Poetry students in the 1960s were fond of a game based on renga, the Japanese collaborative form that alternates stanzas of seventeen and fourteen syllables. The classical form depends on the principles of link and shift, what Basho called “refraining from stepping back,” each individual stanza both connected to and evolving from its predecessor. In Stanley Kunitz’s twentieth-century classroom, the poem rotated clockwise from student to student; for “poem” read a piece of paper folded backward from the top, so that each of us saw only that stanza directly preceding the one we were about to write, which we hoped would be both boldly formal and mathematically perfect. The whole, to which the increasing thickness of the fold alluded, was unknowable: its progressive temporary vanishing facilitated our Basho-like refraining—there was no world to step back into. Narrative, trajectory, sustained meditation around a single set of ideas, these conventions by which we practiced a form, were precluded by the renga’s methodical opacity; it restricted from view nearly everything that came before. Instead we made a chain of associations, each moment connected only to the two adjacent, making the last stanza often entirely remote from the first.
Retrospectively, a poem of this kind acquired a distinct psychological aura: it suggested a mode of being characterized by disconnection, requiring a compensatory intensity of focus on immediate detail. In place of a single governing idea or story, we relied on inference and improvisation: the past was buried or denied (folded over) though it continued imperiously to shape the present. Coexisting with heightened sensitivity to the moment was a constant intuition of something vast or crucial, veiled, but still limiting or directing choices. One analogue to this state might be the immigrant experience, what Ken Chen calls “the Peking opera soundtrack of my childhood.”
Strange passengers in a stationary Acura, in what might be a parking lot, might also be a film lot: a father who drops the keys in the toilet, a mother “like the moon which rents light from the past,” a small boy, an ancient Chinese poet (long dead), and, floating through the scene like a bit player in a crowd scene who goes where needed, an equally remote dreamlike grandfather who seems a character in a surreal gangster movie:
The suitcase open on the bed.
My grandfather is packing up his organs.
When he is done, he takes a taxi to my grandmother’s house for supper.
Exits the empty car to Taipei alley.
Dissolve. Now the Los Altos lot.
So did you listen to him, my Father says, taking his keys out of the ignition. You should become a lawyer but your grandfather says anything is fine. As long as you’re the best.
My Father stays, my Mother stays silent. I sit and suck my thumb.
I saw your painting. It was beautiful, my Mother says to Wang Wei, restrained beside me by backseat-belt and streetlight world …
…
California moon not glow—or as the translation might say, irradiates instead …
And later:
… You’re young, my Father says,
I’m not sure to me or Wang Wei …
…
… and then Wang Wei:
Red hearts in the southern country.
Spring comes with stems enlarging.
I didn’t know you two were still together.
We’re not, my Father says.…
—“MY FATHER AND MOTHER DECIDE MY FUTURE AND HOW COULD WE FORGET WANG WEI?”
The dead poet, dutifully dragged into the twentieth century, is no more adrift than the other hostages, including the nascent poet, representative of the first generation’s amnesia. In their experience, the present does not build on the past; it replaces the past. Normal evolutionary modifications yield to something more radical and violent, the early self less changed than buried, its memories incapable of mutation or incorporation. Memories of this kind, of a lost world, are frozen: they exist independent of the present, in no relation to it. On the surface, the present may seem to outsiders enviably free, the past not close enough to reproach it or dictate to it. In fact, the present is haunted or crippled precisely because it cannot contain the past in a way that might change one’s perception of it.
In this world, cryptic non sequitur and silence often substitute for disclosure. The alternative: the child poet comes to his vocation for speech unwittingly, body-first, via his “garrulous rash that tells my skin all the secrets of my body.” He has, by now, instead of one car, two households; instead of a dead poet, a sibling:
He asked about his parents, why they split up in the first place, what were they like when they were his age? My father—my mom’s roommate from thirty years ago reveals—would mill around my mother’s place every day, inspect the grass …
But in general, “They don’t talk about these things, my parents, who are as talkative as trees.” What does talk is the world outside the family; doctors and waiters are mines of information, not all of it useful:
At the doctor’s office, I watch the doctor’s wall. A new flu bulletin! Have good posture!
Or:
The waiter at Jade Pavilion thinks my mother is my sister. The waiter walks up and says, “It doesn’t matter that no one is home, we still love her.” He pours the tea and asks, “What good is eternal youth if no one loves you?”
And later:
She takes me to the last doctor. Doctor number seven. Who jerks his finger in the air and says “Ah, Penicillin! Penicillin muddies the waters!” and his hair plugs rustle like a lawn in suburbia.
—“THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF TREES IN WINTER,”
Juvenilia is not, however, in its primary impulses autobiographical. Ken Chen is far too sophisticated and ambitious a poet to have written a local or sentimental book. The power and originality of this collection owe in part to Chen’s use of immigrant displacement as a metaphor for the adult’s relation to his childhood, or origins. No accident that the child is trapped in the backseat with the dead poet: over and over in these poems, the lost homeland corresponds to the vanished world of childhood and the adult speaker to the immigrant. The first world is gone: no one who knew it will talk about it. What survives is a vivid (sometimes paralyzing) conviction that, like the folded-over stanzas, it determines the present.
“The Invisible Memoir” is a tour de force on these themes; the defining thread of abandonment holds together diverse forms:
My gold sword sunk into the ground.
My spirit lost among the long weeds.
Then in the cool night. Then in the quiet sky. Then the moon blossoming open.
My mind goes back to those old hallways, but now only
the light glows hollow on the waters of Ch’in-huai.
Uncle’s house—the happiest time of my life.
Staying—fate
3rd daughter
Grandfather—divorce
Your son is having an affair
The same price
I pay for the son, you pay for the daughter
So the poem proceeds, a collage of exquisite, elusive translations, strange lists and outlines in which an entire human drama is contained, conversations, opinions, homilies, verdicts, scenes:
I sit with my sister on my grandmother’s couch, where we stare at the coffee table and chew dried sour plums and wafers of Chinese candy, like a pink roll of pennies. My mother would measure our height against our grandmother, who with her husband had fled Beijing for Taipei … When my mother was homesick, she thought of Taiwan, unlike her mother who thought of China. My grandmother had acquired a patience that wanted nothing—a sort of contented despair.…
“The Invisible Memoir” tells one person’s story implicitly; explicitly it is, if not exactly dynastic, a portrait of a culture. The deliberate blurring and overlapping of narrative voices point to thematic recurrences and repetitions. Here, as throughout the book, the first-person pronoun is markedly mobile, only occasionally attached to the artist or his persona. Chen’s method is unique: a sort of narrative through excision (the formal correlative of discretion) like a diary with pages torn out, or an account of a complicated past thought to be suitable for a child’s ears, the disturbing material prominently deleted. The fragments that exist have to count for a great deal, for everything. Hence the coaching, sometimes by the poet, sometimes by one of the other figures (though it is not always clear who speaks): “Fate is a trap,” we are reminded, “but context is dynamic.” And a general textbook for living: “Don’t gossip / Live in the past.” Beyond virtuosity, there is in this (as in many of Chen’s poems) a resonant, pervasive echoing, the sense of an earlier language underlying the English lines, faintly distorting them or shifting emphasis. (A striking example of this occurs in “Taipei Novel,” one section of which ends with a strangely unforgettable line: “‘When I am alone, I feel penitent, my heart damp like cold metal.’” It took me several readings to register the fact that the line is a perfect seventeen syllables, a linear haiku. In other words, the embedded past.)
The blurred identities and boundary confusions of “The Invisible Memoir” take other forms in this book, sometimes direct, comic, and sometimes, as in the love poems, sustained, so that love becomes a kind of quicksand, dissolving individuality. There seems sometimes only the haziest boundary between self and other, self and world:
She said to her husband, “Last night
my life was so quiet that my feelings were audible.
When the phone rang, I thought it was my heart.”
Elsewhere, this blurring produces a false reasoning, cause and effect hopelessly intertwined:
And the waters swallow him—are like the tears you shed.
Then he must not be swimming, for there were no tears …
—“TAIPEI NOVEL”
The protagonist, like the reader, must play detective, sniffing out essential facts. Ordering them is another issue.
If it does not simply create panic, the absence of apparent causal relations, together with the scale and frequency of change, stimulates analytic capacities: what experience and memory cannot supply, intelligence infers or pieces together. Pattern and cause can be hypothesized. Chen is obsessed, though, with the defects of this process: logic, which is synthetic, cannot substitute for knowledge; the passion invested in logic mirrors the voids and gaps of memory—the more crucial the gaps, the more passionate the stake in logic.
Ken Chen is a lawyer by education, but these tendencies do not simply reflect training in law. Rather, the habits of mind and disposition that make an effective lawyer (and predispose someone to seek this training) make, in an artist, art of this kind: on the surface, cool, fastidious, obsessive; underneath, daring, relentless. Reasoning is taken to a level of scrupulousness that seems a new form of surrealism:
Love is like tautology in the same way like is like tautology. Both are technologies with which we can turn one thing into another. Like for example turns an object around until we realize that what we had thought was a moon had actually been something else entirely—a pearl perhaps … Love too is about turns. It begins with turning my head to meet your eye and ends when I turn away from you, lost … The middle of love—when we forget that love is what describes us—occurs when I turn to you for everything: to learn how to sleep, to remind myself that yes I too possess a body and slowly it seems life conveys forward only so I have something to tell you at dinner. Time passes and I know you so well that these two terms—I and You (henceforth, “U”)—grow indivisible, are the same … Friendship is an expression; love is an equation.
Yet even equations can be unhappy.…
The poem goes on to enact a series of crises and failures of feeling, abstract but recognizable, the symbols increasingly baroque, increasingly poignant. The end returns to the simplicities of the beginning:
I call you up to tell you this, but no one answers the phone. Should I go home to see you? I do. There is no U. I is only me, me without you. There is a word for this. When there is only I, when I equals I—we call this an identity.
—“‘LOVE IS LIKE TAUTOLOGY IN THE SAME WAY LIKE IS LIKE TAUTOLOGY’”
The confusion love creates with its overeagerness to replace the orphan self with a composite self is partly a confusion of conflicting extreme responses. Love creates feelings both ecstatic and terrifying—a composite self, a “U” or union, mends the wounds of childhood; it also contributes to its obsolescence; the past vanishes in being healed.
Bravura poems work here because there is, at the book’s heart, such deep sadness, such wistfulness, such piercing awareness of irreconcilable, immutable needs. Likewise the aphorisms, which in other hands might seem trivial, an exercise in willed charm: these blossom, late in the collection, into a string of pithy, preemptive one-liners that both initiate and end conversations. Sometimes one hears the tone in which a parent silences a child:
Longing would be so much easier without the other person obstructing it.
And:
Just because you are the victim does not mean that you are not the perpetrator.
And:
Why do we cover our mouths in embarrassment? Once we have seen the fangs we can never forget them.
—“THE CITY OF HABITS”
Some of these moments are ascribed to Confucius, the father of all pith:
How I have gone downhill! It has been such a long time since I have dreamt of the Duke of Chou.
And in the end, the great man by the river:
What passes away is, perhaps, like this. Day and night it never lets up.
—“TAIPEI NOVEL”
These moments occur in a long anecdotal account of an affair, doomed, filled with imbalances, the lovers meeting in the one place, at the one time in which they can come together. The dreamlike result makes a poem in which each moment seems to be memorialized as it occurs.
Great sophistication and high style often flourish at the expense of emotional range. It may be more accurate to say that they are strategies to mask a deficit. The miracle of this book is the degree to which Ken Chen manages to be exhilaratingly modern (anti-catharsis, anti-epiphany) while at the same time never losing his attachment to voice, and the implicit claims of voice: these are poems of intense feeling; they have isolated and dramatized the profound dilemma of the adult’s relation to childhood in poems of riveting intelligence and sharp wit and austere beauty.
Reading for a competition such as this involves reading very few books that are not well made. But current systems of education and standards of judgment have tended to produce bodies of work in which a kind of airbrushed polish obscures eccentricity and real distinction. Imagine, among a hundred-odd collections, many of them impressive, coming on a book called Juvenilia, with its delicious knowingness and sly collusive irony: the title alone staked a flag at the edge. If this is juvenilia, it seems to say, the earth is flat. Or, alternatively: this is juvenilia in that I, the poet, am young; then imagine the work of my maturity—
Here clearly was a poet who felt it was not enough for him to be good or even brilliant in one of the period manners—here was someone who meant to be individual, electric. The scale of the gift is more than equal to the dare. Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category:
Your son? asks Wang Wei. He has seen me and become real, as though a ghost could die into a man. Not the monk you quite expect, Wang Wei wears a cowboy’s deadened face and stares at you not unlike an establishing shot.…
…
And Wang Wei asks Who are you? And my Father says Decide.
—“MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER DECIDE MY FUTURE AND HOW COULD WE FORGET WANG WEI?”
2010