Kimiko Hahn: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s]

I click the pieces into sharp arrangements — 
grouse, crow, craven
 — no, now, my own daughter turns sovereign

—Kimiko Hahn, Foreign Body

Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020), Brain Fever (Norton, 2014), Toxic Flora (Norton, 2010), The Narrow Road to the Interior (Norton, 2006), The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), and Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992). She is the winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the 2007 Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. 

It is said that a clean house is a sign of a wasted life and mess a sign of a life well-lived. Among her poetry students, Kimiko Hahn has been known to advise: “Make a mess.” She encourages them to get their hands dirty, to jump into (not over) puddles, to play with their food. This, Hahn insists as poetry teacher and practitioner, is how we come to know ourselves and the world we share.

—Nicole Sealey, “The Breadth of Our Existence: On Kimiko Hahn” in Poetry

Kimiko Hahn is a poet-scientist not because she follows research developments and draws on biological metaphors but because she examines human understanding by observing various paradigms under fluctuating conditions. Whether contemplating a newly observed firefly behavior or spiritual instruction calligraphed by a twelfth-century Taoist priestess, Hahn pays “attention to attention,” archiving those turning points of focus that track the movement of the mind. The process positions subjectivity at a distance, like bowing grasses that render the wind visible.

When I had the opportunity to interview her for my book Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round (Sarabande, 2021), she expressed admiration for the subjectivity in Sei Shōnagon’s Makura no Sōshi, known in English as The Pillow Book. Our exchange follows. Though subjectivity often evokes separation and bias, in Hahn’s work, inward-looking generates an outward-gathering invitation.

How does integrating various voices, like Sei Shōnagon’s and Stephen Jay Gould’s, inspire your work?

Hahn: I’ve been called a magpie as far as range of subject and reference go. My first draw is usually language, which is certainly the case with Gould. The language of science is so exotic to my ear. Sei Shōnagon’s pillow book offers form, such as the list, and a subjectivity that is tantamount to self-mythologizing. I love that.

How do you hope your writing informs current events or scientific discoveries?

Hahn: I enjoy writing on a range of subject matter, and in the case of the natural world I hope to draw attention to the outer real world, even though I dovetail into the personal. For those not interested in science, poems may be an offbeat way of learning about, say, extinction. For others, like myself, the sciences are intrinsically captivating, and a kind of portal into other themes and issues . . . but how would my poems inform events? By bringing artists (the “cultural intelligentsia”) and artwork into the conversation.

— Amy Wright

Kimiko Hahn’s selected poems in order of publication

1990s

“Guard the Jade Pass” (1999)

I keep a cigar box
on my bureau and fill it with objects
befitting a private altar:
coins, feather, thread.
An empty envelope when you forget
to enclose the letter.

The Jade Pass refers to a traffic gateway between the southern and northern routes of the Silk Road in China during the Western Han dynasty, but it is also a metaphor for the way in the body through which the Tao—a word gesturing at the life-animating force that, when intuited, suggests a path—enters. Conveying revelatory knowledge is one of poetry’s devotions; Hahn indicates this importance by including the instructive titles from The Fourteen Poems by Sun Bu’er: “Gathering the Mind / Nurturing Energy / Cutting Off the Dragon / The Womb Breath / Facing a Wall.”

Hahn’s speaker stops to reflect while reading “The Fourteen Poems” by this twelfth-century priestess, who was the only female to become one of the Seven Perfected Masters of Quanzhen. Allowing her words to “orbit the body,” the speaker considers freedom she, too, has experienced when “unblocked” to “walk around light-headed” abuzz with such an abundance of oxygen that it stays the need for “sleep or water.” This spiritual communion led by the Tao is sealed in the final stanza, which enacts the title’s instruction to “guard” the pass. To safeguard the absence of a letter is to know “an empty envelope” preserves something other than words and may even contain meaning. One keeps the pass open for more than commerce through a certain reverence to the unknown; the “secret texts” remain ever vulnerable to corruption when exchanged.

2000s

“In Childhood” (2002)

things don’t die or remain damaged
but return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.

In the first line of this poem, Hahn invokes the supreme magic of fairy tales to raise a corpse “blushing and newly elastic” in a child’s mind and undo death—while such beliefs last. Who among us does not reimagine the possibility after loss? “In Childhood,” after all, is written after one has grown wise to make-believe and recognizes that Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother “remains dead / not hibernating in a wolf’s belly.” 

Alas. To come of age is to put away naïve notions. And yet, Hahn suggests, something of the promise of that other realm of possibility shades ours. No, a mother cannot “return / from the little grave in the fern garden” like a blue parakeet, but “one may wake in the morning / thinking mother’s call is the bird.” 

The bird and the wolf have invited us, in the agility of youth, to imagine differently. In adulthood, they remain as conduits for the imagination, like the playmates at the poem’s end “pumping so high the swing hiccups.” We may continue to look for “the gone things” inside ourselves inside metaphor, image, and memory; fairy tales taught us that things are not lost but hidden, yearning to be transformed.

“The Orient” (2008)

Translated as running brush, I love the way zuihitsu runs with the content.

But even with a hint of narrative, the form relies on sensibility and spatiality––and a way to identify with the most important writers in the world, who happened to be Japanese women. I love them.

This long zuihitsu begins “inside” meaning “a little café on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn” but also the “queer” space it represents where the “impulse is to categorize” oneself and others, where the feeling is of being inside and outside various circles of belonging and exclusion. The poem conjures a textual space constructed in part from Edward Said’s Orient, which he defines as a “semi-mythical construct” invented by the West to characterize “its cultural contestant and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”

Removing the capitalization, Hahn more broadly considers how orient functions as a verb to navigate identity beyond geography or ethnicity. In this space “sweet with women” the speaker says, “I write almost everything … in a woman’s hand,” recognizing “how words can arouse.” Here she can “tease” out and “use a new language” to confess even to herself novel points of attraction to the Japanese women who write zuihitsu as well as to Cicely, a barkeeper, k.d. lang, and “times when I feel boyish.” Throughout the poem, Hahn repeats the commands to “turn the channel” and “switch the station,” even as the speaker contemplates becoming someone new to herself who can learn to “slow-dance with a woman.”

The word love or lover recurs 11 times in this poem, reflecting an attraction beyond the poem to the zuihitsu form, a form Hahn loves so much it recurs 31 times in The Narrow Road to the Interior, interspersed with tanka. But nowhere is the appeal of the form more apparent than in “The Orient,” which plays on the desire to be overtaken by “where the words have taken the heart,” all while devising a cunningly deceptive path. The speaker loves “blurs” and “Japanese women” from the Heian period who defined the golden age of literature in Japan; she loves “cocks,” “attention,” and “the unabashed first person”; and she loves “the way zuihitsu runs with the content,” meaning the “construct” of flight replicated in quick confessions “drawn and quartered” with a careful hand.

No, a zuihitsu is no first love but the insights first love left you with upon reflection. Is now a good time to note that Hahn wrote this book post-divorce? In hindsight, it seems inevitable that she embraced a form designed to painstakingly titrate every heart-spilling emotion while appearing to be casual and accidentally revealing. By choreographing and even faking intimacy, she illustrates, we grow honest enough to “allow ourselves to feel what we want.”

2010s

“Yellow Jackets” (2010)

protect through venom and candor

While timing their own dinners
to mother’s tray, father’s tongs,

or baby’s saucer-sized cheeks,

they can sting any intruder repeatedly
unlike the honeybee’s suicidal sortie.

One of the rules of the poetry game Hahn plays—and with enough delight that readers are invited to revel with her in it—is to regift surprise, packaging observations with epiphany. What clean music resounds in that pairing of “venom and candor”! The contrast between each word’s harsh opening consonant and the rounded vowels that blur the tails swing them around each other like nunchaku. We cannot listen and miss the pull of paradox that characterizes the book in which this poem appears, Toxic Flora. A sting is nothing if not frank: directed, spite dazzles brilliantly.

Another aspect of Hahn’s playfulness engages poetry to train the attention to focus when it might flit, and learn from creatures we might shun or overlook. As anyone who has stepped into a nest of yellow jackets knows, their assault is endless. To applaud this offensive and gawk at weaponry that marks your weakness, rather than demonize or downplay the threat, is a “startling attribute.” We best use the tools we come by naturally, and this poem is a stinger. By riveting her powers of discernment to the lyric, Hahn shows how “X” sinks her invectives and arms her readers with curiosity barbed with insights.

“Resilience” (2014)

A single drop of rain can weigh
fifty times as much as a mosquito and yet

the insect flies through a downpour without injury.

Metaphors work by correlation. In their value lies the danger of overstepping difference and, in the case of different species, anthropomorphizing others in the service of ourselves. Hahn avoids that pitfall through deference. Her poems respect discrepancies and wonder at adaptations. Here, she marvels at how “the insect can pull through the globule” because its long wings and legs act “like a kite with a lengthy / tail.” The example of the mosquito remains other but not unknowable. After all, how like the mosquito’s ability to “go with the flow” was that “boyfriend who trained in aikido.” No, he could not replicate the winged feat with his body, but neither are human bodies outweighed by raindrops. Impacts with the potential to annihilate us are not always physical.

However, we are physical beings. Hahn reminds us that poems occur to the mind in a body by taking a sharp turn at the end of this one as unexpected as those thwacks given to awake Zen practitioners. Here, not in a zen-dō but a lab studying mosquitos and resilience, readers are prompted as fellow researchers to make their own observations. How would it feel to be “very, very small” in a downpour? We are less fragile than we might assume, since humans are not outfitted with a “tough exoskeleton,” yet all it takes is one “direct hit” to take anyone down. We share that commonality: many are the maneuvers species have evolved to survive. Only the steeliest among us, though, will be armored for the bolt of that final line.

2020s

“Likeness: A Self-Portrait” (2020)

Like the Professor     fluent in firefly    I am fluent in
    on-the-fly     and     on-the-sly
        when circumstances are     well     well lit

What it means to have a self to portray or admire we learn by looking and being looked at. Do we better bear the guise of the ballerina or the bobcat? By juxtaposing ourselves against other variables, we extrapolate what is unknown or not “well lit” inside us. 

Appearances can be deceiving. Some species evolved traits specifically to “mimic | deceive | devour” others. Consider the J a male firefly carves in the air with his lamp like a come-hither finger. Given that there are predatory female fireflies in the genus Photuris who flash signals that lure male fireflies to their deaths, such beckons radiate risk. Thus, it is “crucial to pay attention.” Notice how the poet instructs her “daughters” to “pay attention to attention.” Gender intimates differing needs for caretaking appearances in humans, while the insect world riddles our assumptions about males and females.

Taking “the meadow as theater” dramatizes life-and-death decisions that depend on distinguishing differences. To be “like” another is to lack distinction. Even in the natural world camouflage is not a constant; some evolve to stand out. We might resemble Sara Lewis when it comes to scrutinizing other organisms, but we are also “unlike Professor Sara Lewis” in our conclusions. Each comparison begs to be measured in our “competitions for affection,” but the criteria are haphazard and idiosyncratic. Eccentricity, not rhyme or reason, governs the determinants. We are sparked or dulled “during courtship” by interest, which illumines what attracts us and why.