The “Power of Poetry in Commemorating Personal and Historical Sorrows in Ways Historians Cannot”: Poet Weijia Pan on “Motherlands” https://ift.tt/7fX8eOP
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Weijia Pan’s debut poetry collection, Motherlands, uses poetic inquiry to explore the tensions within family relationships in post-Maoist China. The focus on the experience of individuals makes the poems in this collection living histories — truths that pack a visceral punch. Eventually the thread moves overseas to the United States, where Chinese labored on the transcontinental railroad, and to the present during the Covid-19 pandemic. This engaging collection tackles politics on a personal level with relationship to place (something that can be lost) as a central concern. I found Pan’s use of language exciting and charismatic throughout the collection. There’s an intensity maintained from the start to finish that made me feel transformed in the reading of this collection.
Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and published by Milkweed Editions. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.
This interview took place via email in August and September 2024.
It’s a pleasure to speak with you Weijia about Motherlands, which won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Congratulations! Can you speak a bit about how this collection came together, how long you’ve been working on these poems and which was the first to be written?
Thank you, Sara! Motherlands was written between 2021 and 2023, though the initial ideas can be traced back to the alleys of Nanjing and Shanghai — cities where I grew up — and to earlier conversations with my family. I didn’t start until after Covid-19 hit, when my parents were under lockdown in Shanghai, and I was studying creative writing at the University of Houston. It was a time of crisis, and I regretted not staying home with them. As a poet, however, I could at least document my thoughts in verse. Thus began the first poems in Motherlands.
Many poems began with traumatic pages in family history. The first poems, “Poem to Survive the Summer” and “First Time to a Bathhouse,” explore post-Maoist China from a child’s perspective. As I continued writing, I expanded beyond the immediately personal to address injustice and displacement in transnational settings. In “On the Railways: A Little Song,” I imagine a linguistic clash in the 1880s between the chants of Chinese laborers who built the transcontinental railroad and the orders of their white superiors. In “Writing When the World’s a Mess,” I erase cultural or national markers to discuss a young couple separated by a civil war — a tragedy that can happen anywhere.
This is a pretty weighty collection that examines parts of a country’s turbulent history through the lens of a family tree. Some say that all politics are personal and this collection establishes the personal by exploring the lived experience of individuals and what has been lost or taken from different generations. Can you talk more about that? What does it mean to you to have inherited this legacy?
This is a great question. When I think of legacies, I consider not only political and family events, but also the long tradition of historical writing by court historians in imperial China. Their highly literary accounts often adopt a moral and cyclical worldview, focusing on the upper echelons of society — the great clans, generals, government ministers, etc. Instead of attributing the rise and fall of nations to court struggles or moral failure, I examine how history influences ordinary lives and how individual experiences can shed light on how we evaluate the political and the historical. I often ask myself: In what ways do personal and family stories mirror the rise and fall of nations? How did people experience isolation and displacement historically? Are there historical figures whose stories I feel, lament, or deplore, or whose sensibilities I share?
These questions aren’t meant to be fully answered. Instead, I see writing as a way to better frame my questions, adding depth by drawing from personal and historical events. In “Poética Histórica: Or, How to Leave My Country a Voicemail,” for example, the speaker recounts the story of his great-grandfather, who worked for the KMT government before he disappeared after the Communist victory in 1949. Uncertain about his great-grandfather’s fate, the speaker asks his father, who was once equally curious but now wishes to move on. The poem ends on a somewhat pessimistic note, observing how the rise of capitalism in China has drawn people’s attention away from political issues. What can a poet do if history repeats itself and those who suffer always choose to forget? But then I think of Du Fu, whose poetry survived the Tang civil war and whose attention to history and ordinary lives earned him the nickname “Poet-Historian.” The popularity of his poems testifies to the power of poetry in commemorating personal and historical sorrows in ways historians cannot.
You have a background as a translator, so in light of that, can you tell us about your poem,“Betrayal: Or, When a Poet Translates Another Poet” that makes its point with elegant lines such as:“I walk fitfully into the moon of silence, aspirant”versus“an aspirin silences fitfulness; I walk into the moon”? I can’t help but find this poem both humorous and concerning as to how much meaning can be lost through translation. In some ways this poem has larger implications, such as how the history of countries is portrayed via“translators.”
Glad you brought this up! This poem mocks my own frustration as a translator, particularly when trying to finalize a piece of translation. It’s also a response to Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which discusses how Chinese poems have been translated by generations of academic and poet-translators. Instead of seeing myself as a poet-translator along the modernist vein, however, I’m more interested in discussing the translation process with readers (many of whom are poets or translators themselves) and in making a poem out of the apparent futility of translation.
And yes, I’m also aware of translation as a political act. Historians who base their narratives on limited (or sometimes an over-abundance of) first-hand materials engage in an act of translation. To establish a sense of national awareness, nation-states remake their histories by revising, adopting, translating (or mistranslating) other nation’s histories or myths. Just like history writing often has cultural and political motives, poetry translation has its own determining factors: market demand, linguistic imperialism (how certain languages take precedence over others), the prestige of the translator/publisher, etc. Considering that translations make up only about three percent of books published in the U.S., it’s no small miracle for a book of translations to reach your hands.
One of the features of your writing that I really appreciate, is the way it leans into traditional Chinese literature and history while weaving in bits of modern and global culture. I discovered new poets and historical events through your poems. Can you say more about this globalization in your writing? Also, there are many references to composers, do you have a background in music?
I think poetry is always a global enterprise made possible by the dissemination of language, forms and imagery. Many popular forms in Anglophone poetry, from the sonnet to the ghazal, originated elsewhere. My first introduction to poetry was classical Chinese poetry taught in school, and my interests later led me to European modernists and Russian Silver Age poets. Modern Chinese poetry — which differs from classical poetry in being written in the vernacular — was heavily influenced by the translation of Western literature in the early 20th century. So I was glad to know a lot of Chinese and non-Chinese names, whom I imagine talking to when I write.
My understanding of global literature is also inseparable from my role as an international student in the U.S. The more I care about regional and global issues, the more I worry about our increasingly polarizing world and my own place in it. As a result, I have a special affinity for poets, artists and sometimes fictional characters who are under duress. My poem “Poem to Survive the Summer,” for example, mentions Ōe Kenzaburō, Van Gogh, Walter Benjamin and the Karamazov brothers. “Wang Wei” imagines a gathering of poets at Wang’s villa before the Tang civil war. In the last two stanzas, Wang Wei — aware of how his precarious his clan’s and his own standings are — writes a letter to Pound. To me, this is the moment where genuine communication becomes possible in literature, even if it seems increasingly unlikely in real life.
My references to composers stem from my piano playing, though I was mostly self-taught, with only two years of training. When I think of composers, I see them as fellow artists struggling to make sense of similar issues, whose sensibilities I can feel, if only vicariously, by studying their work and anecdotes. In this sense, I am perhaps akin to the pianists I mentioned in “Notes on Twentieth-Century Musicians.” Do musicians feel the same way about writers? I’d like to know.
I noticed you employed Jericho Brown’s duplex form for your poem“To My Classless Motherland.” It’s interesting to pair a modern American form for a poem about China. The focus of the collection turns its attention away from the East at times, towards American history in a few places, like the poem that honors the Chinese laborers who built the transcontinental railroad. How has living in the U.S. affected your perspective and idea of place?
Living in the U.S. has allowed me to approach my background and tradition differently. While I’ve always been passionate about Chinese history and politics and have written poems in Chinese, I was mostly addressing the Chinese readership. When I write in English, I know I’m addressing a different audience whose understanding of China varies. Jericho Brown’s duplex allows me to write a personal and succinct poem about the experiences of a factory worker in China. I’m particularly interested in how the speaker’s experience as a menial worker in a Western factory in China mirrors the experiences of ethnic minorities in the U.S.
Speaking very generally about contemporary American and Chinese poetry: I think contemporary American poetry is more interested in formal innovations, whereas contemporary Chinese poetry focuses more on bridging classical and modern ideas and imagery to address domestic Chinese issues. Both approaches are valuable to my work, allowing me to write more confidently about global issues, drawing from Chinese and American forms, imagery and events. Here, I want to think of poetry as creating a third way that allows me to escape simple binaries. This may sound a bit idealistic, but it is what I strive to achieve.
The late Louise Glück, a Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, judged this contest and selected your manuscript. In what ways did you work with her to prepare your manuscript for publication? What did you learn from the process? How did it feel to win this prize?
I was, as you can imagine, very excited. Louise Glück was such a genuine teacher — always down to business and witty. I remember our very first call, where she insisted that we go over the manuscript before I flew to Montpelier, Vermont, to discuss it with her in person. She told me that she felt this manuscript was the most alive and that she liked the fact that it wasn’t long or repetitive. Then she pointed out the problems: the book’s title had to be changed (it was initially “Peppered Path,” the title of the first poem); some poems should be halved, some rearranged, and others should end differently. She also mailed me a marked-up copy of the manuscript and asked me to send her drafts, including juvenilia, so she could recycle ideas or images for revision.
At first, I felt a little daunted. Working with Louise Glück was such a privilege, so I strived to meet her expectations. Sometimes her suggestions were so radical that I had to come up with multiple drafts before choosing the right one, while still fearing she wouldn’t like it. Later, I learned from a friend of hers that I should see the process of working with Louise as a “tussle,” which means that I should listen to her and argue with her later in my head. Instead of applying everything she suggests, I should only employ suggestions that feel right to me. So I followed the advice, adopting some of Louise’s ideas while retaining parts I liked. I finally sent my revision back to Louise, not long before she was diagnosed with cancer. But even after she was hospitalized, she gave me additional comments over email and text, which boosted me up and gave me a sense of direction.
When Louise passed away last October, I was truly saddened. As far as I’m concerned, this was the final manuscript Louise handpicked and edited. I’m honored that she decided to spend her last two months with a young poet who, at that time, was uncertain about his future in writing. After the “tussle,” I feel much stronger, and my poems are better. Louise’s diagnosis offered me a different lens to examine my own poetry, while her passion for editing showed me what it took to be a good teacher who never stopped educating her students, even at the end of her life.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a second book of poems. I’ll continue to focus on individual lives within the grand narrative of history, as I did in Motherlands, while paying more attention to primary source materials such as oral histories, diaries and poetry. The Angel Island Immigration Station, as an important site of Chinese immigration, will be interesting to explore. In particular, I’m excited to write epistolary poems in which Du Fu and Angel Island poets speak to each other and create a new language and historical sensibility that will shed light on the dilemmas of the Chinese diaspora today.
Additionally, I’m working on two literary translation projects. The first is a volume of collected poems by the contemporary Chinese poet Huang Jiyun, whose work interweaves classical Chinese references with internet neologisms. The second is an anthology of poems written about the Covid-19 outbreak in the 50 most spoken languages in the world, which I’m coediting with translators at the University of Houston and beyond. Through work on this project, my colleagues and I have encountered marginalized voices further dwindled by the pandemic, which pushed us to democratize our search to include more poets and translators of suppressed languages and communities.
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