Decapitated Poetry
Ophthalmologist–poet Ko-Hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry exuberantly straddles the bodily and the speculative. Selections from Chen’s eponymous 1995 book and other collections form the first half of this volume, their tone affectless, outlandish, and ebullient by turns. “Ode to Muscles” interleaves patriotic slogans, non sequiturs, and luxuriations in the body:
Orbicularis oculi. Our motherland is so magnificent.
Gastrocnemius. Are you happy? It’s wonderful.
Superior oblique muscle. Superlative sex position.
The clarity of the poet’s voice never grows prosaic, and the ambit of his imagination remains broad as his perspective leaps from instruction manual to fairy tale to editorial to deadpan personal snapshot:
Why do men have nipples?
This is the headline of today’s newspaper—on my table, two poached eggs,
creamy yolks on a white plate
waiting to be licked clean.
Here, Chen’s landmark poems of gay love are paired with two long works: “Twelve Love Poems for an Android” and “Notes on a Planet,” a 40+-page epic penned when Chen was still a teenager, written from the perspective of a human/android chimera and directed to their comrade/beloved, “WS.” “A Mixed-Race Baby,” from “Notes,” relates the narrator’s origin story: “My mother deliberately fell into the sperm tank, / then somehow conceived a child with a computer that knew how to fuck.”
The death’s-edge love story between the chimerical narrator and WS is piercing in its pathos:
From my 13th-generation computer,
I send you signals designed
to allay my fatigue:
a request for warmth, for assistance.
Yes, I am calling for help. WS, can you hear me?
I repent. The V of my dignity crumbles.
Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell have brought the two strains of Chen’s oeuvre into a dynamic tension, and their illuminating translators’ foreword reflects on the “fascinating interplay between queer identity and technology.” Though the content is so widely disparate, both halves of this volume contain the same vital assertions of selfhood.