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.
There are times when my eyes are flooded with color. As I’ve mentioned before since being diagnosed with osteoperosis in December 2020, I have shifted my ideas of health. I’m trying now to think about making my body healthy from the inside out. This is also probably due to the rewiring of my body and brain after divorce. There is a keen awareness of mortality. I must drink this in and what is it? Laughing at the absurdity of accumulation to stave off death, the efforts that people go through to do what exactly? I have an awareness of death that rumbles under my daily habits. How will I spend this day and how many more do I have? Will I see the water today? Decisions become more clear.
I have chosen images of paths. The two in Makiki are in marked contrast to the row of flowers in Kahala at the edge of the sidewalk. In the Kahala image, Nature is what is observed from the path, in contrast to the two other paths which suggest our walking and participation is part of nature, we as human beings, inseparable from the path.
We must attempt to understand that we are never separate from the physical path. We can try to act as if we master and shape the path, but we are the path, just as the path is who we are.
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.
There are four steps you need to take or at least strongly consider doing as you ready for divorce. Everyone is different, so understand that I am giving advice based on my personal experience and circumstances. I found there wasn’t much out there for women who were divorcing–unlike the wedding industry.
So here are my four steps:
Every week I hike the Kokohead Trail. This trail provides a beautiful view once you hit the top, but you are climbing steps up the entire way.
Steep steps. I do it faster or slower, but mostly, I just get up there and speed is not a priority which is good because if it was, I’d never bother with anything. I’m fast small picture, but big picture, I’m kind of slow and do things at my own pace. This means, my goal is overall health, and that takes time.
In December 2020 I was diagnosed with osteoperosis, so I am working now to keep it in check. I’ve also become acutely aware of all aspects of emotional and physical health and prioritize this. This, along with the big D for Death serve to remind me that life is temporal and it is how we move through it that counts.
The other week I was dismayed to find someone was being rescued and with helicoptors overhead, rescue workers trudging up, I thought what happened? Turns out someone is rescued from this trail 3 times a week!
TOURISTS:
If you don’t regularly ascend stairs and keep a cardio rhythm going for about 25-40 minutes, do not try this on your once-in-a-lifetime holiday to Hawai’i! Do not attempt this climb! Every time someone is rescued this costs the average citizen of the state tens of thousands of dollars. We have the highest cost of living here and some of the lowest wages. It makes no sense.
Just for good measure, I will add, if you cannot SWIM, do not go out and rent a surfboard and decide you want to try this!
I feel like sometimes people come here and all logic goes out the window! This is basic common sense. I know you are excited to be here, but be pragmatic so that you can enjoy and avoid rescues and the hospital. $$$
I haven’t read poetry in public over the past decade, so in March when I had the opportunity to do this with The Literary Cypher run by LP Kersey and Obsidian Pen Publishing, it was really fun! Poetry is community and the expectations around reading and writing poetry, at least for me, are much different than writing prose. I read some poetry from my manuscript Passing in the Middle Kingdom, which is, if you have been tuning in, what I am also blogging about–specifically ideas of creative process.
The point here is to show you or anyone who may benefit from writing poetry how a poem unfolds, and how and why writing poetry can help us answer and ask questions.
This poem An Ocean Ago was written and submitted to Great Ocean Quarterly in Australia. They ended up taking another one (I’ll blog about that later), but it gave me some confidence that they had liked it, although admittedly, this poem was dramatically rewritten over the course of a decade. I was living as a Korean American expatriate in Hong Kong who was four generations in on the Hawai’i side. Most Asian Americans pivot between two countries: the US and the country of their ethnic origin. When you throw that third country in, stuff gets a little different, also when you throw in another country due to a partner. So you start dealing with 3-4 countries and you start to see how reductive life can be if you insist only upon a dichotomy and polarization of two sides. We can’t and don’t live that way anymore. We all inhabit a global economy. All I can say is there is a nuclear accident in Japan and the stuff washes up off the Oregon coast, what does that mean? One planet everyone…yep…
When I first wrote it, I was really trying to understand what I was feeling about marriage, motherhood, and place. I had gotten it in my brain, as writers do, that if I write something a certain way, then I would will my life a certain way. This is both true and not. You cannot write you love someone if you do not love someone, and suddenly start to love someone. You can write to convince yourself you love someone, but this only goes so far. I was trying to write into this question. So the first draft was me desperately trying to write and through writing, rationalize my situation, no matter what. Later, I became more comfortable saying there was confusion and finally, no. Love gone. The poem turned. It worked out. Writing confirms what we know and allows us to search inside of ourselves.
This poem was also about memory, about a road trip to Arizona when we first met, about aging and what this means, about pregnancy and the movement between Hong Kong and the US, back and forth, on and off for years. There was always a rather frantic dynamic, this is a polite or euphemistic way of describing what can only be said to be harrowing. I know now such feelings are linked to living with and under trauma. I live very differently now. My body is recalibrating. For anyone who has lived in this way–I will tell you this: Just. Step. Away.
Also the thing about aging is that it is linked to death, of course. What it means to die. How we die. Why we die. Fear of dying. We all die. You will not be saved from the truth that we will all perish. Every person you see, every tree or sign of life that you witness or experience will perish too, just as you do. You can do whatever you want to try to stop this: pray, exercise fanatically, get plastic surgery, have a child, find a new partner, move to a new home or city, get a new job, but guess what. The Big D is coming for you. And the flag the Big D is waving says this: Take No Prisoners.
That’s right. The END is real. SO…what does Dr. Stephanie Han say about this?
Be real. Be kind. Be fair. Here’s the poem below–
An Ocean Ago
A shower runs down my husband’s back.
Torks, twists, a broken spine.
He hoists our child on to his shoulders.
A shift in his gait. Silver hair thinning.
An ocean ago.
We floated in a blue pool
he held me up to a red rock sun.
Will you love me
when I can no longer lift you to the sky?
So late, so fast,
an ocean ago,
a splash, a belly, a pink bikini.
Liquid pooled between my legs,
the current pulled.
Our baby fought the crossing.
His arrival, our return.
An ocean ago,
money crushed the fetal grip,
trash floated, we swam the harbor
of age and loss, panicked
through tubes and wires.
Tread water, refuse to drown.
We searched for an elixir,
discovered gray vapor death.
Will you love me?
Let me lie, I said,
I do.