It’s helpful to understand the slipperiness inherent to a Valerie Hsiung’s poem. And by slippery I mean that feeling when you think you have ahold of something, only to feel it slip out of your hands. A bar of soap. A dish you’re washing by hand. Reading [they won’t see us coming], Hsiung coaxes me to frame the reading in certain lights. She provides poetic handles, like in this poem the “us” opposed to “them” appearing in the first stanza. Or further into the poem, the journey. It’s reasonable to approach a Hsiung poem looking for what would be familiar: rhetorically familiar, trope-familiar, sequence-of-events-resembling-plot familiar. I would argue the poem even encourages you to grasp the poem by that familiarity. But be prepared for it to slip right away from you.
Sometimes the slip happen on the sentence level in [they won’t see us coming]. It’s one of the hazards when punctuation is so sparingly used. And the poem’s lineation doesn’t really coincide with grammatical units either. Semantically, the poem could slip away from you if you try too hard to nail down whether all the references to “people” are the same. And if it’s different groups of people, should that be in support of whatever plot line exists around “a poet’s journey,” or are there many different peoples because the poem wants to think carefully about what “people” as a metonym for “country” might mean. As though all the people in a country or a certain region share some collection of traits or attitudes that would bind them together. Is it fair that “everyone” would imply each person in a country subscribe to a set of uniform qualities? Is this just what the person on a journey does? Think of what it means traveling among a “people,” comment to themselves how this “people” has essentially been folded into the landscape, like how you might think of a country as having a lot of tree. Or a big urban city having a lot of trash. And what the journeying person thinks is how the “people” in the foreign place are different from the “people” in their native country.
I am hoping you sense what I mean by “slippery” in Hsiung’s work. It’s like bewildering her reader is her number one mode. And it can appear in many ways. In the sentences that seem to have a hobby of french braiding themselves around a stanza’s other sentences. Like it’s not just about the continuity of thought threading stanzas together, and it’s not just the condensity (”condensation” and “density” collapsed on one another) and abstraction of setting, where there are enough details and circumstances among the stanzas that you might read them like they’ve settled on a certain world or they provide insights on a protagonist, thus hinting at plot. Or perhaps the slipperiness would make it more an eau de plot sprayed on cambric curtains so the air coming in the window will fill the room with the plot-ish, setting-ish feelings as you move from one stanza to the next.
Color me pathetic, but this slipperiness and the swim of ideas they bring to my mind makes me want to be Valerie Hsiung’s writing style. I would like to impersonate her when she’s the poet with a whole poem fashioned around her. Or I am helpless to it, possessed on some level. Because there is a way that Hsiung just makes sense in these stanzas of [they won’t see us coming] (whether they are an excerpt from some longer piece (her books tend to swallow any single portion existing in them) or what Mercury Firs has published is a set of stanzas that exist together in some ephemeral fashion. Maybe they are documentation of what she’s thinking about right now).
It’s difficult for me, then, to close read the poem so I can find some “center” or string of thought. Partly because reading Valerie Hsiung’s poems makes me delirious! And partly because Hsiung’s mode is to be writing as thinking would look if it were in writing. Which is a total mode in poetry that appears in many ways in these 2020s. Pull up something by Dawn Lundy Martin. Pull up something from Tess Brown-Lavoie (who I just saw Valerie Hsiung read with a couple weeks ago!). Pull up something from Kevin Holden, who I was just reading this week. Pull up something from Jorie Graham. From Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. From Tommy Pico (will he ever write poetry again???). From Cody Rose-Clevidence! I marvel at this kind of writing. I’m often writing about this kind of writing in these blog posts. (for examples: “Althea,” by Molly Ledbetter. “Central Oregon,” by Patty Nash. It’s often just this immersive style that I respond to that heightens my attention, so I might discover how it is used differently in the hands of an individual poet.
Thus my argument that Hsiung’s work shifts itself. Its slipperiness. On one hand, the poem deals with a concrete occasion or circumstance situating the poet (she’s leaving where she’s from and realizing the complexity of any journey). On the other hand, the poet is realizing she’s realizing some new frame that redefines her reality. If her perspective on reality is changing, how should that shift appear? Like in the opening of [they won’t see us coming], the “us” is opposed to “them,” but then the poet isn’t sure she wants to be included in the “us” anymore, the reference for “us” seems to shift. When “babe” appears in the poem, with the sense that someone helpful has arrived on the scene, should “babe” be how the poet addresses the mountain that had just arrived? Is “babe” an earlier reference to the “protector” that will appear later? It’s hard not to feel like you should know what’s going on at these moments, because the poet relates the poem as though you would be on the same page as her. My best advice, however: Ride through the stanzas with ambiguity as an enabler for your read.
Or maybe not ambiguity but precarity. Whatever you normally use when navigating through a series of rhetorical gestures. Like think of that Kathleen Turner movie “Romancing the Stone.” When she and Michael Douglas are pulling themselves through the jungle. All that greenery is the rhetorical gestures in Valerie Hsiung’s poems. On one hand, you can confidently state you’re in a rhetorical jungle. You’re moving ahead. On the other hand, where moving ahead is taking you remains unclear.