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***This is the forty-fifth in a never-ending series called BACKSTORY
OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one
specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem. All BACKSTORY
OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece.
#45
Backstory of the Poem
“Sungmyo”
“Sungmyo”
by
Ian Haight
Can you
go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the
idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? To be
fair to the process of “Sungmyo,” I have to start at the very beginning, which was the decision to take poetry and writing
seriously, and to that end I enrolled in Goddard College’s MFA program. I was
reading a lot of different material at the time, trying to understand all the
incredible possibilities there are in poetry and how those possibilities are
realized. I had been reading the poetry of Gary Snyder, and as a reader, had
been experiencing a love-hate relationship with him. On the one hand, his poems
felt technically and thematically simplistic compared to what I thought poetry
should be; on the other, when I closed the last page of his book, The Back Country, I had a jolt, which I
have never experienced with any other poet. The jolt was feeling like I had
lived his life—or a life. I realized the power of Snyder’s poetry for me wasn’t
in any single poem, but the tonal evocation of a united collection. For the
record, after reading many of Snyder’s books and more fully appreciating his
range, precedent, and lineage in poetry—which I think goes back to Wordsworth (below, left),
at least—I believe he is one of the truly great American poets of the 20th Century.
I was thinking about how Snyder made a collection live,
which for me came down to the question of how he made a poem invoke life. There
was nothing necessarily extraordinary about the incidents Snyder was writing
about. The topics felt common and everyday (walking in a forest, walking in a
city, working on a house, attending a meeting), but the attention to detail and
the reflective perspective in that detail is what created a point of view that
I as a reader could engage with. Ok, so if I admired this approach to writing
so much, what if anything could I use in my own writing?
At the time of all this poetry exploration I was living in
Pusan, Korea, and I was and still am married to a Korean woman. Traditionally
in Korea, males of a family are supposed to visit the graves of their deceased
parents or grandparents during Chusok, which is a kind of Korean Thanksgiving.
My wife’s parents had no sons—only daughters, five daughters—and so this custom
fell to the husbands of the daughters. My mother-in-law was still alive but my
father-in-law had died soon after my wife was born, so there was a need to go
to his grave and perform a ceremony. Because I was American I had no hometown
in Korea to visit during Chusok. It fell to me and one of my elder
brothers-in-law to carry out the ceremony. (Right: Ian and wife in Pusan, Korea in 2004. Copyright permission granted by Ian Haight for this CRC Blog Post Only)
We lived at the base of a very small hill-enclosed valley,
and my father-in-law’s tomb was near the top of the valley. I felt like this
ceremony, in the spirit of Snyder, might be a piece of life worth writing
about. The process of the poem is straightforward: I wrote about going to the
gravesite, conducting the ceremony, and a noteworthy incident on the way back. (Left: Ian's father-in-law's burial mound with three daughters and one nephew present. Copyright permission granted by Ian Haight for this CRC Blog Post Only)
In terms of craft I breath-broke the lines to make them
reflective of life. Looking at the initial draft of the poem I am surprised by
how much it resembles the final draft, even though I went through more than
twenty versions. Expansion of details and the title were the chief revision
issues. I particularly struggled with the title because I couldn’t figure out
how to succinctly inform a non-Korean reader regarding the what and the why of
the poem. (Right: Copyright permission granted by Ian Haight for this CRC Blog Post Only)
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. At the time of the poem’s writing, we lived in one of a collection of four-unit condos. My family was a bit young then. My two sons had been born but they were both under the age of eight, so although our three-bedroom unit was small by the American standards I was familiar with (about 1,200 square feet), it was livable for our family size. Because I was doing graduate work half of one of the rooms was my own. There was space for a bookcase or two of books and my computer desk—that was it. I did all of my writing on the computer. The walls of the room, like all the walls of all the units, were concrete, but papered with some standard flower print on a white background. The floors had a plastic surface, which emulated a shade of wood. The sliding wood-framed windows were barred, large and opaque, but opened to a view of the forested hill. I could hear birds; I was happy for that. (Right: Ian Haight family photo - wife is pregnant with their daughter. Copyright permission granted by Ian Haight for this CRC Blog Post Only)
What month and year did you start writing this
poem? Looking
at the file dates that are still intact, I had to have written the first draft
around September-October 2002. Chusok is annually held in September. (Left: Ian in October of 2002. Copyright permission granted by Ian Haight for this CRC Blog Post Only)
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I may have drafts with markings on them, but if I do they are in storage, so I will attach the earliest draft of the poem and the most recent draft for comparison.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I may have drafts with markings on them, but if I do they are in storage, so I will attach the earliest draft of the poem and the most recent draft for comparison.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? There’s only one line that got cut. In the fifth stanza, line 3: “and red berries” (Right, Korean berries) was deleted because I felt like it was too much detail and made the poem clunk. To me it felt like a detail that was not entirely necessary in comparison with what was rhythmically gained by losing it. The first line lost the phrase “Yellow fin” to describe the kind of fish for the same reason, and because it wasn’t authentically true. People laid out all sorts of different fish.
What do
you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? That we are all capable of
entering and being received by different cultures and communities no matter
what we look like or what skills we may/may not possess. It doesn’t always
happen but it can happen to anybody and everybody regardless of identity. This
gives me hope for humanity. Maybe also that there’s a lot of love in this
world. It’s not always easy to see and it might be different from what I am
used to experiencing but that does not mean the love is not there. (Ian Haight's father in law is wearing the necktie. Copyright permission granted by Ian Haight for this CRC Blog Post Only)
The ending, for sure. To see that pheasant rise and then to place it in context of the poem…I got what that meant when it happened but I didn’t really feel it until I re-read it in the finished poem. It’s spiritual—and very Korean. I love that I can deeply feel what that moment means even though I am an American white male. I also love that Korean people understand and respect my authentic experience.
Has
this poem been published before? And if so where? Quarterly West and Barrow
Street both published it in 2003. I think Quarterly West accepted it first and when I notified Barrow Street they said they were going
to publish it anyway, regardless. The publications came out pretty quick after
that so there wasn’t much more to be said to either journal. Funny how that
worked—I wish I experienced poetry publishing that way more frequently.
Contact
info?
Anything you would like to add?
Thank you again for inviting me to participate in this. It was fun to look back and revisit not only
the poem, but where I was at as a writer and the life I was living at the time.
Sungmyo for Our Dead
Father-in-Law
By the doors
of houses,
fish heads
on newspapers
with oranges
and
deep-fried sweet potatoes
for the
street gods.
The
outhouses smell
like farm
fields.
We light a
cigarette,
smoke some;
lay it on
dried grass
at the base
of his
burial mound
pour makali
into a cup,
drink some,
put it in
front of the smoke
lay four
paper plates, white
with holly
leaves
from
Christmas
place
oranges
rice cakes—
some made
with sticky corn syrup,
others
sweetened with ginger,
squid strips
and bananas
on the
plates
stand in a
row
we bow like
Buddhists
three times
eat and
drink
ask about
the names of trees,
talk about
how the jays
gathered and
croaked
in old
villages
when someone
who didn’t live there
would come
or how the
children
followed
GI’s
saying,
Ajashi, gum please!
Notice how
the cigarette is smoked,
and remember
how the old man
finished
thirty a day
how he got a
children’s book
in English,
though no
one could read it,
and wrote
his daughters’ names
in Chinese
on the first
page.
At the
bottom of the hill
the
copper-colored body
of a
green-headed pheasant
flaps to the
heights
of white
pines,
trailing its
long
brush-stroked
tail feathers
two feet
behind the breast.
Ian
Haight’s book, Celadon, won the 2016
Unicorn Press First Book Prize for poetry and was published in the fall of
2017. He is the editor of Zen Questions
and Answers from Korea, and with T'ae-young Ho, he is the co-translator of Borderland
Roads: Selected Poems of Kyun Hŏ and Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of
Hyesim—finalist for ALTA’s Stryk Prize. Other
awards include Ninth Letter’s
Literary Award in Translation, and grants from the Daesan Foundation, the Korea
Literary Translation Institute, and the Baroboin Buddhist Foundation. (Left: Ian with his youngest son Brennan in Pusan in 2003. Copyright permission granted by Ian Haight for this CRC Blog Post Only)
BACKSTORY OF THE POEM
LINKS
001 December 29, 2017
Margo
Berdeshevksy’s “12-24”
002 January 08, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “82 Miles From the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake
Café”
003 January 12, 2018
Barbara
Crooker’s “Orange”
004 January 22, 2018
Sonia
Saikaley’s “Modern Matsushima”
005 January 29, 2018
Ellen
Foos’s “Side Yard”
006 February 03, 2018
Susan
Sundwall’s “The Ringmaster”
007 February 09, 2018
Leslea
Newman’s “That Night”
008 February 17, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher “June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”
009 February 24, 2018
Charles
Clifford Brooks III “The Gift of the Year With Granny”
010 March 03, 2018
Scott
Thomas Outlar’s “The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”
011 March 10, 2018
Anya
Francesca Jenkins’s “After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
012 March 17, 2018
Angela
Narciso Torres’s “What I Learned This Week”
013 March 24, 2018
Jan
Steckel’s “Holiday On ICE”
014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim
Honjo’s “Colors”
015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn
Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”
016 April 27, 2018
Beth
Copeland’s “Reliquary”
017 May 12, 2018
Marlon
L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”
018 May 25, 2018
Juliet
Cook’s “ARTERIAL DISCOMBOBULATION”
019 June 09, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “Stiletto Killer. . . A Surmise”
020 June 16, 2018
Charles
Rammelkamp’s “At Last I Can Start Suffering”
021 July 05, 2018
Marla
Shaw O’Neill’s “Wind Chimes”
022 July 13, 2018
Julia Gordon-Bramer’s
“Studying Ariel”
023 July 20, 2018
Bill Yarrow’s “Jesus
Zombie”
024 July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag
2016”
025 August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s “It is only
Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”
026 August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In
the Details”
027 August 13, 2018
Gloria Mindock’s “Carmen
Polo, Lady Necklaces, 2017”
028 August 21, 2018
Connie Post’s “Two
Deaths”
029 August 30, 2018
Mary Harwell Sayler’s
“Faces in a Crowd”
030 September 16, 2018
Larry Jaffe’s “The
Risking Point”
031 September 24,
2018
Mark Lee Webb’s “After
We Drove”
032 October 04, 2018
Melissa Studdard’s
“Astral”
033 October 13, 2018
Robert Craven’s “I Have
A Bass Guitar Called Vanessa”
034 October 17, 2018
David Sullivan’s “Paper
Mache Peaches of Heaven”
035 October 23, 2018
Timothy Gager’s
“Sobriety”
036 October 30, 2018
Gary Glauber’s “The
Second Breakfast”
037 November 04, 2018
Heather Forbes-McKeon’s
“Melania’s Deaf Tone Jacket”
038 November 11, 2018
Andrena Zawinski’s
“Women of the Fields”
039 November 00, 2018
Gordon Hilger’s “Poe”
040 November 16, 2018
Rita Quillen’s “My
Children Question Me About Poetry” and “Deathbed Dreams”
041 November 20, 2018
Jonathan Kevin Rice’s
“Dog Sitting”
042 November 22, 2018
Haroldo Barbosa Filho’s
“Mountain”
043 November 27, 2018
Megan Merchant’s “Grief
Flowers”
044 November 30, 2018
Jonathan P Taylor’s
“This poem is too neat”
045 December 03, 2018
Ian Haight’s “Sungmyo
for our Dead Father-in-Law”
