Author Note: Genevieve DeGuzman
Genevieve DeGuzman is the author of the poem “How to Fold a Paper Crane,” published in The Puritan Issue 41, Spring 2018. In the following piece, DeGuzman writes about the making of the poem as part of our author notes series.
I consider origami the poetry of sculpture for the economy and complexity of the art form. Take a piece of paper, often a simple square, and fold and crease it in a particular sequence. Out of an ordinary flat plane, pulled from pure, blank abstraction, usually some creature or object is born: a crane, a tiger, or a lantern, an airplane. See, just like poetry.Origami isn’t a hobby of mine but I admire it as an art form. Hoang Tien Quyet is an origami artist who renders paper the way Bernini rendered stone into the illusion of flesh. The forms in Quyet’s paper creations are curvilinear and organic—far from the geometric rigidity we often associate with origami. Quyet achieves this through a technique called “wet-folding,” I learned, where a thicker paper is slightly dampened and then manipulated and pressed in painstaking degrees. The results can be striking: rounded forms that look to have the softness of textiles.As I was writing “How to Fold a Paper Crane,” my thoughts wandered back to that artist, and thinking about his work directly influenced the way I thought about the structure and form of my poem. When I started writing the poem, it began as straightforward confessional narrative, as something I might say to my own sister (with whom I’ve had a fraught relationship at times). But that all seemed a bit stock and conventional. I then played with numbering the lines, turning it into a list, but that also didn’t feel right.Finally, it struck me that I wanted readers to feel the poem in a different way, not just through the imagery and storytelling, but through the poem’s structure. I wanted the poem to convey something tactile, tilted.
In other words, how do you overcome those sharp edges of pain and resentment that only arise in family relationships?
Well, how about a crane? The crane is emblematic of origami, the first creature one makes in origami 101. Also, a crane is an animal always ready to fly. It is a creature of trademark stillness but also of movement. And that to me felt somewhat emblematic of the poem’s themes of regret and forgiveness, of the burdens of past mistakes.And of course, this wet-folding technique was ideal as an analogy for the poem. In the poem, there’s a question posed:
"How do you make a line / bend into a curve?"
In other words, how do you overcome those sharp edges of pain and resentment that only arise in family relationships? A paper artist like Quyet would wet the paper to bend and dull the edges. In the poem, then, the implication for these two estranged siblings is they would use tears and the gentle, tender pressure of communication:
Cry onto this paper square, dear sister, / so we might not be the crane stamped down / sharp it would cut fingers but the crane / gently folded.
The poem is an apology, after all, addressed directly to the aggrieved. There would be no dearth of crying. In fact, there would be bawling even, I imagine. The sisters use that catharsis to get over their mutual hurts and grievances (that’s the hope, anyway). To fold it. In other words, to transform it into something healing and begin walking that hard road of reconciliation.
Genevieve DeGuzman is a Filipino-American writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her recent work appears in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, FOLIO, Reed Magazine, Five:2:One, Ithaca Lit, Strange Horizons, and Switchback. A finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2017 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize, and a winner of the 2017 Oregon Poetry Association’s New Poets Contest, she is working on several writing projects and on perfecting her hygge.
