Thanks for your recent collection, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. It really opened up for me ways of positioning poetic composition and language around the complex social dynamic of “asking.” The way you enlarge the focus of the interrogative by framing it as genealogical and personal is powerful. As Charles Olson said (somewhere), “the subjective as objective requires correct processing.”1 The frame of “asking” in this book is manifestly “soulful” (I hesitate to say spiritual, but close); I feel thrown back into R. D. Laing’s The Politics of the Family, an eye-opener I taught from many years ago. I also triangulated this poetry with Phyllis Webb’s intricate reflections in her poem “A Question of Questions” as a way of thinking about the role of desire behind the questing/questioning in these poems. You make a “poetry of asking” intriguingly multi-faceted (not complicated, though). It could be theoretically simplistic and I appreciate that you don’t do that. I feel energized by this poetic biotext and more aware of the realm of “hungry ghosts” that inhabit all our bloodlines.
Best, Fred
JUST ASKING HOW MANY TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE
(Music at the Heart of Thinking 172)
extract the breeze from her river mistake the answer for the question
refinement of the bruised knee Dear Mother may I step away
into the bruised words you’ll have more than you asked for what
did you forget remember the future It’ll show up in the tea leaves
ask the waitress to leave it ask her when when she’s off ask her
tenderly don’t misunderstand the suddenness equal to hello
we’s tricked into this future tense a knee job a little fishy
the agent of endurement interrogates the sentence misspells the word “reckon”
the mistake is in wanting the answers doesn’t the family equal desire
do you want to see her face are you asking for the moon
the 15th day of the seventh moon souls wander another American war
just happens ask around about it the answers are untranslatable
until a white soldier wanders by kapow and you still don’t know how
the herbicides of memory are lost and gone forever no cookie no ph?
it is what it is but don’t touch my dragon my bike is what I hold on to
the speed is for balance the scar a strawberry the kickstand
a “bundled trick” of hybridity the shaved head must be love the hello
of her arms Dear Mother may I hold up your arms
now sing the answers hum a little trick smell the mums
with clarity a thousand times you’re lost hold out your arms
a thousand times I’ll meet you
Editor’s Note
1 As Wah reveals elsewhere, the phrase is from “Charles Olson’s seminar on Contemporary Poetry at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1964,”where it “was chalked on the blackboard.” See Fred Wah, “Cohen’s Noos,” Canadian Poetry, no. 33, Fall-Winter 1993, canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol33/wah.html.
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