MUSINGS ON "JONAH" AND OTHER POEMS BY TOMAZ SALAMUN

Jonah

how does the sun set?
like snow
what color is the sea?
large
Jonah are you salty?
I’m salty
Jonah are you a flag?
I’m a flag
the fireflies rest now

what are stones like?
green
how do little dogs play?
like flowers
Jonah are you a fish?
I’m a fish
Jonah are you a sea urchin?
I’m a sea urchin
listen to the flow

Jonah is the roe running through the woods
Jonah is the mountain breathing
Jonah is all the houses
have you ever heard such a rainbow?
what is the dew like?
are you asleep?

I first read Tomaz Salamun in graduate school at UNC Greensboro. My favorite writers then were Robert Hass, Raymond Carver, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, the dead Russians; I was easily influenced by what my teachers taught and my friends liked. One day, a fellow student, frustrated with our workshop's narrative, predictable, linear, very 90s poems (it was the early 90s, after all) brought in a pile of poems that included Salamun's "I Have a Horse" and "History":

Tomaz Salamun is a monster.
Tomaz Salamun is a sphere rushing through the air.
He lies down in twilight, he swims in twilight.
People and I, we both look at him amazed, 
we wish him well, maybe he is a comet.
Maybe he is punishment from the gods,
the boundary stone of the world.
Maybe he is such a speck in the universe
that he will give energy to the planet
when oil, steel, and food run short.
He might only be a hump, his head
should be taken off like a spider's.
But something would then suck up
Tomaz Salamun, possibly the head.
Possibly he should be pressed between
glass, his photo should be taken.
He should be put in formaldehyde, so children
would look at him as they do foetuses,
protei, and mermaids.
Next year, he'll probably be in Hawaii
or in Ljubljana. Doorkeepers will scalp
tickets. People walk barefoot
to the university there. The waves can be
a hundred feet high. The city is fantastic,
shot through with people on the make,
the wind is mild.
But in Ljubljana people say: look!
This is Tomaz Salamun, he went to the store
with his wife Marushka to buy some milk.
He will drink it and this is history.

I was in love. I had that Emily-Dickinson-quote feeling, the top of my head coming off: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" 

"History and "I Have a Horse" I think are better poems than the first one here, "Jonah." But somehow Jonah became one of my favorite poems, part of my blood and bone. It felt familiar and strange, its simplicity and tender voice refreshingly transparent, earnest, sweet, at a time I was trying to wrap my mind around, say, Jorie Graham's poems, or prying my eyes open through a 18th-century British literature class (the mention of "Clarissa" is like Ambien to this day). In an Irish literature class I was gulping down quantities of Yeats and yet remained stubbornly attached to his early sentimental pieces, "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" and "When You Are Old and Grey." They reminded me of the very first literary poem I remember loving, Wordsworth's "Daffodils." I didn't understand the complexities of Irish history, didn't care for Yeats's creepy seances and communing with afterlife, just as, I confess, I'm still shaky on the Eastern European history informing Salumun's poems. Being versed in the historical contexts of these writers' lives would only deepen my appreciation for their poems, but I don't think the poets would disapprove of my limited knowledge of politics. The language alone offers abundant beauty and lasting resonance. 

I remember running to the Poets House in the mid 90s for a reading by Salamun, that feverish feeling of anticipation, the thrill of hearing the word live. I've kept the poster for that reading the way a Deadhead would keep a bumper sticker of dancing bears. The poster is in a box of keepsakes in my closet, along with ticket stubs for Pavement and Yo la Tengo, a map of Greensboro, xeroxes of poems, dog-eared and coffee-stained. Ah, grad school.

 

Katherine Mansfield said, “To be alive and to be a writer is enough.” To be a reader--a close second indeed. Tomaz Salalmun reads on Friday, October 12, 5pm at NYU Creative Writing Program.

BEING BIRACIAL

I’ve been asked to submit some poems and an essay to an anthology of poetry by biracial writers. The “poems” part is easy, but I’ve been stewing over the "prose piece between 200 and 2000 words. It can take the form of a brief biography, an anecdote, or a full-fledged essay. We only ask that it be relevant to the experience of biraciality."  

I’ve competed in two bicycle races, therefore I am biracial? Twice a week I slather on my mudmask--love my bifacials? I watched a rerun of the series finale of “Friends” last night: bye Rachel?


I suppose the editor is referring to my ethnicity, my Caucasian father and my Japanese (Mongolian, technically) mother. My father was, by all appearances, a white dude. So white, he was pink-cheeked, pink-nosed. He had blond hair and blue eyes. He was also adopted as a baby in a Chicago hospital. I never heard a word about his biological mother--I imagined a knocked-up Irish Catholic girl--so in fact, my father might be of mixed race himself. My essay could end here. But questions about my father’s actual lineage aside, what’s more important than DNA is that I’m perceived as biracial. “I have a Caucasian father and Japanese mother” I tell people who ask. Actually, that’s a lie. I say American father—Caucasian sounds too clinical--and people get it. 

Talking about race is like asking how gravity works, why aren’t we floating and bumping around like multicolored balloons? We say, re: gravity working, It just does, so that we can attend to more immediate matters, like what’s for dinner or the traffic light turning red or is that good-looking guy straight. 

Maybe what's meant by "the experience of biraciality" is: “What is it like to not be 100% white in America?”  

I was bullied by Japanese kids as a child growing up in Japan (my hair was too light, my eyes too roundish), so for a moment I thought I was white. But then I was bullied through elementary, middle, and high school in Ohio (I was Chinawoman, I was greasy-haired chink). Biracial means, to me, not being asked to a single prom or homecoming dance. It means spending my teenage years living vicariously through Molly Ringwald in John Hughes movies. It means vowing to dye my hair blond, wear colored contacts, and find the best damn mascara in the world to camouflage my slanted eyes. It means, in college, reading about the demographic breakdown of my class and realizing that I AM the ".002% Asian American Students from Ohio." 

Just a few years ago, a woman asked me my name. I said "April." She said, "Angel?" I said "APRIL." And she said, "Eggroll?" I was too flabbergasted to reply. I should have said, "What is this, free association? You must be 'Bad Perm White Lady'." 

As a poet, there seems little left to say about being harassed. Childhood is traumatic. Kids are mean. Adults are mean. You're ejected from the safety of the womb and it’s all sticks and stones from there. So what? 

Maybe the best poetry about being called chink isn’t in words, but in actions. I fight a little harder for the underdog because I am one. About five years ago, on a D.C. bus, I watched a black guy harass an Indian woman, perhaps a university student, from the looks of her heavy backpack. He looked like he might be a vagrant; it was a battle for power, the bullied kid setting fire to a kitten. Where you from he said. You from India. You seen the Namesake. Go back home. The girl sat still, her mouth shut, her eyes looking straight ahead. I walked/lurched up to the front of the bus and told the driver. He actually pulled over and stopped the bus. As I took my seat again, the driver stood up and faced us. "Don’t be making trouble on my bus or you will walk. You hear me? You will get off my bus and walk." I clapped my hands, I sat two feet from the giant bully of a man and cheered.             

"little plum": erasure poems

These erasures are from two facing pages of Little Plum, a young adult book published by Rumer Godden in 1962.

                                    messages

         happen.
               Miss Flower’s bowls and tea
                           happen.

teas sets,
cups,       bowls.


                           (a Japanese
                 teapot.)

 “Japanese people seem to have tea with
everything – green tea – I can make that
with paint water.”

                                       (shiny black
                                         lacquer

                            bowls.)

II.

                           dolls are used to having

dollhouse food   
             the size of half your little fingernail.

                    each bowl held rice,

                                      fish as small as ants,

                 silver in        red sauce     (Japanese

people are very fond fish
  vegetable,
                          cake,
                sugar.         There were chop-
sticks made from pine needles.

                                     the tea was hot.   

                the teapot    

looked                                      real.