Happy Holidays everyone.

XXXXXXXXXXX

you asked me for a poem. A clever and brazen
request. It’s not so easy. Poems come and go. Fly
like rage into the night; pink elephants big and heavy,
sobering. How to write a show poem full of dance
and song. Happy is a place I know, though who would believe it?
Words run amok telling stories bound in anger; reactions.
I am safe inside a poem.
Outside, when the wind blows bullets, I hunker low
eat silence, not so brave. Today,
I ask forgiveness. Talk and write from a gentle heart,
my gut recovering slowly. Forgive me for not knowing
the devil in men sooner than later. But do you believe
in fate? The world spins so quickly. I was afraid
I would be left dying, pronounced imperfect, immoral.
If intuitively I could have recognized love’s imperfections,
instead of believing because someone says he loves you
he loves you. Some clichés are to be taken seriously actions
speak louder than words (this is not about you). To speak/action.
Not to speak/inaction. A poet needs words, has faith in words.
You have asked for a poem. Here it is. You have said tell me
so I understand. Thank you. So here it is. You, I have taken
slowly. Cautious. Devil and angel. I embrace you, trustworthy,
with wild enthusiasm. I don’t expect devil to harm, nor angel
to deceive. Still, I won’t imagine conclusions because
I am not seeking endings. In answer to your question, yes,
I believe in fate; I also believe in choice. Thank you
for the conversation, please, more. Curiosity
is the Christmas gift I give to both of us.

Sherry Quan Lee
Copyright, December 21, 2009

Dinner and a movie.  Julie & Julia.  I loved Mama Mia, that’s all I will say, love.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone to a 10:55 showing or eaten steak and baked potato and, then, popcorn with lots of butter and salt.  Others, I hear, loved the movie.  I loved going to a movie, being in a theatre, having someone sit next to me (if only an ex/or especially an ex), instead of my usual popcorn and DVD at home in my rocking chair, alone but for my grandsons’ stuffed dogs gracing my living room.

Seeing a current movie gives me something to talk about, to write about.  A writer’s prompt.  Cooks and writers, both artists for sure.  I understand working for a public agency, don’t many artists inhabit the cubicles of many a federal or state agency? I am fortunate, I work with other artists in my role as “program associate” and, unlike, perhaps others, my work, however trivial and routine, is work spirited in the arts and I do feel blessed to be in the realm of women and men who want to create, who for them creativity is not always just about pleasure, but it’s a necessity.  (Also, I might add, I am blessed with an office and a window—the fourth room I’ve occupied in the eight years I’ve been at the University. but yes, my first two rooms were cubes.)

Where was I?  Julie & Julia.  Julia, bored, wanting something to do, wanting to be someone, blessed with a supportive and loving husband.  Julie, bored (maybe), wanting something to do, wanting to be someone, blessed with a supportive and loving husband.  Julia, it seemed, could afford to do something, become someone—spend eight years working toward publication.  Julie, however, how did she manage to work fulltime, cook every evening in a cramped, small as a cardboard box, kitchen, and blog!  524 meals in 365 days!  How did she afford the ingredients for all 524 recipes (and why didn’t any of them gain weight)?

How does an author write without a room of her own (what did Virginia Woolf write about A Room of One’s Own)?  I think we need space.  Space to empty monkey mind.  Space away from “have to do’s” and doing.  But, like Julie, I think we writers can write in a cramped kitchen, at a dining room table, or at our desk at work during our lunch hour or breaks—if, we have had the space beforehand to contemplate, and murmur sweet or sour, hot or cold delicacies.

I admire Julie’s perseverance, and as a writer, I can learn from her.  What motivated her?  What fortified her?  How did she handle set backs and criticism by family and friends?  I admire and I’m challenged by Julie’s day-to-day productiveness, and the success of accomplishing her goal.  However, I’m not challenged enough to say, I can do it, or even I want to do it—I want to write 524 poems in a year (why 524 and not 365)! 

There are online challenges where writers write a 30,000 word novel in 30 days (or some such challenge), and poets have been known to write a poem a day—but for how many days?  As for me, a poet, the last thing I need is a deadline.  Writing deadlines, for me, equal anxiety, and, yes, sometimes fear.  Writers’ block!  (However, as a worker bee, deadlines are sweet and savory.  Deadlines, for me, help me get a job done.  A job done is something my self-esteem can stick to.)

I am committed to posting blogs.  I am not committed to posting something every day.  Perhaps a cook has the stamina to cook something yummy every day.  There is always the satisfaction of someone tasting the beef, even if it is only the cook herself.  A meal cooked and eaten.  However, with a poem, like Julie’s burnt stew, I might want to start over.  Throw out everything except the basic ingredients—the subject and knowledge of the craft.  I might not want my raw poems consumed.  

I am a loner.  No supportive husband in the background waiting to dine.  Aha!  Perhaps that should be my motivation.  My subject is love.  An alternative to online dating.  Love poems—to anyone, to everyone.  One a day.  Maybe I should rev it up.  Two or three a day.  What would it take to find the lover who will hunker patiently, waiting to consume—my words?

Here’s the challenge.  Make love noble, global.  Make love make a difference.  Make love a poem.   Make it green—or red, or purple.  Let love save us.  The day after 9/11 I visited my local dry cleaner.  I said to the owner, kissing him with words, I said there is nothing left now but love, nothing but love.  I embrace that thought questioning why there are times the world comes together (times of illness, of disaster, of death)—and love rules; and there are times love is so absent I must cover my ears because the noise of the lack of love is so painful, so sad, so not understandable.

I believe in love.  I believe it like I believe in miracles.  Love is a miracle.  Here is a love poem for today, first draft, no revision.  But, I don’t promise another one tomorrow.

Summer has sent chills

down

my

back I want water

crave fluidity

listen for sound like wind

wandering through trees, yet

wet             weekends not enough

to escape from sheet rock and nails

I want sun sizzling, crackling like wounded

cement, my view of night.  Darkness

awakens me, memory of seasons

I could afford to be happy.

Sherry Quan Lee

August 24, 2009

Ernest:

For you, and some other writers including myself, writing saves lives. And How to Write a Suicide Note is persistent on this point. One poem in the book specifically indicates [Because] Writing Saves Lives. Since you also teach writing, did you ever include writing as therapy in your lessons?

Sherry:

I taught a workshop Writing to Save Your Life, an interdisciplinary workshop for Women of Color. Some of the students from that workshop continue to write and share their stories. One of the students later taught a similar workshop, and she and another writer in her workshop (which I co-facilitated) are now managing the blog I started in conjunction with the first workshop! So, yes, in my classes, I introduce my belief that writing can save lives. However, writing as ‘therapy’ connotes something different for me:  it conjures a feeling that we need to be fixed. Instead, isn’t it the world that needs to be fixed? We must keep ourselves alive! Keep our stories alive! So together we can make a difference. I believe writing can be a necessary part of therapy, but therapy needs to be facilitated by professionals. While there are professional art therapists—I am not one.

There are many women of color writers who have saved my life. Their stories familiar-the anger, the pain, the confusion, the loneliness, the abuse, the struggle, the triumph, the beauty, the passion, the creativity, and the love. I use the work of other writers such as Jungian therapist Clarissa Pinkola Estés as well as my own writing, as writing prompts. I encourage students to write the often very difficult stories that allow them to let go of what needs to be let go of, in order to keep going!   Here’s a quote from Estés that I find inspiring:

“Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding someone else’s creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone”? (Women Who Run With Wolves, Ballantine Books, 1992, page 299)

I will never forget the angel I met at a Split Rock writing workshop. After introductions and at the end of the class she came up to me and asked if I was the Sherry Quan Lee that had read at the Loft some seven or eight years before. She went on to recite some lines from my poems! We might never know when we have touched someone’s life with our words, but our words can be transformative!  I keep some of the letters and notes from people whose lives I have touched. It is not narcissistic. It’s what I return to when I wonder what my purpose in life is. When I wonder if my life/my writing matters.  When I’m feeling low down. The kind words others have written to me save my life time and time again.

In Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris (Riverhead, 2000), Eden says:

“…and between my tears words began to bloom on the page, one after the other. Words crowded each other, trying to lead me out of despair. I was exuberant. The maps I’d made were guides to my interior. I remembered all the places I’d been, all the things I’d seen, and I caught them in my imagination. Jimmy was with me and Langston too. I wrote to understand where I had been, where I was going, to make sense of the world that had led me to the small room on the edge of the abyss.”

Writing by colorful women writers has kept me alive, along with my own writing. Writers like Audrey Lorde, Joy Harjo, Evelina Galang, Toi Derricotte, Nikki Giovanni, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Wang Ping, Linda Hogan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Eden Torres, bell hooks, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and others have given me the courage to discover who I am as I continue to map my life through writing.

Only the written word saves when all else fails, July 30, 2009

How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman’s life

Desperation in shifting waves of rhythm; hope in scuttling across consciousness of living; rolling in the distance between self and the outside; a poetical delirium giving out vibes of bitter truth and sweet resilience – there is so much of substance in Sherry Quan Lee’s poetry titled How to Write a Suicide Note (Modern History Press, 2008) that one may assert it as a crash course in the impact of growing up as a woman and as an ethnic minority in a multicultural society.

For its title, Lee’s book stands in danger of rousing fear or concern, sounding like an offer of assistance in passing to the other side – the dreaded one. But thanks to the subtitle serial essays that saved a woman’s life, which gives a hint of the book’s greater purpose. And yet, it takes a while before an average reader can come to terms with Lee’s desultoriness so profusely showing in each page of her verse like a medium catching vibes from multiple dimensions and conveying them in a somewhat unsorted pattern. Persistence and concentration on behalf of the reader brings joy and depth to Lee’s message, interwoven with her personal story, cultural critique, and philosophical/existential interpretation of life experiences.

Lee’s poetry in How to Write a Suicide Note is one of the few that probe into the origin of emotional trauma as something beyond the individual; living as a Black-Chinese woman in a white-dominated society, her status as a woman of a minority class culturally pressured her into becoming (and acting) someone she really was not; hence, the pain of deprivation from the natural right of self-expression. For Lee, it is a historical trauma traveling through the medium of culture with individuals at the receiving end. What is purely individual, however, is her artistic fluidity with which she creates palpable imagery and brings spontaneity to the thought prevalent in the moment:

`I smoke wearing fleeced gloves. Smoke hangs in the air like
frigid poems burning holes in hands that need to write
suicide notes…’ (page 9)

In several poems, Lee points to the therapeutic effect of writing as a life-saving habit. Writing suicide notes in her verse symbolizes the involvement with life even when the straw of hope is not in reach; she shows that our thinking about life, about writing about it, and actually coming back to life through the written work, are all saviors of life. Only the written word saves when all else fails before the trauma of a scarred identity. And it is so tersely put in one of her poems Because Writing Saves Lives:

`When you can, write
When you can’t live.
When you can’t live, write.’ (page 16)

Reckoned as the first (and only) poetry book by the Modern History Press – as the publisher found its message so irresistibly revealing, and one of the very first books about living as a Black-Chinese woman in America, How to Write a Suicide Note is a unique read, full of life, and throbbing with the will to live again as a person out of the reach of trauma.