, on the way you each work & then collaborate so well.
DM: Thank you. It’s good for both of us.
TG: What are you up to next, in the world of readings?
DM: You’d think at this advanced age, it would be a piece of cake. I taught at New College for over 30 years. The administration tanked, & one of the things they forgot was to give us guys pensions.
TG: That’s not a good way to retire from teaching.
DM: I’m not retired. There’s social security, but it doesn’t cover rent. We’re always working on something. If we were to wake up one morning & say, “I’ve got nothing left to do,” you’d start hearing funereal music. It would be like a bad movie.
TG: You’ve done a book of interviews called San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets. Are you more comfortable doing the interview or being interviewed yourself?
DM: I didn’t even want to be in it (as an interview subject), but a student pulled me in. That book covers a lot of time. Part of it was published in the 60’s. The rest of it is in the 90’s. But I was there for all of it.
SL: It seems like you’re always in charge of the after-party.
DM: Keep the poetry going & the wine flowing.
Xue Di Interview
Interview with Xue Di on the poetry of revolution, life in the United States, and the precise word
The following phone and email interview with Xue Di was conducted by Timothy Gillis in February 2014. Xue Di was born in Beijing. He is the author of three volumes of collected works and one book of criticism on contemporary Chinese poetry in Chinese. In English translation, he has published four full-length books, Across Borders, Another Kind of Tenderness, An Ordinary Day, and Heart into Soil, and four chapbooks, Forgive, Cat’s Eye in a Splintered Mirror, Circumstances, and Flames. His work has appeared in numerous American journals and anthologies and has been translated into several languages. Xue Di is a two-time recipient of the Hellman / Hammett Award and a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship.
TG: When did you begin writing poetry and who or what was your earliest muse?
XD: I was born in China in 1957. Right about when I was six years old, my parents got divorced. In 1966, the Chinese Cultural Revolution started. The whole country was in chaos. The living conditions and my personal life were in miserable circumstances. Back then, China did not allow people to divorce. My parents were punished by the government and the working unit.
I have tried many different things to see in my younger years. I could not find happiness. One day when I was 12 years old (I lived in a dormitory where my father worked), I found an abandoned collection of poems written by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. That was the first time — we had Chinese classical poetry, but this was the first poet — I read it, and it touched my heart and shaped my whole being.
I did not feel love from society, from my family — there was so much nature, and the beauty and the love was there — it was the first time I felt that wonderful thing in my life. That was the first time I tried to write some poems.
Xue Di, as an active member of the Beijing branch of the Chinese Writer’s Association, began to organize resident writers and poets into support groups for the Tian’anmen students’ hunger strike. The Chinese Writer’s Association and an ad–hoc group calling themselves the “Beijing Poets” marched in support May 17–19, 1989, immediately before the declaration of martial law. Xue Di was in the front ranks during these days. In blood, he wrote the word “Save” on the front of his shirt and “Revolt” on the shirt’s back, making clear his political commitment to the democratic movement. He continued to march and wear his shirt in support of the movement until the crackdown on June 4.
TG: How did your poetry change or develop during the Tian’anmen Square period?
XD: At that time, I was not working. Somehow I got early retirement in my working unit. When I graduated from the middle school, all the colleges and universities shut down. That was a part of the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao believed that real knowledge is not from the professors, not from the teachers. It’s from the workers, from societies, from farmers, so the university was shut off. Lots of the professors were sent to the camp. So I could not go to the university. I went into the institute to study film for two years. So I started working there. That’s not what I wanted to do, but I had no choice. Whatever was assigned to you, you had to go or you had no work.
Xue Di’s work involved researching how to make a brighter light bulb that would also burn longer. He was able to gain early retirement.
XD: During the 1989 Tian’anmen Square democracy movement, I was able to participate a lot because I was not in the working unit. In China, a lot of people went to support the students’ movement in groups from the working units. That’s why, when the movement was crashed on by the army, a lot of people got in trouble because there was proof who went there. I was in my retirement so I was able to go. I did organize the writers in Beijing to march in support of the student movement.
When I came to the United States, I wrote a poem to dedicate to the 1989 events. I don’t write a lot of poems like that. The poems have really changed a lot since I came to the United States.
At Tian’anmen Square, everyone was so angry. The poem was an open heart, emotional. While I was in China, a lot of poems I wrote, during the Cultural Revolution, — we felt we were part of the younger generation, we felt our work was oppressed by the government. A lot of my writing back then was emotional, was letting things go out, outwards. Imagine living in a room all closed, no door, no windows. You don’t see anything. You don’t see the sunlight; you don’t see the birds. All of my life was to try to chisel on the wall, try to make a crack, so I can see something, hear something from nature. When you do that you put all your strength and emotion into chiseling the wall.
TG: Art has been a major influence on your writing. Can you discuss its impact on you?
XD: Van Gogh loves nature. In Beijing, there was no nature. Society was very closed. Van Gogh’s paintings really touched my heart so deeply. I felt like Van Gogh’s painting was close to his heart. He did not really care about other people’s judgments of his work, and he madly loved nature. For me, I feel like I was very close with his art work. My living was closed and oppressed. There was no nature. I was crying for all the beauty in life and nature. That’s why I wrote poems dedicated to Van Gogh’s paintings.
TG: Discuss how you write your poems.
XD: I write my poems in Chinese. Before 1990, I did not know English at all. I learned everything after I came to the United States. Poetry is so precise, so subtle. Even with my native language, I work so hard to pull out one precise word.
I speak English every day at work. Somehow I have to find a way to maintain the Chinese culture, to stay close to the fruit of my culture. This is one thing I feel great about, to write my work in Chinese. At least, I’m still in my culture.
I write my work in Chinese, and then I have a group of people who help translate my work into English. My English is okay.
I’ve found once in a while, I can translate my work on my own, but this is only the first step. (The translators) are really loyal to the original meaning.
The first step is literally from Chinese to English. When I worked with Keith Waldrop, a wonderful American poet who is passionate about translation — he would work on the English translation to bring it to a fine poem in English. It’s really hard to find someone who knows Chinese very well and in English, their original language, they are also a poet. I would read the first draft and put in my notes on what I wanted to say. Then, when Keith would work on the final draft, he knew my exact meaning and would work further on it.
TG: What is lost (if anything) in translation? What is gained?
XD: Poetry is very hard to translate. It’s not like a novel or a short story. For a poem, the word has its own culture and so much history behind the words.
So when you translate from Chinese to English, the beauty of the language, the rhythm of the original language, the culture of the language; these things get lost in the translation: the root of the language, the history, and the beauty of the language, itself. But if the translator does a really good job, the translator actually can catch up the rhythm of the language and put it into the English language. It can flow really well and also can obtain the subtleness, the history, and the meaning of the words into English.
TG: I noticed that you use a poem’s line end as a period or comma at times (without an actual period or comma). It’s very effective in English. How is punctuation handled in Chinese? Do your translators account for this?
XD: For me, I do not want to use them. I feel like when you don’t have the mark at the end of the line, it looks better. The word Xue in Chinese looks like a snowflake falling to the ground. My original name was Bing Li. That was one of the most popular names in China, like John in this country. If I walked along the street, and someone called Bing Li, I would turn around and see another ten people turn around. A good friend came to my house and said you published a poem that was really lousy. He showed me the paper with a poem by someone called “Bing Li” — it was really bad. That’s the reason I gave myself a pen name. When I put the two words together, it was a very unique combination. No one had this name, but unfortunately now, if I did a web search in Chinese, I would see Xue Di as it’s a popular name — a beer factory, a sock factory, even a hotel in Italy, using exactly my name.
TG: Discuss your writing routine: where and when do you write? What is the medium (i.e. pencil and paper, computer?) Do you listen to music? How many drafts does a typical poem go through? How do you know when a poem is finished?
XD: When I write, I usually write in the later morning or early afternoon. When I get up in the morning, I like to not talk to anyone, no TV or anything, and go to writing. My general time to write is about three hours. After three hours, you could keep writing, but a lot of what you write is not high quality, to focus on the poem. If I still have a feeling, I hold the feeling, let it stew.
A lot of writers like to write down whatever is in their minds, then they rewrite, time after time. This is not the way I write. When I write a poem, I need to make the poem pretty much precise in my mind. When I write the first line, it’s pretty much what I’d like to write. I work pretty hard for the first draft, and when I’m finished, it’s pretty much finished. I do rewrite, but that’s not the way that I do my work. I like to write poems not more than 20 lines. They are short, but they are strong. There is more power than if it’s spread out. I write all my work with my hand in ink pen. If I need to cross (out), I cross. When I type them, I polish. When I write, I have all the meaning and feeling and emotion in my head. When I type it on the computer, I see the work. Sometimes it does not look like I like it, so I do change it.
I don’t listen to music when I write. I need no sound at all.
I follow my mind, carefully, closely, and intensely, and also sensitively, so I need no sound. I used to train myself. In China, wherever you go, there is noise. So I would intentionally go to a very noisy place and read a book, just to train my mind. So when I write, I could have less bother.
TG: I’d like to discuss the poems that are in this edition of The Café Review, especially their origins, themes, and literary devices. “New Year” is a poem set in New England. Compare and contrast the holiday as it’s experienced in the U.S. and China. Is the line “The trumpet blows the lips” an intentional inversion? Discuss your family and friends still living in China. Who are they? What are their lives like? Has your poetic success affected them?
XD: China and the United States are both countries that celebrate the New Year with passion. I have more friends in China to celebrate this holiday with than in the U.S. Yes, it’s intentional. To write this way is to also indicate my unusual situation far away from my homeland’s circumstances.
My both parents are still living in Beijing, China, and my younger sister lives in New York City. My parents are getting old and have some health issues. My sister is doing fine in the city. They are all very pleased with my literary achievements. I hope I can go back to China to visit my parents, and spend some time with them.
My last visit was in 1997.
TG: In “Seven Years,” you write about “living / in a city whose dialect I don’t speak.” Discuss your life in Providence, R.I. You also write “Loneliness, then a precise / word.” Can you talk about the loneliness that is assuaged when a writer finds the precise word? What is the “precise word?”
XD: I am a foreigner living in this country. My spirit fits into this land, but my emotions and language are still difficult to mix in. This poem was written seven years after I came to the U.S. Seven years in a foreign land, there are so many things that I could write and express, but I decided to compress all those feelings onto a short poem. To do so, it required very precise words / lines to be created and chosen, and many more things are hidden between the lines, to give the readers a lot of spaces in which to feel the poem. It was challenging, but it came out as I expected. Ten lines for seven years, and as many experiences as possible to be included in this short poem.
To describe loneliness, there are already millions of ways to say, to write about it. How can I create a very unique and fresh
way / imagery to describe it? This must be my feeling and my skill to write about loneliness. So, “Loneliness, then a precise / word.”
A precise word is solid, reaches to the core of things, and exists somewhere alone — my feeling of loneliness, even stronger and more alone than that solid and individual word.
A precise word should be one word containing multiple meanings, and when this word connects with another precise word, it would depict so much of life’s experiences. The more precise the words, the lines would be short, but the information and experiences would be richer within the lines.
TG: In “First Love,” you write, “Pain contains me,” “Nightmare clutches me,” and “Love leads me by the nose” — three great examples of personification. What is your favorite poetic device?
XD: Personification is one way to write poems, and those feelings become images. It makes poems sounds poetic. I like to try different ways to write poems and keep myself feeling fresh, not repeating the techniques of other writers, and also challenging my writing and thinking.
TG: Who was your first love?
XD: A girl in China.