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Shin Yu Pai and Rick Benjamin InteReview




Shin Yu Pai’s work engages all of the senses. When her latest offering, Works on Paper (Convivo Press: 2007, a limited letterpress edition of 125 copies) arrived in the mail it even smelled unlike any other book, which I found out later had to do with the persimmon dye that was used to brush the Kumoi paper which was wrapped over the boards. It figured. Shin Yu’s poems are meant to be read, looked at, breathed in and with: she is a poet of remarkable range and vision.

Her book, Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005] (1913 Press: 2007), about which most of this InteReview was concerned, shows her gifts as a poet in abundance. It is an explosive, cunning mix of the visual and the sonic; it’s last or first touch is that her own hand and Exacto knife put sight-lines onto the cover to peer through. The work is stunningly anthropological: delving into realms of human experience—athletics, food, Japanese Love Hotels, phrases from a Chinese-English phrasebook that make up the word-play, Concave is the Opposite of Convex—in entirely new, ironic, penetrating ways. Shin Yu’s poetry in this book ranges from ironic to lyrical to suddenly and wildly associative and volatile. It is the work of a poet-critic of multiple cultures, a look through a handful of lenses at the new century’s pop-human; and the poems literally pop off the page and out of the book.


RB: The visual arts inform so much of your work. I’m thinking particularly of Nutritional Feed, Unnecessary Roughness, The Love Hotel Poems. Can you talk about the interplay between your poems and paintings and photographs?

SP: The paintings and photographs that are part of those series were produced by collaborators. With Unnecessary Roughness, I was looking at a set of photographs by a NY artist Ferenc Suto who was doing some interesting work around gender and adolescence which resonated for me.

The Love Hotel Poems grew out of a project with a young documentary photographer who had spent time living abroad in Japan on a JET contract. Things went down badly and she ended up terminating her contract and returning to the U.S. early. But before she left Japan, she took photographs of the love hotels, which she showed in exhibitions devoid of any substantial context. Without the aid of outside information, it would be very easy to draw certain conclusions about the Japanese. I had also heard her talk about this work too, both publicly and off the record, and what I heard disturbed me.

The first poem that I wrote for the series was “Little Chapel Christmas, Nihonbashi.” My husband Kort was serving Japanese tea in our studio and the photographer was over talking to a group of artists about her time in Japan. She described the love hotels and their visually eccentric themes - no one in the group except for Kort and I had heard about this phenomena – Kort lived in Kyoto and I had seen images and heard about love similar establishments in Taiwan. The photographer described the Santa Claus Love Hotel and it’s Xmas-themed imagery - she went on to scornfully remark that “The Japanese don’t even know who Christ was.” I knew this to be completely untrue. Xianity is viral in its global pervasiveness.

In my undergrad days, I read Shushaku Endo’s historical novel Silence on Xianity in 17th century Japan. The Sotome district of Nagasaki city is the famed home of kakure kirishitan - the hidden Xians - and where Endo set his book. Endo was himself a practicing Catholic. While it is true that Christmas is a commercialized holiday worldwide these days, to make a wide-sweeping statement that Japanese people don't know who Christ is or what they are even celebrating is as wide-sweeping a generalization as saying that Americans have no clue who Siddhartha was. Jesus is not the name of just another john. I will say that living in Texas, people who’ve occasionally walked into my studio have sometime mistaken the photo I keep of H.H. the Dalai Lama on my shrine as a picture of my father!

The poem-writing process became a process to dialogue with the photographer’s images and to open up the possibilities of other narratives and storylines that the photos set the stage for, but left out. I did a lot of research into the love hotels and treated them as an anthropological study in some ways. I read about the history of the Hello Kitty shoulder massager which was parlayed into a vibrator by imaginative types.

RB: Not even imaginative types -- one need only be obsessed slightly to find any device a potential vibrator!

SP: Sanrio actually stopped producing the shoulder massager when they learned that it was being used for deviant purposes! So now they are quite the collector’s item.

RB: You work very much as a visual artist in these books yourself -- the whole page is your grid. I love the sudden, explosive events in these poems, how they leap off the page in some intensely visual, vibrant way. They are also wildly associative. You’re a riff-writer; & the wave you're riding is eye-catching.

SP: I’m very interested in the way that typography and white space can be used in poetry to push the boundaries of the notion of a poem. I think the associative riffs come from growing up with a lot of television and subsequently spending time in the advertising world - being inundated with pop culture and then spending a lot of time with headlines, taglines, buzz words where everything begins to rub together, and it becomes very clear – the way in which language is used to seduce and sell. When I wrote Unnecessary Roughness and Nutritional Feed, I really felt like all of my life experiences were coming into that work in a way.

RB: Yes. These books have a very pop, Dada feel to them: like Basquiat might write on paper instead of one of his canvases. Your own life experiences, just to push the point a bit, are made up of disjunctions, contradictions and discordances worthy of Basquiat-- how does growing up Asian American in Riverside, CA, inform your work?

SP: Basquiat is definitely there in the milk poem in Nutritional Feed. His habit of copyrighting his images.

As you know firsthand from growing up in Los Angeles, Southern California is a strange place. I think people who move there as adults or college students, live on the surface of the California experience without knowing how dark it can be. My parents chose to settle in a community where there were very few Asians and as a result we were a cultural anomaly for the first 12 or so years of my life. We didn't have a tribe or Asian community available to us in our everyday lives. And there was always pressure to become a part of a tribe. The part of Riverside I grew up was heavily Latino and African-American. A lot of families moving out of L.A. to get away from the gang life. As the only Asian kid besides my brother and Mimi Ton, who showed up in the 6th grade, there was a certain pressure to also culturally represent. Kids asking you to teach them Chinese. Kids asking you to teach them martial arts.

RB: Thank god your parents spared you a life in the Crips or Bloods...

SP: I think it was “East Side Riva in the 909” … Also kids asking if every time you went out to dinner you were going out for Chinese food. Food was a really big deal growing up and is a current obsession. Can I talk about food for a second?

RB: Yes, please talk about food.

SP: Food was a way in which I always knew I was fundamentally different than the other kids. When I entered public school, I had never tasted pizza, a canned green bean, a sloppy joe, a tater tot or a taco. My mother used to pack these lunches for my brother and I. She'd take an aluminum container and fill it with rice and hardboiled egg and chicken stewed in soy sauce, with cauliflower and green onion. Not unlike the Japanese stew o-den. That was neatly packaged in my bright red Peanuts lunch box. The other kids had brown paper sacks and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or ate the school lunches.

Food is a big part of Nutritional Feed. Frozen dinners. Meat. Milk. Things that I didn't eat in my early childhood, but as a result of socialization had to adopt into my diet. Lately, I have been thinking about how food can be a really touchy subject with people. Like they offer you what they are eating and if you turn it down...

RB: Yep, I was one of those other kids. I think this is the first time I've wanted to switch moms with you.

SP: You had bad manners or are judging how heavy they are, or their taste (or lack of it). And that becomes a very awkward social interaction. Because food is a way in which we can fit in, share culture, exchange and learn. I have several friends in Dallas who are on strict Ayurvedic diets and are wheat-free, sugar-free, etc. In the end, it's the best thing to say, no thanks, I've already eaten when offered and to politely decline. Dig this – the customary greeting in Taiwanese is “Have you eaten?” Not “hello, how are you” – but have you eaten! Nutrition has dominated my thoughts for many years, even before I started learning about Ayurvedic nutrition.

RB: It’s true what you say and Nutritional Feed is certainly a pointed critique of the way we are force-fed this dominant, sugar-laden, mucous-ridden mindset.

SP: Yes, dairy causes phlegm and heaviness, mental cloudiness. Something like 95% of all Asians are lactose intolerant.

RB: You are such a cultural anthropologist! And you haven’t even entered into your graduate study in that field yet! Switching gears – who is Mr. Butch?

SP: Mr. Butch appears in Nutritional Feed. Mr. Butch is an interesting outsider figure to me. He was a 6-foot tall black homeless artist who hung out at the intersection of Harvard Ave and Comm Ave. People who lived in Allston during a certain generation knew Mr. Butch. He played guitar (real guitar, not air guitar like the Mixed Nuts guys) in front of Marty's Liquors. He hung out with B.U. students and went to their parties. He was a fixture on the Allston scene when I lived in Boston from ‘93-‘97, and when we moved back from 2001-2004 he was still there. The guy was very much doing his own thing and living life on his terms. He was the honorary mayor of Allston. He contributed to cultural production by playing his music on the street and being a very public personality. In 2002, someone made a documentary about Mr. Butch. You can even experience him now on YouTube. There's something interesting to me about the way in which he became appropriated into the mainstream pop culture of Boston to become something of a local legend. The poems in Nutritional Feed are about types of production - news, food, education, culture - and I feel like somewhere in there is an important tie-in. Mr. Butch was killed in 2007 in a scooter accident. The news of his death was widespread, reaching beyond Boston.

RB: I want to talk a little bit more about visual art, since it seems to me that you are frequently working with the visual in a way that produces a kind of sonic depth. Your books, among other things, are beautiful to look at. Works on Paper, hot off the presses, is the best example of this. You care deeply about every part of the book-making process don’t you? And book writing and making are companionable tasks for you.

SP: These days, I seem to conceive of the book as a fully formed idea before even embarking on the writing of a project. The writing of a suite of poems seems very much linked to the ultimate presentation of that work. This way of thinking may come from two sources. Grad school at SAIC - in photography classes we were taught to think in terms of sequences in photography class. How you present your work on the wall of a gallery. The sequence that you put your slides in a slide sheet for a portfolio. Taking book arts classes and experimenting with different forms for the book, also nurtured this kind of thinking. What's appropriate for the visual presentation of a body of work.

RB: Neil Young said that he never ever wanted to make the same album twice & that his impulse, in fact, was almost to destroy what came before his next musical act. I've been thinking that you're a lot like that as a poet: you never repeat yourself.

SP: Yes, I'm not interested in repeating myself. Exploring and revisiting the same concerns over again interest me, yes - but with some new insight or angle. It's like drawing the image of Daruma 10,000 times, or walking 360 degrees around a sculpture or stupa. Even a minor change or deviation in circumstances can open up a new way of seeing.

RB: Yes. As one example, your new manuscript, Adamantine, revisits some of the Buddhist terrain of your first, full-length book, Equivalence, but your thinking has certainly evolved & developed over time.

SP: I’m still looking at interconnectedness, but in less of an abstract way. Hybridization and intersections were very important to my early work as these were strands in my own identity that I was trying to come to terms with. The focus on my present work really looks at the need for compassion and the examination of the human experience. Perhaps the Equivalence poems could be considered more philosophical, whereas this new work is much more in and of the world (versus the imagination).

Shin Yu Pai is the author of several poetry books, most recently Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks) and Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005] (1913 Press). Haiku Not Bombs, a collection of haiku written in conversation with friends, is forthcoming from the Booklyn Artists Alliance. Shin Yu has exhibited her visual work at The Dallas Museum of Art, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Harvard University, The Paterson Museum and the Three Arts Club of Chicago. She lives in Seattle, WA, where she studies sociocultural anthropology and museology at the University of Washington.

Rick Benjamin is the author, most recently, of "Mixed-up Medium: Kevin Young's Turn-of-the-Century American Triptych" in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press: 2007), and "Mosoquotaash-- It is All Connected," in the ecological journal, Watershed (Spring, Summer 2007). His poems have appeared most recently in Logolalia, and his poetic and musical collaboration with the actor, Ricardo Pitts Wiley, Poets & Players, debuted at Mixed Magic Theater. He teaches at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design and Goddard College.