Out of body, she’s in a cab on the way to the airport, away from home and husband – going to a poetry workshop in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He, R, beside her on the clapped-out cab seat – he, R, will teach but she’s not in his group – she’s chosen Rosmarie Waldrop – she could have chosen R – she did not. She flung out words in hot ugly gushes. How to speak so it wasn’t puke. Why do women always write about personal things, G the poet at the college asked her, agreeing with his friend that the only woman in Canada who could write was Alice Munro though no one could write like V. S. Naipaul, why don’t they write about what’s out there: objective reality?
How to talk so it wasn’t puke. How to converse in this cab with he, R, who talked of Dante, he who claimed Dante as his companion. How even to be in this cab with the hugeness of his poetry, his French and Latin, his panama hat, linen jacket, and chestnut woven shoes. Oh, speak to him for god’s sake. An hour till they board, an hour for her to be silent rude stone. Speak. She’s reading Gender Trouble, words like hegemony, ontological, totalized winging around her head spewing out hunches, glimpses that blow away again like papers in a wind, as though she suddenly had to give a lecture in French at the Sorbonne, having only grade-eight French. Hadn’t it been decided there was no objective reality? And must she, in order not to write puke, prostrate herself before some Olympian Dante?
Like who? Virginia Woolf? Gertrude Stein? Oh, she loathed that she loathed herself. How to simply be visible as he was, to speak visibly. She ventures her worries about G and his friend. Oh, he’s just stirring the pot, R tells her. The cab weaves through hot traffic, its dollar sign clicks higher. G’s a very good poet, R says. So this is the way it’s done – always speak well of other poets, even when they’ve said terrible things to you in the past, as G had when they were both young, calling he whose companion was Dante a “womanish soufflé maker.”
She – I – float like figures in a Chinese character, cat’s whiskers drifting off their cat, lingering sur l’air. She forgets I, I forgets She in character’s galaxy. I public / I publish, does I know She pubic hiding the mark of her? Does She know I’s suit of gestures inside out? She caught in the rabble, in language’s heroism – the erect I displays her. Visible to some, invisible to many. She imagines visibility – then I forgets her TV screen and marches out in dark to darkness.
To be visible, stand for something – water, women, workers. Claim your She sealed in I’s package. Or cut a figure, repeating asshole or road-squashed raccoon guts twenty times in your poem. Be pleasing. Who or what?
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. The packed lobby of the Boulder theatre, crazy with girls in Cleopatra hair, cigarettes pointing straight down from their lips, R and D drinking martinis at the bar, before the star reading. Burrito boys fold bundles of rice, beans, cheese, handing them out in red plastic baskets. Hers dripping salsa, cream, shrimp, and onions toward the only chair at a table where Allen Ginsberg . . . ! Of course no one’s sitting there, grumpily shuffling his reading papers. She/I takes chair, bites into face-smearing guacamole – people rush up to him – hug him – joke with him – remember him in New York. Her fingers oozing salsa and cheese. Then someone tells her David Bromige can’t make it. He’s hit a wall. Maybe it’s his diabetes, She/I replies. Allen looks at her – David has diabetes?! All his life, she offers, the injection kind. Allen has diabetes, too, he tells her. Allen has cured his by eating brown rice and vegetables. He must talk to David.
Visibility – it would be like fluency in a language – she would have substance as a word in a dictionary. She could not be erased – it would flow out of her – not this conviction of nothinghood. Homework for Rosmarie Waldrop: write using counting or reduction, a set number of syllables, a letter avoided. He/R with one hundred students in the big white tent speaks of the reparable – a quality among things – we swimming among holograms of words – She/I flowing his words into her ear, down her arm, through her fingers in tattered thoughts across her notebook – the irreparable a position in relation to what surrounds. The poetics of relations now reversed – R’s phrase inscrutable as Chinese characters, her pen flying on to the next. The reparable, a making ready, a preparing, not making amends for a wrong but preparing in consciousness, in poesis, in feeling. Irreparable She/I lost in Chinese R. Human plus cosmic. R’s whatever.
Exercise for workshop: she tries to write Psalm 23 in lines of the same syntax and syllables using different words beginning with the same letters. Impossible. Then six verses with the same number of words as each psalm verse using only words containing a certain letter. Another failure. Years later she will transform nineteen of R’s poems into lines of the same stress pattern and syllable count.
In which dictionary would She/I be a word? Would it be R’s? Or the Cleopatra girls’? The bookstore man doesn’t have Rosmarie Waldrop. There’s a big conference here tonight with someone she’s never heard of. Who’s that? He’s into men’s stuff, he said, handing her the book. She/I opens it at random, reads: “woman is the gateway to judgment and hell.” Repeats it to bookstore man, adding, I don’t think this is really me. It doesn’t say that, he says, that’s not what it’s about. Someone else asks for Rosmarie’s books – he really likes The Reproduction of Profiles. Yeah, bookstore man says, the lady poets are really into psychobabble. She/I wonders, Is this R’s idea of stirring the pot? Anger and despair to write with, bumping hunks of stewed meat into soggy carrots.
Eating portobello mushrooms in the Full Moon Cafe, Rosmarie tells She/I her next book explores dialogues that confuse male and female. She doesn’t think Irigaray is right about a feminine language – what good does it do to call open form feminine?
She/I eats beans and sweet corn pancakes at the Harvest restaurant with Norma Cole. What to do about G’s objective reality? But we are writing about reality, Norma says, one that no one’s noticed. Don’t be polite. Write what embarrasses you, drive it against constraint. She/I must get a bucket of magnetic letters. Post them one at a time. What does each mean to I/She? What does I/She want from it? From them? She/I must make ten copies of first and last pages of a favourite book, black out the words she doesn’t want; each day do it again – black out words – which ones does I/She really want?
She/I sits on the floor of the crowded lounge for sudden unplanned talk – Barbara Guest, her book Seeking Air. The poet almost falls before reaching her chair. She doesn’t know how to start. What do the students want? They don’t know either. We have a lot of trouble finding ourselves in the world, she says, and that is what poetry’s about. Context is not an exterior – it’s an emergence, even an emergency.
Six years later She/I translates poems by R. Each of her poems copies the exact number of syllables on each line of his, each of her lines copies the exact stress pattern of each of his. Only the words differ. Ten years later, She/I uncovers R’s poem “Translator: A Tale” enfolding a story of Attis, his brain stung by Cybele, slicing off cock and balls, manhood slipping out of him with the blood that will be violets, he becoming she to beat her drum with soft white fingers.
Silence
The guide – wearing a ponytail, blue blazer, and plaid skirt – checks our names on her clipboard, then looks up at our host, who smiles broadly, saying how pleased he is to show us his gallery, as we sign waivers absolving it of liability. A couple in leather jackets, she in stiletto heels and silver-sequined blouse, he flashing Navajo bracelets and a row of earrings, joke with him, while a group of Japanese tourists – young men – one with orange hair – swirl past a woman in brown tweed standing back as though not wanting anyone to notice: Alice Toklas, the way she stood just behind Gertrude on the steps of an airplane or while feeding pigeons in St. Mark’s Square.
We must only go where the guide/guard tells us, beginning with A Couple (of Swings) by Mona Hatoum. Beautifully crafted with stainless steel chains and glass seats, the guide notes. Alice stands beside them, two hands holding the strap of her reticule in fr
ont of her ankle-length skirt. The Japanese men crowd in, pointing at the glass and jousting with Japanese words, one of them holding his hands six inches apart: the swings are too close. Alice pays no heed. The chains of the swings hang from a distant white ceiling. Some people have noticed, the guide states, that the swings would bump into each other if you swung them.
In her trim brown hat, brown velvet gloves, and slight moustache, Alice gazes at the floor through the glass seats of the swings, as though remembering piano lessons from her grandmother who learned to play from the father of Clara Schumann; remembering prep for university with Sarah Hamlin who brought Pandita Ramabei to lecture against the sacrifice of Hindu wives on the funeral pyres of their husbands; remembering getting her music degree, training with Otto Bendix who’d been taught by Liszt – the wood grain in the floorboards swirling through the seats of the swings like music under her fingers playing Schumann’s variations in concert with Elizabeth, her dear Lilyana. Until Otto Bendix died.
The guide ushers us to upper echelons past windows to our host’s agents working at their computers. In 1912, she says, Yip Sang built a second block on the other side of Market Alley, devoting three floors to his warehouse and giving one floor to each of his three wives. We enter a passage like an Italian covered bridge that connects the buildings. The wives were probably glad, I find out later, that they did not have to walk far on their golden lotus feet. Is it true there was an opium factory, asks one of the Japanese. You could smell it in the Market Alley shops, our guide tells them. She points to a brick facade welded to a concrete wall, its grey mass sealing the windows of the old building like the eyes of ancient sculptures that no longer show the irises of Athena or Venus.
Leather-and-earrings mocks a soccer kick at a car-sized model of Earth with orange neon continents while Alice slips down a narrow passage running between the old brick face and the crisp white Gyproc enclosing it, Alice like a domino of bread in a two-storey toaster, thinking, I imagine, of Allan Stein whom she wrote has made it evident that he will obstruct wherever he can, or thinking even of the rents that were being raised according to a new law filled with coefficients and articles and titles. Leather-and-stilettos clicks over to a crib made entirely of glass tubing – a piece called Silence. She links arms with her companion and pulls him toward the crib chatting about an offer on a three-bedroom on False Creek. Alice slides sideways under a tall thin slice of air between the walls till she emerges in the next room. You are still here, says the mirror in front of her.
Guide/guard. I think of Virgil or dogs for the blind or the metal bar on a power saw. She tells us nothing about Mona Hatoum or why she made these works. Perhaps she’s thinking about her projects at art school – clay-splattered wheels, or charcoaled fingers drawing a nude. Or perhaps she’s studying economics or taking a degree in tourism, working part-time for our host while learning to lead sightseeing groups and run hotels and ski resorts.
The young Japanese men enter like a chorus, this perhaps their grand tour of the Occident, to stand in front of Quarters – steel bunks stacked five high, reminding me of paper trays on office desks except, like the crib, each bed offers only air for mattress. Orange hair lies down next to the metal frame, which barely fits him head to heel. The others look to the guide, pull up their friend, brush him off – shooting rapid volleys of Japanese and laughing. Alice meanwhile stops at a wire fence in front of a kitchen table. Roll cream-puff dough into fingers, she wrote to Mrs. Kiddie. Cook spinach in practically no water. Knives shouldn’t touch it any more than they should salad. She wrote of jellied eggs, a hen quite presentable in estragon sauce, herself (one hearty meal a day), tomorrow’s fruitcake, a wreath of large spoonfuls beaten high in the air, artichoke omelette, cockscombs – excellent – not red because the thin outer skin is removed (like on feet) – occasionally I have the head minus tongue and eyes.
Metal colanders, pots, whisks, and openers litter the kitchen table – an iron meat grinder clamped to its edge – wires linking the tools to electric lamps, wires linked to metal tubing of table and chairs, wires running from metal coat hangers on a metal rack, wires from the sewing machine, wires from a metal bed frame. The room hums and buzzes with electricity.
Recipes are symptomatic, Alice wrote to Harold Knapik. The snails are plentiful and excellent. But now the guide takes us to the oldest schoolroom in the city, built by Yip Sang for his twenty-three children, its blackboards and tongue-and-groove wainscoting just as he left it, our host explaining, except for its new green paint, since Yip means green leaf. We crowd against the scarred blackboards, the leather couple holding hands and brushing chalk dust from their sleeves, next to the chorus of simmering Japanese, and Alice, who preferred not to sell one of the paintings though her flat was only 12 degrees. Alice of the averted gaze, thinking of Lilyana, Isabel, Louise, Carl, and Fania or the Kiddies and winter that must be arranged not for but against. Yip Sang’s Chinese characters painted on the blackboard, calling for happiness and celebration.
Chow Lung
for Ethel Wilson
Come outside. We want to take a picture. He tells them he will change. No no. Just as you are. He swishes another dish, wipes it, then another and another. Doctor beckons. He slings the dishtowel and lights a cigarette. A photograph just as he is in cook’s coat and soiled apron. Doctor stands him in the middle of a clearing behind the cabin. Missus offers him an ashtray. No, he will keep the cigarette. Just as I am. Missus looks at Doctor. Doctor peers into his camera on its three legs. Not Doctor who wants the picture. It’s Missus. Asking him, Did he go to Shanghai Alley last night, did he play fan-tan? Where did he get his silk brocade jacket? Which now they do not let him wear so he could look like more than a nobody cook in their picture. Could look like a proper man. Could walk like other men the streets of Gold Mountain. Could buy things, sell things, smoke and talk like other men. No no, the light’s too low here. Doctor moves him to a sunny patch, moves the three-legged camera, squints into it, waves him toward the trees. Squints into the box, fiddles with the lens. Missus smiles at him. Tells him to smile for the camera, say cheese. He takes a drag of the cigarette cupped in his hand.
Even if they give him a copy of this picture, he will not send it to his wife in Beijing – Mo-li, his jasmine flower, who can’t come here. No more Chinese, the government says, even if he pays $500. Yellow peril, the newspaper says.
Chow Lung doesn’t look at the camera. Doesn’t smile. Lets the camera photograph smears on his apron. He looks up at the trees – huge, heavy branches loom over the cabin, throw dark damp everywhere. Why don’t they cut them down, let in sun, grow apples, pears, plums? Missus looks at him, like she does with her notebook, writing him down. Writing down Shanghai Alley. He’s seen her there. Evenings, sitting in the car, bent over her notebook, while Doctor takes his black bag to someone sick. Chow Lung striding past the car in his good jacket, daring her to see him on the way to mah-jong. Doctor clicks the camera, writing Chow Lung in its black box. He picks up his doctor bag, kisses Missus goodbye, walks down the road to the next boat to Vancouver. Not back till tomorrow.
Missus in her chair with her notebook, smiling now that Doctor’s mother has gone to live with Doctor’s sister. Writing, writing, writing. Writes about him, Chow Lung. She calls him Yow. Stories about him for the New Statesman. People will read about him all around the world, not like in Vancouver’s yellow-peril newspaper. Why does she make him into Yow the cook when she could make him a doctor or a businessman like Yip Sang, with his tall building and three wives? Instead she makes him into Yow, who steals and goes to prison. He, Chow Lung, does not steal. Back at his dishes in the lean-to kitchen behind the cabin, clatter and bang so she hears it on the front veranda. Only a wood stove here, no electricity like in town – wood and kindling to chop, fire to watch, oven always too hot. He does not steal, but people everywhere will read about him, just the same. He goes out for more wood, sits on the chopping block, smokes a cigarette. Just him and Missus tonight. He will c
ook rice and Chinese vegetables like she asked. After dinner, what? Trees, trees, trees, an island of trees, except the hotel at Snug Cove, three miles away. Sit on the dock, then; look at the water between him and Vancouver. Even more water between him and Mo-li and his baby boy. Now sixteen, never seen. Mo-li, if I come to you, they will not let me back in Gold Mountain.
Missus stooping over her notebook – she will turn crooked like a walking stick – only see the ground. Not good for a lady. Not good for a lady to spit either – Missus spits on the iron – he catches her, he tells her. She promises. Then she does it again. She takes the iron into the lounge, he catches her. She takes it into her bedroom, he catches her. Even the bathroom, he catches her. A game. A joke. Like when he is Yow in her story on this same island: he serves Grandmother, Aunt Topaz, Rachel, and Rose their breakfast on the veranda. Look, a snake out on the grass, they shriek, don’t touch; it will bite. He dangles the snake near the table, tells them he’ll put it in the stew for dinner. Oh, don’t, please don’t, they beg him.
Missus looks at him. When a woman looks at you like that, she wants something. Why does she make Yow steal silk stockings for a white waitress, till he goes to prison? He takes off his cook’s apron and coat, puts on his high-collared black silk jacket. If she asks again what it’s like where he came from, he’ll tell her how big his family is, all his cousins and uncles, their businesses, their wives, all the sons they have. He grabs an old telephone book half torn up for lighting fires, slides through the cabin to the veranda – she’s bent over her notebook writing, writing, writing. Looks up. Chow Lung? He waves the telephone book in her face. My family’s bigger than all your Wilsons in here; we have banquets, parties, weddings – Peking duck, roast pork, hot pot, wontons. How come you don’t invite all your Wilsons to your big house in town?
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