USA

AN INTERVIEW WITH TIMOTHY LIU 

Photo: C. Arabadjis

by  ANDRENA ZAWINSKI 

Timothy Liu is an accomplished poet early in his writing career, 33 with three published collections of poetry: Vox Angelica (1992, Alice James Books) and  Burnt Offerings (1995) and Say Goodnight (1998) from Copper Canyon Press.  It  is a daring, sensitive, impassioned body of work that deftly struggles to balance the internal, sensitive, solitary world of the poet against the external  struggle of an Asian, Mormon, gay man with everyday living.  Liu’s range of subject matter is wide and contemporary, sometimes sexually frank, often meditative, always emo- tionally candid.  His most recent book, Say Goodnight,  reveals his talent. The influences are classic and ancient, are abusive and loving,  are solitary yet integrated as any poet coming to terms with his identity--in Liu’s case sometimes occupied by a Mormon priest, other times by an abused child, others by a man who loves men, in writing that can range from the lean and conversational to highly textured compositions that are imagistic and rhythmic.

Q: Let’s start with the basics--where and when you were born, where you studied,  your greatest poetic influences, work, degrees, favorite teachers, how you came  to be a poet, and if any of this background really sticks to your writing.
A: I was born in San Jose, California in 1965 and educated at UCLA, Brigham Young University (B.A. in English) the University of Houston (M.A. in English) and the  University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  In addition to California, Utah, Texas, and Massachusetts, I lived in Hong Kong for two years as a  Mormon missionary and  four years in Iowa as an Assistant Professor at Cornell College. I currently reside  in Hoboken and teach at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ.  Place always  affects my imagination, so these various locales do also pressurize my work.  Favorite poets as an undergraduate included Louise Gluck, Linda Gregg, and Jean  Valentine.  Recent favorites include Gustaf Sobin and Charles Wright.  Three mentors in my first decade of writing were crucial to my sense of self as a writer: a Welsh poet named Leslie Norris, the poet Richard Howard, and the writer/editor  Gordon Lish.  Without their eyes and constant attention, who knows where I would  have ended up?  On being a poet: the commitment was gradual, like religion or  playing a musical instrument. First half an hour a day, and then, years later,  five to six hours a day of reading and writing. If not poetry, then surely  something else would have come along to equally demand my energies.

Q:  Martin Espada has said his subject, identity, and audience exist in concentric  circles:  Puerto Ricans, Latinos, people of color, the Left, the working class, and  anyone who will listen.  Mary Oliver, in A Poetry Handbook, suggests poems be written  for some stranger in a distant country hundreds of years from now.  Who and where is  the audience for which you write as an Asian, as a Mormon, as a gay man?
A: I would start with readers of contemporary poetry. There are so many great books written in prose about the various identities that I occupy, so to me,  that is not  the point. The point is poetry, the experience of reading it and writing it.  My  Asianness, my Mormon roots, my homosexuality, are but a part of my being and therefore  but a part of my poetry. Therefore, in addition to those identities, there are countless  others.  None of the poets I have previously mentioned (Gluck, Gregg, Sobin, Valentine,  Wright) share with me the identities that you mention. Now what are we to make of that?

Q: In “Echoes” (Burnt Offerings, Copper Canyon Press, 1995), a particularly haunting  line reads:  “...All my life/the sound I’ve been trying to hear is the sound/of my own  voice.”  Tell me about that voice,  what the sound of it means to the poet and the man, and how much closer you are to hearing it now.
A:  “Echoes” is a poem that deals with sexual abuse and its consequences.  My own voice was silenced by my mother’s abuse, something I did not deal with until my early twenties.  In the interim,  I heard that abuse echoed in my relationships with others and within works of art. It was in therapy that I first gave “voice” to this hidden history, and after that, in some of the poems that I wrote.

Q: Some of the content of your poetry must have faced both guns of criticism and flags of praise, specifically  “I Came,”  “In the Outhouse, “ “Ikon,” with their frank and forceful imagery.  The poems “Rest Stop, Highway 91” or “The Marriage,’” from Burnt  Offerings or “The Prodigal Son Writes Home,” “Black Out in the White Swallow,”  or  “Power” in Say Goodnight are also sexually explicit without being necessarily erotic in intention.  What is it you would like the poetry audience at-large to take away  from these kind of poems?
A:  To admire what language can do. Language is erotic, intended or not.  Some of the  poems you mention of course toy with cultural taboos as well, and therefore are obscene,  that is “offstage.”  Greek dramas found it crude, for example, to portray actual murders  onstage.  Many of my poems seek to stage linguistic tropes and situations that have been  largely left out of poetic discourse, thus releasing textual energies that our culture seeks to suppress.

POWER

Half of the penis remains
for a man whose dong had been bitten off
by a dog, the organ extended

by cutting ligaments that attached it
to the pubic bone, the public
turning away from preop photos

of another member eaten out
by cancer - two  million men  (ruined
by birth defects, burns, and accidents

on the farm) still waiting for
the pudendal nerve in the perineum
to be reconnected for pleasure.

How else restore their dignity? -phallic
disabilities our nation’s silent
agony.  But what of men

who want a couple of extra inches
for their own self-esteem, standing outside
a clinic in Toronto
among boutiques, no sample large enough

to estimate what constitutes
an “average” endowment?

Some say it’s a power thing. Pure power.
An impulse not to be resisted--
phobias in locker rooms

across the country.  (Lorena Bobbit
flinging her husband’s manhood
out the window.)  Some go through with it:

dysfunction and death the risk they take
as they give consent - sex lives
reconstructed with rectus abdominus

myocutaneous flaps
while a manicurist from Ecuador
(who claims her husband forced

anal sex on her) gets acquitted
in front of courtroom cameras
in Manassas, Virginia: “Attacked

the instrument of her torture.”
“An impulse that she could not resist.”
“A world in which the biggest knife wins.”

Q:  In the beautiful and powerful poem “Men Without,” the writing is spare and honest.  In it you say, “...Who is that man/who weeps unheard inside my  body?”  This kind of  sweet pining sings out again in “Across the River” with “Finally snow/with no ones  footprints in it.”  How much does your own inner solitude drive your poems’ outer  voice to reach out for a kind of companionship, perhaps with self, through the process  of writing? 
A:  Poetry is a discipline best practiced in solitude, although it is also communal, as church is.  But language desires otherness, what Frost called “counter-love” or  “original response” in his poems “The Most of It.”  So there is the reaching out, but  again, as Frost says, “instead of proving human as it neared/ and someone else additional to him,/  as a great buck it powerfully appeared...”  Poetry is suffused with mysteries.

Q:  Many of your more recent poems seem to move from the narrative voice laced  with textured imagery in Burnt Offerings to poems whose content depend upon a  sensory imagery of momentary essence and metaphor reminiscent of the subject and  tone of ancient haikuists.  The short poem “That Room in Which Disaster Played a Part” that leads off Say Goodnight is a case in point with its “broken sprigs of  jasmine/strewn about meticulous lawns at dusk”  and “So many flowers/ igniting in that garden beyond the mind--/four walls and a door we called the future” or :

READING LU CHI

Moonlight touching all eight corners
of a room where antiquity flowered

late---eyes cast down to hand-thrown
jars cracked with a celadon glaze

while ashes falling from a mountain
of books at last return to the source.

Q:  What influence do the likes of ancient Chinese writers have upon your work?
A: The great masters like Li Po and Tu Fu make me feel totally inadequate as I write, but there they are!  So, of course, they also make me feel proud of my  Chinese heritage.  I came to their poems via western poets like Pound and in  English translations.  I have tried my hand at translating a handful of Tu Fu poems as well.  I feel so much admiration for the Imagists of Modernism leading  us back to the source, and  so this inheritance of mine is a marriage of East and West across the centuries. 

Q:  How does your religious background figure into poems like “Apostasy?”
A:  The simplest answer I can give is that I went from being a priest in the Mormon Church to what Wallace Stevens would call “a priest of the invisible,” but the Biblical imagination remains a strong force in the way I perceive the world.  

APOSTASY

Those voices from below roiling up
around our ankles,
scalloped edges
gouging at our ankles in the sea foam--
succumb  succumb
     the moon a trophy
hung in heaven, nothing but pages
scattered on the floor
where a pen lies
on a desk for forty years in fear
of faded passages
       marked in red--
the Word of God in my father’s house
a monolith
      that grew too heavy
for us to lift - a brigade of ants
marching over torsos
   cast in bronze
outside the chapel door, a fountain 
smudged by the lips
                            of passing strangers
as we wait for the next god-body
to appear: how we want
                                  that ghost-Christ
kneeling over there, hands outstretched

on a burnished pew,
                              the cross not loved
as symbol but as wood and nail -
that iron song
                      as our bodies flail.

Q:  As a modern writer, you seem to use and invent form with a deliberate  self- consciousness whether it is the couplet, projected verse, or inventive  patterns with use of enjambed lines.  What is it in your process of crafting  your poetry that determines the shape and rhythm in which your content and  imagery will appear? 
A:  Most of the poems in my three books are written in syllabics, an inheritance from Pound, Charles Wright, Richard Howard, even Marianne Moore.  English is an accentual language, so a commitment to syllabics creates a tension to work against, especially when writing in free verse.  The ancient Chinese used to count each character, so it makes sense to me to tally up those syllables. Besides, in high school, I would also get the metrical stresses wrong, so syllabics became my fallback!

Q: “Strange Music,”  from Burnt Offerings, seems a song of regret and sorrow speaks softly of those who  love those who die of HIV/AIDS.  How difficult is it for you to  write a poem like this?

STRANGE MUSIC

Men have seen their own graves at the edge
of clinic beds, afraid
the watches strapped to their wrists are nothing
       more than faces on clocks
still ticking in a childhood house.  To kneel
before a dying lover
is to know those calendars yellowing
         against a wall.  Sometimes
men stop eating. Just like that. No taste
to revive their tongues again.
Bells linger in the air long after
        pigeons fly up into
the afternoon, yet nothing endures
longer in the mind
than that echo of what we might have been.

A:  I wrote that poem at a Benedictine monastery outside of Dubuque, IA.  I heard the abbey bells from my private cell and began to write.

Q:  “Strange Fruit,”  in once again lean and forthright language addresses a hate crime through sheer description:  “--some lesbians/returning home to find their cats/ still hanging from a coat rack/in the entry hall...” How important is it to you that your imagery speak for more than itself in these cases?
A:  I think the images speak for themselves.

Q:  How has the work of other gay writers affected your own work?
A:  The work of other gay writers has helped to make my own work possible.  My debt  to Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and scores of others is immense.  I am currently editing an anthology of gay American poetry for Talisman House, an innovative press that makes its home in Jersey City.  I plan to represent work by over forty poets who have been publishing over the past fifty years.  While pre- vious anthologies have been loyal to representing “gay experience,” my anthol- ogy seeks to complicate the relationship between one’s sexuality and one’s textuality.  Collecting poems that span the gamut from traditional to radical forms, I hope the need to label a poem or poet as gay is brought into question. 

Q:  There are, in the book Say Goodnight, four poems titled “Say Goodnight”  weaving their way through the book.  What is the purpose of that in the book’s trajectory? 
A:  "Say Goodnight" is a title I have used for several poems because lately I have enjoyed recycling titles. This kind of practice was quite notable on Louise Gluck's  The Wild Iris, for example. "Say Goodnight I" informs a childhood view. "Say Goodnight  II"  was originally published as "After Van Gogh"--I was reading the letters of Van Gogh at the time of its drafting. "Say Goodnight III" looks at an erotic act as a kind of  artistic masterpiece in and of itself. And "Say Goodnight IV" looks at the silence that follows the completion of an artistic/erotic act:

SAY GOODNIGHT

It is better to be alone. Tree and sun
as icons beside a house with windows
that never close.  No hills. It seems
this was all the lovers could imagine--
broken crayons strewn about the table.

SAY GOODNIGHT

Trunks of charred pines rooted to the rocks.
Women laid to rest in fields they dug up

when alive. Who will come to warm themselves
beside the hearth where dogs huddle close
while a man in a Shaker chair nods off

into sleep?  We only can see a little smoke--
those chimneys blackening an evening sky.

SAY GOODNIGHT

Muted bells ringing inside my body
as I undress, thinking of that afternoon
a stranger pinned me down between the legs
of my mother’s piano where we had been

rehearsing hymns that we knew by heart
as twin shafts slid through valves of spit,
pure grip rammed into bruised hips, the bench
mere plinth to the masterpiece we were.

SAY GOODNIGHT

No kisses. Not tonight. Stand
before that folding easel
and sketch the cup, the saucer,
the china plate.
                       We shall eat
after all our labors. No Doubt
the canvas will be torn to shreds
as quickly as a pencil rolls
off the crooked kitchen table--

and night with its call of trumpets
will sound in our ears as lovers
say goodnight.