Following the Impulse of the Brush

I met Kimiko Hahn in the early 1980s when Jessica Hagedorn invited us to read in a series she curated at Basement Workshop in New York City’s Chinatown. I was immediately struck by Kimiko’s poise and focus. Since that first meeting, I have followed her work with keen interest and pleasure. She has now published 10 books of poetry: Foreign Bodies (2020), Brain Fever (2014), Toxic Flora (2010), The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), The Artist’s Daughter (2002), Mosquito & Ant (1999), Volatile (1999), The Unbearable Heart (1995), Earshot (1992), and Air Pocket (1989).

Over the years our paths crossed periodically. In 1998, we read together at the Dia Art Foundation in Manhattan. More than a deacde later, in 2010, Kimiko came to Santa Fe for a residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where I had retired as a professor emeritus. I took her to the Puyé Cliff Dwellings on Kah’p’oo Owinge / Santa Clara Pueblo land. It was a glorious afternoon as we wandered among petroglyphs and climbed the ruins. At that time, I was particularly struck by The Narrow Road to the Interior and wrote, in a blurb, “Following the impulse of the brush, Kimiko Hahn composes a journey that is, by turns, lyrical, provocative, meditative, gritty, intuitive, revelatory, and, ultimately, unforgettable.” In all of Kimiko’s work, I admire how she, as an Asian American poet, speaks in a voice that is immediate and compelling.

Kimiko’s many honors include the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, a PEN/Voelcker Award, an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 2016-2019, she was President of the Board of Governors, Poetry Society of America, and now she is the recipient of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. A distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives with her husband, the writer Harold Schechter, in New York.

Let’s start with zuihitsu, a Japanese form that blurs lyric and essay, and whose kanji, or Chinese characters, mean “follow the brush,” or even “following the impulse of the brush.” How did you discover this form and when did you write your first zuihitsu?

I was invited to participate in The Poetry Project's millennium celebration of Sei Shōnagon (St. Mark's Church, 1991), so I wrote "The Downpour," hoping that I was approximating a zuihitsu. I'd read The Pillow Book numerous times in undergrad and grad schools, but I'd never tried my hand at zuihitsu. A haphazard quality felt natural, like a home. I continued writing more, especially in response to requests for essays.  

You have done more than any other American poet to bring the zuihitsu to fruition in contemporary American poetry. How has your relationship to it expanded, deepened, and perhaps changed over time?

For decades I've tried to find a definition in my grad school texts and in more recent books. But even in Linda Chance's scholarly Formless in Form: Kenko, Tsurezuregusa and the Rhetoric of Japanese Fragmentary Prose (1997), I couldn't pinpoint a definition useful to the creative writer. So, I created a definition and wrote the essay "The Zuihitsu and the Toadstool" (The American Poetry Review, Vol. 50, No. 2). I taught workshops. Now I fear I've unleashed a free-for-all: That writer and readers think of the zuihitsu as a kind of potpourri. Because I was as influenced by Modernist collages, such as Williams's Paterson, as I was by Japanese literature, my own zuihitsu were more explorations of a form rather than models of the form itself. Now I need to dial back. My recent ones are more list-oriented. In short, my relationship was one of curiosity, commitment to a means to write one, reckless experimentation, and, now, pulling back to classic models.

Dana Isokawa edited a terrific zuihitsu portfolio for The Margins, the journal of the Asian American Writer's Workshop. More recently we've been talking about what constitutes an American zuihitsu. I'm wondering now if haibun should or should not fall in that generic penumbra.

You’ve talked about how the zuihitsu is open to spontaneity, irregularity, and suggestion, and I’m interested in exploring how you compose in this form. You may include an excerpt from an email, turpentine, a sesame bath oil, “psychosomatic blindness,” porcelain doll parts, an intimate memory—since “revision is about choices,” how do you go about composing in this non-linear form? And is maintaining urgency and emotional pressure a challenge when writing in this way?

For myself and in my workshops, I most often start with an organizing subject or theme: things that remind me of squalor. Or I might have an image that prompts a paragraph. And recklessness is a productive way to draft. For the zuihitsu a feeling of spontaneity is a crucial aspect, but the trick is how to compose and revise so that the final version feels spontaneous. Engendering a sense of urgency and emotional pressure are useful in that regard. These are, for me, ultimately craft tricks. Sleights of hand, so to speak.

By the way, those attributes come from The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (1988) by Donald Keene, with whom I studied. I added "asymmetry," which was not in an essay on aesthetics but is certainly central: tanka is 31 syllables, haiku is 17, and in flower arrangement (ikebana), asymmetry is an essential value.

Finally, writing for me follows different kinds of intuitive practices. That is why the real way of understanding how to write a zuihitsu is not following my definition; rather, rereading the classics by Sei Shōnagon, Yoshida Kenkō, and Kamo no Chōmei. Steven D. Carter edited the amazing collection The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century (2014).

In “Resistances: a reading of ikat,” the last poem in your first book, Air Pocket, I already see bold experimentation, where you draw on elements of Japanese culture but are not bound by them. In this extended poem, with its sensual vibrations, with its astute examination of gender roles, of mother and daughter, of desire and sexuality, of contemporary women artists who are role models of resistance—Judy Chicago and George O’Keefe named explicitly—of shifting textures and contours of language, where English is interspersed with Japanese, is it fair to see this poem as an early landmark and also as a glimmering of things to come? And what about “resistance” as an ongoing theme or commitment?

Thank you for referring to that poem, which came at a pivotal point in my twenties. I was reading Eliot's The Waste Land on my own (I missed it in college!) and was struck by the fragments and jagged juxtapositions. I was impressed by the inclusion of, say, Dante, with no reference until the endnotes. Cheeky person that I am, Eliot gave me permission. I thought: If he can add those Western languages, why shouldn't I add lines of Japanese and East Asian literature? Why shouldn't I include my cultural references? (Although I get that he assumed educated people such as himself would be able to read and recognize the quotes.)

"Resistance" refers to ikat, a method of resist-dyeing. Also, "refusing to accept" and progressive resistance movements. At the time, I knew I was staking out aesthetic and thematic choices for myself—plays on words, East Asian culture, severe fragmentation and juxtaposition—but I'm not sure how aware I was. I knew I was writing about language itself: the difficulty of understanding for us all, and especially for immigrants and immigrant families. And for a young woman who seeks to understand her grandmother's language. Plus, all this theoretical stuff was in the air!

The Artist’s Daughter ventures into charged terrain, with its depictions of necrophilia and vivisection, for instance. In this book, are you deliberately trying to shock a reader out of complacency while also intensifying focus, so that, as Mark Doty asserts: “If she focuses on the body torn apart, it is because she longs to be made whole”?

Thinking back, several dimensions came together around the time I wrote the poems that became The Artist’s Daughter. I was thinking a lot about growing up as the designated monster in my family. The B student, the slut, the one writing about politics (which was then equated with propaganda), running around leafletting (instead of being an artist), and so on. I was continuing to think about the place of women and people of color in society (both have historical monster stereotypes). Then there were the childhood monsters from myths and fairy tales. The same draw to those stories was true for my then-colleague Harold Schechter (now my husband of 20 years). I was attracted to his writing on historical true crime, especially those based on archetypes. And I found very rich research material on his shelves!

A funny moment: after we saw the film Wisconsin Death Trip, based on a book by the same title, I exclaimed that I wanted to write a poem about premature burial, and he responded, "I have just the book for you: Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented (1896)." When I wanted to write about "freaks," he had books by, among others, his mentor Leslie Fiedler, who had written Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1988). For me, research can be a portal. At that time, I was committed to researching monsters and opening up monstrous worlds. I wanted to own the designated monster that I was and exhume what that role might have meant.

The title The Narrow Road to the Interior invokes Bashō’s great journey of walking into the back country of Japan to uncover or discover deep parts of the interior self along the way. You adapt the structure of that classic haibun to suit your contemporary and personal needs. In the necessary movement through disorientation toward a resetting of one’s bearings, you write:  

“The Orient,” according to Said, is not only adjacent to Europe and one of its richest colonies but also is “its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”
 
This is where I write.

How is this insight and assertion fundamental to the compass bearings of your work?

According to Said, the Orient/Other for Gustave Flaubert was inspired by a prostitute with whom he was involved in Egypt. She became the model for the Orient in his books. "The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem," a long piece from my earlier collection The Unbearable Heart, circles around his relationship with her. I was beginning to investigate and explore the images of the Other that emerged from Western Imperialism of the mid-19th century and also in psychology—the first Other being the mother.

I both identify and do not identify with Kuchuk Hanem. I know there was a kind of disconnect in my relationship with my mother. And I know that it was unusual to be mixed-race in the 1950s, or at least to speak of one's background in those terms. For the child then, what does it mean not to resemble a parent? These are some complexities that I explore.

How important is music and musicality to you?

It is important for writing—really for any art—to be an experience. That is what I want and what I'd like for readers. Regarding musicality, I've always assumed that my poems, like anyone else's, would be read aloud. Over the decades my awareness of sound qualities in language has increased. Especially since I've been playing with given forms.

During the pandemic, I reread Emily Dickinson, whose poems are heady experiences. In particular, I'm drawn to her consonance. In general, I find slant rhyme very seductive. For example, when reading Elizabeth Bishop, I don't always know what is moving me, but something reverberates and draws me in: white…paint…started.  

An early pleasure was hearing my mother read Kipling's "Just So" stories and also read to me in Japanese, which I didn't understand but loved hearing. In The Portable Poetry Workshop (2004), Jack Myers writes about texture in poetry, which I find very useful. Glück's texture is very different from Hopkins. Silk differs from nubby wool. Maybe texture in poetry is a kind of tangible music?

In my mind, repetition such as assonance or consonance is what holds a piece together, and dialectical deviation from the repetition threatens to break the piece open. That combination is electrifying.

With Toxic Flora, you take a marked turn by writing poems inspired by articles from the New York Times’s science section. Can you say what sparked this shift?

I am most often inspired by words. So, I delighted in the last sentence in Kipling’s "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin,” which reads: the rhinoceros "went away in the direction of Orotavo, Amygdala, the Upland Meadows of Anatarivo, and the Marshes of Sonaput." Similarly, I find the language of science very exotic. After writing the sequence "Reckless Sonnets" on insects, I realized how much fun I'd had. I turned to New York Times clippings I had (real clippings!) and set out to use them. Research is just another kind of writing prompt. So the poems might not be as much as a shift. In past collections I've researched and written about black lung disease, Heian court culture, extinct birds. It’s true that the Toxic Flora pieces are lyric poems, and that was a shift for me. But I didn't set out to write shorter pieces. I wanted to start with the diction and odd information from science and move to the personal.

In your latest book, Foreign Bodies, personalized objects, such as “a reclining ivory nude, female,” or “Mother’s plastic collar stay” trigger powerful memories. Can these foreign bodies be likened to the tails of comets, where, instead of being static, they are actually tracks that, carefully considered, bring the previously unseen or unexamined to light?

Tails of comets! I love that! I would also liken the objects to a portal, movement through a portal. An image or a word triggers a path or spaces to memory, fantasy, wordplay. The collar stay triggers a time when the daughter recollects them and also the wish for Mother to stay.

And when these foreign bodies are personalized, are they shards of something much larger? Do the fragments eventually become wholes, especially in regard to family?

The "foreign bodies" are symbolic but not necessarily synedochic. And I don't think of fragments as necessarily being a part of a something larger, although that is obviously the definition. I mean, I think that sometimes the fragment becomes a whole. A link in a renga can stand on its own as a haiku.

What are you working on now?

I am just finishing up The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems. I begin with new poems then work in reverse chronology so there is a view backwards in time, from my current age to that young woman who was running around leafletting and scribbling on yellow legal pads in The Hungarian Pastry Shop. I didn't have a mentor. So, the older me is, in effect, advising the younger one and making small revisions.

Through the manuscript is a thread that comments on craft and the writing life. I play, too, with images of ghosts. For example, I see literary allusion as a way of communing with ghosts. And themes over a period of time are haunting.

Another thread—and I hope it will be included—are snapshots of objects. They are not from Dr. Chevalier Jackson's collection but they are swallow-able things. I start with generic things like paper clips and wend my way to the personal: Brownie pin, toy bunny, charm.

I appreciate the care you gave poems like "Resistance." Most people don't know my earlier work and some are precious to me. Perhaps as a new-and-selected, readers can make sense of my writing practice. What then? Some notions are percolating.

What sustains and inspires you most over your writing life?

What sustains me most is connection to self and, simultaneously, to the outside world. Making sense is such a sensual proposition. Play comes into composition. Risk and trust of craft. As a practical matter, writing prompts lead me to drafts. Writing and weather.

What is the role of mystery in a poem?

Well, I don't know where poems really come from. The unconscious? Dream material? What are those realms? (A friend says he channels his poetry; I love that description.) Further, if a poem ends with resonance, where does that resonance come from? What is it? A poem's very appearance is a mystery. And mystery for the reader is a wonderful offering.

I will take advantage of your question and slightly change it. In a past edition of The Penguin Book of Literary Terms, under poetry, the opening definition is: "a species of magic."