writing – Clara Hsu

Learning to Write

Learning is a strange process. After writing poetry for ten years I’m beginning to realize there are skills involved. My tool bag? Quite empty at the moment. And it is this lack that propels me to enquire.

Language. We begin learning by listening, not by recognizing the alphabets. Perhaps poetry is the same thing. We begin by thinking (not writing)—that everything is a puzzle and nothing is what it seems to be. From one thought, go deep, branch out, retrieve, manipulate; poetry is art.

Take out logic, what do we have? Capturing random thoughts requires intention. Connecting the conscious and the subconscious and what to do with them? These are my questions. After breaking down one door there is always another. Poetry is mystery.

Listen to many languages to come up with a new language, one that may illustrate my thoughts. It’s English with a new outfit. And I’m fickle, always wanting a new outfit.

Taking Joyce Out

It was raining, and the popular Java Beach Cafe had a line running out the door. Dan Brady and I had passed another cafe about a block away that looked pleasant and empty and decided to try it. Can’t remember the name of it now—something like Beach Cafe—with southern food like fried chicken and waffle; and a cotton candy machine. We found a nice corner in front of a shelf full of books and I took out Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Dan and I would use the book to jump start some poetic exercises.

Three women came over and sat at the table next to us. As I read a passage from the book, Dan began to write. I noticed at one point the women had stopped talking. They were attracted by the obscurity of my recitation as I navigated precariously from word to word, sounding out long running syllables, short exclamations, pausing at combinations that befuddled the mind. After two pages of reading I stopped. Then it was Dan’s turn to read while I wrote. At the end of his reading we read to each other what we had written and laughed at the strangeness of our “poems” that seemed to vibrate with a raw energy.

“Excuse me.” One of the women leaned over. “We have been watching you reading and writing. It seems like you are playing a most wonderful game.”

We talked about Finnegans Wake, how its obscurity helped us not to get stuck on the narrative but listen to the words and sounds and that propelled us to write down what we heard.

“Would you like to try?” I proposed.

They laughingly declined. “But you’d be sure we’ll be talking about you for days to come.”

My Writing Buddy

Having a writing buddy is to have someone hold me accountable to my work. Jeanne Lupton and I have been meeting every Monday morning since 2009. Mostly at Mission Pie in San Francisco, sometimes at Leila’s Cafe in Berkeley, we take our meeting seriously and rarely have we missed a week. When I was working on the second draft of my memoir I promised to show her a chapter a week. I was eternally struggling with grammar and syntax. Jeanne patiently corrected and explained to me my mistakes. It was her steadfastness, expectation and our discipline that made me finish the book in a timely manner.

Writing is a solitary undertaking but sharing is an integral part of the process. When I look back, we have worked through a variety of works: my book, Jeanne’s draft on her poetic memoir, poems, stories and her incisive tankas. What can be accomplished over a cup of tea is truly amazing.

This Funny Thing We Called The Brain

To get to know a friend is to try finding things in common. Pick a topic–hobby, age, birth signs, politics–between two people there has got to be something you can talk about. My friend Andy and I are excited over our dyslexia. It may be too broad a term to describe the sense of loss in our childhood, but we definitely were not wired optimally and timely. I remember eating an interminable lunch at my desk, while the rest of the class lined up to go somewhere. But more tragically was the lack of comprehension on all subjects (except music) no matter how hard I tried.

For some, the wires of writing, reading, remembering, comprehending, interest, drive and skills in the “jelly-mold” may never touch. The disconnect is real and surreal. I don’t understand why I write poems and not be able to read others’. My love of sound does not help me in learning a language. People said if you can play the piano you can type. That’s an assumption that I can prove them wrong. Anyway, I tell my piano students the brain is a separate entity of the body. In order to make it work for you, you have to command and repeat an action over and over again. That means practice, practice, practice.

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.

Waiting

It’s like throwing a bottle with a message into the ocean. In this case, a query letter dropped into the sea of literary agents. The initial excitement cooled down as time passed and when I received the very nice form letter in the mail after six weeks of idling I had no drama left but a sigh of relief. Thank you. I may go on with my life. Submission has to become mechanical without emotion like brushing teeth, cleaning the toilet or putting on my shoes; stoic as someone who leans on the pier fishing . The bait is out there, as long as the line is connected.