A Literary Couple

What a contrast: she writes poetry, and he writes about serial killers.

Kimiko Hahn and Harold Schechter are a fascinating, kind and generous literary couple who've been visiting us from New York for the past two days (they both teach at SUNY, Queens College).

Kimiko gave talks and readings on Wednesday and Harold last night.

Kimiko told me--kind of tongue-in-cheek--that it was necrophelia that brought them together. She had been teaching the book by Jeffery Dahmer's father in one of her frosh courses. When someone told Harold--the author of many historical books about psychopaths--what his colleague was up to, he just had to talk to her. (Kimiko was teaching the Dahmer book because she knew there were some frosh who'd never read a book the whole way through, and her goal was to find a book they wouldn't put down.)

Kimiko's poetry is fresh and intriguing. In her past two collections, she's been playing around with her own version of the zuihitsu, which she says is like a fungus: a fungus is its own species (neither plant nor animal) and a zuihitsu is also its own thing, not really poetry or prose. It's random thoughts woven around an organizing principle. It's miscellany, sort of stream-of-consciousness, and can contain lists and fragments. It's intuitive, illogical, spontaneous, ambiguous, contradictory and playful.

Harold is interested in the mythical creation of "monsters" in popular culture (including popular culture of the 19th century). He's written a whole series of books about murders that became famous in their day, exploring why certain crimes ignite the imagination (while others that may be even "more horrible" drop away from the headlines).

Harold wrote an episode of Law & Order about a (homosexual) murderer whose defense involves that he was influenced by television violence. (I

don't watch the show, but I figure someone out there who reads this may have.)

Being around both of them has been fun and inspiring. I'm now ready to attack my own writing today.

And Next Week, Poet Kimiko Hahn

Next week Kimiko Hahn visits us at SJSU.

Her most recent collection, The Narrow Road to the Interior, is a surprising, intriguing mix of prose and lineated fragments that weave together, to my ear, in a surprisingly holistic way.

She draws on, "and even reinvents, classic forms and techniques used by women writers in Japan and China, including the zuihitsu, or pillow book, and nu shu, a nearly extinct script Chinese women used to correspond with one another."

Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York, the child of artists, a Japanese American mother from Hawaii and a German American father from Wisconsin.

She is a Distinguished Professor in the English department at Queens College/CUNY and has won a ton of awards.

But let's cut to the chase. Here are two of her poems:

*****************

The Razor

I want to return to the moment
father and I brought the canister of mother's ashes
to the temple in some odd shopping bag.
We then dropped off the remains
to leave for a couple slices down the block
but the reverend pulled a robe
over her jeans and blouse,
picked up prayer beads
and suggested which was not a question
we say a sutra. Which one was it?
I only recall I didn't have a tissue;
that the incense which I so dislike
felt sweet wafting into my sweater
and hair; that my whole body
shook without pause
though I did not make a sound
and tears and mucus covered my face and
sleeves because father did not know
I needed the handkerchief
mother had pressed a week earlier.
At times the loss felt like an organ
one could excise with a razor.


Wax
Initial Correspondence to L . . .

i.
I am looking for clues
on how to stay a woman, not
a middle-aged woman
who sings all those girl-group lyrics
over the dash
but a woman since
I've earned that title over years of (honey, you know — )
wicked repartees
among my girlfriends and boyfriends.
Here's the subtext:
the twenty-year-olds
at poetry readings
are so exquisite they might be
fashioned of wax, even
the blemishes. I realize now
how lithe I was when I thought
I was the ugly daughter — how
tremulous my beauty. I didn't know.
I just knew
I wanted to fuck my professor
(Chaucer 8:30 am M/W)
and boys from Chinese History
wearing blue caps. Nixon
was still President.
The war was nearly over.
And the young now listen
to fifty-year-old rockers.
No wonder they don't think
they invented sex. Fuckin-A
we did.
And what I want at some moment
in my forties
is not an affair —
that would rip my breast open —
I would like to wrap my arms around a guy
(I guess a guy)
for a lengthy kiss.
Standing up. In the dark.
Pulse at the boiling point
one recalls
from those irretrievable initial encounters.
L, send me advice quick.

ii.
waxing

iii.
I send these words to you
across the frozen continent,
through waning light
and steam rising off rivers.


(c) Kimiko Hahn. All rights reserved.

Spring is Here

Spring semester, that is.

It's still miserably winter here with rain, rain, rain and the longest cold-snap in recent memory. I long for this.

This semester I'm teaching Fiction Writing and Introduction to Creative Writing. Hi to all my students who've found me here!

The Center for Literary Arts spring events include the following:

ZZ Packer, who is now on campus for the semester as an endowed chair. She was named Best of Young American Novelists by Granta. Her story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, is our campus book selection. She's currently working on an historical novel about the Buffalo Soliders, which I'll be sure to ask her about when I interview her on-stage February 27.

On March 12 & 13, American Book Award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn will be here for several events. Her work is edgy and rich. Read a few of her poems here.

Hahn's husband Harold Schechter will be joining her and giving a talk the day after hers. Schecheter is a writer of historical true-crime classics and a series of mystery novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe.

Other events include talks by Nick Taylor, SJSU professor and author of a forthcoming Civil War historical novel, and an evening of poetry featuring Ishmael Reed, Boadiba, Neli Moody and others.

Check out the CLA website for more information on any of these events: http://www.litart.org/.