“That Thing to Have”: A Review of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Light

 

Though it was late in the season, I sprinkled a pinch of kale seeds, about to expire, into a pot. I’d moved house in May and been abroad in the summer, and so hadn’t planted a garden that year. I gave the soil a scoop of water, and pushed the pot to the window. In a few days, green specks appeared. The next morning, a dozen tiny sprouts were straining toward the light. I marveled: this too was a form of work.

In her poem, “Parsley,” I feel Souvankham Thammavongsa shares this awe: “All lean / in the same / direction / as if / some event / outside / needed witness.” Yet the growth of the plant is an event itself, and we witness to it. Thammavongsa’s third collection of poems, Light, alerts us to the act of witnessing, as well as to the events and moments that can be easily missed. The poems plot those moments and memories along a kind of trajectory. This trajectory does not always form a story. Instead, it leaps and takes us from one impression to another. The mind works this way too, assembling its observations and revelations seemingly without order, making us wonder how we arrived at a certain point in our lives or in our work. Small shifts can lead to a transformation, a rearrangement of language or an adaptation in nature, and Thammavongsa’s poems stress how necessary those shifts are. What do those changes cost us? What do they offer? How do we view them? What energy makes these transformations possible? The book expands on the literal meaning of light, as a source of illumination and energy, and as a source of nourishment that makes growth possible. These idiomatic and metaphorical connotations are also alluded to in poems about bringing things to light or about being light-hearted, without burdens or weight. Because of these multiple inferences, the book’s title, for me, stands for an open-endedness rather than a quantifiable thing or object. Light is an agent that stimulates vision and direction, like poetry. Thammavongsa’s work highlights this role of poetry—to look at our relationships and the world in many different lights. Fields of Action and Influences Thammavongsa lays her words out in a variety of shapes and forms, though her signature style includes lyric compactness and austere line placements complemented by ample white space. The spaces are given as much thought and weight as the words themselves. Her style is a refreshing contrast to the dense, baroque imagery of current poetic styles. Other work can feel hyperbolic and verbose after reading Thammavongsa’s lean verse. The poems in Light are neither superficial nor undemanding, creating instead a space of quiet discomfort. Some poems take the shape of lists and prose poems, others look like little jetties, unmoored on the page but carrying the reader across ledges of language. Most make minimal use of punctuation, letting syntax do the work of conveying sense. The sentence structure is often straightforward, emphasizing a clarity and strictness, but occasionally, the word order conveys playfulness and surprise. There aren’t many precedents for Thammavongsa’s work, though some of the practices associated with concrete poetry, the Black Mountain poets, and Japanese haiku can serve as possible entry points for thinking about her writing. William Carlos Williams has called the poem a “field of action,” and a “daydream of wish fulfillment.” There is a tension between desire and beauty in Thammavonga’s work. These poems seem to circle certain truths, but ultimately refrain from satisfying that desire, like someone who wishes to gaze at the sun but must take care not to damage his or her retinas. The views that are offered, eventually, feel involuntary. The reader is also caught in that dream of wish fulfillment, looking to the poems for explanations. A few elements of Williams’s formal technique are present in Thammavongsa’s poems, which break from traditional forms and rigid stanzas. Rather than relying on a formulaic metre and rhythm, Williams preferred using the breath as a measure. When Thammavongsa reads aloud, I hear how her natural pauses and intonations shape the line-breaks and stresses. The white spaces then, are not empty, but taut with silences, pauses, breaths. If comparisons must be made, the poems of Susan Howe and Robert Creeley can serve to show what Light sets out to do. For example, here is Thammavongsa’s “The Sun in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away:”

Here, it bursts [tab5]into blood[/tab5] and fire [tab5]or rises[/tab5] calm [tab5]and contained;[/tab5] slips [tab5]over thin lines[/tab5] of trees; [tab5]or circles[/tab5] and circles [tab5]in a yellow haze[/tab5]

and Creeley’s “A Night Sky:”

All the grass dies in front of us. The fire again flares out. The night such a large place. Stars the points

Not only are the line-breaks, punctuation, and diction similar, but there are echoes in the arrangement and economy of syntax. With a subject or verb omitted occasionally, the line is even more brief and musical. The severity of the line-breaks stack the clipped “i” and “in” sounds. The violence of the sun may seem “calm / and contained” by the compact stanzas. The ferocity is a closely guarded, but it is still “furious / and hot,” and the danger of things bursting and slipping is always present. In “When You Learn to Swim,” the poem tells us, “It will be different here. You can take a leap / off this ledge ten feet and never touch / ground. You can hover in what / could be air.” Making your way through a Thammavongsa poem is a like letting yourself float through a strangely familiar fluid, only to be buoyed by a mysterious force:

it’s some kind of physics, law, a rule of matter put in place, set in place as old and as constant as that sun: that unsettled speck, that shadowless thing, that thing to have.

Susan Howe’s “That This” begins:

Day is a type when visible objects change then put on form but the anti-type That thing not shadowed … Is light anything like this stray pencil commonplace copy as to one aberrant onward-gliding mystery

Thammavongsa’s work is less abstract than Howe’s, but both poets embrace a sense of mystery, each making room for the impenetrability of their subject matter. But what do we know about insects, sea creatures, birds, plants, scarecrows, houses, feathers, volcanoes—the subjects that give rise to Thammavongsa’s poems? The poet describes their forms and shapes for us, and the descriptions hold their own. We see, as Howe writes, “when visible / objects change,” but the forces behind that change are an “aberrant / onward-gliding mystery.” The poet provides little to no imposition of human presence or mediation; sometimes we don't know what we’re supposed to feel toward this world of living things and commonplace objects. They’re shown as self-contained, as if they have lives of their own.

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Poems such as “The Sun Does Not Know” turn the perspective of the poem toward these unknown forces: “it doesn’t even know / what it looks like / to each of us.” In “A Volcano,” the poet suggests the sun could be embedded in the earth: “You don’t know it yet, / but here, / it won’t come round.” These poems do more than simply personify nature.  The special importance or value of an object is not dependent upon human qualities or knowledge. Instead, these poems deviate from the idea that objects in nature are on display for our personal benefit. They shed light and give life regardless of our presence. For instance, in “Mountain Ash,” we’re told, “Whatever we know of fire, we know it is not done.” Might ash “have colour like life?” The tension between ignorance and innocence is the subject of a poem about children cutting paper snowflakes, who “know none of these things are like the real thing.” They’re not told how the light will melt and destroy their complex patterns. In another poem, a small cat “knows / to go out there” along the train tracks and neighbourhood blocks to hunt its prey. Thammavongsa brings us to the edges of the limits of our knowledge, and to places we’re reluctant or afraid to know. The poems turn an unflinching eye to the violence, the death, and the unstinting love in our relationships. It will be different here. The reader will be set adrift. Bands of Colour and States of Being In interviews, Thammavongsa cites influences from art forms other than poetry; she also works on photographs and paper-clip paintings, and collaborates on short films. The first poem in Light refers to a painting by Agnes Martin, Untitled #10. Thammavongsa has perhaps more harmonies with the work of Martin than with any other poet. Martin’s most well known works are large canvases with neutral washes and bands of colour. Grids and lines, drawn with pencil or graphite, divide the canvas, some extending to the edges, others just short. The geometric patterns resemble hand-drawn graph paper. When I viewed a series of Agnes’s work a few years ago at the AGO, I thought of musical staff paper, awaiting the hand of the composer. “This is a clearing: a rule / you will bind to yourself like a promise / to begin,” writes Thammavongsa. It is a clearing, but it is not empty space or silence. There are rules here, and measures, but they are not restrictive or dogmatic. Rather, they are prompts, promises, and guarantees that the work of the artist will emerge. The poem asks us to note the “colour” and “shape” of “the lines, the grids, the marks” because—as in Martin’s painting—there are no figures or objects to be differentiated from the background. There is no horizon or obvious perspective. Instead, the viewer is presented with an austere vision of a landscape that withholds forceful emotions. It’s a space of meditation, a psychic space that represents a real experience. In her 1976 lecture, “We Are in the Midst of Reality Responding with Joy,” Martin writes that reality “is an absolutely satisfying experience but extremely elusive. It is elusive because we must recognize so many other things at the same time.” Thammavongsa’s poems also express this elusiveness and the multiplicity of experience; for instance, in “A Straight Line,” she tells us: “It’s hard to tell / at this point / where it’s going / and where it’s been.” All that’s known of the line or mark is that it’s both too soon and too late to tell “what it was / before it got here.” The Abstract Expressionist painters attempted to convey the spontaneous act of creation rather than a figure subject or object. Martin’s precise work reveals the discipline and concentration of her process. In images where there are so few elements, the poet’s or artist’s ego appears to be almost negligible. Similarly, Thammavongsa’s poems are not landscapes where the self competes to impose its vision, and yet her experience comes across in a powerful way.

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When Thammavongsa and I chatted about Martin’s work, she commented that the fine lines and grids, rendered with such care, are still merely lines. The meticulousness and discipline exist for their own sake. For her, writing a poem is like clearing a field and marking it. An empty page resembles a landscape, but one that has limits, just as there are limits to experience and knowledge. The poem, like a mathematical proof, makes a proposition that we can choose to accept as real. It tallies and deduces each change in argument. Do those changes reverberate more loudly in a sparser field? Are variations in the lines more visible? Can the “the plot and path / of a small single letter” stand out in that clearing? There are other entry points into the landscape of Thammavongsa’s poems, which may be inevitably compared to Japanese poetic forms such as haiku and tanka. Thammavongsa does not use strict syllable count, so to align her work too closely with other Asian traditions would be overly facile. Yet there is a similar sensibility, particularly in her use of juxtaposition, a feature of haiku. For instance, in “Lightning Storm Seen from the Window of an Airplane,” a series of images are tenuously related: “Some bent metal wire charged and flickered inside an incandescent bulb /  Some fly fisher’s line pulled at by one who didn’t know how to fly cast.” The poem stacks a series of views and images, each one seemingly independent. Each line also conveys a particular perception and moment in time, and altogether they plot an actual event in the physical world. Regarding a haiku by the 16^th century Japanese poet Bashō, Jane Hirshfield writes:

Seemingly a moment of pure perception, this poem also portrays a state of being. Though the poem is rooted in an actual visit to a mountain temple, a prose notation written by Bashō tells us of his intention—to present the condition of ‘profound quietness, the heart-mind open and transparent’ … Bashō’s subject is one independent of place and time, of the stories and plot lines of self. But even the condition of transparence realizes itself within the stitched fabric of the phenomenal world, and all good haikus are precise in their seeming, true to the facts of the outer.

Thammavongsa’s juxtaposed images and similes produce a “stitched fabric” of feeling. Each detail is still grounded in sights and sounds—snow in a field, a bit of tinsel, the sound of a gunshot. For instance, in “At the Farm,” a number of flies enter the car window where the speaker is sitting. “One was on the rear-view mirror /// The other three were perched on my left hand” and then: “I heard a gunshot by the barn and thought nothing of it /// We were at a farm /// I saw a cow come charging forward with its head half gone /// A man with an axe came running behind it.” The almost-comic violence is underscored by the brevity and bluntness of the language. The poem creates a scene simultaneously fleeting and slow. Moments are distilled, and the spaces in between are like pauses in between a speech in which someone else might respond or ask a question. “Japanese poetry’s brevity similarly invites renewed intensity of perception. The brief poem murmurs, ‘Just this, just this,’ opening the reader to the sharpness of each blade of grass,” writes Hirshfield. “The poems’ brevity reminds us of the nature of time and our relationship to it, but their strong roots in the particular clarify that our fleeting lives do not simply ‘happen’ and vanish, they take place—take place in the physical world; take place in the current of lived events.” However, where Japanese poetry is rooted in Buddhist and Shinto values and spiritual practices, Thammavongsa’s work does not exhort an ideology or belief system. The poems of Light may explore faith, but they also explore electricity. Thammavongsa’s poems get at something more primal—some elemental drama of the earth’s memory. The Drama of the Personal Every poet chooses his or her own trajectory, even as readers and reviewers try to place them in a particular camp or community. The varied threads and tendencies in Thammavongsa’s writing show a range of poetic style and subject matter that compromise this kind of easy categorization. This is also true of the work of other “Asian-Canadian” female poets, such as Evelyn Lau, Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Sachiko Murakami, whose work, paradoxically, cannot be categorized into a particular set of experiences based on their ethnicity or gender. What they do share is a similar position toward established literary traditions and Canadian writing, a position characterized by skepticism, hesitation, discomfort, and anger. It’s a position that stems from so rarely seeing their experiences and perspectives represented in Canadian culture. In a recent interview, Rita Wong explains that the reason she “turned off a lot of that so-called mainstream media historically had to do with both its gender and racial biases. Why keep watching yourself being erased, over and over?” Thammavongsa writes poems about family and memory of childhood with purpose and richness. “Perfect,” “Dream,” and “I Remember” are full and eventful, as if when writing about the past, she needs to go on at length. In “Perfect,” a poem that relates the breakup of her parents’ marriage, the teenage speaker finds concentrating on her math homework easy compared with thinking about the upheavals at home: “There’s always an answer, a sure thing. / You just have to work your way there. Everything / you need to know to solve it has already been given / to you.” The speaker reminds herself that everything she needs to know to solve the distress of the past has been provided, and if it hasn’t been given, it’s likely not needed. At the same time, working through a math problem is likened to working through a poem. Has everything we need to solve these poems been provided to us? In “Dream,” the speaker remembers the funeral of her father. His body was “light-boned” but when she picked him up and “held him like he was my child,” he slips away “like he was doing a backward dive into a pool,” and at last she realizes he is dead. Her mother and brother “are watching me now and want me to say / something, explain what’s happened to us,” and yet, the speaker remains silent, just as the poet withholds any direct explanation of the scenes in these poems. Again and again, the poet walks up to a problem of how things mean, of some mysterious event of the past or present, only to accept its difficulty and its impenetrability. Yet somehow, her view of the world, as well as the reader’s, is made more familiar by the attempt. The childhood Thammavongsa describes is typically Canadian, with school play auditions, pen pals, cutting snowflakes, Sunday School, riding the bus for fifty cents, “yo-yos and hula hoops,” swing sets and lab dissections. This familiar subject matter does not match up with what might typically be deemed “immigrant writing,” and while her previous collection of poetry, Found, drew upon a scrapbook her father kept in a Thai refugee camp, her newest work draws from a wide range of experiences and images, and not a predetermined category of themes. The speaker in Thammavongsa’s poem experiences tension between how others see her and how she sees herself. Someone who grows up without seeing her own experience reflected in mainstream films and TV, in children’s books that are never about parents’ accents or holidays in distant countries, learns that her perspective and her view of the world is incongruous, out of place, barely visible. While I am also the daughter of immigrant parents (my father was born in Shanghai, my mother native of one of the many small islands south of Hong Kong), my own childhood—surrounded by their paintings and record collections—had its share of cultural tension. It’s for that undercurrent of tension that I read the work of other Asian writers. This sense of not belonging is devastating to a young woman’s sense of self and confidence, but valuable to a poet, who learns never to take things for granted. Thammavongsa takes nothing for granted—every line, every meaning is a slow achievement and a gradual accumulation. In a few of the poems, she contemplates words for light, in Icelandic, Arabic, Dutch and Lao. The poems offer vocabularies, brief translations, images of how the letters circle on the page. “Ljós” is the Islandic word for light, we’re told: “And the word for poem is ljóð  /// What happens at the end changes everything.” The letters travel as if making a journey on the page, looking back or pointed upwards, small changes in direction making a world of difference. In “Bare”: “If the ending were different, if you placed the last letter right after the beginning, it would be an animal, a power, a warning from which to stay away,” and Thammavonga notes, “a rearrangement, a shift, a move out of place, a spine realigned” because it is those small shifts that have the noticeable effects on our understanding. Even in poems without words in other languages, a rendering of meaning takes place, a conversion of something from one form or medium to another. One bright afternoon this October, I brought out the kale shoots and put them on the patio. When I came home, something had bent the shoots and crushed them against the side of the pot. There was nothing I could do but bring it inside again and sprinkle more seeds. In the world of Thammavongsa’s poems, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, it not only makes a sound but it changes the way the light falls. Suddenly, a beetle can scurry out, and a weedy shoot has a greater share of sunlight and air. There is an ecosystem to these poems, and some parts of it will matter more to one reader than another. Some of the images will seem more vigorous than others, some endings more hushed and static, but everything here has “its place in the universe and its order.”