Blog – Page 45 – Clara Hsu

The Pit Bull

I’m scared of Chris Trian because he is big, tall and loud. When he stands up to read I imagine his mop of blond curls grazing the ceiling igniting fire. I am scared because Chris seems angry all the time. Except for sex, he blasts drugs, alcohol, God, Devil and Hell alike. Chris is not the cordial kind of guy who welcomes you to the Sacred Grounds poetry reading with open arms. He and his wife Dierdre occupy front row seats every Wednesday night. And if they come in late, somehow the seats are reserved for them.

I don’t remember how we get connected. I think Dierdre is the key. She is the witch with the pit bull and if you are nice to the witch, the pit bull won’t bite. When Chris turns off his poetry voice he is warm and gentle and sane. And as my anxiety eases I begin to hear his words, strong, no nonsense words that spew fiery imageries.

Chris brought his paintings to the SF Poetry Podcast TV Show. We mounted a different one for each of the taping segments. I listened to Chris without the distractions of noise and people and found myself reacting emotionally to his every word. We have great poets among us, writing with no recognition, struggling to make a living. Here’s Chris, a living example. Hear him and be moved.

Memories

sook-ching — Click image to read more about the massacre.

My father was a young man working in Singapore during the Japanese occupation in 1941. Until 1945, he survived between road blocks, anti-communist informants and escaped the Sook-Ching massacre where ten thousand Chinese men were murdered. To rid of the bodies the Japanese dumped the corpses into the ocean. The water turned red.

When my father talked about this episode in his life there was no emotion. He told it more like a fantastical story. Many of his friends disappeared during this time, including his piano teacher’s husband. At ninety, only one memory consistently brings moisture to his eyes. He left his first love in Singapore.

10 O’clock, City Lights

What? Ten in the morning and already hungry for books? What would you like? A petite chapbook, a pick-me-up travel log, or something heavier, a novel like the spaghetti and cream sauce my daughter used to eat for breakfast? I show the guy at the front counter my backpack. He waves me in.

I know where I’m going. I need a quiet place to sit down and write. My teaching schedule is changed to eleven o’clock and I have an hour to kill. Can’t go into a cafe. Yesterday’s delicious iced Hong Kong milk tea kept me up all night. Besides, cafes are too noisy. It’s good for people watching but I never write anything coherent listening to the espresso machine.

The Poetry Room feels like an attic of a house. Only three women are there browsing. I move a chair next to the half-opened window. The sun is gentle and the air fresh. Within a few moments I’m sucked into my note book and notice relatively little of what’s happening around me. The floor creaks now and then. Footsteps, whispers, rustle of pages. I look up to a baby bouncing on the back of a young mother checking out a shelf of titles. Both happy. I am too, in possession of a new poem.

Why Practice?

My piano students don’t understand why they have to perfect their Hanon technical exercises. What’s the point in playing perfectly in a lesson only for their teacher to say OK let’s move on to a new exercise? Surely they are not practicing that hard to please me.

“Imagine you are an apprentice working in a piano factory,” I said to twelve year old Kelly. “You are trained to do one thing, like wrapping the bass wires to make them thicker. You’re doing it and doing it because it’s what your boss asks you to do. Then after some time they train you on leveling the keys and you do that over and over until it becomes second nature. With each skill you know a little more but in the big picture you don’t know how the piano is put together. But as you accumulate these skills, you’ll begin to have some ideas, and I’m talking way down in the future. Some how, some day, these little insignificant details you have perfected will have an impact on your playing.”

She nodded at me politely. Did she understand my point? Will she practice more vigorously for her own sake? Each night I write a poem and each day a blog. It is how I polish my writing skills. As for my students, I only hope my teaching means more to them one day than their piano lessons.

Go Back In Time For A Cheap Eat

Late night in Chinatown has the atmosphere of a film noir. With shops and restaurants closed so vanished the crowd. Freshly sprayed sidewalks smell of fish. Garbage cans and wet cardboard boxes are the still lifes. Walk uphill into the neon-sphere. A couple tumble out of the Buddha Bar. Our car is parked on Washington and Taylor. I need to fill my stomach before taking on the hill and Sam Wo’s dirty red sign blinks at me.

It has been some years since I went to Sam Wo. I am no longer the young wide-eyed tourist, nor the tour guide when friends came to town, nor the music shop owner who needed a bowl of won-ton soup at one in the morning before driving home. Sam Wo hasn’t changed in all its one hundred years. The slapdash kitchen at the entrance, the narrow stairs, the rectangular tables with slanted red legs, the dumb waiter, the thin film of grease that get swished around by the waitress’ rag…food is still priced no more than $6.25. Time stops, where the good Sam Wo stuffs the bellies of poets and wanderers. I finish a third of my chicken chow-mein and box the rest to go. Outside it is darker still.

SF Poetry TV Show

In the early 1980’s I was stopped by a reporter on the street. He said he was from some TV station and wanted to ask me a question. I said OK and he proceeded. But when the camera man swung his huge lens in front of me I froze. Unable to speak into that big black cold and expressionless eye, I shook my head and walked away.

John Rhodes and Ken Saffran — John Rhodes with guest Ken Saffran

30 years later I was given the chance again. John Rhodes is one of the lone soldiers who documents the now poetry scene. Poverty and health problems do not deter him from realizing his artistic endeavor. He carries his equipment and go places by bus. When he started the monthly TV show in 2010 he asked me to co-host. Each of us have fifteen minutes to feature a poet. We tape the shows at BVAC (Bay Area Video Coalition)’s very nice studio. Back in his tiny room, John edits the segments and sends them out into cyber space.

The terror that haunted me so long ago subsided in time. Now I calm my guests and warn them about Big Eye. “He’s cold.” I said, “but make love to him.”

Artists Don’t Apologize

Cookie, Klimey, Petey and Me — The Artist Way

Workmen arrived before nine to work on the bathroom. I was still in bed. The night owl wrote poems and watched Macbeth until nearly two in the morning, and then danced with Cookie the cat. When I was small I used to look into the mirror at midnight. They said at the hour of witching you may see your life passes by.

Of course that was child play, and long ago I had lost interest knowing what lies ahead, unlike the hero in Shakespeare’s tragedy. I only wonder sometimes if I should get a full time job and work like a normal person—8 to 5, no-nonsense, justifying my existence. But I’m artist, one that requires lots of mental space and catching up. The moment before rising is often rich with thoughts. They are not to be ignored but to be mulled over between the sheets. The artist way has no clock. The artist job is to feel and I don’t apologize.

The Shakuhachi Man

My poetry partner Bill Mercer and I have a duo called “Lunation”. Aside from being a poet, Bill plays the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute. When I first heard him play I was still running Clarion Music Center. I was struck by his sound–free–was the only word I could use to describe it. You can’t plot his notes because there is no scale. You can’t define them because there is no meter. You can’t confine them because there is no rhythm. He plays by how his great body and mind feel. His music is like the cosmos, infinite and mysterious.

We practice regularly before a performance. The challenge for me is to harness his freedom so that my verse and his music may come together and not be entangled. After five years we are beginning to tap into each other’s psyche. He understands my needs if I can verbalize them. There are moments in our practices and performances that are exquisite and heavenly but they will never be repeated. Only a memory remains, but indescribable.

Someone Who Doesn’t Want My Money

My stepmother was very generous in her old age, giving money to charities that came in the mail. After she passed away, I was given the task to terminate all her contributions. Those who received my calls expressed regret, but also appreciation for all that she had given.

I give sparingly, and definitely not to charities. I have a different view about organizations. My money is spent on knowledge. I pay dearly, with my savings, to Alan Rinzler, who edited The Painted Skin. From his editing I learn how to bring a theme forward and keep it focused. Unlike poetry, which is concise, a book-length work is far more intricate and demanding in form.

Alan Kaufman, my teacher in prose writing, said every writer should have a book-length work. A book of something is easier to sell than poetry. He may be right, but I’m still looking for that illusive agent, someone who doesn’t want my money.

A Title That’s Worth A Thousand Words

I’m a sucker for titles. I have problems with poems that titled “Untitled”. If the poet doesn’t know what he/she is talking about, then I won’t know either. Great titles stimulate the imagination. It creates a hunger in me to know more. Take The Chinese Bigamy of Mr. Winterlea—three fantasies in a flash, promiscuously displayed for the eager eyes.

I don’t know how many copies there are floating in space, but my guess is Henry McAleavy, the translator of this book, has fallen into obscurity. His delightful soap-opera account of intrigues between the English and the Chinese in the early 1900’s reminded me of the serial stories in the Hong Kong evening newspaper when I was growing up. The nightly short installment produced an inexplicable hunger as I went to school and listened to the drones. And if the papers were not delivered when I got home, I threw a fit.