Category: Poetry

Passing in the Middle Kingdom: I Never Liked Redheads

Post author By Stephanie Han
Post date July 9, 2021
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This poem appeared in the hard copy journal Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine Intercourse and Intertextuality (2019).

Myself, ex, and child were in London. We stayed in Canary Wharf. Shout out to Mark Higham @theartshop360 for the image. I sat in the bathtub writing. Yes, at 3AM. I had spent the day alone pushing my child along in a stroller and went to the Tate. I can’t remember the exhibit. I remember wheeling the push chair as they say in UK English, or stroller as they say in American English, over concrete.

Lots of concrete. Are people still pouring concrete everywhere in an attempt to make floor fashionable? After living in a place where concrete dust was always flying due to buildings going up, I really loathe concrete. It’s a necessity, but why get worked up about it aesthetically?

By now, life was full-swing dysfunctional–although in retrospect, it was never functional and full of anxiety and abuse. There were only a few brief windows over the course of many years when there was any calm to the relationship. It was either volatility or boredom.

I see now from a distance that even in the early days (the reference below to steamy night was the night of Handover and meeting up in a bar in Lan Kwai Fong) there was an unease that later became a resignation. There was the stress of money, addiction, depression, passports, and whatever headaches that modern expatriate multi-national relationships potentially have. The difference at this point, which I clearly sensed, was infidelity, though I am now aware that lying is not something someone suddenly does. People lie. Or they don’t. Some lie more than others. At the root of lying is the fear of authenticity. My former mother-in-law was a redhead, which gives everything an Oedipal spin.

I wanted to create a poem that was very short and ambiguous, but not. There are always games of evasion and language. I like the poem now. Moreover, I inhabit such a different emotional space.

I. Am. Free.

I think that might be a new three-word poem. I think that’s about all I need to ever write. Because maybe, that’s all there really is. Once you start moving differently in your truth there is nothing more. This includes fear of Death. I may have some fear of certain physical gestures or movements (i.e. I don’t wear a hat anymore surfing because I tried to come up for air and the hat was in front of my face and I couldn’t get it off and it freaked me out), but fear of Death, no. I am truly not anxious…because yes, this is what it means to live in your own personal truth. You hit the end, and you’re okay with it.

I Never Liked Redheads

I see—

red hair and pale flesh straddling you.

I awaken,

sweat, kick in the dark.

I remember:

a silk dress damp against my skin

the steam of Hong Kong’s night

when you walked

in from the rain.

Desert sun on my back,

light spilled on your shoulders.

A soothing whisper, a baby born.

The wounds and crush.

Dream:

a journey down a silken road tropic solitude

walks in cold forests

slow, slow.

Poetry.

Truth:

long commutes, silent returns

a chase that devours.

Back to back

fast, fast.

Money.

I pen this in a hotel bathtub at 3AM,

rest on a brown cushion on cool porcelain.

You come in to pee.

I tell you the dream, you say,

I never liked redheads,

and return to sleep.

Tags #asianamericanpoetry, #canarywharf, #drstephaniehan, #hawaii, #hongkongpoetry, #lankwaifong, #passinginthemiddlekingdom, #selfhelp, #vvpoetryhk, #writeyourdivorce, #writeyourdivorcestory

Belief and Philosophy Blog Divorce Passing in the Middle Kingdom Poetry Reading & Writing

Passing in the Middle Kingdom: The Forgetting

Post author By Stephanie Han
Post date July 5, 2021
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I have posted this poem The Forgetting elsewhere. It’s never been published by a journal. It is one of the most significant poems that I have written and I stand by it as a piece of writing. It came to me quickly.

I was at the Hong Kong ferry pier

and had a pencil and a wrinkled piece of paper in my bag. I stopped and wrote it down leaning against a steel column breathing in diesel. I was angry, bitter, upset. I don’t like to focus on how a type of creative energy works because I believe craft is important, but I admit here that the words came to me as if I was in a trance. Sometimes, you open your body up and the words tumble out. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is a strange feeling because for me, I write poetry when I have too many feelings and cannot express or name a particular emotion. It would be fair to say there’s always an idea of madness, blood, and a strange churning of the self when poems like this come to me. When you write in these moments you are not present. You come back when you edit. This poem is nearly in its original form. About three years ago, I was given some solid advice about editing and writing and the suggestion to cut the poem in half. I could not. Doing so would lose the frenzied pace of it, the instability.

Fairly obvious, but this reflected the miserable dynamic of my marriage and an attempt at escape.

New York and 57th street

The 57th street reference: a college boyfriend. Charlie committed suicide by jumping from his mother’s penthouse and died in his early 20s. I did not find out about this until years after he had jumped. I also used him, in some ways, as a model for a story from Swimming in Hong Kong that appeared in Cha Online Literary Journal Nantucket’s Laundry, 1985. This was the last story that was published from the collection. Charlie was terribly depressed, on the verge of alcoholism, completely and dangerously unstable. I learned later that he had his face completely reconstructed because he was beaten up so badly. In my memory he is young and handsome, but I also remember, due to depression, he had an eerily elderly quality to him. He had sent me a postcard from Taiwan–that was the last I had heard from him prior to learning of his death. I found the postcard, I believe around the time I wrote the poem, which is probably how this side story of the main story of my marriage made its way into the text…

The Forgetting

I descend, my body splits, and I roar to recover

quickly, urgently,

before wounds break, blood pours,

and I ravage pills of memory.

This body wove from man to man,

fucked and begged on hotel room floors,

bore a child and raged in a fire

as my feet burned across the continents.

I am called across the ocean to sands and palms,

pools that lap forests breathe hot nights on my neck.

Weepy drugs feed this cloying beast.

Wicked songs to memory and heart.

I drink your eye in a dark bar of money,

choking rage of forgetting and longing

cheating time like diamonds in a room of amputated arms.

In this land I join the cockroach dance,

survive the holocaust of malls

lured by spas and women on their knees.

There are ways of knowing—

an arm, a breast, an ankle acting the role of thief.

Fingers tap screens of pornographic screams,

but deadened nerves feel no skin.

I drink bitterness pressing buttons,

dropping clothes, closing doors.

An early death, a godless benediction of madness,

for this wild, I surrender all.

I forget to remember,

tongue acid rain,

lost in watery promises of the dark.

Six white hairs, a dozen soon.

Age and beauty,

orchestrated by gods gambling geography games.

Rising like a beast of present perfect:

A face smashed by thugs.

A body sprawled on 57^th street.

Penthouse jumps are things of youth.

Suicides and lovers, friends ‘til we part,

the stuff of life lived to the bone.

I clock love and lines by years,

smells of wet nylon and stale beer,

taxi clangs of sorry lies.

A marriage scraped from the bottom of a glass,

gathered to divide, until air becomes

what I long to breathe,

joy a regret unknown.

Freedom calls. Sorrow creeps to sky.

The penury of age a certain misery.

Abandonment defies what we know as beauty,

yet to this green I leave my shell,

crawl before gods in forgiveness,

hell in my heart,

knowing the madness of it all.

Tags #57thstreet, #asianamericanpoetry, #asiancha, #drstephaniehan, #hongkongferry, #hongkongpoetry, #muiwo, #passinginthemiddlekingdom, #womanwarriorwriter, #writeyourdivorce, #writeyourdivorcestory, SwimminginHongKong

Belief and Philosophy Poetry Self-help Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Adolescence and Clothing: Inner and Outer Selves

Post author By Stephanie Han
Post date June 30, 2021
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These patched retro Levi’s jeans are from my very early adolescence, fashion-wise–from that leftover phase of hippy rebellion. As someone from the GenX cut-off year, I was influenced by this era older than myself and the era in which I lived. At boarding school, I swapped three skirts for this pair of blue jeans that has small embroidered hearts in purple and pink on the back pocket. Thanks, Mary, yes, I still have them. I kept patching them, but of course, I never wore them after a period of time and they don’t really fit me.

I carted them around everywhere as an odd remembrance because it reminds me of a time when I was trying to define my interior self through clothing and all that is exterior. I don’t think about clothing like this anymore. But back then, one minute I would be dressed like X and the next minute like Y and clothing was pure costuming, fun, curiosity, rebellion, and celebration of self. I couldn’t bring myself to be something, so I wore the clothes that suggested I could be something. I am now rather utilitarian most days; I don’t think of clothing in that same way. I’m more in my body, but yet the body seems to occupy a more esoteric space. I recognize clothing as an avenue of expression, but don’t use it that much in this direction.

As I say often, this is all down to how we see death and self.

For me, the more I recognize my interior as an identity, the less I seem to get worried about the exterior. I realize that what we are in the exterior can be entirely artificial. As the membrane between the inner and outer becomes more fluid, soluble, porous, there is less to worry about. We are what we are. Life is rather short. We are temporal beings. Our body is simply our exterior shell.

Social media, avatars, the way we present can be entirely false or mystical and one can be always aware of the gap between what is seen and what is hidden. I think the easiest solution is to collapse the inner and outer. What you see is what you get. That patched jean self is carried within memory. Memory is one part of the inner self, but not necessarily a construct of the present. How I became who I am in the present, was influenced by the time I spent in these jeans, but yeah, but the cells have all regenerated. I am not that girl.

I hope this makes sense for people. For those who experience anxiety about outer appearance, know that the key is to bring the inner as close to the outer as possible. It’s a much easier way to live.

Tags #Asian philosophy, #asianamerican, #belief, #drstephaniehan, #phillipsacademyandover, #selfhelp, #thehawaiireviewofbooks #thedoctorisin #drstephaniehan #womanwarriorwriter

Belief and Philosophy Blog Divorce Poetry Reading & Writing Self-help

CUT THE CORD

Cut the Cord

I cut the cord of connection

of belief

of desire

of obligation

of responsibility

of care.

I cut the cord knowing that

indifference casts myself into an unknown.

I cut the cord knowing

it no longer matters.

I cut the cord understanding intimacy

is not violent, it is knowing.

I cut the cord knowing to be seen

I need to see myself.

I cut the cord.

I cut this cord to move into

the world as my full self.

Everything I need to navigate life—

I have.

Every symbol I have

Comes from a reflection of my

interior.

I cut a cord and know that

on my own I am full

on my own I am free.

I cut the cord without fear.

I cut the cord.

Tags #drstephaniehan, #womanwarriorwriter, #writeyourdivorce, #writeyourdivorcestory, Poetry

Educators Hawai'i Poetry Reading & Writing Teachers THROB

The Poetry and Song of Ishle Yi Park

Post author By Stephanie Han
Post date June 23, 2021
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I interviewed Ishle Yi Park, the first woman to become Poet Laureate of Queens for the Council of Korean Americans and for THROB aka The Hawai’i Review of Books!

Park was a Na Hoku Nominee for Female Vocalist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year in Hawai’i.

Tags #drstephaniehan, #girlseducation, #ishleyipark, #womanwarriorwriter

Blog Passing in the Middle Kingdom Poetry

Passing in the Middle Kingdom: Out of the Depths

Post author By Stephanie Han
Post date June 19, 2021
No Comments on Passing in the Middle Kingdom: Out of the Depths

I have written and posted about Out of the Depths in a few places. It was previously published, in a different form in Vice-Versa as a prose poem. I wrote this poem in a fit of absolute despair? I wrote it quickly. I’m reluctant to act like this was some mystical act of writing because in the end, writing is about going to the page whether you want to or not. But this was an example of those moments where the words fly in. They do this now and then, only if you don’t judge yourself, if you allow yourself to be vulnerable to the impulse of feeling. I was living in Hong Kong. I was supposed to be working on on the dissertation. This choir program was sent around that time.

I was touched by this. It was sent via email from one I think of in many ways as my very first boyfriend in that the emotional pitch of that adolescent relationship was intense: during that time I experienced a myriad of feelings I had never felt prior. It was exciting. I remember thinking, wow, I get it! I understand what the books say, what love means in the movies! Older people forget and dismiss the feelings of young people all the time, but because the feelings are brand-new, they are intense, wonderful, miserable, and complicated. I was 17. He was a friend’s older brother’s friend. He was backpacking around Italy at the same time I was singing in a school choir and we fell in love. There was Florence and Rome. Sculpture. Art. Food. My senses were suddenly awakened, to love, to beauty, to an environment that was unusual and lyrical. I think of this time with fondness. It was funny and lovely that he had kept that program all of those years. We have not seen each other in decades and like most people, now and then chat on social media.

At the time this was sent to me my marriage was more or less, emotionally over. There was work. Obligations. It was a time of severe unhappiness because I was hoping for a revival, an awakening for a moment that would ultimately never come, and I had, I think, suspected that it would remain in this state and it was driving me mad. This was the poem. It was the last time my ex would see me read a poem too–rather fitting, in hindsight. A lot of young women approached me after this reading. Memory. Heartbreak. Hope.

I also find it interesting that this was a choir program and it got me thinking more recently about how I used to like to sing. Then for years I went into silence. I stopped all song. I sang to my child when he was little, but by the time of this poem, I had entered a phase of quiet. He was slightly older. Silence reigned. I’m not singing yet, although I am more inclined to do so these days. Hula taught me to smile. Singing: defiance and joy. I was inclined to write in a peculiar space–something I can think of as akin to snow. Too many words to fill the page. This was written in that space.

I added a phrase long after the poem was done: Madness suffocates the heart. I took out the date, 1982 that was in the title because I wanted the poem to float more in time.

I had begun to make a lot of connections between past and present, an idea of traveling and finding love in an unpredictable geographic space. How we disappear and move. The why of hope and memory. How we become what we dream and how we persist in dreaming. Death. We ferry to the end. How desire brings us to our knees. A longing for intimacy beyond the violence of indifference.

Out of the Depths

I learn to sing for love: St. James Church, Florence, Italy, 1982.

Out of the Depths. Aus der Tiefe.

Bach knew voices peel notes before gods.

In foreign lands, terrain is the body.

Journeys: autumnal kiln walls,

cobblestones beating boot leather,

dust of clay and time.

An alabaster youth towers,

crowds gather, transfixed.

Madonna’s electric blues,

her child’s peach fists,

halos, halos everywhere.

This air shouts love and belief.

Passion: a cigarette nipping dusk,

March cold whipping the back of my knees,

a quiver and kiss, a penance for longing.

The hope and embrace of supple flesh,

passion so wide, skin barely holds it.

Memory is now.

What is Love,

but an ancient bridge over an ageless water,

flocks of birds that hurry to heaven,

skies that echo eyes?

In youth one knows its purpose:

the creation of memories, urgent, desperate, alive.

Such things follow me to China.

Here, continents and decades away,

I push back memory’s cloying scent

to stay alive.

What now, but to sift and store

my love from the past

remains in a box I always carry:

This is what it means to have innocence.

What of love now?

A familiar traveler,

a wanderer,

a man of rage and longing,

a rough rock of intelligence.

Madness suffocates the heart.

Poetry is difference, the unknown.

We unfold like origami—lines remain—

to create the map I came to follow.

* * *

The compass rose blooms and points,

directs us to deserts and possibility.

I know the gravity of love,

how it breaks and mends,

its flowers and soil,

the cracking of its perfect wood,

its thirsty jagged roots,

a light it demands and gives

or Death: this ocean comes.

I have moved countries again.

Again.

Time, time, from one cradle to another.

Love—bound in a man without a country,

began in the hiss of summer’s heat,

through the eye of an Empire’s possession.

This East swallows: I am one of its minions,

a snack, a witness, nothing more.

A boat ferries me over water

delivers me on hands and knees

to anchor dreams

that sweat from my flesh,

to love that awakens again.

Again.

Tags #asianamericanpoetry, #drstephaniehan, #passinginthemiddlekingdom, #phillipsacademyandover, Poetry

Dr. Stephanie Han

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