I finished Kimiko Hahn's Narrow Road to the Interior on the megabus from Maryland to NYC. It was a good ride! My favorite poems/portions seem to fall at the beginning and end of the book, "Utica Station" and "Shelling" especially.
However I did ultimately decide not to assign this book in Intermediate Poetry. As a contemporary zuihitsu it aims for an improvisational feel, folding in emails, notes for course proposals, and other almost informal journal/diary elements with writing that we'd consider "poetic" in traditional ways. As a reader I enjoyed the variety of forms, but as a teacher I was concerned that undergraduate students could misinterpret Hahn's aims and use that misinterpretation as an excuse for slacking in their assignments. I'm always striving to get my students to reflect more upon their writing, and they seem to have enough clever arguments against revision ("First thought, best thought") without adding fuel to the fire. Have any of you had similar experiences?
Yet as a graduate student / developing writer I really appreciated the moments when Hahn pulls back the curtain and speaks frankly about her process and consideration of forms. Here's a great conversation-starter on prose poems:
Paragraphs absorb the emotionality differently than lineated poems. When I tried rendering a few scribbled paragraphs into conventional poems they did not work; there was an over-sentimentality that was not evident in paragraphs. It wasn't that the feeling was camouflaged, more, there was an absorption, an acceptance of emotion that the verse could not bear.
Those lines come from "Pulse and Impulse." But it was a different line from this work, a single sentence, that has had a powerful influence on my own thoughts about poetry lately:
Intuition, like subjectivity, is not treated as a valid, responsible trait.
This idea of subjectivity as a responsible trait has triggered a return to my old considerations of the role of the "I" in poetry. I've begun to wonder if poetry itself has a responsibility towards The Self, the subjective "I." In this way Hahn's writing has pointed towards a gap in my own, a responsibility I may have neglected... These thoughts are sure to influence the next few poems I write, I'm interested to see what will come of it!
I also enjoyed Hahn's loose tankas immensely, and it was in these that I could feel Bashō's presence the most. Here is a portion of "Wellfleet, Late Summer":
2
By the outdoor shower, the pine drop their needles in the sandy soil. By morning we find them in our double bed.
5
Rain a third day. We'll still walk at low tide to look for moving things. I can stop thinking about my daughter for a second.
9
When he picks a conch out of the bay it furls back inside. Who wouldn't?
17
Rolls of waves off Wellfleet. This could be Maui. I could be my mother.
19
At the beach I avoid the blankets of squalling children but miss my own.
25
Lying together on a towel, the sand flies bite us till we return to the rented bungalow. What strange foreplay!
33
Returning with bagels and the news, a cicada has fastened onto the screen door--a broach for a daughter I think I don't think enough of.
I love how thoughts of children continuously invade upon the scene of romantic seclusion / natural beauty, and the irony of feeling the daughter is not thought of often enough when she seems continuously present. But the exclamation about foreplay is so essentially Bashō to me, good stuff!
cited: Kahn, Kimiko. Narrow Road to the Interior. New York: Norton, 2006. 50, 62.
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