MCLC: conversation with Eleanor Goodman

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: conversation with Eleanor Goodman
***********************************************************

Source: Beijing Cream (2/25/14):
http://beijingcream.com/2014/02/poetry-night-in-beijing-a-conversation-with
-eleanor-goodman/

Poetry Night In Beijing: A Conversation With Eleanor Goodman
By Anthony Tao

We’re rapidly approaching the March 1 submission deadline for those
interested in reading at Poetry Night in Beijing, a curated community
event on March 16 that’s part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. If you’re
wondering whether you should submit, please heed the advice of Eleanor
Goodman, one of our curators: “Submit! There’s nothing lonelier than a
poem sitting unread on

a laptop or in a notebook.” Goodman is a writer and translator whose work
has appeared in a variety of publications
<http://www.eleanorgoodman.com/>. Her translations of Wang Xiaoni will be
published this year (The Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni). She’s currently
in Beijing on a Fulbright Fellowship.

We recently had a chat over email about poetry, translating, and our March
16 event (jointly hosted by Pathlight <http://pathlightmag.tumblr.com/>).

AT: We’ll begin with an impossible question: what is poetry?

EG: That is an impossible question. I’d be very hard pressed to define
poetry, although like the Supreme Court and pornography, I know it when I
see it. The older I get and the more I read and write, the less I feel we
should or can dictate to others the confines of a given craft. Having said
that, the poetry I gravitate toward has a keen sense of rhythm and music,
some sort of emotional content, a fresh use of language and a strong
intellectual underpinning. These things can come in many forms and guises.
Do you have a definition for poetry?

AT:You covered the basics. I’ll just add that one aspect of poetry I
really admire is its range. An able poet is able to traverse the cosmic
and quotidian in the thin space of fifty pages, i.e. the length of a
collection. Hmm… maybe one could even do it in eleven words? To borrow
from the American poet Virginia Hamilton Adair and the Tang Dynasty poet
Li Bai: Did the parturition of nothingness give rise to all this
frost?Also, poetry’s basic function as expression – articulating the
inexpressible, de-familiarizing the familiar, helping us see the familiar,
etc. – should make it essential.

But is it? Is poetry fulfilling its duties / potential? Can it, in our day
and age?

EG: Poetry’s role is a hard one too. I think it can play many roles, or
none at all. To some limited extent, poetry is that which can’t be pinned
down. So I’m reluctant to say it has “duties.” On the other hand, people
who dedicate themselves to writing poetry (and I think that’s a very small
group of people) are trying to communicate something. A writer like Han
Dong or Ashbery or Yan Li is trying to get at something very serious with
absurdism that sometimes seems slight. So perhaps I should say that there
is a duty, and an extremely important one, but I wouldn’t want to go about
articulating it outside of a poem. As for this day and age, my father
always liked to tell a story about archeologists discovering a new
tattered scrap of Egyptian papyrus. After struggling to interpret the
ancient, faded script, they figured out it said something along the lines
of, “Well, the world is going to hell in a handbasket: children don’t
respect their elders and the women wear too much makeup.” This is
obviously apocryphal, but the point is sound. There’s nothing new under
the sun. If poetry has ever had any power in the real world – and it has –
it has that same power now.

AT:How or why did you begin translating poems? From Chinese, no less?

EG: The Chinese came before the translation. I first dipped my toes into
translation in a class I took with Rosanna Warren when I was getting my
Masters in Creative Writing. At that point, I was just back in the States
after living in Shanghai for more than a year, and she encouraged me to
try translating from Chinese. I was dubious, but took my best shot at
translating some Wang Wei, who remains one of my favorite poets. I did a
miserable job, but it inspired me to continue to translate as a way of
learning/practicing Chinese. Later, my close friend and
sometimes-collaborator Wang Ao (poet and translator extraordinaire)
introduced me to the world of contemporary Chinese poetry and I was
immediately hooked. I like to translate the work of people who are still
alive and kicking.

AT: Has translation made you more aware of how you write? Does thinking in
two languages help your writing, and if so, in what ways?

EG: Translation has had an enormous influence on my own poetry. Chinese is
structurally very different from English, and the norms of Chinese poetry
are different too, so I’ve consciously (and surely unconsciously) imported
some of that into my own work. In particular, I’ve gotten very interested
in the lack of punctuation in a lot of contemporary Chinese poetry. Merwin
does that too, but few other American poets write straight-up
sentence-based poetry that relies on line break and emphasis instead of
punctuation. It opens up a lot of new space, at least for me. It’s cliché
now to say this, but I do think that writing, thinking, living in another
language brings out a different personality that otherwise doesn’t have a
chance to emerge. At least that’s true for me.

AT:The trick is to stay sharp and current in your native language while
mastering a second. I don’t have any tips at all in how to do that. Wait,
I do. Read poetry.

EG: I couldn’t agree more with the admonition to read poetry. But I also
think that for many (if not most) poets, there isn’t a danger of losing
touch with their native language despite being in a linguistically foreign
environment. I once asked Bei Dao if living in the United States for so
long made him feel estranged from Chinese, and he said it made him feel
like he had a more intimate relationship with his mother tongue, not less.
The same is true for me. Living here in Beijing and operating in Chinese
all day long only makes my love affair with the English language stronger.
I know its soft contours and rough edges much better than I will ever know
Chinese, no matter how many years I spend here.

AT: I wonder: how does Chinese poetry differ from English-language poetry,
and how are they similar? Are there any defining characteristics about
Chinese poetry?

EG: This question is huge and I’m unqualified to answer it. But I will say
this: the varieties of Chinese poetry that exist are as different from
each other as Chinese poetry is from English-language poetry, especially
when looking across a distance of more than a thousand years.

AT: What’s the current poetry scene like here?

EG: In my experience, the Chinese poetry scene is quite close-knit and
self-aware. That isn’t to say it’s not contentious, cliquish, and often
catty – it is. But poets tend to know or be aware of each other, and to
keep close tabs on what their contemporaries are writing. They also know
who’s gotten a divorce, who won an Italian poetry prize, who’s building a
house in Yunnan, who slept with whom at what conference, and so on. It’s
full of gossip, nepotism, and guanxi-mongering. But the flip side of that
is that everyone’s in touch with what’s going on and there’s some sense of
common purpose at work. This is in sharp contrast to what I’ve seen in the
States, where poets are spread out and nobody’s ever heard of anyone else
unless he or she is a star.

AT: Fascinating and worthy of a thousand-word essay. (By the way, that’s
due next week, I’ll expect it in my inbox.) How are Chinese poets viewed
among the public? Who are some of the leading voices, and do they have
more or less influence than their counterparts in, say, the US?

EG: In the 1980s, being a poet was a big deal. In the Tang, you had to
write poetry to get a government post. Today, it’s sort of an
embarrassment. I’ve met several accomplished poets with day jobs who would
never tell their colleagues that they write poetry. Parents tend to
discourage their kids from spending too much time on poetry. Poetry and
poets are not in the public space the way they once were. Still, I’m not
sure that’s a bad thing. Do you have thoughts about that? I’ve noticed
that Beijing Creamrarely if ever mentions poetry – is that a sign of
something?

AT: I’d love to incorporate more of it. I wrote a silly villanelle here
<http://beijingcream.com/2013/07/the-real-china-a-villanelle-about-beijing-
and-shanghai/>, and appended Adrienne Rich’s masterful “The Ballad of the
Poverties” to a post about nail houses
<http://beijingcream.com/2014/02/nail-house-the-poverty-of-modern-china/>,
but more suggestions are always welcome. I’d be happy to run a poetry blog
if I thought I was qualified.

EG: I really admire the way you’ve incorporated Rich’s poem into your
post. I think we need a lot more of exactly that: poetry as part of the
common conversation. In some ways I think these poetry blogs are a kind of
sequestering. They have their place, but let’s have poetry all over the
place, preferably where it “doesn’t belong.” Don’t you think?

AT: What do you hope to see at the literary festival event on March 16? Do
you have any expectations?

EG: I’m eagerly expectation-less. Still, I’m very curious what kind of
crowd will come out for this event. Are there English-language poets
hiding in obscure dark corners of Beijing who only creep out occasionally
in the middle of the night to drink at Amilal? Will they come to the
Bookworm? As the organizer of this event, what kind of crowd are you
hoping for?

AT: Honestly no clue. It’s a curated community event – not a “contest,” as
Canaan Morse has rightly pointed out – so I really do hope it can serve as
a meeting ground for poetry enthusiasts and anyone interested in writing /
THE ARTS / community events / meeting cool people. We will be drinking
whisky afterwards, so you Amilal folk have no excuse to not swing by.

EG: Thanks for confirming there will be whisky. And as usual, Canaan is
right on the money. I despise contests, but I’m all for curation.

AT: That reminds me: we’re still looking for poets who are willing / able
to read their work at the event. The deadline is March 1. Any advice for
people out there who may have poems they’ve written but are hesitant about
submitting?

EG: Submit! There’s nothing lonelier than a poem sitting unread on a
laptop or in a notebook. The worst that can happen is that it’s read by
three very savvy readers who love poetry, and that’s not too bad.

AT: Would you like to share any of your own works?

EG: Thanks for the opportunity – here’s a recent poem about the Henan
countryside that I hope answers the question of how I define poetry and
what I think its duty is.

In This Village (II)
In this village live old men and children
no one else is left to harvest the corn and collect the eggs
feed the three goats and family of rabbits sold for meat
down the central lane where water collects in ribbons of mud
and dogs go busily along their way
I’d like to ask the old man sorting peppers on a stool
if he’s happy
a nil question that points its finger at the asker
I want to ask the dogs as well and the roosters
and the plump rabbits who will soon be slaughtered
all of their dialects are foreign to my ear
I understand only the dark stare of the sockets
of the calf’s head set on the table at lunch
saying there is nothing left to save here
though once there was and someday might be again

Eleanor Goodman <http://www.eleanorgoodman.com/> is a Fulbright fellow,
Harvard Fairbank fellow, poet and translator. She can be reached at
eleanor at eleanorgoodman.com