LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Student Poetry Presentation 2006

Monday 18 September:

poetry: Cathy Song, "Heaven," N 2847

poetry reader / discussion leader: Nguyen Le

I. ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND HER WRITING:

Cathy Song is a contemporary poet. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1955 and now teaches creative writing at a number of colleges and universities. She has had a number of publications, including Picture Bride (1983), School Figures (1994), and The Land of Bliss (2001).

In many of Cathy Song’s poems, a particular moment or event becomes a window through which she enters a field of vision. “What frames the view,” she has written, “is the mind in the diamond pinpoint light of concentration tunneling into memory, released by the imagination.” Song suggests that the artist and poet capture the moment, knowing that it is always dissolving. Besides, Song’s tactful sense of both the power and the limits of imagination is one of her distinctive marks as a poet.

Song’s ability to write about her own or another’s experience as an acute observer may have to do with her multicultural background, which often places her on the boundary of what she sees.

The careful composition of her poems, with their vivid detail, blend the accidental and spontaneous quality of life with the design of art, like the Japanese floral arrangement she describes in her poem “Ikebana”. Although her work can sometimes seem too composed, too removed from the sharp impact of experience, her strongest poems balance a sense of tradition with a feel for contemporary life and catch in the patterns of art the transient instant: “the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing.”  

(Notes from Norton Anthology)

example of ikebana (Japanese art of flower arrangement)

II. THE POEM “HEAVEN” (N 2847)

HEAVEN

Cathy Song

He thinks when we die well go to China

Think of it – a Chinese heaven

where, except for his blond hair,

the part that belongs to his father,

everyone will look like him.                                      5

China, that blue flower on the map,

bluer than the sea

his hand must span like a bridge

to reach it.

An octave away.                                   10

I’ve never seen it.

It’s as if I can’t sing that far.

But look–-

on the map, this black dot.

Here is where we live,                              15

on the pancake plains

just east of the Rockies,

on the other side of the clouds.

A mile above the sea,

the air is so thin, you can starve on it.    20

No bamboo trees

but the alpine equivalent,

reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves.

Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this

as his last stop?                                 25

I’ve heard the trains at night

whistling past our yards,

what we’ve come to own,

the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars.

It’s still the wild west,                              30

mean and grubby,

the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley.

With my son the dreamer

and my daughter, who is too young to walk,

I’ve sat in this spot                                       35

and wondered why here?

Why in this short life,

this town, this creek that they call a river?

He had never planned to stay,

the boy who helped to build               40

the railroads for a dollar a day.

He had always meant to go back.

When did he finally know

that each mile of track led him further away,

that he would die in his sleep,                    45

dispossessed,

having seen Gold Mountain,

the icy wind tunneling through it,

these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns?

It must be in the blood,                           50

this notion of returning.

It skipped two generations, lay fallow,

the garden an unmarked grave.

On a spring sweater day

it's as if we remember him.                     55

I call to the children.

We can see the mountains

shimmering blue above the air.

If you look really hard

says my son the dreamer,                      60

leaning out from the laundry’s rigging,

the work shirts fluttering like sails,

you can see all the way to heaven.

                                                                                 (1988)

Objective 1a: The Romantic Spirit

* the quest or journey of the romantic narrative involves crossing physical borders or transgressing social or psychological boundaries in order to attain or regain some transcendent goal or dream.

* To identify and criticize ideas and attitudes associated with Romanticism, such as nostalgia, the sublime.

What are the details that show the prevailing ideology of romanticism in this poem?

Are there any restraints on the journey to “heaven”?

Objective 1b: The Romantic Period

To speculate on residual elements in “post-Romantic” writings from later periods including “Modernism” and “Postmodernism”.

Cathy Song is a contemporary poet. In what way has she continued the romantic tradition in the modern time? 

Objective 2: The convergence of “America” and “Romanticism” enables us to investigate to what degree American popular culture and ideology represent a popular or derivative form of classic Romanticism.

How does the American setting now give Song the romantic and nostalgic inspiration?

Further discussion questions:

1. Is the free-verse format of the poem anything to do with romantic expression?

2. To what extent does her multicultural background influence her choice of China and a Chinese boy for her nostalgic and transcendent inspiration?

3. Are the feminine traditions of relations and domesticity reflected in this poem?