Shin Yu Pai’s new book, Ensō, is filed by Google Search under “Poetry,” “Hybrid Genre,” “Asian & Asian American Studies,” “Performance Studies,” “Music,” and “Women’s Studies.” A twenty-year retrospective of this Taiwanese-American writer, Ensō flows among genres —poetry, personal essay, visual art — and out of its book-binding onto online audio (songs, readings) and video (installation art, short film) that add sensory dimensions to the printed page. Michael Stipe even makes a brief audio appearance reading twenty-eight haiku.
Simultaneously a document of her art and the process of making it, Ensō is a record of a woman growing into a mother: learning to nurture her self and her creative talents, mothering the wounds of her father, bringing a child — a son — into the world, parenting a community with collaborative projects. “Giving Birth” and “Mothering Time” are chapter headings but they are also analogues to the term “Ensō,” a Zen Buddhist meditative practice in which a circle is painted in one brushstroke. It is a letting-go of the mind, allowing the body to create while accepting imperfections that arise. In doing so, the artist accepts and honors what she has to give.
There’s a lot here for so many different readers to discover. To start with, Ensō is the journey of an Asian-American woman who finds the permission, strength, and purpose to “open up a space and time beyond what the label prescribed, to create something distinct from what was visibly enshrined, translating the other into a language of self.” In the poem “The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion,” Pai writes of a father and daughter looking at a landscape in which bearded scholars read, write, and celebrate poetry:
Where does the story begin?
father insists gently.
In the mountains, the girl cries.
Traces of handprints left on glass.
It starts here, she says.
Here.
“Here” being the present: this moment. Also, “here” I think refers to the handprints: each a metaphor for what is unique within us. In Ensō, value is found in the overlooked and forgotten, the simple, the common, the distinctive gestures full of humanity. Pai treasures them like offerings made in a temple. Here is the opening for the book’s first poem, “Devotion”:
I roll the ball of golden wax
between my thumb and forefinger
leftovers gleaned from the gallery
floor, during the artist’s installation
… the soft perfumed artifact
I take with me to tuck away …
a keepsake activated &
sanctified so long ago,
this token
I held back for myself
The memento that Pai saves is beeswax: first produced in the abdomen of worker bees, then formed by hive bees into a honeycomb-nursery and -pantry for its community. I think Pai provides for her own wellbeing by keeping this “token.” This final line — “I held back for myself” — is the only line that steps forward, out of the narrow, flush-left column, opening into boundlessness. For this reason, I think Pai is equating the meaning of “holding back” with “moving ahead”: she must withhold to make progress. Similar instances of a paradox of opposites animate much of this book.
Pai demonstrates how even small steps accrue through daily practice into an artful life — from writing haiku to learning the nuances of a tea ceremony, like positioning of the hearth in winter or choosing a lighter bowl in summer to evoke coolness. Her mother, Noko Pai, moves among art-making practices — from throwing a pot to cooking a meal — too. She “created a language,” Pai says, “I wanted to know and enter into.” Regardless of her mother’s inspiration, Pai does not want to have a child. “I fully expected motherhood to be obliterating,” she writes. Her poem, “Reproduction,” begins with this startling image:
In the painted screen a woman
confined to a wheelchair sees
turquoise rocks pure as sea stacks …
Through the poem, Pai realizes how pregnancy can be expansive. What’s notable is that she sees it as liberating her from a sexist role, empowering her to take her place with gravitas.
… gilded and burnished in gold
this screen made for “women’s quarters”
dominated by virile likenesses,
I reach towards my own life …
& in the final intervention
I displace the patriarchal form
enshrouded in mondokoro
to even up the numbers,
take my seat with symbols
of my own making: sixteen
stanzas for sixteen pillars
in this gathering space.
While pregnancy is “a profound experience of being alone,” it gives her another opportunity to struggle with coming to peace with “my difficulty with trusting the process, the anxiety and fear of failure.” Motherhood becomes a catalyst for heading towards a more community-oriented, outward-looking life which includes artwork collaborations. “I grew less interested in writing for the page and more interested in taking risks that could make my work available to people outside of the typical audience of poetry. I wanted to see the poetry that is everywhere around us through my son’s eyes and to activate that space.” Her work has always been spare and imagistic — not plain but lustrous — and now it becomes richer and the concepts more embodied.
In considering how language can be made more visible and delightful to a child encountering words for the first time, Pai stencils words on to apples in an orchard, creating poems within each tree. She envisions, also, “a field guide for visitors — for families — a text that could teach my son everything that I wanted him to know about Piper’s Orchard: the fruit trees, the land, and the people who’d cared for it, including Minna Piper, the mother of eleven children, had been credited historically with grafting the varietals.” The project, called “Heirloom,” evolves into a twenty-six section abecedarian on the page.
In 2015, Pai is appointed poet laureate of Redmond, WA. Perhaps in response to this public position, Pai expands her practice into documentary poetics as she considers how to publicly address wounds in the community born of injustice and intergenerational trauma. A hate crime in a suburb of her city reminds her of experiences in San Marcos, TX where her neighbor hung a Confederate flag on the balcony two days after she moved in. This was just the beginning of a series of micro aggressions. “What is my responsibility as a poet and as the poet laureate of that city to raise my voice?” she asks. Pai embroiders the poem “Same Cloth” on a white silk organza broadside with blood-red cotton in which she suggests we “recover/some deeper meaning of ‘clan.’” In her accompanying essay, Pai writes that she chooses these materials “to evoke the language of lived trauma and to make that pain tactile and visible.”
[Right: “Same Cloth,” embroidered broadside, cotton thread on silk organza. Commissioned by the City of Redmond, Washington, 2017]
Another influence on Pai’s text may be Li Po, the T’ang Dynasty Chinese poet her father introduces her to, and whose poetry she translates for her first book. Po and his colleagues prize tzu-jan, the Taoist practice of living in tune with the earth’s process through selfless spontaneity. I see in her work a similar ethos—an attunement to natural and human processes without judgment. I believe Pai finds in this approach a sense of belonging to something fundamental, something not only the natural but pointing towards the sacred. Perhaps this is why “Devotion” is such a suitable proem to open the book, and why Ensō ends with these lines from the title poem:
the place of possibility where lotus
& sakura are born, to bloom together
upheld by your own sense of boundlessness
in the contours of hand-drawn waves
you start to pull your own story
[Left: Chlorophyll print: “as the sun bleached out the chlorophyll from each surface, the individual variations of the leaves imbued each historical image with a living, breathing quality”]
The symbol “Ensō” is hand drawn with water and ink rather like a wave to illustrate each chapter heading in the book. What do you “pull” from waves? Nets full of fish from the surface and depths. A metaphor for the process of creating art, whether poetry or song, video performance or fine art. And a metaphor for the creation of an artful life. But netting fish usually leads to their death, which brings us to a final paradox: After the shock of going on a squid fishing expedition, it was the idea of gyotaku, a “fish rubbing” — the traditionally Japanese art of making prints from the body of a dead fish — that sparked “Ensō.” Throughout this rich, original book, Pai continually transforms the challenges she encounters — deaths, losses, disappointments — into opportunities to become closer to life, to what is important, what is joyous, what is wise: the best parts of being human. This is what Pai shares with us in Ensō.
[Published by Entre Ríos Books on March 17, 2020, 160 pages, 8.5” x 11” format, full color, audio, $25.00 hardcover]