Marilyn Chin 101

Few poets are as fearless and as innovative as Marilyn Chin. Her life in verse began early: born in Hong Kong but raised in Portland, Oregon, she recalls her grandmother reciting hundreds of Tang dynasty poems to her as a child, before she was introduced to the English and American literary canon in her teens. Throughout her writing career, which began in the 1980s, she has taken all kinds of risks—personal, political, and formal. She’s endeavored to tell the truth about Asian American experience, immigrant life, and sexual relationships and has honed her craft relentlessly, experimenting in a huge range of genres and tones. Whether writing about anger, ardor, or the “bone lonely” experience of grief, she’s always unabashed. Yet her sense of humor, playful but incisive, often shines through: in the introduction to her recent selected poems, Chin identifies herself as an “activist-subversive-radical-immigrant-feminist-transnational-Buddhist-neoclassical-nerd poet.” Her self-described “fusionist aesthetics” draw on (and often reference) a wide range of sources, from blues musicians and anonymous troubadours to poets Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Li Bai. But she’s forged from these influences a style all her own. Focusing on more recent work, this brief selection of Chin’s poems is intended to give new readers a sense of Chin’s formidable intellect and formal virtuosity.

“Gruel”
This poem from Chin’s celebrated book The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994) is representative not only of her earlier work but also many of the stylistic and thematic concerns she still returns to in her work. The poem is clear, direct, and sensory: it focuses readers’ attention on “cold, stale rice gruel.” It’s invested in perspective and character—we glimpse immigrant life through the eyes of a child who is reluctant to eat breakfast. That glimpse is notably unsentimental: Chin’s vision of Asian American experience is double-edged, including both the “bitter” and the “sweet.” Poised between grit and beauty, the poem pays homage to the industriousness of parents who made old leftovers “dance in [a] porcelain bowl.” But their denials also suggest the toll that their attitude (and the broader deprivations of poverty) exact on their children.

“Horse Horse Hyphen Hyphen”
Chin is a rare kind of contemporary poet: the radical formalist. Her work engages deeply with the tradition without feeling beholden to it. Indeed, often it feels quite the opposite: she begins this poem, from her book Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002), by rewriting the Roman poet Catullus and opens its second section by making fun of the English 17th-century poet John Donne. Her irreverence extends to the ghazal, which here lacks its signature repetition. Instead, she focuses on the form’s openness, on its loose construction, and uses couplets to comment on couples and coupling. The tenuous linkages between stanzas in the second section, for instance, perfectly mirror the dynamics in the fraught relationship they describe.

“Millennium, Six Songs”
This sequence, also from Chin’s third book, is a virtuosic study of both the list and the long line. Like Whitman and his surrealist descendants, Chin gains momentum here through the incantatory interplay of repetition and variation. The song for Leah builds its lines around the expectation of a caesura, while Janie’s middle-aged yawp focuses attention on what comes later in the line, on syntactic variations that follow from their anaphora. But the refrains and lack of enjambment here also highlight Chin’s mastery of diction and the ways she brings real energy and integrity to each line as an individual unit.

“Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)”
The quatrain is one of the durable forms in Western literature—the building block of both the sonnet and the ballad, it’s been foundational for everyone from Tennyson to Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan. But it also has a history in Chinese poetry that goes all the way back to the Tang dynasty, when it was the stanza of choice for jue ju (cut verse) poets. Chin’s decades-long dialogue with the stanza draws on both traditions, blending their sometimes-competing impulses in surprising and invigorating ways. The closed quatrains of this 2002 poem, for example, may evoke the brevity of Du Fu and Wang Wei, but its thematic continuities also riff on the ballad—as do its wry, often bawdy rhymes (penis/unhappiness, Taiwan/blonde).

“Formosan Elegy”
Chin’s obsession with the quatrain continued into her 2014 book Hard Love Province, where she put the form to a vastly different end: the work of mourning. “Formosan Elegy” is dedicated to her long-term lover Charles, whose loss she also lamented in the earlier poem “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.” If that longer, looser composition offered a raw reassessment of their romance—it’s “my turn to objectify you,” she writes—this later poem strikes a more somber tone. The “certain // caesura” of death in “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” has here become an empty space and a musical pause that breaks her lines here in half. Sitting again with his loss, she faces down the “nada” part of all life and wrings a song from it that, full of echo and syncopation, is half blues and half sutra.

“Brown Girl Manifesto (Too)”
Chin’s sense of identity has always been intersectional: hybrid, hyphenated, and multiple, her work often explores what it means to be both “brown” and a “girl.” In this poem from the May 2014 issue of Poetry magazine, later published in Hard Love Province, she connects that politics of this both-ness to her poetics. She describes her “aesthetic” as “pestilential” because it’s impure, contaminated, spreading across borders and boundaries and refusing to play by the rules of how a poem should be or how a person should behave. She plays with linguistic connections between sex and violence, sometimes using them to bear witness (“girl skulls piled like fresh-baked loaves”) but also using them to express the ferocity of her ardor (“Slay me,” she says, “stone me”). She acknowledges her debt to Ezra Pound, one of modernism’s most problematic figures but also puns on his name, making him into a prop in her campy, Orientalist sex-play. Still this “manifesto” ends, importantly, with an image of freedom, with an earnest but playful hope: with the brown girls “dancing on the roof” of the master’s house.

Translation of “Wasps”
Though written in early 19th-century Vietnam, Ho Xuan Huong’s poems sound remarkably contemporary in Chin’s translations, which were first published in Poetry magazine in 2008. Indeed, it’s easy to see why Chin, a prolific reader of writing from across Asia, might be drawn to Huong’s work. Witty and brash, Huong sounds like one of Chin’s proto-feminist precursors. The “big sister” of these poems dances between taunt and tease, defiance and desire, cleverly upending classical nature imagery. In “Jackfruit” and “Snail,” she uses fruit and even insects to make sexual innuendos. In “Floating Sweet Dumpling,” she pictures her own indomitable spirit as “a mountain in a pond.” These translations often feel like Chin is citing the sources of some of her inspiration and innovation—as though she’s offering a glimpse of the verse that, as she writes in “Wasps,” taught her “how to write verse.” But they’re also a reminder of Chin’s own erudition and the sly wisdom with which she expands our sense of the poetic.