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Poet's Sampler: Tan Lin
Tan Lin's new work sparkles with unoriginality and falsification. He
wants to make good on his sense of language as "forever temporal,
subject to change, cancellation, decay," of language's harrowing,
or is it hallowing, "failure to specify anything in the here and
now." Lin's first book, Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, published
by Sun & Moon in 1996, made apparent the acuity of his formal imagination.
That book can be read as a brilliant synthesis of the poetic innovations
of the two decades that preceded it. In his new work, Lin is trying
to critique a number of the underlying assumptions of "innovative"
poetry, exploring ways to make poetry more readable and, as he puts
it, more relaxing. While there is some irony in his notion of using
ambient textuality to induce a meditative space for poetry, Lin's "Ambient
Stylistics" (which takes the form of an interview) and the companion
set of ongoing, apparently endless, couplets called "Box,"
suggest a fresh, nonpressured modality for reading. These are not meditative
poems but temporal processes cast into words: permeable, open, meandering.
"Yes I am lying to you," says Lin. No he is not lying to you.
Breathe deeply as you read.
from Ambient Stylistics
So. On the 10th of March I board a plane into Seattle, rent a white
Honda Acura and drive 87 miles to Concrete, WA, which is on the edge
of the park and where the Bear Park Motel is located. When I arrive,
my aunt shows me to Room 17, and whenever I have gone to the The Bear
Park in the intervening years I stay in Room 17, just as Salvador Dali
when he came to New York always stayed at the St. Regis and always in
Room 1628. Although I don't remember any, there is as I gather from
the photographs an occasional painting in the rooms, and once when I
first thought about visiting, when I was in high school, I remember
thinking about a photograph of a door that had been kicked in. After
arriving, my aunt proudly tells me that the Bear Park is one of the
only motels in America where there are no phones in any of the rooms.
I believe this says something about the clientele, about the kinds of
people who have and have not stayed at the Bear Park Motel on the western
edge of North Cascades National Park, the people who have died and not
died there, had sex and not had sex, lied and not lied there way out
of that godforsaken landscape or one of those rooms. I have often thought
of the motel and have asked my aunt many times if she had ever discovered
a corpse in one of the rooms and she said no, never. On my second and
last night at the Bear Park I asked my aunt if she liked running the
motel. She said she did but she added that the worst thing about running
a motel was never being able to take a vacation. And drunks bang on
the office door, which is the door to their living room, and this wakes
her and her uncle up in the middle of the night. People come to cheat
in their motel. I have taken that trip to Glacier and the Bear Park
Motel many times. I know the head is made for places like the Bear Park
Motel where a half-Chinese woman runs a motel filled with language and
its lies.
When I was in graduate school getting a Ph.D in 1983 and writing poetry
on the side I met a woman who spoke 8 languages-Chinese (mandarin and
cantonese and an amoy dialect known as xiamen), German, French, Vietnamese,
and English, almost all of them fluently except for German, which she
learned in school I think. She was born in Saigon, was raised in Paris
and told me she had never ridden in public transportation before NYC
because she had spent her childhood in the back seat of a limousine
and whenever I think of her I think of her in the back seat of a limousine
and basically just living there and reading her favorite books there
(she was born a reader just as all avid readers are born not made),
and being taken to restaurants, and waiting for her father to put her
in the car so she could go to school. I believe she told me her father
was in business and that her mother was capable of extreme cruelty.
She was very pretty for her age and very slight, almost trop raffiné,
and her name was G________, but she had a laugh that was just loud enough,
and she was very fond of smiling and not quite smiling at the same time.
Her eyes were brown with the color of scuffed shoe polish. From the
moment I met her I believed she was an exquisite liar. One night I asked
her if she lied in one language better than another because I knew she
loved questions like that (all questions for her resembled lies), and
she said she knew she could lie best in English, because it was not
her favorite language and was most free in it but when she was in bed
with someone she preferred to make the sounds of endearment and physical
longing in Chinese. One hot very early July morning, my father who was
visiting Brooke Alexander, a gallery owner who deals a lot of print
works by contemporary artists in NY, walked up the five flights of stairs
in my walkup apartment on 125th St. in Spanish Harlem, and met her by
accident (she was leaving). I introduced them, asked them to say a few
words of Chinese to each other because at the time I was not sure how
well she spoke Chinese, and they exchanged a few words in mandarin which
I did not understand because I do not speak or understand Chinese except
certain names of food. I have always told my friends that I can speak
Chinese but only in a restaurant.
Years afterwards when my father had decided to buy another house and
was living in Santa Barbara and I had gone to visit him during my summer
off, my father asked what happened to her, said she was very well brought
up, and that she spoke a very beautiful mandarin. I believe that she
reminded my father of my mother though I realize this only now as I
am writing it.
Fig. 1b
One night I remember she had told me she was a virgin. I knew she was
not really lying because she was lying to me in my favorite language,
which is English because it is the only one that I really possess as
a language to imagine things in, and because I have always thought that
she is probably one of those persons that can only lie well over the
phone. I continue to believe to this day that she was a terrible liar
in person, although I am probably lying to myself, and of course this
is the main reason I fell in love with her after we had ended things,
and this is the main reason I still, years later, remember her voice
when I am on the telephone and am lonely and am waiting for someone
on the other end of the telephone to tell me they love me. One can wait
for years to hear a beautiful lie like that. Nearly ten years later
I ran into a friend of hers on the Columbia campus near the statue of
Rodin's The Thinker. I had gone back (I love the campus and steps
where the students sit out on a warm day) to see a professor of mine,
George Stade, who wrote a novel called Confessions of a Lady Killer
and is my one of favorite professors because he of all my professors,
he always acted glad to see me (and I believe he genuinely was) when
I came in to talk with him about orals exams, or dissertation chapters
or whatever. Anyway, Christina and I talked for a long time. Eventually
the subject of G________ came up and she told me that G________ had
finished her thesis on the Princesse de Cleves, had married a Swiss
banker, and was living in Geneva. Today I feel a strong urge to know
what country her parents live in, if they are even alive, and I have
an irrevocable desire to meet them, not to talk to them, just to be
introduced to them, to go through the mechanical social pleasantries
with them. Sometimes there are times when I wish G________ had lied
that night when she told me she was a virgin. Without lies, the brain
would be more empty than a midtown office building. Without lies, the
emotions would have nothing to live for except themselves and no emotion
should have to live with itself for very long. Lies are the ways the
mind has of accepting our own emotions. None of the lies we tell is
real except to the person we tell that lie to. It never really matters
if one is telling the truth. It only matters if one cares enough not
to tell a lie to someone. There is nothing so sad as a family without
liars. My father died in 1989 of a heart attack (he was the best liar
in our family) and of course there were things that I never said to
him. Everybody needs to lie to someone. As I was saying, the rooms at
the Big Bear Park rent for $37 a night.
Originally published in the April/May
1999 issue of Boston Review
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