Concerning Joy

Poet Hayden Carruth died last week. I did not read and have not read a lot of his work, but what I did read was good, in my opinion. Also, he did seem to have one of those names that seemed manufactured just for a poet. He's considered an important American poet.

My most specific memory regarding him goes back to an evening maybe two decades ago when I was having dinner with three other poets, Lee Bassett, Sam Hamill (best or most recently known for the Poets Against the War project, but also a fine poet, translator, and publisher), and Madeline DeFrees. This was not long after Richard Hugo had died, and Madeline was angry about a bad review Carruth had written about Hugo--maybe it was about his collected poems. I don't know. I never tracked down the review. I just remember that Madeline, not the type to anger easily, was pretty miffed at Carruth's review, especially where it (according to her) had observed that Hugo "had no hear"--for poetry, that is. Hugo's poetry is deliberately clipped and sometimes purposely monotonous and/or staccato, but he had a great sense of language. My own view is that he was writing in the way he'd heard language when he was growing up, working class, Pacific Northwest. And he just leaned more toward the Anglo Saxon side of the language as opposed to the Latin side. Carruth probably just didn't get what Hugo was doing, but Hugo had studied with Roethke, after all, and Roethke was all about sound. If you've read Hugo's The Triggering Town, you know Hugo was almost all about sound, too.

To digress from the digression, the NY Times obituary (which I think I found online) of Carruth mentioned his once saying that he wrote a lot about loss, a statement that made me giggle because, well, don't we all write about loss, even people who don't write? Then I scolded myself for a) giggling and b) writing about loss too much myself. So I made one of those precipitous resolutions. I resolved to write about joy more. I don't know precisely why I chose joy as the opposite of loss when gain, possession, interest-accrued, or permanence would probably have been more reasonable choices as opposites to loss. Fulfilling the resolution hasn't gone all that well, but here's one poem, at least, allegedly on joy--with one of my classic, numbingly obvious titles, which Carruth probably would have hated, along with my poetry, although I doubt if he ever read even one by me, unless maybe one I had in Ploughshares. (Anyway, Mr. Carruth, I'm sorry you're dead.)


Concerning Joy


When an infant laughs,
especially at nothing,
joy has scrawled a note
for anyone to read
and get a giggle.

When people see someone
they love receive what's right,
joy juices a corpuscle of time.

When you sense that thing
move through you, the one
that feels as if your bones
just told a joke to your nerves,
which then told your feet
to dance (knowing full well
your feet ache) joy just might
have been nearby. Mercurial,

needed, and nimble,
as small as a thimble
and as big as a moon,
joy is, I'm telling you,
welcome most any time,
including midnight,
noon, and soon. I'm

saying something about
joy, okay? I'm not trying
to reproduce it, so don't
get all joyless on me. If
joy comes to you, let it.
If it doesn't, ask around.
See what you can find out.
Somebody has to know something.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Some Favorite Asian American Writers

A long, long time ago (jeez, I sound like Don McLean), I created an Asian American literature class for the English Department's curriculum, chiefly because I thought the course should exist. I'd taught American literature in a variety of venues, and I'd been concentrating a lot on African American literature, but I was straying pretty far afield, and I remember having to do a ton of reading just to come close to being adequately prepared. I was prepared enough to start preparing, in a way.

I think I taught the class two or three times before, thank goodness, the department hired someone with expertise in the field. I haven't taught the class since, and the parting was most cordial indeed. The course and I thanked each other for the good times and parted ways. In addition to exploring interesting texts from good writers with interested students, I also remember a few students who were from Asian American backgrounds, who were not English majors, but who ventured into a senior-level English class because they were curious about/hungry for the material, or perhaps because they were simply curious. I also remember students-in-general being surprised by certain basic facts of American history.

One of innumerable complexities about reading, studying, and teaching this literature is that, of course, it springs from so many different communities, which themselves include many complexities. At a basic level, you have literature produced by persons with filial or cultural ties with Japan, China, the Philippines, Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and so on, and so forth. Then just imagine how complex each of these nations/cultures is, and how particular any one writer's connection to the culture--and to U.S. culture--is. Yikes. Moreover, you may also encounter writers whose backgrounds weave together heritages from two or more of these cultures. I was very glad to have gone a few kilometers down this side-road of reading and teaching, but (to shift metaphors), I knew from the beginning I was merely a place-holder for someone who actually knew something about the field.

I'm still very fond of two anthologies, The Big Aiiieeeee, a landmark anthology of Asian-American literature, controversial because all anthologies are, but also controversial because of Frank Chin's combative introduction, although "combative" may be a stretch. The other one is Charlie Chan Is Dead, a fine anthology of short fiction, really superb.

Among the areas I fell very short in was drama.

I'm not exactly sure why, but I think my favorite Asian American novel, and one of my favorite novels in general, is Bone, by Fae Myenne Ng. The narrative voice and characters seem just right, and the plot is well constructed. All the proportions of the novel seem balanced. It's set in San Francisco.

Of course I like The Joy Luck Club, too, just maybe not as much as other people do. I also like China Boy, by Gus Lee, in part because Gus's primary career is not writing (or wasn't then) and in part because it's a heck of a story. I feel okay about calling Gus Gus because I interviewed him once, we got on well, and it turned out we went to the same university. Homebase, by Shawn Wong, is a classic that's earned that status. A spare, well written novel.

Favorite poets include Hisaye Yamamoto and Marilyn Chin. A terrific anthology of poetry is Watermark, edited by Barbara Tranh, which features poems by Vietnamese-American poets.

Chin is a splendid poet. She really knows what she's doing.

Of course, Japanese-American internment, the use of Chinese immigrants (among others) as lowly paid, overworked labor (especially on railroads), only to be followed by deportation, the hostility toward different immigrant-groups, inter-generational conflict, and gender-conflict loom large in much of this literature, as does the question of the extent writers want or need to identify themselves as "Asian American." I think I first offered the course over 15 years ago, so I can only imagine how much more literature is out there and how much more complex the discussions are. I haven't tried to keep up in any kind of systematic way, partly because I started working hard in African American literature and ended up co-editing a 5-volume encyclopedia on the subject. Encyclopedias are kind of time-consuming, believe it or not.

I think I'll end with my sleeper-favorite book: Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, by Lois-Ann Yamanaka. It's a hilarious book concerning a working-class family in Hawaii and narrated by a spunky, irreverent young woman, very much her own person but also in possession of just a faint trace of Huck Finn and other famous fictional mischief-makers. Yamanaka has published a couple books since then, including Name Me Nobody.

It was too much work to get such a course going, essentially from scratch, but I'm glad I didn't discover that until afterward. I can always lie like a football coach and say that "it built character."

One semester the scheduler put the class upstairs in the old gym on campus, several steep flights up in a weird little classroom. Just getting to class was an adventure. Good times.