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The pantoum across the Pacific: the circumnavigation of a poetic form; and, Why can’t it be tenderness (poems)
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Content
The Pantoum across the Pacific:
The Circumnavigation of a Poetic Form
and
Why Can’t It Be Tenderness (poems)
by
Michelle Brittan Rosado
A Dissertation Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Literature and Creative Writing
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
August 2019
2
Acknowledgments
I am immensely grateful to many individuals during the process of writing this
dissertation. I wish to thank the co-chairs of my dissertation committee, Susan McCabe and
David St. John, for helping me bring personal meaning to my scholarship and critical insights to
my poetry. Thank you also to committee member Viet Thanh Nguyen, for giving me the
opportunity to conceive of the critical component of this dissertation in his “Introduction to
Transpacific Studies” course co-taught with Janet Hoskins, and for inspiring me to take risks and
challenge the boundaries of genre and discipline. I also thank outside committee member Brian
Bernards, for helping me see my work in the context of Southeast Asian studies, and pointing me
to theorists and scholars whose ideas resonate so much with my own on this subject.
I am additionally thankful to have worked with and learned from faculty members Mark
Irwin, Carol Muske-Dukes, Claudia Rankine, and John Carlos Rowe, who have all given me
opportunities to think through the critical and creative components of this project. I am indebted
to Janalynn Bliss, for sage advice and support in mapping my time in the program and securing
the institutional support that made it possible. Likewise, I thank Flora Ruiz for her kindness and
assistance as I navigated coursework. Thanks also to Joe Boone for his guidance with
professionalization; and to Molly Bendall, LauraAnne Carroll-Adler, Jim Condon, Chris
Freeman, Dana Gioia, and Trisha Tucker for their mentorship in teaching. I would not have
arrived at this program to undertake this work without the encouragement and support of my
professors at California State University, Fresno, in particular Tim Skeen, Corinne Clegg Hales,
Analola Santana, Samina Najmi, Alex Espinoza, and Steven Church; as well as professors at
University of Puget Sound in the departments of English and Comparative Sociology, Hans
3
Ostrom, Sunil Kukreja, Richard Anderson-Connolly, David Tinsley, Beverly Conner, Margi
Nowak, Mirelle Cohen, Judy Pine, and Karen Porter.
My colleagues have been a tremendous source of encouragement and wisdom. Thank you
to Corinna McClanahan Schroeder, for friendship and poem workshops and chapter drafts over
numerous cups of coffee; to Dagmar Van Engen, for fountain-side writing dates and academic
solidarity and many laughs; and to Doug Manuel, for conversations on drives to Long Beach and
manuscript feedback that changed the trajectory of my book and the poems that have come after.
I thank Kyungee Eo and Brittany Miller for valuable commentary on early drafts of these
chapters, and also my colleagues throughout the department as well as other disciplines, for
sharing their brilliance and camaraderie: Diana Arterian, Vanessa Carlisle, Melissa Chan, Li-
Ping Chen, Todd Fredson, Yunwen Gao, Viola Lasmana, Robin Coste Lewis, Ali Pearl, Vanessa
Ovalle Perez, Chinmayi Sirsi, Catherine Theis, Sarah Vap, and Marci Vogel. Thanks, too, to my
students in the Writing Program, Thematic Option, and English Department whom I was grateful
to both teach and learn from. Beyond USC, I am thankful to Erin Álvarez for PhD sisterhood and
conference adventures, Mari L’Esperance for friendship and holding space, and Cynthia
Guardado for a decade of writing and working together from Fresno to LA.
I greatly appreciate the thoughtful feedback I received on parts of this project from fellow
panelists, panel organizers, and audience members at the 2019 Modern Language Association
convention, the 2017 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference, and the
2016 Center for Southeast Asian Studies Conference at University of California, Berkeley. This
project would not have been possible without the financial support received from the Wallis
Annenberg Endowed Fellowship, a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the USC Graduate
School, the Childcare Subsidy Grant program from the USC Graduate Student Government,
4
several research and travel grants from the USC Creative Writing and Literature program, and a
summer research travel grant from the Center for Transpacific Studies that enabled me to
conduct archival research in Malaysia.
Thank you to my parents, John and Magdalene Brittan, for supporting me in my
educational endeavors; and to my parents-in-law, Eva Moreno and Mariano Rosado. Thank you
also to my extended family, particularly those in Malaysia who helped me during my research
trip in 2014: my cousin, Sharon Mejin, for bringing me to the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak; my
uncle, Duke Ripid, and aunt, Sonia Todeng, for hosting me in Kuching; and my aunt Katee
Ripid, for help with a pantun translation in Malay.
My heartfelt thanks to my husband, Mario Rosado, for countless instances of support and
love: reading drafts of poems and conference abstracts, picking up takeout orders on long work
nights, celebrating achievements and offering solace in equal measure, and much more over the
years. Finally, my love and gratitude to Adrian, who always wanted more time with me
whenever I would leave home to work on this project; I dedicate this to you, and your curious
and joyful spirit through which you’ve allowed me to reimagine the world.
5
Table of Contents
I. Critical Dissertation
Acknowledgments 3
Map of the Pantun/Pantoum Form’s Migration as a Four-Stage Process 8
with Historical Timeline
List of Figures 9
Introduction 10
The Pantoum as Archipelago:
Toward an Autoethnography in Parts
Chapter 1 20
The Maritime Pantun:
Early Circulation in the Malay Archipelago and Cultural Appropriation
Chapter 2 46
The Colonial Pantoum:
Entanglement with the Other in Baudelaire’s “Evening Harmony”
Chapter 3 71
The Postcolonial Pantoum:
Ambivalence and Anxiety in Two Poems by John Ashbery
Chapter 4 88
The Transpacific Pantoum:
Hybrid Poems from the Diaspora by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Barbara Jane Reyes
Conclusion 98
The Decolonial Pantoum:
Beyond Cultural Appropriation toward a Transformation of Mastery
Appendices 102
Appendix A: Anonymous pantun berkait in original Jawi script, transliteration,
French, and English
Appendix B: Charles Baudelaire, “Harmonie du Soir” in original French and English
Appendix C: John Ashbery, “Pantoum”
Appendix D: John Ashbery, “Hotel Lautréamont”
Appendix E: Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Pantoun for Chinese Women”
Appendix F: Barbara Jane Reyes, “Sea Incantation”
Works Cited 111
6
II. Creative Dissertation
Table of Contents 117
Poems 119
Notes 173
7
The Pantoum across the Pacific:
The Circumnavigation of a Poetic Form
8
Map of the Pantun/Pantoum Form’s Migration as a Four-Stage Process
I. Originating on Malay peninsula and circulating throughout Archipelago
II. Imported west to Europe
III. Transported over the Atlantic Ocean to the United States
IV. Returning to Asia over the Pacific Ocean
Historical Timeline
19
th
C:
French adaptation;
Victor Hugo's Les
Orientales in
1829, Charles
Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du Mal
(1857)
1950s:
Renewed interest by
John Ashbery (who
published Some Trees
in 1956 while in
France) and other
poets of the NY school
Prior to 15
th
Century:
Pantun as oral tradition,
call-and-response
15
th
/16
th
C.:
Written examples
of pantun, including
the Sejarah Melayu
(or Malay Annals),
a historical epic on the
founding of Melaka
(Malacca) through to
its fall to the
Portuguese
18
th
& 19
th
C:
European presence
and later colonization
in and around area
that would form
modern nation-state
of Malaysia
1957-1963:
Malaysian
independence from
British colonial rule
I
II
III
IV
9
List of Figures
Figure 1. Sign at entrance of the Taman Pantun (pantun garden), Universiti Kebangsaan
Malaysia (National University of Malaysia).
Figure 2. Istana, Taman Pantun (pantun garden), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National
University of Malaysia).
Figure 3. Detail of Istana, Taman Pantun (pantun garden), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
(National University of Malaysia).
Figure 4. Tree with plaque and pantun verse, Taman Pantun (pantun garden), Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia).
Figure 5. International Exhibition on Malay Manuscript in the Shape of a Boat,
Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (National Library of Malaysia).
Figure 6. Pantun Indera Quraisy from Sri Lanka in original Jawi script, Perpustakaan
Negara Malaysia (National Library of Malaysia).
10
Introduction
The Pantoum as Archipelago:
Toward an Autoethnography in Parts
“Do you know what pantun means?” my mother asks.
It occurs to me that I know what a pantun is but not what it means. I’ve been studying the
poetic form, and I know there are always four lines in the original Malay version of it.
Sometimes the quatrains are interconnected through repetition. Images from nature are paired
with philosophical meaning to create a reflection of each other. But what does the word that
signifies the form actually mean? And what meanings am I after?
She looks at me. “It means poetry.”
*
In the area now known as the modern-state of Malaysia, a form of poetry called the
pantun has origins that can be dated back to the 15
th
century. Several centuries later, it would be
renamed the pantoum by the French, who, along with the British and other European empires,
had a colonial presence in Southeast Asia, and brought this form back with them to Europe.
Today, in the United States, the form is enjoying a “resurgence among contemporary poets,”
according to American poet and critic Maxine Kumin (112).
That is the map of the pantoum’s history, from one vantage point.
*
The pantoum in the West is actually modeled after one type of pantun, called the pantun
berkait. Comprised of interlocking quatrains, it is only an offshoot of the pantun form, which is
typically a stand-alone quatrain in Southeast Asia.
11
The scholar and poet Muhammad Haji Salleh, who was named national laureate of
Malaysia in 1993, has written extensively on Malaysian literary traditions, and makes the
following distinction between the pantun and the pantun berkait: whereas the former is “not able
to narrate a sequence of events” and more suited to “catch the moment or a singular fleeting
experience,” the latter holds the potential for narration (17).
*
The pantoum, descendent of the pantun berkait, made its way across oceans, part captive
and part stowaway.
*
Whereas ethnography is the study of a people or culture, Mary Louise Pratt defines
autoethnography as a “text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage
with representations others have made of them” (35, emphasis mine). Though my research on the
pantoum is primarily concerned with the Malay poetic form and its history before, during, and
after colonialism, I feel a great sense of responsibility in how this project also presents a part of a
culture, because it is also related to mine. Raised in the United States with few, if any, references
in popular culture to the country from which my mother immigrated, I practiced from a young
age explaining to people where Malaysia was in the world, the ethnic group I belonged to, the
languages spoken there. Part of the urge behind this study is autoethnographic in nature. Pratt
explains that “if ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent
to themselves their others (usually their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are
representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts”
(35, emphasis in original). I imagine this dissertation as suspended somewhere between these
two categories, myself as both author and other, responding and in dialogue with others.
12
*
The pantoum in the West is comprised of interlocking quatrains that repeat all lines
twice. From the first stanza, two lines are repeated in the second stanza with two new ones, and
those new ones become repeated lines in the third stanza with an additional two lines, and so on.
The lines that were not repeated in the opening stanza make their reappearance in the final one,
closing the form and making a satisfying circle that returns us to the initial images and
sentiments with which the poem began, despite its wanderings in the intervening stanzas.
The arrangements of the repeating lines typically follow this pattern:
A B C D
B E D F
E G F H
G I H J
I K J L
K M L N
M C N A
The above is a representation of a pantoum with seven stanzas, though the number of
stanzas can be infinite. That example contains 28 lines, but half of these are repetitions, so one
might consider only 14 to be original. Lines A and C are reserved for the ending, while the other
lines shift back and forth between adjacent stanzas.
Such shifts can be followed diagonally: note how line D in the first stanza falls back into
a new position within the second, as do all the other letters. Even as lines seem to slip back, the
poem nevertheless propels forward with each stanza issuing new lines. At the end of a pantoum,
one might wonder whether we’ve moved anywhere, having arrived where we started.
13
*
I wait in the doorframe, listening.
My grandfather hasn’t eaten for days.
My aunt places the bowl in my hands,
believing I can change his mind.
When was the last time we saw him eat?
Before sunrise, he disappears on his bicycle
and his name, in the voices of his descendants,
echoes through the house, unanswered.
He returns at dusk from the jungle,
a bloom of bananas slung over his shoulder.
He only wants to survive on his own knowledge.
Even these he consumes in secret,
the peels under the sink like black starfish
unseen at the bottom of the ocean.
*
14
I wait in the doorframe, listening.
My grandfather hasn’t eaten for days.
My aunt places the bowl in my hands
Believing I can change his mind.
My grandfather hasn’t eaten for days,
Or at least no one has seen him.
We believe we can change his mind
But he disappears on his bicycle before sunrise.
Since morning, no one has seen him,
Though his descendants call his name.
While he disappears on his bicycle into the sunrise
The house echoes without answering.
His descendants call his name
So he returns at dusk from the jungle.
The house answers in echoes
And a bloom of bananas over his shoulder.
At dusk, he returns from the jungle because
He only wants to survive on his own knowledge.
The bananas he slung over his shoulder
He consumes only in secret.
To survive is to hold onto knowledge.
The peels under the sink like black starfish
Consume him in secret,
Unseen at the bottom of the ocean.
The peels under the sink are black starfish
Filling the bowl in my hands.
Unseen, as if at the bottom of the ocean,
I wait in the doorframe, listening.
*
15
“I remember,” my mother begins, and I listen closely. She does not often share memories.
She has a handful I get to hear repeatedly, sometimes with variations that reveal a new angle I
hadn’t been aware of before. Less common are stories I haven’t heard before, and I am waiting
to discover which one this will be.
She recalls the sounds of singing, elders reciting pantun, playing drums. My mother
begins patting the dining room table with her palms. I imagine these are large drums stretched
with animal skin, with deep sounds, maybe held in a lap, based on the way she hits the table in
slow, resonant beats near her stomach. My mother’s eyes are closed and she is smiling, shoulders
in motion to a music only she can hear. She has a way of becoming animated, silly—a mode of
interacting with me I remember from when I was a young child, when she would often try to
make me laugh. She is taking on the same persona now, though underneath the exaggerated
movements she makes I can detect a genuine nostalgia, an attempt to coax a buried memory out
of the past.
“People were dancing, singing,” she recalls happily.
I do not think to ask what the occasion was, or where they are gathered, or how often this
took place. I do not know how old she was, which siblings were born yet and joined her, where
her parents—my grandparents—could be found in this picture. The first thing I can think to ask
is, “Do you remember what they sang about? Any lines?”
She stops moving side to side, thinks a moment. “No,” she says. “I don’t remember any
words. Just all the sounds, and the dancing.” With that, we are both transported back to the living
room and I feel I have ruined the spell with my question. A clock ticks in the nearby kitchen.
*
16
Because the pantun began as an oral art form, it is difficult to say exactly how old it is.
Salleh believes that even the earliest written pantuns from over 400 years ago “betray an already
mature form and sophisticated form,” and suggests it may be over 1000 years old (4). Some of
these early examples can be found in the Malay epic, the Hikayat Hang Tuah, as well as the
Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals, which contain stories of heroism that took place during the
era of the Malaccan sultanate.
Before the existence of these manuscripts, the form existed as an oral tradition employed
during such occasions as weddings and the harvest.
*
My mother doesn’t like a translation of a pantun I’m reading, which she comes across
while picking up my copy of her book from the dining room table. Though my mother isn’t
fluent in Malay—since it was not commonly spoken in the area at the time she was growing
up—she still knows some words and phrases. “Duduk diam,” she says over and over. “Duduk
diam. No, the author says this is ‘sits very silent.’ That sounds wrong, I would say ‘sitting still.’
Duduk diam…”
She is making the same face when we have traveled a long way to a Malaysian restaurant
in the Bay Area that we have heard about, from word of mouth or the internet, and when we
finally sit down to eat the food, it is not what she had in mind. “They are catering to American
tastes,” she says; or, “I can tell this place is owned by Malaysian Chinese. They are doing things
more in the Chinese style.”
Sometimes I can see what she means. Even though I only manage to visit our family in
the Malaysian state of Sarawak once or twice a decade, I can easily recall my favorite noodles
served in a plastic bowl at a roadside stall, which seldom came with garnish or julienned carrots,
17
perfectly arranged on a ceramic plate. Missing is the shallow pool of seasoned oil, and the smoky
taste of the same dish cooked all day in the same pot as the vendor hawks over it in an open-air
market.
*
Dayaks—a catchall term for the various indigenous peoples of Borneo—began
composing pantuns following the arrival of two Muslim missionaries on the island during the
Sintang sultanate in 1600. Along with religion and the Malay language, this poetic form was also
spread through the island and were recited in many Dayak languages (Salleh 9).
Though I am not ethnically Malay, I’m fascinated to learn that on the indigenous Dayak
side of my heritage, people have been composing pantuns more than twice as long as those on
the European side. It makes me curious about the occasionally poetic things my mother says in
everyday conversation; I remember, for instance, how she once described taking risks in life:
“You can’t be afraid to step on your own shadow.” I was struck by the simultaneous materiality
and immateriality of the shadow image in that statement, how the metaphor made a shadow seem
like something you could touch, that one must dare to test its tangibility, and strive to not
conduct one’s life based on the angle of light during any point of the day. I’ve often felt my
poetic sensibility came to me through my maternal line, and indirect speech through metaphor
seems familiar and intuitive. I can only wonder how centuries of an oral tradition like the pantun
shapes language and communication, and how much of that was passed down to me over many
generations through a mother who immigrated from a country on the other side of the world.
*
18
While my mother’s memory of the sung pantuns is hazy, she clearly remembers
children’s songs taught in the boarding school, where she learned from English-speaking
teachers from Australia and Europe and North America.
One-two-three-four-five, I caught a fish alive.
Some of these songs I know too.
Six-seven-eight-nine-ten, I threw it back again.
We laugh when I finish the rhyme for her. Sometimes our childhoods seem so different
from each other, but this feels like a shared memory. I forget that our earliest experiences in life
take place decades and half a globe apart.
One song we can’t agree upon:
Kuching’s burning, Kuching’s burning. Fetch the sampan, fetch the sampan.
Mom, it’s London. London’s burning.
She’s not listening. Pour on wot-uh, pour on wot-uh! she dramatically exclaims in a
British accent, and we’re both laughing again.
Fire fire, fire fire.
*
According to The Oxford Companion to Ships and Seas, a sampan is “the typical small
and light boats of oriental waters and rivers. There are two types, the harbour sampan which
usually has an awning over the centre and after part and is normally propelled by a single scull
over the stern, and the coastal sampan fitted with a single mast and junk rig.
“The origin of the name, first recorded in the 8th century, is generally said to come from
the Chinese san-pan, meaning ‘three boards’, but some believe it has a Malayan origin.”
Some sampans feature a cabin, which can provide shelter during longer trips at sea.
19
*
With its four lines, the pantun resembles a house, walled in by its own content.
Or planks in the floor, with sunlight shining between them.
The house my grandfather built was made from planks of jackwood, on stilts ten feet off
the ground. When the river flooded, the house remained above it. When the river was low, I
imagine daylight entering from beneath, the house brightening from all sides.
Now the river is a barely noticeable rope of water running behind the house. It is
inaudible and has not flooded for decades.
Due to environmental changes in the village it is no longer necessary to live suspended
above the land. Beneath the house, a ground floor was filled in with cement. This is the only way
I know it. From outside, it looks like an outgrowth of the dark earth, with a faded yellow house
on top of it.
The bottom floor is a repetition of the top floor, with variation.
20
Chapter 1
The Maritime Pantun:
Early Circulation in the Malay Archipelago and Cultural Appropriation
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time
a document of barbarism.
—Walter Benjamin
In July 2014, I visit the pantun garden at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, or National
University of Malaysia. The taxi driver doesn’t know what the garden is, or where; we drive up
and down the length of the campus, until we spot a chain-link fence and a sign painted in the
university’s colors of blue and white further down the street. The sign reads Taman Pantun,
which might be translated as “pantun garden,” or “pantun park.” A dirt driveway leads to the
park’s entrance.
Figure 1. Sign at entrance of the Taman Pantun (pantun garden), Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia).
21
I have traveled here to study the pantun, a centuries-old poetic form with origins in what
is now the nation state of Malaysia, which I encountered in poetry workshops I’d taken at
California State University, Fresno. So far I’ve spent most of my visit in libraries with
fluorescent lighting, making photocopies from books I’ll read when I get back to the United
States. I seek out the university’s garden mostly for the novelty of it, unsure of what I can learn
here that wasn’t in the archives. Empty of visitors or staff, there’s no one I can turn to with
questions. The garden is not as lush as I expect, the grass dried to yellow in an unseasonably hot
month that will stay upwards of ninety degrees. The humidity makes the air feel heavy, as if my
lungs draw in more heat than oxygen. I ask the driver to return in an hour.
Figure 2. Istana, Taman Pantun (pantun garden), Universiti Kebangsaan
Malaysia (National University of Malaysia).
At the center of the garden stands an elevated, single-room building called an istana, built
of dark wood. Much of what I know about the park and the istana is informed by an article
22
written by journalist Shafizal Musa and posted on the university’s website the previous year. It
commemorates the installation of the park and a ceremony that took place here when it opened.
According to Musa, the istana is more than a century old and “was built for a member of the
Kelantan Royalty,” Kelantan being a state in Malaysia and previously a sultanate. I do the math:
the British were already here a century ago, though often the sultans were kept on as local rulers
to carry out colonial rule or act as figureheads. Today, the entrance to the istana is blocked by a
board of plywood and an orange cone. I take as many pictures as I can without entering.
Figure 3. Detail of Istana, Taman Pantun (pantun garden), Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia).
The darkness of the wood belies the istana’s age; I would have imagined it weathered and
dry, bleached by the sun. But even in the bright sunlight, the wooden planks are a deep brown,
and through the intricate carvings that still retain the sharp angles of the architect’s knife, I can
only see the interior dimly. Nusa notes in his article that “[t]he design and building method used
23
enables the building to be dismantled […] and moved to another location without damaging it.”
It is hard to believe not a single nail holds the structure together. For it to stand here, it had to be
reassembled—by people alive now repeating the movements of those who assembled it in the
last century. I imagine the walls falling open easily. The light would enter, revealing what can’t
be seen from where I stand. The walls join back together, and I turn to the rest of the garden.
Surrounding the istana are “119 fruit and herbal trees and shrubs,” each “provided with a
plaque giving information about the species written in pantun” (Musa). Due to the central
presence of the Malay istana in the park’s grounds, and the local form of poetry marking each
plant, I expected that the atmosphere of the Taman Pantun would be a celebration of local or
national culture. Instead, I’m surprised by the presence of trees and shrubs with global origins:
India, Indonesia, New Guinea, South America, Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia in general, and
“tropical countries” (negara tropika). Europe appears to be omitted, perhaps because of the
difference in environments and climates. Plants that grow in more than one place had these listed
and separated by commas, such as the rambutan tree that grows in both Malaysia and Indonesia.
Armfuls of the fruit lie at my feet, some split open and showing the white center that looks like
an eye without an iris. Thin lines of ants trace the cracked earth, converge on the uncollected
harvest.
On each plaque here is a single quatrain, or four-line stanza of poetry. This differs from
the pantoum as I know it in the West, which is a series of interlinking quatrains, based on a
specific type of pantun, the pantun berkait. If my mother were here, perhaps she could translate
the signs beside each plant or tree. A pocket dictionary tells me their origins easily, but the whole
stanzas of poetry are of course more complex and require more time. Some words I know, like
kelapa: coconut. Some words, like durian, are the same in either English or Bahasa Malaysia, the
24
national language based on Malay. And as soon as I think of their equivalent, I feel a duty to
recall their translations in Bidayuh, our family’s tribe and language: butaan, den. Perhaps my
mother wouldn’t be able to translate fully. Much of her schooling took place during British
colonialism, conducted in English. There was less necessity then to know the language that
would later become a national language.
I take pictures of all the signs with my phone, sure I can translate them some other time.
Though I don’t know how to read them as a speaker of Bahasa, as a poet I can see the way the
words follow the pantun’s ABAB rhyme scheme: ayam / karam, hulu / dahulu, Melayu / berbau,
berbua / Allah, orang / dicanang. Though I don’t know the meanings of most of the words, some
I recognize: Malay, God, person. Beyond these I sense vague meanings and tones, and I can
approximate the pronunciations by recalling the voices of my relatives, the local news on the
hotel television, the prerecorded announcements aired at the airport, my mother’s voice on one
side of phone calls.
Later I translate one of the signs, for a tree designated as jambu mawar. Simply finding
out what fruit grows on this tree was a challenge, as the literal translation is “guava pink.” The
Latin name beneath—syzygium jambos—turns out to be a better lead, and I learn the fruit is
known by many names, though the most common seems to be “rose-apple.” Below this is the
place of origin, India. This three-line header—local name, Latin name, origin—is the format for
all the signs, and the quatrain follows in larger font.
Di tanah pamah bertanam pisang
Ditanam berselang si jambu mawar
Pulang ke rumah hati nan tenang
Isteri meradang apa penawar?
25
Figure 4. Tree with plaque and pantun verse, Taman Pantun (pantun garden),
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia).
As with any translation, there are many options for each word, depending on context. I guess at
the meanings, and somehow certain words seem more fitting than others:
26
In the lowlands planted bananas
Later planted rose-apples
The distant heart returns quietly home
What cure is there for a wife seeing red?
Unfamiliar with conjugations in Malay, I’m not sure if the translation lacks a pronoun. Is there
an “I”? Is the speaker the husband who, after a day of planting trees, must return home to an
uncertain home life? Or could the speaker be the wife herself, busying herself in the lowlands,
then referring to the self in a detached third-person? The translation is ambiguous to an outsider
like me. And yet ambiguity does not need to result in an absence of meaning but can be the
starting point of inquiry.
I begin this chapter with my experience at the pantun garden because it was the moment
in my research that most clearly demonstrated the stark contrasts between the pantun form that
originated on the Malay peninsula and the pantoum form as I knew it from examples and texts in
contemporary American poetry. In this first chapter, I provide a brief overview of the pantun
form as described primarily by several prominent Malaysian scholars, framing this analysis for
an American audience in particular.
My purpose in beginning this dissertation with a chapter devoted to the pantun is to
foreground its history prior to European colonization, and to resist as much as possible—at least
for one chapter—examining the pantun primarily in relation to the Euroamerican pantoum. My
approach is informed by the methods of Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih in Minor
Transnationalism, who call for examining minority cultures apart from majority cultures to avoid
framing the conversation primarily through comparison and assimilation. “Critiquing the center,
when it stands as an end in itself, seems only to enhance it,” they write. “[T]he center remains
the focus and the main object of study. The deconstructive dyad center/margin thus appears to
27
privilege marginality only to end up containing it. The marginal or the other remains a
philosophical concept and futuristic promise: the other never ‘arrives,’ he or she is always ‘à
venir’” (3). Although in the larger scope of this dissertation, the Western pantoum is the center,
in this chapter I delay bringing in the latter for as long as possible—so that the pantun may fully
“arrive” in the conversation I construct, before moving on. Instead of describing the pantun only
as the Oriental counterpart to the pantoum in the West, my goal is to decenter the latter and
recenter the former so that we may more fully understand the original form before considering
later iterations elsewhere.
Acknowledging that the Malay pantun is worth its own consideration separate from the
Western pantoum, I write this chapter and dissertation as a whole for an American audience in
order to unpack the form’s precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial history beyond the Malay
Archipelago. Furthermore, I write this chapter for an American audience because I suspect that
this is the contingent that needs to read it: from my survey of Malaysian scholarship in English,
the Western adaptation of the form is more of an interesting aside in the scholarship rather than a
matter of serious study to their audience. The longstanding history of the pantun form in
Southeast Asia for at least five centuries, and its many deep-rooted functions in cultures
throughout the Malay Archipelago, seem to far outweigh for scholars in this region any of the
relatively recent fascination the form has garnered from Western poets who have only selectively
adapted certain characteristics of the original form. I cannot fault Malaysian anglophone scholars
for the scant work on a relatively derivative form of their poetic tradition, though I wonder how
Western pantoums that demonstrate a vested interest in the form’s colonial history might be
received. My goal is to highlight the aesthetic and sociohistorical aspects of the form that
28
American poets and scholars ought to understand and appreciate if they wish to make any
meaningful engagement with the pantoum.
On Types of Cultural Appropriation and a Case for a More Nuanced Understanding of the
Formal Qualities and History of the Pantun
Before exploring these underexamined aspects of the pantun form, some discussion of
cultural appropriation is necessary. Philosopher James O. Young makes important distinctions in
various types of cultural appropriation with regard to art and also outlines the range of harm such
appropriation can have on members of the originating culture. By better understanding the
pantoum’s adaptation by Western poets as a particular type of cultural appropriation, and
evaluating the extent to which it might harm or be in alliance with larger processes of harm to the
originating Malay culture, I argue that a more nuanced understanding of the pantun is critical for
Western poets writing pantoums if they wish to write from a place of resistance to, rather than
complicity with, the colonial processes that brought the form to the West.
Young defines appropriation as the “use of something developed in one cultural context
by someone from another culture,” which could either be “unobjectionable” or “objectionable.”
He also notes the difference between appropriating “complete works” and “artistic elements” (4).
I would classify the pantoum as fitting in the latter, as it’s a form that provides the “building
blocks of art” that the poet would still need to engage to create their own original poem, though
dependent on the appropriation of the form for its creation. Young is careful to insist that the
classification of appropriation does not in and of itself “necessarily carry with it any moral
baggage” and depends upon the type of appropriation taking place. These five types, as defined
by Young, are object appropriation, content appropriation, style appropriation, motif
appropriation, and subject (or voice) appropriation. Without going into all the definitions of
these, I’ve determined that the pantoum might be thought of as motif appropriation, as Western
29
poets are not typically reproducing specific pantuns or their subject matter or style, but rather,
influenced by the pattern of repetition and circularity that are the constraints of the pantun
berkait form.
Though this project specifically considers Western poets’ use of the pantoum form in
writing their own poems, there is a valid and necessary argument one can make about the clear
case of object appropriation with regard to the earliest written records of pantun in Jawi script
that are housed in European museums. This is not my particular focus, but it nonetheless points
to an important feature of “outsider” colonial cultures’ relationship to this poetic tradition
produced by Malay “insiders” and other cultures of the Archipelago, who cannot access the
works of art produced by their own cultures, including Southeast Asian scholars. This is a case
that certainly merits closer examination and critique elsewhere; though I cannot delve into this
kind of appropriation to the extent it deserves, I would nevertheless argue that such artifacts
should absolutely be returned to the members of the cultures that produced them.
The example of museum artifacts as object appropriation is also a helpful contrast to the
individual writing of pantoums as motif appropriation, which is the focus of this dissertation
examining pantoums written by “outsiders” of the originating culture. Classifying different types
of cultural appropriation is important, Young argues, because it is related to whether it causes
harm or not, and if so, to what extent (18). An outsider culture’s appropriation of an object, such
as an early and rare inscription of pantun verses, is theft because it is literally withholding
something from the originating culture; and while also writing poems in pantoum form is also a
kind of appropriation, it is not the kind of theft that deprives the insider culture of anything. A
poet who writes a pantoum in the United States is not preventing a poet in Malaysia from writing
one. Aside from theft, Young also notes that appropriation can harm through offense to the
30
insider culture, through misrepresentation or a violation of that culture’s norms. If the writings I
have consulted from Muhammad Haji Salleh, Ding Choo Ming, and Katharine Sim are
representative of the sentiments of the Malay community, then it seems that the cultural
appropriation of the pantun by Westerners is not offensive, but rather, a curious literary practice
occurring elsewhere, and which has no significant effect on the pantun tradition. As a member of
the diaspora and relative outsider in America, I can’t feel justified to be offended on behalf of
Malays and Southeast Asians in that region.
At the same time, even relatively benign cultural appropriation merits the outsider culture
paying a certain debt to the insider culture. I argue that it behooves Western poets who write
pantoums to be conscious of certain aspects of the form and its history. This is the point at which
I disagree with Young’s conclusion that all art is dependent on borrowing and influence, and that
in this spirit, his suggestion that cultural appropriation in the arts is largely harmless—with
exceptions made for the theft of objects, and the offensive misrepresentation of cultures. He
insists that he is “sympathetic to the members of these cultures [that have been appropriated], but
the source of most of their grievances is not cultural appropriation. Rather racism, xenophobia,
religious intolerance, and other forms of bigotry are to blame. Cultural appropriation in the
sphere of the arts has contributed very little to the state in which disadvantaged minorities find
themselves” (153). Young fails to interrogate the relationship of appropriation to the forms of
bigotry he blames for oppressing others; at least in the case of the pantoum, cultural
appropriation of this form by Westerners was only made possible by colonialism, which has
harmed Malay culture and modern Malaysian society in a myriad of ways. As we shall see in
chapter 2, the form was another kind of exoticized cultural export; but unlike spices or textiles, it
is an infinite resource as a cultural tradition that can be reproduced in art. Though the creation of
31
pantoums by Western writers does not directly contribute to the oppression of others, the form’s
importation was made possible by oppression. One might also argue that creative appropriation
of the form can normalize more harmful acts of appropriation and outright theft.
Therefore, I propose that poets in the West can write pantoums without being entirely
complicit in the appropriation of the form through becoming more knowledgeable of the original
pantun form and the history surrounding its appropriation, and the extent to which the adapted
pantoum in the West has changed. In particular, my hope is that American scholars of this form,
and authors of pedagogical and reference texts, include the following information for the benefit
of fellow scholars and American poets who write pantoums:
I. The pantun form has many variations throughout the Malay Archipelago, but the single
quatrain is the most common
II. The four-line pantun is comprised of two parts, the pembayang and the maksud
III. The pantun serves many functions in Malay and surrounding cultures, such as celebrating
the harvest or participating in courtship
IV. Originally an oral form, the pantun’s structure is reflective of the music of the Malay
language
V. Though the form is originally Malay, it has been adapted by neighboring cultures
throughout the archipelago, though the definition of the pantun may differ between
groups and the form may be known by different names
VI. The circulation of the form throughout the Malay Archipelago was made possible by
maritime trade between precolonial kingdoms
VII. Malay examples of the pantun as well as the perspectives of Southeast Asian scholars
deserve to be considered in American criticism on this form
32
The last section of this chapter that follows will explore the eight points above based on
my survey of Western and Malaysian scholarship on the pantun and pantoum. In order to play a
supportive role in the decolonization of the pantoum explored in the final chapter of this
dissertation, American poets should consciously and critically engage in the form’s postcolonial
legacy and participate in a conversation across the Pacific rather than a unidirectional taking.
Key Features of the Pantun Form
Inspired by Agha Shahid Ali’s work on what constitutes a proper ghazal from his
introduction on the Arabic verse form in Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, I would
argue for the following aspects of the pantoum form be included in future American texts on
craft and also ought to be basic knowledge for any American poet who wishes to write a poem in
this form:
I. The pantun form has many variations throughout the Malay Archipelago, but the single
quatrain is the most common
Although poets in the West are most familiar with the pantun berkait, in which lines
repeat through interlocking quatrains, the most common form of the pantun throughout the
Malay Archipelago is actually a single four-line stanza. According to Malaysian scholar
Muhammad Haji Salleh, the predecessor to the pantun quatrain was simply a couplet, but the
form expanded to include four lines to allow for more complexity and “rumination” in the still-
brief form (15). Similarly, the linked pantun berkait form, which would inspire the Western
pantoum, was developed from the single quatrain to give poets greater flexibility. He offers a
helpful comparison of the pantun and the pantun berkait by explaining that the former is “not
able to narrate a sequence of events. It is a form to catch the moment or a singular fleeting
experience. A successful way out is the linked pantun or the pantun berkait, composed of a
sequence of quatrains that repeat two lines from the preceding quatrain” (17). Salleh goes on to
33
briefly mention other variations on the pantun, including the berbalas pantun, a call-and-
response between a man and woman in courtship; and the pantun alif ba ta, which he describes
much like the abecedarian that Western poets and scholars of poetry will know, as each verse
begins with consecutive letters of the alphabet (18).
Because of the form’s orality, it’s difficult to trace the developments of these variations,
or even a definition of the word “pantun.” Salleh located the earliest written definition in a
Malay-English Dictionary from 1701, in which the pantun was transliterated as “pantoon” and
merely defined as a “meeter, rhime, verses, a poem” (Bowrey qtd. in Salleh 4-5). In 1907, E. O.
Wilkinson classifies the pantun as a “simile” and “proverbial saying” (Wilkinson qtd. in Salleh
5). Wilkinson’s Malay student, the mononymous Za’ba, defines it as “the oldest mode of verse
and Malay in its origins. Even before Malays knew how to write they were already well-versed
in the pantuns and were used to answer each other in the form” (Za’ba qtd. in Salleh 5).
The contemporary French scholar and poet, François-René Daillie, in a book-length study
of the pantun form from fieldwork on the Malay peninsula, writes with much disdain for the
Western pantoum and therefore is not interested in exploring that branch of the form’s global
genealogy. He describes the Western pantoum as a “superficial and approximate adaptation
made by our [i.e. the French] Romanticists and some of their followers from one of the various
forms assumed by the Malay pantun, the pantun berkait” (21). He goes on to explain his
disinterest in considering either the pantun berkait form in Malay culture or the Western version
it inspired, because he is “not very fond of pantun berkait, mainly because they tend to become
so to speak mechanical. The longer they grow, the farther astray from the original idea in the first
quatrain” (26). This is subjective, of course; while Daillie appreciates the cohesion of the
traditional pantun constrained by the four lines of a single quatrain, going “astray” delivers its
34
own pleasures: surprise and delayed satisfaction. Furthermore, for this particular study, I read
this formal quality of going astray in the linked form as a metaphor for the pantoum’s migration
and return.
II. The four-line pantun is comprised of two parts, the pembayang and the maksud
The organization of the pantun as a single quatrain is dependent upon the metaphorical
mechanism at work within it, giving this form a binary structure. As mentioned previously, the
pantun was born from proverbs that began as couplets. The first line provided an image, and the
second explicated that image as a lesson. Salleh offers the following example:
Ada ubi, ada batas,
Ada budi, ada balas.
Tubers in the ridge,
Kindness will see repayment.
In this earlier iteration of the pantun, we can see that at the core of this form is metaphor-making.
The second line about kindness being returned does not need the first line about tubers, but that
is the poetic impulse, and what transforms the proverb to poetry. The preceding image suggests
that what is invisible will become visible with time, though in the moment of the brief poem, we
are still waiting.
Considering this binary construction, a more nuanced way of viewing the pantun quatrain
is as two couplets. The first couplet is the pembayang, the preceding image, and the second is the
maksud, a lesson that can be drawn from the image. Together they make the pantun’s quatrain.
The pembayang usually consists of the “elements of the environment,” which function as the
“preparatory images” of the pantun (11). For Malays, agrarian life historically provided many of
the everyday images related to cultivation of crops like rice padi as well as tending to orchards
and gardens. “The Nusantara peoples were especially sensitive to their environment,” writes
35
Salleh, invoking the ancient Javanese term that literally means “archipelago” to include Malays
as well as the peoples of the surrounding island cultures. “[T]hey read nature as signs, or
metaphor for the human condition. […] They knew the trees, the flowers, the fish, the valleys
and mountains intimately. They interpreted them and their ways so that they might learn the
lessons of living” (13-14). At its core, the function of pantun was to synthesize the sensory
details of daily life while also being instructive about how one should conduct their life. The
symmetry of the poetic form suggests holding self and nature in balance. Salleh describes the
pembayang as a “mirror” for understanding human nature, and cites a famous proverb to explain
this philosophy: “Alam terbentang menjadi guru, nature is spread out to be a teacher” (7).
Finally, the pembayang foreshadows the maksud not only thematically through metaphorical
imagery but also through its construction by preparing the reader or listener for the rhyme that
will follow. The pantun features both end rhymes and internal rhymes, and each line frequently
has a caesura in the middle. The use of rhyme and rhythm further emphasizes how nature is a
reflection of human life, using parallel structure and sound to bring these two realms—the
ecological and the human—into symmetrical balance.
In More than a Pantun, Malaysian scholar Katharine Sim echoes Salleh’s observations
about the push and pull tension in the relationship between pembayang and maksud. Whereas
Salleh describes these elements in more lyrical terms, Sim’s take on the pantun’s halves is more
prosaic: “Generally the first two lines describe a place. […] Afterwards comes the story, the idea,
the feeling, the essence” (13). Sim’s interpretation invites the reader to move beyond
consideration of the tubers in the ridge as metaphor, but suggests a speaker or figure in the poem
who may be literally standing in the ridge contemplating action and expectation.
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III. The pantun serves many functions in Malay and surrounding cultures
Salleh, having written extensively throughout his career on the pantun and Malay poetry
and literature in general, has explained at length the function of the pantun in Malay society. I
will not reproduce that work here, but wish to highlight three aspects: the form’s accessibility to
members of society at all ranks, its usefulness in daily life, and its role in other forms of
literature.
Because the pantun has historically used everyday language and common imagery, it is a
form for people of all stations in Malay society. Anyone can be a pemantun, or writer of pantun
verses; it is a form for “all groups of people, from the farmer to the Prime Minister, from the
shaman to the young housewife” (Salleh vi). Therefore, we see pantun playing many roles in
daily life, including fishing, hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming. Salleh gives a brief
overview of the nature of the way of life for Malays historically:
Most of it was backbreaking and monotonous work, which had been lightened by sharing
the burden and by singing [pantuns]. Sometimes the members of the community gathered
together. The occasions might be at rice or sugar-cane harvesting times. Food was often
contributed by the host and it might turn into a feast, as in many areas the planting,
reaping, winnowing of padi were communally carried out. However, communal work
was also a place where boys might be allowed to meet girls and given a chance to
exchange words, often enough through the pantun, in song or in spoken replies. On days
like these, social constraints were relaxed to allow possible romance and marriage. (21)
In other words, singing and reciting pantun verses has been woven throughout Malay life, from
the fields to ceremonies. As a form associated with manual work, we can also imagine this as a
contributing factor to the tradition’s orality, as the voice and mind were free to compose and
recite poems even as the poet’s hands were occupied with a particular task. Some of the advice in
pantuns are related to adat, which is a broad term that includes laws and traditions related to
personal conduct, especially in Muslim communities. The “themes and functions of the adat”
range from “advice to the young in human relationship, to care of the old, to the division of
37
property after the death of parents and the like” (25). Salleh cites an adage: “Hidup dikandung
adat, mati dikandang tanah—in life we are contained in adats (customs), in death we are
contained in the earth” (24). Adat pantuns, then, trace the contours of such a container for life,
giving form to the values by which a Malay should live. Not only are pantun verses recited in
these contexts of daily life and serve various functions, but they can also be found in longer
works of literature. Somewhat similar to discovering a complete sonnet embedded in a speech
gien by a character in a Shakespeare play, Malay epic poems like the Hikayat Hang Tuah contain
pantun verses that draw attention to a particular moment in the narrative and can be understood
both in isolation and in the context of the story.
IV. Originally an oral form, the pantun’s structure is reflective of the music of the Malay
language
The musicality and form of the pantun is related to the repetition of sounds in the Malay
language itself (Salleh 13). For instance, the word “child” is anak, but its plural—“children”—is
the word said or written twice, anak anak. Or, frequently heard in airports and bus stations:
penumpang penumpang, which means “passengers.” This is, of course, an aspect of the form that
can’t be translated into English, but provides further insight into how repetition overall functions
in the pantun berkait form.
Furthermore, understanding pantun requires a set of knowledge that suggests, even in
translation, much is lost in the poem’s removal from its geographical and cultural context.
Without the culturally specific knowledge of symbolic significance of images, and the music that
accompanies it, the meaning of pantuns is uncertain for the cultural outsider. The pembayang,
which foreshadows the pantun’s proverb (maksud), relies on imagery that is informed by
culturally specific symbolism. Katharine Sim insists that “to enjoy the pantun one must learn
something of its special symbols” (13). She uses the example of a specific flower: “the bunga
38
kiambang, the pale mauve floating water hyacinth that grows profusely in Malaysia,” which is
meant to represent a “symbol of love that may not take root” (15). A pantun that makes use of
the image of a hyacinth might be partially lost on a reader, in terms of its implications for failed
love, if she is not versed in such symbolism. She can imagine the hyacinth in the pembayang and
perhaps find a satisfactory parallelism in the maksud’s proverb—or, the two halves of the pantun
may seem like unexplained juxtapositions, into which she cannot fully enter.
Patah pasak di dalam kemudi,
Patah di ruang bunga kiambang,
Kalau tidak bertemu lagi,
Bulan terang sama dipandang.
The wedge is broken in the rudder,
Broken in Hyacinth’s well,
If we don’t meet again,
We can but look at the same full moon.
The non-Malay speaker is at a particular disadvantage because symbolism is sometimes
informed by linguistic factors, such as rhyme, which do not neatly translate. For instance, sweet
basil—selasih in Malay—“always means lover, because it rhymes with kekasih” (28).
Tanam selasih di tengah padang,
Sudah bertangkai diurung semut,
Kita kasih orang tak saying,
Halai-balai tempurung hanyut.
I planted sweet basil in mid-field,
Grown, it swarmed with ants,
I love but am not loved,
I am all confused and helpless.
V. Though the form is originally Malay, it has been adapted by neighboring cultures
throughout the archipelago, though the form may be known by different names
In light of the previous point about the interconnectedness between the Malay language
and the pantun’s structure and music, it is necessary to highlight that this form is originally
Malay (Salleh 4). This is a distinction from saying it is “Malaysian,” because Malaysia has only
39
existed as a nation since 1963, its borders more reflective of British control over the land than
ethnic or cultural cohesion. (One can argue that the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah on
Borneo, for instance, have more in common culturally with the adjacent Indonesian state of
Kalimantan on the island, rather than the Malay peninsula across the South China Sea.)
On the other hand, the pantun as a poetic tradition has spread throughout many parts of
Southeast Asia due to centuries of maritime trade, which predates the arrival of Europeans.
Therefore, to say the pantun is only Malay is also erasing the majority of its history, and risks an
Orientalist essentializing that Daillie risks when he suggests that the “discovery of the pantun is
in close connection with that of the country where it was born and of the people who gave birth
to it, which I will henceforth call Malaya and Malays as distinct from today’s political notions of
Malaysia and Malaysians: inseparable from them, I should say, both as one of the emotional
channels of my love for this part of Earth and as an expression, not to say the most
comprehensive expression for the sensitiveness, culture[e] and civilization of its original people”
(Daillie 1-2). His project appears Orientalist in its search for a Malay history untouched by
history and politics. While I also move away from the pantun described as a “Malaysian” form,
my reasons for doing so are decolonial: I wish to highlight the impact of colonialism and its
relatively recent national project of “Malaysia,” comprised of the Malay peninsula and the states
of Sarawak and Sabah, and briefly Singapore before it became its own independent country
following the end of British colonization. In contrast, Daillie’s project is ahistorically Orientalist,
viewing the pantun as the “unique, original and delicious fruit of this country and people, of their
language, from their remotest past to their present,” with the emphasis on an imagined static past
and a disdain for a rapidly changing present (2).
40
In contrast, Ding Choo Ming writes of the pantun’s continued contemporary relevance in
the postcolonial era as a form of transnational solidarity. In light of the region’s participation in
the intragovernmental organization ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) since 1967, Ding suggests that economic efforts are not enough to ensure the
prosperity of Southeast Asia in a globalized economy, but a signifier like the pantun has the
potential to create cultural cohesion. He notes that “nearly all ethnic groups in Nusantara have
pantun in their own languages,” from at least “39 dialects of the Malay language and 25 non-
Malay languages in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Indonesia” (93). Ding lists the many
varieties of pantun with their respective sites:
pantung in Manado, wanton in Kerinci, ende-ende or umpasa in Tobak-Batak, parikan in
Java, sisindiran in Sunda, kalang in Bajau, wewangsalan in Bali, pamiula in Iranun,
sudawil in Kadazandusuun, babendang kapata in Maluku, kalindaqdaq in Mandar,
ungut-ungut in Padangsidimpuan, North Sumatra, sengo-sengo in Putu Ulunna Salu, and
nyuriah in Selum. (93)
Without going into the genealogy of the form or which variety might precede another, Ding
privileges the simultaneous and multiple. Furthermore, he celebrates the hybridization of the
form that accompanied migration and cultural mixing: “many ‘non-indigenous’ ethnic groups in
Nusantara have also produced pantun of their own. This includes the Baba and Nonya,
descendants of the Chinese, the Chetti, descendants of Hindus and Muslims, and the off-springs
of the Portuguese. This fact gives the pantun […] a wide multicultural significance” (95). By
bringing the poetic form to the present state of interethnic relations, Ding makes space for future
connections that are not limited to the past, as Daillie suggests. Ding openly laments that the
younger generation is losing its sense of local heritage, and the pantun could remedy cultural
erosion as well as further strengthen responses to the pressures of Western globalization—a
41
process initiated by European colonization. Daillie seems incapable of admitting Europe’s role in
the destruction of the Malay culture he claims to love.
VI. The circulation of the form throughout the Malay Archipelago was made possible by
maritime trade between kingdoms before and during colonialism
Because it is a form practiced among many ethnic and linguistic groups, the definition of
pantun can vary. The Iban tribe, for instance, uses “pantun” to mean “a song or an old saying”
(Salleh 6). When I asked my own mother, whose family belongs to the Bidayuh tribe, what
“pantun” meant, she simply said, “poetry.” I find it interesting that the term “pantun” defies
Western needs to define and contain. But from my limited survey of the anglophone literature by
Nusantara based scholars as well as those from Europe, is that the heart of the pantun tradition is
the single quatrain containing a maksud and pembayang, that it serves multiple functions in
Malay society and throughout the archipelago, and that many variations of this form exist.
Figure 5. International Exhibition on Malay Manuscript in the Shape of a Boat,
Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (National Library of Malaysia).
42
Salleh traces the form’s earliest circulation to the Srivijayan Empire on the island of
Sumatra and its influence over the hundreds of ethnic groups throughout the archipelago in the
eighth century, predating trade with Europeans. He also offers a fascinating example during
colonialism, when the British exiled Malays to Sri Lanka and the transported pantun tradition
there became inflected with Sri Lankan ecology, cultural sensibilities, and local languages. (9)
He locates written examples of pantun from the fifteenth century in the historic port city of
Malacca, on the western coast of the Malay peninsula, written in Jawi—an ancient script using
the Arabic alphabet, reflecting the influence of Persia and Arabia on the Malay archipelago
during the maritime silk trade.
Figure 6. Pantun Indera Quraisy from Sri Lanka in original Jawi script,
Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (National Library of Malaysia).
43
VII. The contributions of Southeast Asian scholars deserve to be included in American
criticism on this form
In his article, “Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?,” Ariel
Heryanto presents the field of Southeast Asian studies as one that was formed by Western
scholars in Western institutions, and is progressively becoming more relevant and interesting to
Southeast Asian scholars in Southeast Asia. Although poets in the United States may not turn to
scholarship produced within Southeast Asian studies to learn more about the pantoum form, but
rather, reference texts that focus more on the form’s structure and aesthetics, Southeast Asian
studies has much to offer students of poetry and scholars of poetic formalism with particular
interest in this form, even in brief entries. Not only should more of these scholarly contributions
be included in entries on the pantoum form, but specifically Southeast Asian scholars. If any are
cited, it is often Salleh, as in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and my hope is
that he at least becomes universally cited; since he seems to be the preeminent scholar writing in
English on this form, his work is accessible to a broad anglophone audience suited to bridging
this divide between scholarship by the formerly colonized and colonizing. Heryanto has pointed
out that “it is no longer forgivable for outsiders to engage in any scholarly endeavor in this area
of study without some consideration of the unequal relationships between them and those they
study. There has been a general consensus on the need for expanding further the space and
respect for Southeast Asians as speaking subjects and fellow analysts, rather than silent objects
of analysis” (16). I realize I am calling for a rather long bridge to close this gap: from American
craft texts on the pantoum to the discipline of Southeast Asian studies and the need for more
Southeast Asian scholars in both. Salleh, however, sees his project as one of “decolonising my
own past and my work,” having been educated in the United States (viii). Decolonization can’t
44
be left only to those who remain in decolonized territories, and those residing in the lands of the
colonizing are obligated to make space for these voices.
Conclusion
Daillie passionately critiques the “American writer” who favors the French iteration of
the pantoum rather than the “original and genuine form” from Malaya, and especially takes issue
with any justification for such if the “authentic model” might be considered “primitive.” While I
agree that American scholarship owes a larger debt to the original pantun form, I also feel that
the French appropriation of the form is an important trace of colonialism that ought not to be
erased. Both can and should exist in the scholarship, at least in America where the pantoum is a
relatively well-known form amongst contemporary poets and deserves to be understood in its
historical context and cannot be merely written off as inauthentic. Furthermore, for poets of color
and particularly those of Southeast Asian descent—like myself, and for Shirley Geok-lin Lim
and Barbara Jane Reyes, whose pantoums I examine in chapter four—the Western pantoum
nonetheless preserves something worth retaining, however changed it may be through its long
transmission through Europe. It reminds me of the universal resourcefulness of immigrants who
manage to continue their traditions to the extent that they can with the materials available, no
matter that the dish is lacking the exact ingredients, that substitutions may be made. It’s also my
modest hope that this study will also give poets of color a fuller picture of a “minor” tradition
made mainstream, and its history—not to satisfy a reader like Daillie in search of authenticity or
purity, but to give all writers the history that has been lacking, the greater context that might
complicate and deepen our readings of poems written in any version of this form.
Although the chapters that follow depart from the Malay Archipelago in order to trace the
pantun’s (post)colonial trajectory to Europe and the United States, I am compelled to reiterate
45
that the pantun is not a static form in contemporary Malay society and surrounding cultures of
the region. I ask the reader to keep this in mind, even as my analysis after this chapter moves to
pantoums written by Charles Baudelaire and the attitudes of his contemporaries in the next
chapter, and eventually to John Ashbery, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Barbara Jane Reyes. I hope
that the sensory details of the pantun garden will stay with the reader, however neglected or
ignored it may seem, because it grows despite what writers and scholars do in another
hemisphere.
46
Chapter 2
The Colonial Pantoum:
Entanglement with the Other in Baudelaire’s “Evening Harmony”
One of the earliest appearances of the pantoum outside Southeast Asia, Charles
Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du soir” (or “Evening Harmony”) can be read both as a poem about a
lost love and a troubled account of relations with the colonial Other. This chapter provides a
close reading of that poem from his collection Les Fleurs du Mal published in 1857, illuminated
by Baudelaire’s own theories about beauty and history in his essay, “The Painter of Modern
Life.” He became familiar with the form through Victor Hugo’s notes to Les Orientales, which
includes a pantoum among other “Oriental forms” translated by Ernest Fouinet. In these notes,
Hugo betrays an attitude of colonial entitlement to these literary traditions as if they are mere
acquisitions. Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s poetics suggest an ambivalence toward colonialism if
we consider Les Fleurs du Mal as a genuine if imperfect effort to humanize the oppressed and
honor the complexity of a stratified Paris that can be extrapolated to the level of the global.
Reading his pantoum as a conversation with the Other, I examine how Baudelaire constructs a
dialogue across space and time, and the way in which the form’s dual nature and repetitive
movement give him access to the overlapping and binary aspects of beauty he identifies as
“modern” and “eternal,” but might also be substituted with the categories of “colonizer” and
“colonized.”
In order to follow this thread of binary thinking, I consult T.S. Eliot’s eponymous essay
on Baudelaire in which he expounds upon the opposite forces of good and evil throughout the
older poet’s collection, from a religious—and heretical—standpoint, which provides important
insights into the ritualistic imagery of “Evening Harmony.” Walter Benjamin’s concept of the
47
“shock” in modernity is useful to locate the balancing point of the binaries throughout
Baudelaire’s pantoum; the form’s structure acts as a corrective to the surprise of the shock
through repeating the encounter with the colonized and turning the Other’s strangeness into
familiarity. My intervention is then aided by two contemporary critics, Françoise Meltzer and
Françoise Lionnet. Meltzer’s concept of “double vision” is grounded in a historical materialist
approach, building upon Benjamin’s focus on Parisian modernity and the anxiety it produces in
Baudelaire’s work to speak to this particular poem, “Evening Harmony.” Lionnet, although
concerned with poems by Baudelaire not in pantoum form, models a noncanonical reading of
Baudelaire through a postcolonial lens that Meltzer lacks, insisting that his poetry criticizes
rather than reifies colonial dominance. Ultimately, I show that Baudelaire’s “Evening Harmony”
is an example of mimicry-in-reverse, to turn on its head a term I borrow from Homi Bhabha.
Rather than forcing the colonial Other to mimic those who hold power, Baudelaire mimics the
knowledge produced by the colonized in a power reversal that exposes the dynamics of their
entanglement, and produces a new mode of encounter, more intimate than estranged.
Responding to and integrating these voices that span a century and a half, this chapter
historically situates Baudelaire’s pantoum in a colonial context and demonstrates through close
reading how the form is particularly suited to poetic subjects where history and geography meet
to reveal the hybridizing entanglements between those with varying levels of power. It also
provides a bridge from the form’s Malay origins, as described in the previous chapter, and
eventually to the writings of American poet John Ashbery, as discussed in the chapter to follow.
My purpose, then, is two-pronged: to contribute to studies of Baudelaire from a postcolonial
approach, as well as to excavate some of the colonial means and attitudes by which the pantoum
48
was able to be appropriated from the Malay Archipelago by Baudelaire and his European
contemporaries—a cultural transaction that American scholarship on formalism often ignores.
Before examining Baudelaire’s pantoum “Evening Harmony,” it will be helpful to
understand how the poet gained access to this form in the first place and my purpose for focusing
on this poem in particular. The previous chapter details the oral beginnings of the pantun from as
early as the fifteenth century, as well as its circulation beyond the Malay peninsula and
throughout the archipelago, where it remains a cultural tradition today. Because this dissertation
seeks to trace backwards the route of the pantoum from the standpoint of contemporary
American poetry, I follow this particular trajectory of the form through Baudelaire, though it is
one of many. In order to arrive at the United States in the final chapter, I credit John Ashbery
with its popularization here—as explored in the following chapter, where I note how he was
likely influenced by Baudelaire’s work while he lived in France. Therefore, this chapter
examines Baudelaire, because although he was not the only nor the first to write a pantoum
outside of the Malay archipelago, he was perhaps by extension the most influential for American
poets writing pantoums today. Other European writers of the nineteenth century that precede him
include the English orientalist William Marsden, who published A Grammar of the Malayan
Language, and German poet Adelbert von Chamisso. To follow these other routes out of
Southeast Asia and into Europe unfortunately goes beyond the scope of this particular project,
but hopefully other scholars will fill in those branches of the form’s genealogy.
With this particular trajectory in mind, I look to a “pantoum Malais” (Malay pantoum)
translated into French by Orientalist and poet Ernest Fouinet, and published in the notes to Victor
Hugo’s Les Orientales (see Appendix A). I am less concerned with Fouinet’s translation of this
49
pantun berkait into French, but rather the way Hugo frames the poem with his own commentary,
revealing an attitude that diminished the pantun literary tradition to a mere colonial acquisition.
Preceding the pantoum, his comments can be translated as, “Now we end our excerpts with a
pantoum or Malay chant, a delicious originality” (Nous terminons ces extraits par un pantoum
ou chant malais, d’une délicieuse originalité).
1
Whether we translate délicieuse literally as
delicious, or entertain other possible synonyms in English—wonderful, charming, delightful—
Hugo’s characterization of the form’s originality is in terms of its value as he perceives it and the
pleasure he derives from it. Scholar Geoff Ward, in his essay “The Pantoum, and the Pantunite
Element in Poetry,” explains convincingly that Hugo’s importation of the form “can be
understood in this historical context as having been coopted in one of the classic feints of
Orientalism—to contain what is other, and therefore threatening, by miniaturizing it beautifully”
(294). Hugo’s evaluative reference to the pantoum strikes me as less invested in the specific
contributions of the form to his understanding of global poetic formalism but rather a superficial
inclusion meant to entertain than inform, an afterthought in small typeface buried in his “notes,”
and an act of appropriation that severs the tradition from its originating culture. Following his
transcription of the example poem, Hugo admits, “We have not tried to put an order on these
quoted examples. It is a handful of precious stones we take randomly and in haste from the large
mine of the Orient” (Nous n’avons point cherché à mettre d’orde dans ces citations. C’est une
poignée de pierres précieuses que nous prenons au hazard et à la hâte dans la grande mine
d’Orient) (266).
1
While this appearance of the pantoum is often cited in scholarship about the pantoum’s transmission into European
and American poetry, I have yet to find an English translation of Hugo’s notes, whether as a primary translated
source or in secondary sources. I am indebted to USC librarian Dr. Danielle Mihram for her generous assistance
with the original French of Hugo’s text as well as her own expertise in nineteenth century French poetry.
50
This colonial and Orientalist approach to the pantoum can be traced, albeit with more
complexity and ambivalence, in Baudelaire’s poem “Evening Harmony,” which appeared nearly
three decades after Hugo’s Les Orientales. Although the poem initially seems to describe flowers
at night and is empty of people, in the final line a speaker (“I”) is revealed and addresses an other
(“you”). The flowers, then, seem to stand in as metaphors for the two people that eventually
appear, and the poem is marked by oppositions and contrasts throughout, offering the suggestion
of dialogue before we come in contact with the intimacy in the address. On one level, the couple
might be read as a pair of lovers that have parted; on another, as a representation of the fraught
relationship between colonizer and colonized. I argue that existing scholarship supports the idea
that Baudelaire had ambivalent feelings about life in Paris not just as a flâneur but also as a
citizen of the metropole at odds with the colonized periphery. Before developing this historical
analysis, I offer a close reading of the poem itself as a touchstone for the rest of this chapter,
exploring first the metaphor of the lovers and to make possible the consideration of the
colonizer/colonized dynamic I propose. (See Appendix B for the full text of the poem in the
original French and an English translation by Richard Howard.)
Although the previous chapter referenced some of the variations on the single quatrain of
the traditional pantun, Baudelaire’s poem the Western pantoum as following the conventions of
the pantun berkait variation of the form, which builds one quatrain upon the next through
weaving new lines alongside repeated ones. Although this type of pantun can hold as many
quatrains as the poet wishes, Baudelaire’s poem only contains four, like a fractal: the four blocks
of text on the page suggest a macro quatrain and reflect the symmetry and tension within the
content of the poem itself. Baudelaire’s images both seduce with lush description and disturb the
reader by upending expectations. The opening line reverses a natural association of flowers with
51
sunlight by setting the poem at night, an appropriate if foreboding setting for the lovers: “Now
comes the time when swaying on its stem / each flower offers incense to the night” (lines 1-2).
The flowers’ scent is further personified in the lines that follow, as “phrases,” a “waltz,” and a
“spell.” (3-4). The flowers seem to participate in human activities: speech, dance, ritual. This
hints at the relationship between two people that is revealed in the final line and raises the
emotional stakes without the reader knowing what is to come.
In the second stanza, the night time is more specifically associated with romantic
heartbreak and longing, adding to the mood of heartbreak with objects standing in for people. A
violin is compared to a “heart betrayed” through simile, and the starry sky becomes a “mournful
altar” (6, 8). The heart trope continues the work of synecdoche in the third stanza, standing in for
the melancholy lover, though this time the heart is described as “tender,” and the corporeal
imagery devolves into “the sun […] smothered in its clotted blood” (12, 14). With the sunrise,
the poem has progressed from night to morning; but rather than providing relief from the night’s
anguish, the day offers only another variation of the lover’s pain. This is because the daylight
serves as a reminder of the relationship’s extinguished light: “A tender heart unnerved by
nothingness / hoards every fragment of the radiant past” (13-14). The sun’s radiance seems to
mock the lover’s mood, such that he prefers the evening’s mirroring of his own disposition. This
succession of imagery and figurative language create intimacy and vulnerability, and the
repetition through the pantoum form only intensifies this mood in preparation for the revelation
of a speaker addressing the reader.
This symbolic reading of the flowers and nighttime scene reaches its highest pitch in the
final line: “In me your image—like a monstrance—glows” (16). The first and only indication
that the poem contains a speaker who addresses the reader, this last line colors the whole poem
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with the dynamic of the relationship between two figures. Because the lover is glowing followed
by violent imagery, this further supports the speaker’s disdain for light and day. The symbol of a
monstrance—the cross-shaped vessel that displays the Host in Catholic masses—suggests the
speaker is like a receptacle made to contain the addressed lover. This creates a powerful contrast
to the earlier “mournful altar” that “ornament[ed] the sky” at night, in which a comparison was
drawn between stars and altar candles; the sun as our nearest star is not soothing and distant but
giant and unbearable, a religious object covered in blood.
T.S. Eliot, in his essay simply titled “Baudelaire,” explains that the elder poet’s use of
religious themes is more than simply referencing Christianity in his work but a working-through
of his ambivalence toward what the Church would characterize as evil in opposition to what is
good. Eliot writes that “Baudelaire is concerned, not with demons, black masses, and romantic
blasphemy, but with the real problem of good and evil” (389). As the title of his collection Les
Fleurs du Mal suggests, Baudelaire suggests that evil can take an aesthetic form, and therefore
has value and worth. Eliot makes the argument that the collection as a whole is essentially
interested in investigating evilness as it is perceived—through portraits of sex workers,
alcoholics, Jews, and others associated with sin in French society at the time—not to
sensationalize or exploit these individuals for the way they live, but rather to draw attention to
instances where humanity is undervalued and to open up the possibility of spiritual redemption.
In the context of his collection, we might read “Evening Harmony” in particular as a lament for a
sinful—and therefore, doomed—relationship. The religious imagery haunts the speaker, and yet
the two lovers become merged with this sensory details, together embodying an object used in
worship, the monstrance. We can extend Eliot’s argument that Baudelaire’s collection represents
a social critique that challenges religious values within French society, and read this pantoum as
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a critique of French society as a colonizing force that externalizes its own inequities at the global
level.
Though Eliot does not examine “Evening Harmony” in particular, he does comment on
Baudelaire’s craft and his hunger for new approaches to writing that might better reflect the
changing nature of modern life—which was dependent on colonies to generate the resources and
wealth that made urban life in the metropole possible. Noting how Baudelaire is “[i]nevitably the
offspring of romanticism, and by his nature the first counter-romantic in poetry” (386), his
imagery reflects “the sordid life of a great metropolis,” and Eliot attributes to him an “invention
of language, at a moment when French poetry in particular was famishing for such invention”
(388). Though the pantoum was not one of Baudelaire’s inventions, his use of the form was
novel, and its repetition mirrors his ambivalence toward good and evil that his collection
earnestly explored. Relevant to form in particular, Eliot offers that in Baudelaire’s work, “the
content of feeling is constantly bursting the receptacle” (386). The pantoum offers Baudelaire a
new vessel for his uncertain feelings, allowing him to make all assertions twice: each statement
is eventually revised for a new context or meaning. This doubleness is suited to opposites: good
and evil, love and despair, the acquisitions of colonialism and the exploitation they represent. If
we read the poem with opposites in mind, he seems to offer unexpected ones: a “tender heart”
against the “vast, black void” (line 10), and the “sun” in congealing “blood” (line 12). These two
pairings have in common dramatic differences in scale: the smallness of a heart and infinite
darkness, the largeness of a single sun against what seems like an indefinite amount of blood—
though blood within one body is of course finite, and vital.
Indeed, the reference to the monstrance in the final line is a key to reading the poem as a
whole: “your image” is contained in the speaker, the colonial Other is contained in the colonizer,
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and his pantoum is a vessel that preserves the record of its originators. This final line is
additionally striking because it marks a dramatic break from the circular pantun berkait form.
Rather than recuperating the two unrepeated lines from the opening stanza, this last stanza
introduces two new ones. The effect is the feeling of a pantoum left unfinished and unresolved.
This is heightened in Richard Howard’s English translation, as his version does not reflect the
rhyme scheme of the French. In Baudelaire’s original, the first stanza’s end words
(tige/encensoir/soir/vertige) set up the ABBA rhyming pattern, which subsequent stanzas
reproduce with both repeated and new lines (encensoir/afflige/vertige/reposoir in the second
stanza, etc.). The faithfulness of the poem’s rhyming offers a counterbalance to the poem’s
failure to repeat its opening line for its closure. In just sixteen lines, Baudelaire walks the fine
line between faithfulness to the original form and departures from it, making his pantoum an
incomplete adaptation that wavers between acquisition and loss.
Baudelaire as Time and Space Traveler
The doubling established in the pantoum’s form—as well as the effect of breaking its
pattern of repetition—is a textual representation on the page of Baudelaire’s outlook on the
doubleness of beauty in art. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire writes that he intends
“to establish a rational and historical theory of beauty, in contrast to the academic theory of an
unique and absolute beauty” (3). As the title of his essay indicates, he is specifically
interrogating what constitutes the modern, and situating what is beautiful within history. His
purpose is “to show that beauty is always and inevitably of a double composition, although the
impression that it produces is single. […] Beauty is made up on an eternal, invariable element,
whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element,
which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its
55
emotions” (3; emphasis mine). In his theory of beauty’s “double composition,” Baudelaire
believes that the best art ought to reflect the values of the time in which it is made as well as
transcend that era to attain a timeless beauty that can be forever appreciated by those who behold
it. I extrapolate Baudelaire’s reflections on time as also being bound up in notions of place, and
how the conditions of one place in an era of colonialism make possible the conditions of another.
We recall the opening line of his poem—“Now comes the time…”—which also seems to
suggest, “Here is the place.” He did not conceive of beauty as a spectrum or arc, and he did not
identify a middle space, or any other form to his theory. Rather, beauty is something found here
and now, which art makes possible to appreciate again at some other time and place. The night of
which he writes has passed, and the flowers have wilted, but the poem preserves this moment in
present tense for a future reader somewhere else. Therefore, that Baudelaire would theorize
beauty as binary in this way—the moment of capturing it in art, and the moment it is received by
its audience—makes his use of the pantoum form a natural one to represent the appreciation of
art itself: by repeating lines in a new stanza, Baudelaire is portraying the “double composition”
of beauty that becomes deeper and more complicated when it is received in new contexts.
This doubled quality of beauty is not just experienced by those who appreciate art, but
also uniquely by those who create it. In a section of the essay titled “Mnemonic Art,” Baudelaire
insists that this art comprises “two elements” (another binary, of course): “first, an intense effort
of memory that evokes and calls back to life—a memory that says to everything, ‘Arise,
Lazarus’; the second, a fire, an intoxication of the pencil or the brush, amounting almost to a
frenzy” (17). Again, we see Baudelaire’s propensity to order things in pairs. He believes the
artist must be loyal to how things truly are in the world and represent them accurately, but in the
spirit of pure inspiration and urgency during the time of recording it. This approach to creating
56
art parallels his theory of beauty by dividing it into the temporary and the eternal. Artists, in a
particular moment in the present, dutifully record a memory of the past so that they may be
powerfully reunited with the eternal. Of course, the artist of Baudelaire’s time had to rely on
memory more than present day artists, as the average consumer today has all manner of
technology to record the present. For a poet who values memory’s ability to resurrect what has
already transpired, the pantoum could also act as a mnemonic device that doubles its efforts in
reconstructing a scene, to give a second attempt of accurately retrieving a past moment, for both
writer and reader.
With “Evening Harmony” in mind, we can apply Baudelaire’s own ideas about beauty’s
double composition as well as the temporal duality of creating art, and why the pantoum would
have been especially suited to his sensibilities. In a poem ultimately about relationships—an “I”
that addresses “you,” a speaker addressing a lover or a colonial Other, perhaps even an authorial
“I” speaking to the readerly “you”—the poet may have been especially conscious of the beauty
of a past moment he recollected for a future reader to receive in another place and time. Lines
such as, “each flower offers incense to the night,” repeats the poet’s memory into the reader’s
present experience when it appears again in the next stanza. Similarly, the “heart betrayed” might
be yours, or mine. All art is a means of time travel and role reversal for Baudelaire. The pantoum
form’s built-in rules regarding order and space guide poet and reader through a disorienting
experience, simultaneously defamiliarizing and refamiliarizing each line when it repeats though
in a different place.
These various oscillations—between “you” and “I,” the present and the past, here and
there, good and evil—hinge upon what Walter Benjamin called the “shock” experience of
modern life. In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin noted how the poet utilized
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the sonnet to capture a sense of place and time rupturing in one chance encounter. In
Baudelaire’s poem, “A une passante,” or “In Passing,” Benjamin argues that the “sonnet supplies
the figure of shock” through the brevity of its fourteen lines (169). The “shock,” of course, is
what Benjamin had identified as the abrupt and sudden disturbances a city dweller experiences
while navigating within a crowd. The sonnet’s short length is able to capture a moment of shock,
dropping the reader into a situation and concluding it as quickly as a random encounter with a
stranger who keeps walking, a “lovely fugitive / whose glance has brought me back to life” (lines
9-10). The shock is the point of collision between self and other, in which time and place
collapse into a single moment. Since “Baudelaire placed the shock experience at the very center
of his artistic work,” we can follow the effect of the shock experience in his experimentations not
only with the sonnet but also with the pantoum form (163).
Whereas Benjamin shows how the Baudelairean sonnet reenacts the shock experience
through its brevity, I propose that the his pantoum mitigates this shock through repetition and
return. The latter form can restore the “aura,” or the ability to look back, which is impossible in
photography and difficult in an urban crowd since one can look but is not necessarily seen in
return (Benjamin 189). This is “the price for which the sensation of the modern may be had: the
disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock” (194). Had “Evening Harmony” been
written as a sonnet, we can imagine the abrupt declaration of a line such as, “a tender heart
unnerved by nothingness” that would appear only once in such a contained form. But in the
pantoum, we have the chance to encounter this line in two contexts:
The violin trembles like a heart betrayed,
a tender heart unnerved by nothingness!
A mournful alter ornaments the sky;
the sun has smothered in its clotted blood.
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A tender heart unnerved by nothingness
hoards every fragment of the radiant past. (lines 9-14)
This is the opportunity that urban life seldom offers, or does so only if we happen to have
serendipity on our side: to see again and recognize a stranger made familiar. The “lovely
fugitive” from the sonnet “In Passing” is never seen again, but this “tender heart” is bound to
return in a pantoum. While the shock experience is magnified in the closed form of the sonnet,
the pantoum’s circuitous form can diffuse the shock. Through its formal rules, the pantoum
makes a promise that what is lost will be recovered, though in a new place and with renewed
significance.
If we consider Baudelaire’s adaptation of the pantoum form as an act of translation—
from Malay pantun berkait to French pantoum—Benjamin offers further insight into how this
form operates within the poet’s approach to mitigating the shock and to turn toward more
enduring experiences of human relationships. “[A] translation issues from the original—not so
much from its life as from its afterlife,” writes Benjamin. “For a translation comes later than the
original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at
the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life” (71). But the
pantoum is not a single work of world literature: it is a poetic form, a blueprint intended for
reproduction. This capacity for reproduction was discussed in the preceding chapter, as well as
its adaptability into other languages and cultures throughout the Malay Archipelago. But
Baudelaire’s usage of the form—as well as Hugo’s, and other European writers of the nineteenth
century—is a significant modification to the literary tradition in that it only retains the features of
the pantun berkait variation, which braids repeated lines in a set pattern, as opposed to the more
succinct quatrain that lends itself to a myriad of variations. In this way, I suggest that the
European pantoum is a kind of “afterlife,” to use Benjamin’s word, or perhaps more accurately, a
59
separate parallel existence—since pantuns continue to be written and performed in Southeast
Asia.
Baudelaire further explains that “a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the
original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making
both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as
fragments are part of a vessel” (78). With these ideals in mind, I return to Hugo’s unfortunate
admission that the pantoum was just one of “a handful of precious stones we take randomly and
in haste from the large mine of the Orient,” without much more information about the tradition
for Baudelaire to keep in mind when he wrote “Evening Harmony.” Randomness and haste are
qualities quite opposite to the love and detail Benjamin upholds as standards for a successful
translation. Though the parallel I am attempting to draw between linguistic translation and
formal adaptation is an imperfect one—since one applies to a particular text and the other a set of
rules for poets creating original texts—I am nevertheless interested in drawing attention to the
break made in these two iterations of the pantun in the colonial periphery and the pantoum in the
core, and also consider what has been lost and omitted in such haste. Baudelaire’s poem can be
read as a processing of these failings to adequately translate the form in one cultural context to
another.
Baudelaire’s Double Vision and Mimicry-in-Reverse
Perhaps Baudelaire was conscious of the tensions between his reproduction of a formal
poem that originated in another part of the world, and can be attributed to his “double vision” as
theorized by Françoise Meltzer in her book, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity, and in
which she dedicates an entire chapter to “Evening Harmony” in particular. In the introduction,
Meltzer argues this double vision is split between “one of the world as it was, and one as it is.
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[…] I argue that it is a vision in which the past has not yet caught up with the present, and in
which the future seems threatening” (5). In other words, Baudelaire’s poems take place in a
break between the idealized past and the precarious present, seeing both simultaneously but
unable to reconcile them or move forward into the future. Because the pantoum doubles each of
its lines, images, and assertions, Meltzer’s choice to analyze “Evening Harmony” supports her
reading of his poetry as occupying two timeframes, the past and the present.
However, Meltzer’s analysis of this pantoum only briefly considers its formal rules—or
perhaps takes its doubleness as a given without much elaboration or exploration. For all of her
concerns about historical context, she never brings up colonialism, limiting her sense of history
only to time and not geography. She myopically focuses on Baudelaire’s France in the past and
present: “the Paris before Haussmann, and the Paris during and after its redevelopment; France
before the revolution of 1848, and France in the increasingly triumphant capitalist culture that
followed; the death throes of the ancien régime with its unraveling social fabric, and the preening
bourgeoisie with its nouveau riche self-satisfaction that touted social utilitarianism and ‘good
works’ to repress political guilt and crass mercantilism” (1). This reader would rather apply the
framework of double vision to France and the Malay Archipelago, as one needs to depart
France’s national boundaries for colonialism is the engine that made “redevelopment,” “capitalist
culture,” and “mercantilism” in Baudelaire’s Paris possible, and likely contributed to the poet’s
anxiety about the present moment and location in which he was living.
Indeed, double vision is a key feature of mimicry in postcolonial studies, as theorized by
Homi Bhabha. However, Bhabha’s concept of mimicry speaks to the expectation that the
colonized adapt and reflect the colonizer’s culture. Of course, the problem with such mimicry of
values such as freedom or self-determinacy is that it contradicts colonial power over people it
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oppresses. This is the “menace of mimicry,” “its double vision which in disclosing the
ambivalence of colonial discourses also disrupts its authority” (88, emphasis in original). I
propose a fusion of these two ideas: Meltzer’s double vision in Baudelaire’s poetry at the
national level with Bhabha’s mimicry that critiques colonialism through double vision. In doing
so, I argue that Baudelaire’s pantoum can be understood as performing a double vision that looks
beyond the core to the periphery, an attempt to reflect the Other through a mimicry-in-reverse.
This mimicry-in-reverse is different than what Bhabha identifies as the fetish. Hugo’s
Orientalist fascination with the pantoum might be characterized as a fetish for the culture of the
colonized, though his notes referred to a Malay pantun berkait translated to French, as opposed
to Baudelaire’s original composition borrowing this form. In the case of Hugo, Bhabha might
note how this type of fetish “mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes
them,” which is an interesting though separate point than the one I wish to make about
Baudelaire (91). Rather, “Evening Harmony” strikes me less as a fetishized take on another
culture than an earnest attempt to utilize the pantoum form as a means of addressing the Other.
His access to the form is made possible by colonialism but does not fetishize the acquisition; it
turns colonial mimicry inside out, looking back to the colonized rather than the other way
around. It is an attempt to repair the aura—the ability to return the gaze of the other—lost in the
shock of modernity in an era of colonialism.
Though Meltzer neglects to view France’s tumultuous nineteenth century as part of a
larger global interdependence, her close reading of “Evening Harmony” does make important
distinctions about the original French that may not translate with the same significance into
English and supports my argument that Baudelaire’s use of the pantoum form traverses time and
space to repair the aura. Most notably, she highlights how the poem’s first line is actually an
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“announcement of two (or more) times: ‘Voici venir les temps…’ [in which] ‘time’ is in the
plural, adding a certain vertigo, a loss of balance, to the already vertiginous poem. The plural of
time adds to the quivering of the stalks (as does the preponderance of v’s in the poem), as if the
vibrations themselves created a blurring of vision, a doubling of time, and a greater profusion of
flowers” (204). Though Richard Howard translates this line to mean, “Now comes the time,”
because the singular makes the most sense in English, Meltzer helpfully points to the plural of
temps so that “Now come the times” would be the more accurate translation and would prepare
the reader of the original French for the “doubling of time” that occurs throughout the poem. The
doubled lines of the pantoum form, naturally, creates this effect of transportation in our reading
of the poem, moving us through the sequence of its repetitions like an echo. We recall from the
previous chapter that pantuns began as an oral tradition of call-and-response between poet and
audience, and Baudelaire’s mimicry-in-reverse generates a dialogue with the originating culture
of this form.
The simultaneity suggested by this first line, in which the reader is invited to experience
more than one sense of time, is fully integrated into a single cohering image by the final line.
When the poet writes, “In me your image—like a monstrance—glows,” what had initially been
experienced as quivering and vibratory by Meltzer is now still and contained. Though Baudelaire
has chosen to break the pantun berkait form by not repeating the opening line of the poem for its
conclusion, the reader who is familiar with the form is nevertheless invited to bring them
together as a mirror. The effect of this aesthetic choice both disrupts our expectation of a closed
circle, but still offers an image that pulls in the disparate threads of the poem into a unified
vision. The “hoard[ing of] the fragments of the radiant past” becomes “clotted” and enclosed—in
the monstrance, the pantoum form itself becoming a vessel that orders the disorganized.
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Though the past is irretrievable in everyday life in the sense that we can only exist in the
present, the poem achieves the impossible by allowing us to inhabit more than one moment and
creating a cohesive whole from that duality. Meltzer points out that the speaker’s “capacity to see
in the fading light of the present-as-place the unchanging luminosity of memory itself […] gives
back the vision of a vanished past and simultaneously keeps it within the confines of that which
cannot be recaptured” (233). And yet, something has been recaptured and contained. Had
Baudelaire composed it without the structure of the pantoum form’s repetition and sequencing,
such as the sonnet form he employed in “A une passant,” the poem would be absent of the
woven effect of the lines that resurface in subsequent stanzas, as well as the coherence to what
otherwise lacks a discernible shape. Similarly, the form achieves a sense of equanimity when the
final line gestures back to the beginning, even if not perfectly mirrored. This is a different kind
of doubleness than what Meltzer identifies. Her attention to time, and the anxieties it produces
through contemplation of the past and the future, leaves little room to consider whether this form
is an attempt to transcend a linear understanding of time, that moves in one direction from the
past into the present and out toward the future. Ironically, the formal structure of the pantoum
liberates Baudelaire from the tyranny of time that only ever moves forward; instead, we move
forward and backward, reintegrating and reconsidering each line we read twice.
I build upon Meltzer’s concept of double vision in Baudelaire’s poetry—of the past in
conversation with the modern present—by suggesting that “Evening Harmony” enacts a
simultaneity that places the older pantun tradition in direct engagement with his pantoum of
French modernity and colonial power. Meltzer observes that “for Baudelaire as well as for much
of the underclass he describes, the code is missing for comprehension—there is no coherent
narrative to explain the upheaval and chaos of the city, its new social classes, its new money
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system, its inaccessible (for the poor) and yet apparently indispensable (for the bourgeoisie)
commodities” (240). In the pantoum, Baudelaire is perhaps trying out a new “code” for
understanding the current times: not only marked by national class struggles but enmeshed with
colonial systems of oppression. Given that Baudelaire’s poetry advocates for the humanity of the
city’s “underclass,” it would make sense for him regard the global “underclass” by looking
beyond the approaches that would earn approval from the intellectual elite and instead write in a
form that has been adopted from the periphery rather than the core. Perhaps for Baudelaire, the
horror of the present is not only the space in which we can observe the nostalgic past and the
fearful present, but also becomes a potentially transformative place of engagement, a mediated
shock. His employment of the pantoum performs a hybridization that is not either/or but rather, a
third space where times and spaces converge to reveal their entanglement. The form becomes a
cultural and literary portal, connecting Baudelaire and his readers to a product of colonialism—a
jewel of the Orient, to recall Hugo’s phrase. The double vision Baudelaire wields in the pantoum
form unmoors the reader from the present time and place, casting us outward. When “Evening
Harmony” fails to return us to its opening line, I read this as a metaphor for the pantun that has
been transformed by the European poets who adapted it, the Benjaminian “afterlife” of the
pantun that has been translated and exists separately as the pantoum.
I conclude this chapter with contributions by Françoise Lionnet, who has published two
articles on Baudelaire from her working monograph on the poet that specifically examines his
work from a postcolonial standpoint. Where this chapter diverges from Lionnet’s larger project is
her focus on the content and subject matter of Baudelaire’s poetry, while my own study is
concerned, of course, with form and the pantoum in particular. Lionnet usefully provides a
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methodology that I wish to replicate here as I trace the pantoum’s transmission to Europe via
Baudelaire, Hugo, and their contemporaries.
In “Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and
Vernacular Languages,” Lionnet provides a noncanonical reading of Baudelaire informed by his
biography, in particular his travels as a young adult to Bourbon and Reunion in the Indian Ocean.
After graduating college, the poet’s stepfather put him on a boat set for India in an attempt to
curb his bohemian lifestyle, but he disembarked before the ship made it to that destination. Much
of Lionnet’s article brings to life Baudelaire’s travels to these islands that inspired poems like
“To a Creole Lady” and “For a Malabar Woman.” Through her close readings, Lionnet argues
that, despite his exoticizing gaze, critics have not given him enough credit for his inclusion of
local knowledge and creole words, and the way in which his poems make space for voices that
were not widely read, even if mediated through his own voice. Her piece resists both the
uncritical acceptance of Baudelaire as a canonical author and a wholesale writing-off of his work
as objectifying and exoticizing: she sees in Baudelaire’s work a genuine effort to make space for
the colonized Other despite his limitations as a Frenchman of his time. My objective in this
chapter has been to take a similarly evenhanded approach to Baudelaire and resist similar
polarities of opinion in his use of the pantoum. While attempting to avoiding the tendency of
many American scholars who give Baudelaire uncritical credit in popularizing the pantoum form
in Europe, I have also resisted the idea that he merely exploits the form as a colonial acquisition.
Because I see in his work a genuine attempt to cast marginalized members of Parisian society at
the time as deserving subjects in poetry—sex workers, alcoholics, Jewish people, and more—he
is not reifying this hierarchy but rather, attempting to make space for voices that lie outside the
dominant narrative. Similarly, he does not employ the pantoum in order to assimilate or
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domesticate it, but rather, sees in it the radical potential to depart from accepted literary forms
and confront his readership with a poetic tradition that originates outside of Europe, however
fraught that transaction may be.
Although Lionnet concedes that Baudelaire exoticizes—and perhaps fetishizes—his
feminine subjects in the Indian Ocean, he nevertheless draws attention to their lives in a literary
landscape that did not often include them at all. This inclusion, while imperfect, was radical for
its time. She insists that the poet “contributed more to making other cultures and languages
visible and present within mainstream French literature than his critics are willing to grant” (65).
By contemporary standards, his poetry may strike some as dehumanizing in its flair for the
exotic, and still deserves our critical reading. But when contextualized by the mainstream beliefs
of his time, Lionnet reminds us that Baudelaire’s work was provocative and revolutionary in its
outlook on life on the islands of the Indian Ocean. His poetry goes beyond mimicry and fetish,
beyond “radically revalu[ing] the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, and
history” by elevating the knowledges of the colonized (Bhabha 91). His depictions are more
complicated and human than mere stereotype, informed by his firsthand experiences. Lionnet
asserts that “a poem can be the site of a multiplicity of voices, including the reported or indirect
speech of the local women […] however mediated they may be” (66, emphasis mine). In other
words, though we as readers are unable to hear the voices of these women directly, Baudelaire’s
imperfect transmission of them through his poems is preferable to their erasure or simple
caricature. With this in mind, I propose that scholars of the pantoum in the Euroamerican context
similarly consider Baudelaire’s use of the form as the site of a multiplicity of literary traditions:
neither a dehistoricized adaptation or a fetishization, but a mediated transmission, a mimicry-in-
reverse that destabilizes colonial power. His choice to use the pantoum as the formal vessel of
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“Evening Harmony” is a rare instance in which a literary tradition from a colonized part of the
world is given a platform to engage a European readership. Furthermore, that this is a poetic
form and by its nature seeks to be reproduced and enshrines the instructions for its own
proliferation, Baudelaire has interestingly made room for this literary tradition to exist and
continue alongside those ‘native’ to Europe.
One might suggest that this iteration of the pantoum is inauthentic to its origins, as
detailed in the opening chapter, and that Baudelaire’s poem is an act of violence that severs the
form from its cultural beginnings. Of course, restoring those links is the goal of my project, and
is not possible at all without the initial “taking” (Hugo’s word) of the poetic form paired with the
Baudelairean sensibility throughout his oeuvre that highlights experiences from the margins.
Lionnet, in her mission to complicate her readings of the poems which take the women of
Bourbon and Reunion as their subject, asserts that her approach to Baudelaire (which I also
adopt) “resist[s] the temptation either to eulogize the innovations of the poet of modernity or to
denounce the patent racism of his images. The challenge today is to return to the scene of writing
and the conditions of production of the early poetry—in other words, to look at the text from
outside of conventional literary, critical or cultural history, to reclaim it for our side, that of a
more global francophonie” (Reframing 63, emphasis in original). She acknowledges what can be
problematic about the content of Baudelaire’s poetry but doesn’t make proving it her objective;
instead, she recreates the “scene” that explains why he wrote poems in the way he did, and the
space it creates for representation and new voices.
In a later article, “‘The Indies’: Baudelaire’s Colonial World,” Lionnet points to the
poet’s travels and the increasingly mobile world in which he lived as the conditions that made
possible his poems about women in the East Indies. If those poems are the products of his
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mobility, “Evening Harmony” can be read as a performance of that mobility. Lionnet points to
Baudelaire’s fascination with a “mobile colonial world that his poetry helped define for his
contemporaries and for generations of future writers” (724-725). This mobility made possible
poems like “To a Creole Lady,” based on Baudelaire’s own experiences through travel, and
which Lionnet examines at length; this mobility is also enacted in the construction of “Evening
Harmony,” through its traversing of stanzas through the lines it repeats, and the echo it sounds
between France and the Malay archipelago. As noted earlier, not every line repeats, including the
third line of the poem, “phrases and fragrances circle in the dark.” Mobility and circularity
become themes not just reflected in the content of some of Baudelaire’s poems, but in the very
construction of “Evening Harmony,” which, as a pantoum, becomes a means by which the poet
circles back in time and place, a method of transportation and time travel.
The connection between these two poems—“Evening Harmony” in my study, and “To a
Creole Lady” in Lionnet’s—draws closer through Baudelaire’s purposeful diction surrounding
the depiction of colonized subjects. Lionnet helpfully draws attention to his rhymes of “noir”
with “gloire,” “Loire,” and “manoirs,” linking blackness to glory and French manor homes in
“To a Creole Lady.” Although “noirs” has been mistranslated as “slaves,” Lionnet argues that
Baudelaire’s choice of the word “noir” instead of “esclaves” aligns him with the French
abolitionist movement. This observation Lionnet makes about “noir” connoting symbolic and
racial darkness in a particular historical context opens up the opportunity to discuss race in
“Evening Harmony,” which of course is found in the same volume, Les Fleurs du Mal. In the
pantoum, we see the same word “noir” rhyme with “soir,” “encensoir,” “reposoir,” and
“ostensoir.” Blackness is then associated with the evening, incense, an altar, and a monstrance.
Whether intentional or subconscious, Baudelaire has mapped blackness onto a sense of place in
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the former poem, and in the latter, objects and backdrops that act as offerings. If “To a Creole
Lady” is a conversation with his subject and a portrait to the reader, then “Evening Harmony” is
an object that the poet gifts to its reader, the pantoum form being both the poem’s vessel and the
instructions contained therein which we receive to write our own.
Baudelaire’s contribution to the tradition of pantun outside of the Malay archipelago is a
consequence of the colonial era during which he lived and of which he was conscious through
Hugo’s earlier writings. This study is indebted to Lionnet’s research, which highlights the “need
to underscore the worldness of Baudelaire’s writing, […] with the goal not of regrounding
representation in reference but of claiming Baudelaire for a redefined French and francophone
literature that includes the colonial literary and travel influences on his poetry as well as his
legacy in European modernist traditions” (733). Lionnet acknowledges the exoticization in which
Baudelaire participates, and through this chapter I have attempted to show how his appropriation
of the pantun form in its French iteration as the pantoum serves as a reminder of French colonial
history, linking colonizer to colonized.
We can read this as a reification of an unequal power dynamic, or, as I prefer, a unique
reversal of cultural influence however bound within a larger structure of dominance. Rather than
a forced mimicry of the colonizer by the colonized, the pantoum is a literary tradition in which
the colonizer momentarily assimilates to the Other in a mimicry-in-reverse. When we prioritize
the historical context that made this transaction possible, we can, as Lionnet asserts, claim the
pantoum for “our side,” so that it is more than appropriation or fetish, and becomes an influence
upon Euroamerican literary traditions, “an insurgent counter-appeal” (Bhabha 91). Fortunately, a
pantoum is not just created and received as a standalone poem like those that Lionnet analyzes,
but rather, is instructive as a poem in form: it invites the reader to produce it again, and creates
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its own future. Within any pantoum is the pattern of its repeated lines, the number of lines in its
stanzas—the seeds for its reproduction. I want to preserve the history associated with this form,
because a critical concern for history can be a writer’s counterbalance to self-serving
appropriation when participating in a poetic tradition like the pantoum. That colonialism did not
completely obliterate my connection to this form in the way that so many other artifacts and
aspects of cultures have been lost forever, is, I wager at least partially due to Baudelaire’s desire
to portray the marginalized in both Paris and those he encountered during his travels in the
Indian Ocean. In order not to slip into blind appropriation and a universalizing poetics, I call
upon poets to keep this history alive in their practice, as well as educators in their pedagogy, and
critics and scholars in their writings on this poetic tradition.
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Chapter 3
The Postcolonial Pantoum:
Ambivalence and Anxiety in Two Poems by John Ashbery
Scholars of poetic formalism are virtually unanimous in their crediting John Ashbery
with bringing the pantoum to the United States. And yet, this is only one footnote in a long
career of an influential contemporary poet. Numerous critics have written extensively on his
poetry, in part because his repertoire is both various and voluminous. As Susan M. Schultz has
remarked, “[t]here is a meditative Ashbery, a formalist Ashbery, a late-Romantic Ashbery, a
Language poet Ashbery, and so on” (1). In this chapter, I isolate just one of these Ashberys from
the rest—the “formalist Ashbery”—and even more specifically focus on his contribution to
popularizing the pantoum in the United States, connecting his use of the form to the greater
historical trajectory I reconstruct in this dissertation: from the Malay archipelago, through
Europe, and more recently the United States. The early poem “Pantoum” in his debut collection
Some Trees (1956), as well as the title poem in the later collection Hotel Lautréamont (1992),
shed light on the way American poets in the latter half of the twentieth century have engaged
with the pantoum, as well as set the tone for American poets’ engagement (and disengagement)
with the form’s history. I argue that a historicized reading of both pantoums by Ashbery reveals
the form’s capacity to convey feelings of depersonalization of the self and alienation from one’s
“other,” while decolonial movements were taking place in Malaysia and elsewhere in the latter
half of the twentieth century. The fraught introduction of the pantoum during this era mirrors the
debut of new nation-states forming around the world, and both these developments—in poetry
and world politics—required a new way of thinking about power, influence, and authority.
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I begin with “Pantoum” written during this time some sixty years ago because it was the
first noteworthy appearance of the form on the American continent. What it shares in common
with “Hotel Lautréamont” is not only its author, but the presence of French words in their titles:
pantoum as the French renaming of pantun, and “Lautréamont” is a reference to the French poet
Comte de Lautréamont (Herd 36), a contemporary of Victor Hugo who died at age twenty-four
in a hotel. (See chapter 2 for a discussion of Hugo’s role in transporting the pantun to Europe in
the nineteenth century.) Reading these two poems together creates an opportunity to consider the
role of the French in adapting the form for Western use, and the relationship Ashbery and an
English-speaking audience has with the form. More specifically, I suggest that Ashbery has
embedded in these poems a stance of alienation that communicates misgivings about the poem’s
colonial history in light of decolonial movements taking place during the time of publication, and
his further dissemination of the form ambivalently extends that history over the Atlantic in the
United States.
As part of his manuscript selected by W.H. Auden for the esteemed Yale Younger Poets
Prize, “Pantoum” was published in the United States while Ashbery was an expatriate living in
Paris, and perhaps where he encountered it himself while reading nineteenth-century French
poetry (Herd 34). This poem would introduce the pantoum form to poets in his other home base,
New York, and elsewhere in the United States; subsequently, the pantoum continues to be
common in contemporary American formalist poetry. This literary exchange initiated by
Ashbery between Europe and the United States mirrors the pantun’s earlier period of oceanic and
diasporic circulation within the Malay Archipelago, described in chapter one. Ashbery’s poem
acted as the transatlantic bridge between European adaptation of the form, explored in chapter
two, and its American reception, the era and region on which this third chapter makes its focus.
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Like its European predecessors of the nineteenth century, Ashbery’s “Pantoum” is written
in the pantun berkait form, which links its quatrains through repetitions of its lines (see
Appendix C). Visually, his pantoum is bold and regular, with the first word of each line
capitalized and many asserting punctuation marks on the right margin due to its heavy end-stops:
Eyes shining without mystery,
Footprints eager for the past
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,
And what is in store? (lines 1-4)
John Shoptaw has noted that in this “first stanza of ‘Pantoum,’ […] Ashbery dissipates the
sentence and its thesis into piecemeal impressions and signs” (230). Though written in a
plainspoken tone, the images he employs don’t clearly cohere in a setting. The human is reduced
to parts: eyes and footprints. Words like “mystery,” “the past,” and “vague” further disembody
the reader out of time, who must nevertheless attempt to construct an imagined scene that
contains snow and “many clay pipes.” The question raised—“what is in store?”—gives the
reader more wonder than certainty, and points to a future that can’t be ascertained: both because
it is an inquiry without an answer, and because the future has no clear present as its referent.
It’s curious to me that this would be the first pantoum encountered by the American
readership. The human figure difficult to see, as well as the air of mystery set by the poem’s
tone, plays into Orientalist fantasies of the Other as inscrutable, foreign, compelling. That the
poet uses the pantoum form to describe “eager[ness] for the past” not only reflects on the content
of the poem, but seems to suggest that this form is particularly suited to addressing subject
matter that is old rather than present. This point is important to my argument because the
historical model I propose—in which the pantoum moves through maritime, colonial,
postcolonial, and transpacific eras and regions—also holds that the pantun is still relevant and in
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use in globalized Southeast Asia, rather than a static artifact appropriated from the colonized to
be enjoyed by the colonizer.
However, though Ashbery’s pantoum might be read as reinforcing Orientalist notions of
the origins of this poetic form, I want to propose a second reading that might undo such
exoticization by exposing the anxieties of those who are relinquishing their power over the
Other, the events of the world playing out on the page. Perhaps, rather than expressing longing
for the colonial glory of “the past,” this poem may have embedded within it a questioning of
“what is in store” after such a past.
My reading of “Pantoum” presumes a fraught tension between self and other for
additional reasons beyond contemporaneous global movements toward decolonization. One is
that Ashbery’s poem eventually devolves into a dynamic comprised of us versus them: “we” and
“they” (22, 24). Further, the structure of the pantoum is inherently binary, repeating all lines
twice, rearranging its own order as it progresses. The form acts as a mirror for the self to
examine its history by providing a reflection of the Other. The effect is fragmentation and
uncertainty, because the form is always moving around its lines: soon after the reader is offered a
line of verse within a certain context, it reappears as part of a new thought in the following
stanza, and the reader must be able to accept two competing impressions for the poem to hold
together. In a poem constructed by notions of “us and them,” the form creates an instability such
that the reader struggles to construct a reliable image of either side, nor feel as though she has
been placed on firm ground by the poet. Whether the reader identifies with either camps
presented at the end, “we” and “they,” Ashbery does offer some vague introductions to figures
who might comprise either of these groups. As the reader progresses through the poem,
introductions include “those dearest to the king,” the “king” himself, “sirs” addressed by the
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speaker and described as “connoisseurs of oblivion,” a “watchdog,” and “the court.” Of course,
we meet all of these categories of people with power twice, since the lines in which they appear
are repeated in the subsequent stanza.
But what kingdom is this, and at what point in history? The main clue is the “vague
snow,” which if we take somewhat literally, limits us to those regions of the world where snow is
a feature of the weather, and certainly excludes equatorial climates such as the Malay
Archipelago, where the pantoum itself originated. Ashbery echoes the motif of snow, and its
connotations of whiteness and death, through his diction: the “past” is equated with “[t]he usual
obtuse blanket” (5-6), the “sirs” are associated with “oblivion” (12), and the court is described as
trapped within a “silver storm” (22). One line in particular supports this setting as one
somewhere in the global north: “These days are short, brittle; there is only one night” (23).
Whereas locations along the equator stay relatively constant throughout the year in terms of the
length of daylight, Ashbery’s poem suggests we are not only located away from those places, but
also perhaps nearing the winter solstice, in which all seems to be comprised of “one night.”
By the end of the poem, as with any pantoum, the reader arrives again at the beginning
lines, which is where the snow motif was first introduced. In the case of “Pantoum,” Ashbery has
chosen not to reverse the order of the recuperated lines of the first stanza; instead of finishing
with the first line, the poem ends on the third: “Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.”
Although not uncommon to do so, this choice leaves the poem less resolved than other
pantoums. Ashbery does not present a clean circular path, but one that is staggered and
ultimately defers resolution. The final, concrete image of the pipes turns away from the human
figure and points to mere artifacts of the human, which can persist beyond the body. Perhaps for
smoking tobacco, the pipes also carry connotations of music as well as irrigation, suggesting that
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we have more to learn from cultural objects and innovations than people, because our lives are
finite. Like a poem or other piece of literature, the artifact lives beyond its creator.
Questioning the nature of the artifact—its purpose, its origins, to whom it belongs—is for
me the most interesting problem that Ashbery’s poem poses. His poem is itself a vessel for the
pantoum as artifact, especially with its title directing attention to the form, and I read it as a
probing question into where it comes from and from what time. The vagueness about time and
location may have less to do with Oriental inscrutability than a Western anxiety underpinned by
a positivist need to know. It is a worried examination of the idea of authority: of the kind
associated with “kings and leaders,” as well as authors who are responsible to their own
creations. Questions of authorship are, at the same time, matters of authenticity. How do we get
to the root of a thing, its real beginning? And who has the means and the power? Because
Ashbery’s poem uses the French name in its title, it is already a copy once removed from the
original and can never arrive at the answer it seeks. And there is something deeply satisfying and
just about the poet’s refusal to give us answers. Ashbery is often criticized for being opaque, but
his opacity here serves the purpose of diffusing any tendency to oversimplify, or to make easy
generalizations about one group or another.
It is somewhat worrisome, however, that this reading of Ashbery can coexist with the
more Orientalizing one I raise at the beginning of my analysis. On the one hand, we can
approach Ashbery as a reticent vessel for the pantoum’s transmission from Europe to the
Americas. Critical of “king[s]” and “connoisseurs” (11-12), his poem is perhaps self-conscious
of its role in extending the “regrets and amplifications” of the colonial “past” (10, 2). On the
other hand, his poem is abstract enough to invite uncritical readings that might romanticize the
pantoum, its characteristics and origins associated with “mystery” (1), ancient kingdoms
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resigned to “oblivion” and “dying” (12, 2), relegated to the past and unable to be met by the
reader in the present.
Ultimately, I see Ashbery’s poem possessing the capacity for both furthering alienation
of the Other and also calling it into question. Acting as a bridge between Europe and America, he
leaves it up to the American readership to decide what to do with the pantoum form, how to read
it and write within its constraints. He omits himself from the equation in the same way his poem
fragments the human into body parts, and deferring a singular “I” by utilizing a diffuse and
uncertain “we.” Chapter four will examine the pantoum as a complicated inheritance for later
generations of American poets, but for now I continue the examination of Ashbery’s ambivalent
role in the pantoum’s proliferation by turning to a poem he wrote much later in his career, “Hotel
Lautréamont.”
My argument builds upon one forwarded by S. P. Mohanty and Jonathan Monroe in the
article, “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social.” Working “against the popular
misconception of Ashbery as a poet obsessed with the solitary Self and its varying fortunes,”
they instead “suggest that the central concern of Ashbery’s poetic career can only be defined as
the self-world relationship, with an investment in exploring the features of a social voice and
identity” (37). Their analysis of Ashbery’s work is instrumental to my reading because it
supports the idea that his poems are not merely self-reflexive works that examine the speaker’s
interiority, but efforts to reclaim the speaker’s (or speakers’) place within a larger social and
historical context. Rather than attempting to simply ascertain the nature of the speaker’s
subjectivity, as other scholars of Ashbery have done, Mohanty and Monroe seek to draw the
connections between the speaker’s sense of self and the outside world. The way the speaker-self
engages the world is through crisis, “the struggle with spiritual poverty and a movement toward
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the recognition that poetic invention is possible again” (38). In this way, Mohanty and Monroe
go one step further than other critics by assigning a source of and purpose for the themes of
existential despair and loneliness in Ashbery’s work. These feelings are rooted in an inability to
connect with the outside world, and also become the impetus for desiring connection. This
insight is also significant not just to the reading of Ashbery’s poetry for content, but also for
form; put another way, I’m not only interested in what Ashbery writes explaining why his work
reaches outward to others, but how connection is sought through such means as the pantoum.
In these two poems I examine, Ashbery’s sense of crisis manifests as anxiety about the
pantoum as a colonial acquisition and form of cultural appropriation that stands in the way of
meaningful connection to the colonized Other. His use of the form is an act of desire; even if
failing to repair the errors of the past, it is a gift of failure extended to a readership, an imperfect
transmission that makes his readership responsive to the consequences of Eurocolonialism. The
questionable ethics of exploiting an appropriated form became a counter-weight to the more
justifiable need to highlight that history of appropriation and colonialism.
While “Pantoum” introduced the form to the United States, the later “Hotel Lautréamont”
can be read as a sequel to Ashbery’s ongoing engagement with the form while other American
poets had already joined in the American branch of the tradition Ashbery had grandfathered (see
Appendix D). Themes of depersonalization and alienation continue in “Hotel Lautréamont,” with
the metaphor of the hotel conveying the feeling of in-betweenness due to its transitory nature, a
place where individuals encounter each other only in passing. Ashbery himself has explained in
an interview that the structure of his poem is an ideal vessel for this hotel symbolism: “I thought
of the four sections of four stanzas each as being like four floors of a hotel, like the boxes behind
the desk where the keys are hung” (Herd 36). More elaborate than the usual pantoum, “Hotel
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Lautréamont” breaks the chain of quatrains with four Roman numerals to divide the poem in
sections, creating the hotel “floors” Ashbery envisions. If pantoums are generally thought of
weaving lines together, Ashbery’s take on the form in this instance reasserts division,
juxtaposing lines while also separating them from each other. With the French “Lautréamont” in
the title, this is a hotel from the colonial core rather than the colonized periphery, of French
pedigree like its poet namesake more than the Malay pantun, and suggests that the pantoum form
in this location ought to reflect this alienation—rather than the pantun’s original sense of
communalism as a tradition of call-and-response.
Another complex layer to the contrast of Southeast Asian and European poetic traditions
and moods is made as “Hotel Lautréamont” ironically begins with commentary on another poetic
form, the English ballad: “Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society /
working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. / The people, then, knew
what they wanted and how to get it” (lines 1-3). Because the ballad is a straightforwardly English
tradition that originated in England, Ashbery’s poem—written about ballads, but in the pantoum
form—puts the two literary traditions in conversation. Ashbery’s observation that the ballad is a
form made possible through collaboration (“by all of society / working as a team”) references the
form’s history as an oral practice within a group, not unlike the pantun originating in call-and-
response, as discussed in chapter one. While drawing attention to these two forms’ similarities,
Ashbery inevitably also points to their differences. This tension is borne from a desire to
reconcile difference, which is only half-resolved by its unusual structure: written in four sections
of four quatrains each, the poem is sustained for 64 lines, with longer lines occasionally
wrapping beyond the right margin. In doing so, Ashbery retains the longer, prosaic feel of a
ballad telling a story, while honoring the pantoum’s repetitions and circularity (Hirsh 53, 440).
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However, as a ballad the poem fails to deliver any narrative certainty, and as a pantoum its lines
are too long to facilitate memorability. The effect is a poem that furthers distinction between the
two forms rather than synthesizing them, and since the opening lines about the ballad eventually
reappear at the end following the typical pantoum structure, we are reminded that this is a hybrid
form that reifies division rather than resolves it.
In the 60 lines between his bookended remarks on the ballad, Ashbery takes a wide angle
lens and the first person plural point-of-view to describe “[t]he world,” broadening the
geographical scope of the poem to include the opposite ends of the globe from which the ballad
and pantoum originate. He states that the world, “as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving
narrative passé” (10), as if the more narrative ballad has less of a place in the contemporary
moment, making the pantoum a more relevant poetic form for the times. With this line as a
central idea in the poem, it ties together the more linear and narrative form of the ballad to the
circular pantoum form that the speaker employs, the form acting as a kind of antidote to the
world’s “dementia.”
Although the speaker invokes the “world,” the images in the poem are more domestic
than global, offering signs of urban life: “the city,” “hula-hoops,” “the unlit grate,” “a stair” (28,
34, 42, 50). This life beyond one’s house is described as menacing and inescapable, as its
inhabitants stay “indoors,” the “[c]hildren […] imagin[e] a door to the outside,” and “those at
home sit, nervous” (16, 34, 42). The speaker asks at the center of the poem, in the last line of the
second section, “If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?” Nakedness adds another
dimension to the difficulties of linking the domestic to the global, the life conducted indoors to
history played out beyond the home. The poem is questioning the cover a house provides,
clothing being yet another barrier separating the self from everything and everyone else.
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Connoting vulnerability and exposure, house and nation become articles of clothing that can
reveal and conceal. However, it is in the risk of removing the layer between oneself and the rest
of the world where connection can take place.
In the third section, the poet concedes that “all we think of is how much we can carry
with us,” which turns the city-dwellers’ concerns toward material possessions rather than an
ascetic nakedness. He proposes a possible answer to the city-dwellers’ anxieties about the
outside: “It remains for us to come to terms with our commonalty” (46). Easily misread as
“commonality,” the word “commonalty” speaks more to commoners as a section of society,
rather than what all people have in common. Recall in “Pantoum” the preoccupation with the
“king” and his “court” and other people of stature in an undetermined time period; the
“commonalty” in “Hotel Lautréamont” are the leaderless masses in a decidedly more modern
era. In fact the fourth and final section attempts to make sense of the past in order to grasp the
nature of the future: “we must have made some ghastly error. / To end the standoff that history
long ago began / Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?” (54-56). In Ashberian fashion, no
further elaboration is offered regarding the “error.” Instead, the speaker directly addresses the
reader for the first time: “You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns. / Must
we thrust ever onward, into perversity? / Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her”
(58-60). Here, the repeated question of how to continue onward is no longer an interior one, or
part of a collective unconscious of the “we,” but actually a pointed question directed at “you,”
the reader. No answer is expected of us, however, since such knowledge is only possessed by the
night. At this point, perhaps having forgotten that the idea of ballads opened the pantoum, the
poem faithfully returns to these lines at the end, but with a logical twist: “Research has shown
that ballads were produced by all of society; / Only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with
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her: / the people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it” (62-64). Whereas the poem
began with an authoritative stance on ballads backed by “[r]esearch,” it undercuts its assertion by
suggesting that only night knows how ballads came into existence, and research can’t be trusted.
Ending with “the people,” or the “commonalty,” the poem implies that the urban masses can be
thought of as a rebel faction within the “all of society,” having their own desires and agency,
even if at a loss as to how to live out of doors.
John Emil Vincent offers a psychoanalytic reading of “Hotel Lautréamont” that, using
Mohanty and Monroe’s incorporation of the social in Ashbery’s poetry, extends beyond the
anxieties within individual consciousness to the anxieties of a decolonizing world coming to
terms with history. Vincent sees the pantoum form as integral in creating the poem’s affect, with
the repetition as an “attempt to weight words with poetic power, but the attempt comes off as
exasperated and dampened. […] Once poets would have used repetition as a rallying call, say, in
a ballad, but no more—this poet is repeating himself because he’s quite sure his audience is hard
of hearing if not entirely deaf” (79). Aside from Vincent’s ableist appeal to the trope of deafness,
we might interpret his assertion as one that refers to a breakdown in communication and
reciprocity. The pantoum form, when properly understood as a tradition of call-and-response
echoing across time and space, offers a chance to hear and be heard. But keeping in mind the
historical cues from the poem’s title and its commentary on the ballad—and, by nature of the
form its written in, the pantoum—Ashbery perhaps also calls into question the extent to which a
form belongs in a particular language or culture. The poet’s unknown intentions aside, this is the
reading I propose readers and writers of pantoums consider as it relates to the issue of cultural
appropriation.
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Earlier I argued that with his “Pantoum,” Ashbery can be read in two ways: as a product
and extension of colonialism, as well as a means of recuperation for what has been damaged and
lost by that legacy. Vincent theorizes that the form of “Hotel Lautréamont” is “both symptom of
and strategy for dealing with the poet’s feeling that he is yelling into a void. And the invention
the form produces, in recontextualizing lines craftily, reads as the hard work of a really frustrated
poet trying to make his words mean something. If that first time didn’t work, let me try again”
(79; emphasis in original). As opposed to simply the individual poet’s frustration, we could apply
Vincent’s assertion to include a culture’s struggle for meaning-making in an era of
decolonization. The “ghastly error” of colonialism “that history long ago began” is endless in its
repercussions, “thrust[ing] ever onward, into perversity” (lines 54-56).
As disheartening it is that perversity might remain a condition of humankind, this
symptom is also remedied by the pantoum’s ability to insist and insist again, repeating itself into
an assured existence. Mohanty and Monroe have already explored in another poem (“A Wave”)
Ashbery’s propensity to “display[] an acute recognition of the difficulty of turning established
discursive practices to new uses, modulating old habits into new desires” (58). Applying Pound’s
directive of “make it new” to the social, these scholars point to Ashbery’s desire to fashion a new
social paradigm. I extend this mode of thought beyond the “old habits” from a Euroamerican
tradition to include the pantoum as an “old” tradition of another culture transformed into a mode
that is “new” to the speaker. The “difficulty” of this process appears in Ashbery’s pantoums as
anxiety and ambivalence. And yet, with each repetition, the lines seem more permanent; with
every iteration of the form, the pantoum is renewed as an enduring tradition.
Based on comments made in an interview with John Herd, John Ashbery leaves room for
this politicized reading of his work. When asked about his “use of the political idiom” in some of
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his poetry of the late sixties and early seventies, Ashbery responds by saying that politics is just
one of many “tones of voice” he likes to employ. Problematically, he seems to see “the political”
as something that can be isolated in life, rather than a thread that runs through everything:
“[W]ith few exceptions political poetry has the effect of turning me off. Whereas unpolitical
poetry, if it is good, makes one want to behave politically and on other levels as well. Usually
political poetry is preaching to the converted […]. Senators and presidents will probably not
come into contact with it” (35). If we can assume Ashbery strives for “unpolitical poetry,” he
nonetheless leaves a door open for readers to want to “behave politically.” His poems “Pantoum”
and “Hotel Lautréamont,” then, likely were not written to make direct political statements about
the form, but I assert that every poem is political, and I take up Ashbery’s challenge to read
“good” poetry with political interest.
Ashbery’s ambivalence—and indeed his tendency towards opacity in his greater
oeuvre—can be frustrating for a reader. But his treatment of the pantoum stems from a
productive ambivalence. In Fred Moramarco’s reading, “Hotel Lautréamont” has the capacity to
hold ambivalence about its subjects because of its form: “The repetitive and interlocking pattern
of the pantoum creates a sense of two poems occurring simultaneously: one that has been heard
before, and one that is absolutely new. These elaborate repetitions and variations are metonyms
for life experience, both repetitive and new at the same time” (48-49). As Mohanty and Monroe
have argued, Ashbery need not be read as a poet only thinking about the individual in isolation,
the “life experience” divorced from its social context. Perhaps Mohanty and Monroe might
suggest in this instance, as I would, that Ashbery’s pantoum additionally provides commentary
on the social and historical moment in which it was written. I would extend this assertion to the
poem’s formalism, not just its content. “Hotel Lautréamont” presents the pantoum itself as both
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something “heard before”—in Ashbery’s first iteration of it in Some Trees as well as in the
maritime era of the pantun—and yet “absolutely new” to an American readership that keeps the
form at arm’s length, close enough to be utilized but distant enough to retain its foreignness. The
whole poem “illustrat[es] a series of paradoxes: on the one hand, ‘there’s nothing new under the
sun,’ on the other, every artifact produced in our time is utterly new. […] On the one hand, art is
produced by individuals; on the other, it emerges from the collective consciousness of a culture”
(50-51). Moramarco operates in the singular and universal mode here, stopping short of arguing
that—if we stay in the psychoanalytic mode of his argument—art is not static and contained in
the collective consciousness of one culture, but rather, travels along the neural pathways between
cultures, as well as the literal routes of global exchange.
What is “new” and “old,” then, is subjective and a matter of cultural context. If we focus
on the concern with in-betweenness that the hotel image encourages in “Hotel Lautréamont,” our
sense of context is destabilized. As the titular poem of the collection, Moramarco has noted how
the theme of being an outsider estranged from others permeates the entire collection; its readers
are like “visitors to this exotic place called life, which Ashbery calls the Hotel Lautréamont, a
hotel with many different kinds of rooms and, more important, all sorts of people and other
creatures who wander around its corridors and lobbies in all their exotic splendor and amazing
strangeness” (47). Moramarco’s analysis, while almost purely metaphorical and psychoanalytic
in its reading, deserves to place one foot in the literal and material. The exotic suggests that
which has not been encountered before, and that ascertainment depends upon a certain kind of
positionality. If the utilization of the pantoum is part of what makes Ashbery’s collection
strange—with its stanzas and repetitions erecting rooms containing various displays of
exoticism—his poem takes a kind of colonial stance that presupposes the reader (or viewer, or
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visitor) is encountering something entirely new and strange. The pantoum in this instance retains
its foreignness; despite its renaming by the French and its tradition outside of the Malay
archipelago for over a century, it is not yet assimilated and remains alien.
Perhaps Moramarco’s reading does not apply to a reader like myself, because the
pantoum does not strike me as strange or exotic. Rather than consider the contents and
inhabitants of the metaphorical hotel being exotic, what if it were the establishment itself?
Instead of the “exotic” being foreign, perhaps it is the French who are strange; rather than the
colonized on display in “Hotel Lautréamont,” it is the old colonial power made spectacle. For
this reader, the pantoum is more like a distant relative who has become estranged, who has been
decontextualized and reassigned new meanings. Rather than being invested in the preservation of
this strangeness, I am invested in the project of revealing the patina of strangeness that obscures
the familiar. I argue that it is a thin margin between the familiar and the strange, and as a reader
who feels drawn to the pantoum through my own personal and cultural associations, I am aware
of the way Ashbery’s poem retreats into a willful unknowability despite my efforts to become
familiar with it—familiar as in family, as in domestic, as in intimate.
In the next chapter, I explore two pantoums by poets with positionalities closer to my
own: Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Barbara Jane Reyes, contemporary poets of Southeast Asian
descent writing in the United States. Their poems—“Pantoun for Chinese Women” and “Sea
Incantation,” respectively—are transformative of Ashbery’s ambivalence by recuperating the
form. I argue that, while Ashbery may inevitably perpetuate some of the Orientalizing of the
pantoum in his dissemination of the form, he nonetheless also participates in sustaining the
tradition beyond Southeast Asia such that it has become more accessible to diasporic poets on
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this side of the Pacific. This is why I describe the pantoum as a troubling inheritance, enmeshed
with colonial history but with the potential to restore broken ties across time and distance.
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Chapter 4
The Transpacific Pantoum:
Hybrid Poems from the Diaspora by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Barbara Jane Reyes
Following John Ashbery’s popularization of the pantoum form amongst American poets
of the latter twentieth century, the pantun within Southeast Asia is a cultural tradition that has
been declining in popularity, according to Malaysian scholar Ding Choo Ming. He optimistically
proposes, however, that the pantun can act as a unifying art form around which a regional
identity might be built for countries belonging to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), and downplays national, linguistic, and religious divisions by invoking the
geographical and precolonial concept of Nusantara. This chapter is concerned with linking these
two discourses: the future of the pantun in a globalized Southeast Asia on the one hand, and a
dehistoricized engagement with the pantoum in America on the other. To that end, I utilize a
transpacific lens in my readings of two contemporary pantoums written by U.S.-based poets of
Southeast Asian descent, Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Barbara Jane Reyes. Their poems—“Pantoun
for Chinese Women” from Lim’s Monsoon History (1994), as well as “Sea Incantation” from
Diwata by Reyes (2010)—bear traces of the form’s circumnavigation around the globe, through
their use of settings, themes, and language. Much like the form itself takes a circular shape in the
sequencing of repeating lines, I argue that the hybrid poetics of both Reyes and Lim’s pantoums
demonstrate a postcolonial history that comes full circle, looking back across the Pacific to the
form’s cultural origins. In the hands of these diasporic poets, the pantoum is a literary tradition
that need not be read as having two distinct variations in colony and metropole, but rather a
poetic practice that is hybrid and decolonial within Southeast Asia and beyond.
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Before a discussion of these two poems, it is necessary to establish some of the voices in
these discourses across the Pacific. I begin with Ding Choo Ming’s essay, “The Role of Pantun
as Cultural Identity for Nusantara in 21
st
Century and Beyond,” followed by a brief overview of
several texts on poetic craft in the United States. The second half of the chapter addresses the
poems by Lim and Reyes, the full text of which can be found on the handout provided.
Despite the pantun having different names across the archipelago, it is “[o]ne of the
common cultural heritages of the peoples of Nusantara” according to Ding, an ancient Jawi word
that he uses to describe modern Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines (92).
The pantoum is therefore the best answer to the “search for regional identity ever since ASEAN
was established in 1968” as an intergovernmental organization in the region (87). Ding laments
that when it comes to the youth of Nusantara societies, “popular culture from the West is [a]
symbol of modernity, and certainly not pantun, which is considered as out-of-date” (96).
Interestingly, Ding makes no mention of the Western practice of writing pantoum, albeit a
practice that is markedly different from its cultural role within Southeast Asia, in which it has
historically existed as an oral form marking occasions such as weddings, funerals, and the
harvest. Nevertheless, if Ding finds that “many of our cultural heritages are in danger of being
squeezed out” by such forces as globalization, the pantoum in the Euroamerican context is a
postcolonial trace of that process and could lend further support to his argument that the pantun
has continued relevance to the region and beyond.
Although he does not elaborate on the pantun’s manifestations outside Nusantara, he
gestures vaguely to the existence of other related traditions. “[D]ifferent varieties of pantun,” he
suggests, “can be likened to the branches of a growing tree of literature,” one that “has not only
stood for centuries in Nusantara, but also constantly produc[es] beautiful flowers (pantun) that
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now reach far and wide” (93-94). Although he omits further details of those varieties, one might
make the leap from his argument about the present-day relations of the ASEAN countries to the
region’s relationship with the West under colonialism, and how this literary transaction is a
parallel development that is borne of that history.
Ding’s invocation of Nusantara, nevertheless, complicates European and American
notions of the pantoum as a Malaysian form, resisting definitions based on postcolonial
nationhood in favor of shared cultural traits across the archipelago. (The use of this term is also
reflected in scholarship by Muhammad Haji Salleh, discussed in chapter 1.) In contrast, scholars
in the United States generally offer only preliminary information about the pantoum’s origins as
either “Malay,” “Malayan,” or “Malaysian.” Historical context is usually ignored in favor of
focusing on the aesthetics of the form: its arrangement in quatrains, the repetition of two lines in
the stanza that follows along with two new lines, and the final quatrain’s salvaging of the unused
lines from the beginning. Its use of repetition in particular has led to the pantoum being grouped
with the Italian sestina and the French villanelle. Whether or not a reader is familiar with the
constraints of a repeating form like the pantoum, the recurring lines are self-evident, and the
spiraling effect of reading the same thing twice might make someone think of flashbacks,
moments of déjà vu, and the uncanny. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, for instance, describe
how the reader of a pantoum “takes two steps forward, then two steps back” due to its repetition
(44). Similarly, Lewis Turco highlights the “circle-back” that the pantoum makes when it repeats
lines of the first stanza in the final one (223). These descriptions hold the potential for exploring
themes relevant to history: time, geographical movement, and affect. Unfortunately, such
existing approaches to the form in the U.S.-based discourse miss the opportunity to additionally
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consider poems at the level of historical particulars. Instead, these texts characterize the features
of the pantoum as human universals that anyone might access through use of the form.
Furthermore, poets and scholars in the United States often invoke psychological language
to describe the effect of the pantoum’s repetition, favoring a detached interiority rather than a
historically bound subjectivity. In light of the form’s colonial history, they might reconsider why
the pantoum has been further described as “surrealistic” (Carey 108) and “trancelike” (Franich),
due to the “recurring lines [that] hypnotically twine in and out of one another” (Padgett 126).
These themes of surrealism, trance, and hypnosis suggest a detachment from the material world,
but perhaps also a scholarly disengagement from the pantoum’s roots. That it is “obsessive” and
“a good vehicle for expressing conflict, or ambivalence,” I will argue, makes poems in this form
especially suited for readings through a hybrid lens (Addonizio and Laux 166).
The aforementioned pantoums by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Barbara Jane Reyes in
particular might be read as hybrid not only due to their command of this form comprised of
doubled lines and subsequent slippages of meaning, but also the subject matter of their poems,
which embrace liminality, ambiguity, complexity, and multiplicity. Their poetics are hybrid, I
argue, in part because their poems are “intimately linked to the question of resistance to
homogenization or assimilation,” in the words of Anjali Prabhu (12). Both Lim and Reyes resist
cleanly falling into either the tradition of pantun contained in Southeast Asia or the American
usage of the pantoum that came by way of Europe over the Atlantic. Instead, I read their poems
as “a way out of binary thinking, allow[ing] the inscription of the agency of the subaltern, and
even permit[ting] a restructuring and destabilizing of power” (1). In the case of the pantoum
form, this restructuring is transpacific in nature, completing the form’s global trajectory as a
circle that returns to its beginning point.
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s “Pantoun for Chinese Women” utilizes a hybrid sensibility
starting with its title and continues to unfold through the doubled images in the pantoum’s
recurring lines (see Appendix E). The title itself evades our expectations of “pantun” for a poem
that would feature explicitly “Malay” content, but also resists identifying itself as part of the
Euroamerican tradition under the label “pantoum” (as John Ashbery’s poem does, and discussed
in chapter 3). Instead, she opts for a descriptor that falls somewhere between the two—
“pantoun,” a portmanteau of the local Malay word and its Francophone renaming. Lim thereby
gestures to both literary histories, even as she disidentifies with her poem belonging to one in
particular. The dedication in the title, “for Chinese Women,” further complicates the reader’s
sense of the poem’s context, a space not limited to Southeast Asia or Europe and the United
States, but a diasporic “anywhereness.” Lim presents a deceptively straightforward poem about
the devaluation of daughters over sons, but does so through several cultural registers:
interrogating Chinese family dynamics through a Malaysian poetic form written in the English
language. Simultaneously, she multiples the levels at which her poem can be read: as Malaysian
and Chinese, European and Anglophone. Lim’s poem, by integrating all these particulars,
becomes accessible from multiple points of entry, an interconnected system of references that
widens its potential audience even as it shuffles the reader between multiple facets of
identification.
The epigraph that follows the title is taken from The People’s Daily published in Peking
and is dated March 3, 1983. This initially sets up the reader for inferring China as the
geographical location of the poem, although the pantoum form and language employed expand
the potential for reading this poem as taking place in multiple settings. The epigraph reads, “At
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present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants have been
very serious.” The opening line of the poem sets the female child against a patriarchal “them”:
They say a child with two mouths is no good.
In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
Smooth, gumming, echoing wide for food.
No wonder my man is not here at his place. (lines 1-4)
Since the poem’s form largely follows the Euroamerican conventions of the pantoum, the first
line reappears later as the closing line. Written in the first-person point of view of a mother, the
speakers aligns herself with the child as unwanted, while also mirroring her physiologically. The
denial of the daughter by the father is also the denial of the wife by her husband. The poem
points to both the child’s father and paternal grandmother as complicit in the preference for sons:
“[m]y husband frowns” (26, 29) and “[h]is mother prays” (18, 21). In this hierarchy, both
newborn daughter and mother are outranked by gender and age; the “Chinese Women” in the
poem’s title addresses the childbearing woman as well as the girl who will become one, in
addition to cautioning women who might reify patriarchal structures in order to assert power
over younger women.
Lim could have written this poem without the pantoum form, in free verse or rhyming
quatrains without repetition. However, the pantoum’s repetition highlights the binary power
relations in the many relationships mapped by the poem: mother and newborn, wife and husband,
adult son and elder mother, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, grandmother and grandchild,
father and daughter. Set in quatrains, we see these four figures continually repositioned in
relation to each other just as the lines are syntactically decontextualized and repurposed in new
stanzas. When Lim repeats lines verbatim, an insistence emerges; when she deviates from exact
repetition, the reader is also compelled to listen for the difference. As Lim negotiates the rules of
this form, her main deviation is easily apparent: in one line, the infant is “mewing” (14) and in
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the corresponding repetition, is “crying” (17). Somehow both animal and human, the baby
daughter is ambiguous in her value to her relatives, and this innovation from within the form’s
constraints makes the reader participate in the teasing-out of the dynamics of this family.
Although the newspaper in the poem’s epigraph is published in China, Lim’s use of a
form originating in Southeast Asia suggests that the audience is inclusive of diasporic Chinese,
and readers in Malaysia in particular. At the same time, the form implicates those communities
as potentially maintaining patriarchal attitudes, repeating cultural transgressions elsewhere, a
destructive circularity that feels inescapable as a pantoum. The poem is therefore relevant in
China and abroad, amongst Chinese and non-Chinese Malaysians alike. Written in English, the
poem further widens its audience to an Anglophone audience anywhere, making colonizer and
colonized all witness to the domestic scene she describes.
Filipino American poet Vince Gotera describes this poem by Lim as a “decolonization of
the so-called French form,” with decolonization and postcoloniality being the driving concepts in
the essay, “The Pantoum’s Postcolonial Pedigree” (258). He argues that Lim is “precisely
positioned to retake the form” from Euroamerican practitioners, since she was “[b]orn and raised
in Malaysia” (257). However, Gotera’s view potentially reinforces notions of a singular and
“authentic” pantoum that bypasses history rather than integrates and complicates it. That Lim is
simply Malaysian does not make her pantoum a gesture toward decolonization, but rather, the
hybridized spelling in her poem’s title is what exposes the enmeshed histories of the original
form and the colonial appropriation of it and makes decolonization possible. When Gotera states
that Lim has “[brought] pantun and pantoum—both in Malaysia and in the United States—
finally home,” she does through by means of a historical process that Yunte Huang calls
transpacific displacement, which is made possible by the “textual migration of cultural meanings,
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meanings that include linguistic traits, poetics, philosophical ideas, myths, stories, and so on”
(3). Instead of cultural restoration, Lim’s poem performs a hybridization in which future-oriented
change and integration is inevitable, even as it trains one critical eye on the colonial past.
Whereas Lim’s “Pantoun for Chinese Women” employs markers of hybridity and
decolonial possibilities in its ambiguous title and form as well as multiple possibilities of setting
and audience, Barbara Jane Reyes’s “Sea Incantation” uses a latticework of imagery and greater
variations in repetition to critique Orientalism (see Appendix F). Her lines read like a catalog of
oceanic odds and ends, sensory and associative: “Glow of mist, jade tongues of light / Portents
and smoke arousing hungers / Magnolia plumed gold moonstone heart” (lines 2-4). As an
incantation, Reyes’s poem seems to conjure the sea through these objects and images, willing the
presence of the Pacific through the watery greenness of jade, a veil of mist that might roll off the
shore. The pantoum form jumbles these images, like an altar she arranges and rearranges.
On first read, Reyes’s pantoum seems to be no more than an inventory calling up objects,
the repetitions suggesting a failed spell that is unable to achieve its objective at first utterance.
One could easily miss the subtle shifts that take place in most of the lines’ repetitions; a line like
“[a] silk brocade of laughter, waiting” (24) almost imperceptibly transforms into “[a] silk
blockade of laughter, weighting” (27). Just as the lush “brocade” shapeshifts into a “blockade,”
these images turn from the pleasant and seductive to the sinister. Similarly, “tinder, mirror” (line
16) combine into “tender marrow” (19) and “fistfuls of salt” (22) reappears in a “fitful assault”
(25). We could miss these subtle yet potent transformations because they do not occur until the
end of the third stanza, when the “[s]hoals and shelter, stones that sing” (8) have become “[s]ouls
and silted stones that singe” (11). The poem requires the dedicated scrutiny of the reader to
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detect these changes, which can be missed both in print and spoken aloud due to the close
similarities in spelling as well as sound.
Through the pantoum form, this poem evokes an Orientalist treasure and transforms it
into implements of rebellion when each of these images reemerge in the next stanza. I read
Reyes’s incantation is not an exile’s call to the sea as object, but rather, the sea as subject
endowed with the power to intervene in the human history of oceanic exploration and
colonization through related symbols that transform themselves in order to undermine
Orientalism. At the sonic level, her poem is as a challenge to re-see importation as violence, and
the sea as the means of achieving that vision. By poem’s end, the desirable yet dangerous “siren”
(1) of the opening line becomes “silence” (28), a paradoxical assertion of having the final word
without having to speak at all: the incantation is over before the reader even gets to the
conclusion.
These poems by Lim and Reyes highlight the need to integrate scholarship on the
pantoum from both sides of the Pacific, as its Southeast Asian roots and postcolonial history
bring a depth to their word that we lose if we only consider these poets as American inheritors of
Ashbery’s pantoum. At the intersection of Nusantara and the West are diasporic subjects, passing
back and forth, renewing ties and defamiliarizing others. As Stuart Hall has noted, “[d]iasporic
identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through
transformation and difference” (235). Further theorization of the pantoum as not only a
postcolonial tradition but also a hybrid and potentially decolonial one will open new possibilities
for readings of pantoums written today, including those by poets in the diaspora.
In The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng articulates through her analysis of Toni
Morrison, the “precise and particular nature of ‘loss’ in white racial melancholia,” which she
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identifies as “teetering between the known and the unknown, the seen and the deliberately
unseen, the racial other constitutes an oversight that is consciously made unconscious—
naturalized over time as absence, as complementary negative space” (16). The contemporary
American criticism on the pantoum has largely left out the form’s history of colonization and
cultural appropriation for too long, haunting pantoums by Baudelaire and Ashbery as well as
Lim and Reyes. Restoring the violent nature of this literary transaction is the first step towards
understanding the melancholy that informs these readings of their poems, as well as the form’s
capacity to examine and reexamine, to address each other again and again. A poem cannot be a
corrective of the past, but it can rearticulate it, and provide new means for communicating in the
present for more equitable future possibilities.
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Conclusion
The Decolonial Pantoum:
Beyond Cultural Appropriation toward a Transformation of Mastery
Over these four chapters, I have presented the trajectory of the pantoum form in the West
as a four-stage process: from the maritime Malay Archipelago, to colonial Europe, to America
during Malaysia’s postcolonial era, and a transpacific present in which Asian American poets are
reclaiming the form. This intervention in the form’s history rejects the binary found in many
American craft texts, in which the pantun from Malaya is merely a predecessor to the pantoum in
Europe and the United States.
Resisting this binary is also a rejection of overly simplified constructions of ‘us and
them.’ On the one hand, examined critically, we find that this binary is built upon the cultural
appropriation of a literary tradition from the colonized by the colonizer, and this dynamic can be
a representation of the unequal relationship. On the other hand, reification of this binary elides
the complicated and fraught engagements with the foreign form by Western poets like Charles
Baudelaire and John Ashbery while overlooking the remarkable peculiarity of the pantoum’s
inclusion among European forms. By redefining this exchange between Malay and Western
poetic formalisms as a four-stage process shaped by colonial history, my intention has been to
provide new insights into the pantoum that might contribute to both the poetic form’s
decolonization and to a transformed sense of mastery in contemporary poetic formalism.
Before explaining what I mean by transformation of mastery, I must note that I am
drawing upon a pair of related terms coined by Houston A. Baker, Jr.: “mastery of form” and
“deformation of mastery.” In his book, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker argues
that writers of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote in mainstream forms—such as Claude
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McKay’s poems in the sonnet form—did so in order to be legible to mainstream white readers.
Through mastery of form, the writer is able to show through “manipulations of form that there
are rhetorical possibilities for crafting a voice out of tight places” (33, emphasis in original). In
other words, the adherence to Western forms is a performance of the minoritized poet’s survival
in the limited spaces that society affords her or him. Baker argues that such formalism is less a
sign of appeasing the oppressor, but a strategic masking that claims mastery for oneself, and in
turn becomes a deformation of the former master’s power.
While Baker’s study on black writers of the Harlem Renaissance utilizing forms is a
powerful portrayal of minority writers subverting the expectations of the white literary elite, this
dissertation has explored a somewhat inverse relationship between Western writers and a literary
tradition outside of the mainstream. Is the white master still a master in this case? I propose that
the pantoum’s inclusion in Western formalism is both an example of cultural appropriation and
also a site for renegotiating power. Because the pantoum is a poetic form, it is reproducible: not
a finite resource that can be retained or depleted, but a code that proliferates. It changes hands.
Therefore, this form has also opened up a liminal space between mastery and subjugation that
contains the potential for a transformation of mastery. In this term I am also embedding the
trans- prefix from the field of transpacific studies, in which the “concept of the transpacific not
only involves trauma, haunting, and marginalization but also empowerment, enrichment, and
expansion” (Hoskins and Nguyen, 13), so that these contrasts can coexist within the idea of a
transformation of mastery. It also gestures toward Yunte Huang’s concept of “transpacific
displacement” which describes the process of texts that migrate and carry with them a variety of
“cultural meanings,” including a poetic tradition like the pantoum (3). Though the form’s
transmission to the United States was transatlantic—via John Ashbery living in France to his
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American readership—I have shown in chapter four how poets Shirley Geok-lin Lim and
Barbara Jane Reyes have redirected the form over the Pacific Ocean as a conscious engagement
with the form’s origins, incorporating its traumatic history as well as its power to rearticulate that
history. Taking together these definitions from Baker, Hoskins and Nguyen, and Huang, the
pantoum form has the capacity to represent a transformation of mastery that I hope readers,
writers, and scholars of poetry will make room for in their engagements with this poetic
tradition.
This transformation feels most possible when we consider the full history of the form and
its appropriation, as explored in chapter one, and read critically the contributions by Baudelaire
and Ashbery in chapters two and three respectively. Lim and Reyes offer us new ways of writing
and reading pantoums that are hybrid and decolonial, which simultaneously acknowledge and
transform the colonial pantoum’s history. There are a number of other Asian American voices
that could not be included in the analysis here due to the scope of this dissertation, but also turn
toward the Asia and the shadow cast over the continent by history and deserve mention: Sandra
Lim’s “Pantoum,” which begins and ends with the line, “Taking on an aspect of the Orient”;
Nellie Wong’s “Grandmother’s Song,” in which “[b]ound feet struggle to loosen free”; and Mari
L’Esperance’s “Pantoum of the Blind Cambodian Women,” which is also an elegy for the
“burning, falling world.” Perhaps other scholars and critics may consider these contributions by
contemporary poets who have utilized the form to interrogate other shadow aspects of human
relations. For instance, in Blas Falconer’s pantoum of queer vulnerability, “A Ride in the Rain,”
the speaker assesses and reassesses the danger of meeting a stranger in a bar; and Nicole
Homer’s elegiac pantoum, “The Dead Line,” memorializes Alton Sterling and the endlessly
repeating deaths at the hands of police officers that have sparked the Black Lives Matter
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movement. This limited sampling of contemporary pantoums pose challenges to such forces as
Orientalism, patriarchy, war, homophobia, and white supremacy—and it strikes me as less than
coincidental that they do so in a formal tradition with roots outside of Western poetry and yet
comes to us through a history of colonialism.
In her essay “Owning the Masters,” Marilyn Nelson critiques Audre Lorde’s dictum that
“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Like Baker who also addressed the
use of Western forms by African American poets, Nelson shows how the constraints of dominant
poetic traditions become opportunities for minoritized writers to display strategies for survival
within structures not designed for them. “I know, I know,” Nelson writes, “The tradition is the
oppressor. The tradition doesn’t include me because I’m black and a woman” (2). But
formalism’s communal aspect gives it a discursive quality that makes exchange between groups
possible. Nelson invites us to consider how “a poem written with an ear to tradition enables us to
think and sing along with many other minds” (5). We can extend Nelson’s argument to some of
the contemporary pantoums I mention above that are written from diverse positionalities and
consider how this form in particular—both coming from outside and transmitted through
Western poetic formalism—places a wide range of voices in conversation.
If we read and write pantoums through a historical lens that challenges cultural
appropriation and in pursuit of decolonization, the pantoum form can transform our ideas of
mastery. In this way, colonial acquisitions can be returned to the places where they began and
reorganize vertical relationships of power into an intricate chain of relations from which renewed
struggles and radical imagination can grow.
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Appendix A
Anonymous pantun berkait in original Jawi script (Heer 1)
103
Transliteration by Nicholas Heer
(1) Kupu-kupu terbang melintang
Terbang di laut di hujung karang
(2) Hati di dalam menaruh bimbang
Dari dahulu sampai sekarang
(3) Terbang di laut di hujung karang
Burung nasur (nasar) terbang ke Bandan
(4) Dari dahulu sampai sekarang
Banyak muda sudah kupandang
(5) Burung nasur (nasar) terbang ke
Bandan Bulunya lagi jatuh ke Patani
(6) Banyak muda sudah kupandang
Tiada sama mudaku ini
(7) Bulunya jatuh ke Patani
Dua puluh anak merpati
(8) Tiada sama mudaku ini
Sungguh pandai membujuk hati
French translation by Ernest Fouinet
Les papillons jouent a l’entour sur leurs ailes;
Ils volent vers la mer, prés de la chaîne des rochers.
Ma coeur s’est senti malade dans ma poitrine,
Depuis mes premiers jours jusqu’à l’heure présente.
Ils volent vers la mer, prés de la chaîne des rochers... 5
Le vautour dirige son essor vers Bandam.
Depuis mes premiers jours jusqu’ à l’heure présente,
J’ai admiré bien des jeunes gesns.
Le vautour dirige son essor vers Bandam...
Et laisse tomber de ses plumes à Patani. 10
J’ai admiré bien des jeunes gens;
Mais nul n’est à comparer à l’objet de mon choix.
Il laisse tomber de ses plumes à Patani...
Voici deux jeunes pigeons!
Aucun jeune homme ne peut se comparer à celui de mon choix. 15
Habile comme il l’est à toucher le cœur.
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English translation in collaboration with Dr. Danielle Mihram
The butterflies fly around with their wings;
They fly toward the sea, near the row of rocks.
My heart felt pain in my chest,
From my first days to the current hour.
They fly toward the sea, near the row of rocks… 5
The vulture directs its flight towards Bandam.
From my first days to the current hour,
I have admired many young men.
The vulture directs its flight towards Bandam…
And lets drop some of his feathers at Patani. 10
I have admired many young men;
But none are comparable to the object of my desire.
He lets drop some of his feathers at Patani…
Here are two pigeons!
No young man can compare to the object of my desire. 15
Skilled as he is to touch the heart.
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Appendix B: Charles Baudelaire, “Harmonie du Soir”
Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; 5
Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu’on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.
Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu’on afflige;
Un cœur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir! 10
Le ciel triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.
Un cœur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige . . . 15
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
“Evening Harmony” trans. Richard Howard
Now comes the time when swaying on its stem
each flower offers incense to the night;
phrases and fragrances circle in the dark—
languorous waltz that casts a lingering spell!
Each flower offers incense to the night; 5
the violin trembles like a heart betrayed—
languorous waltz that cases a lingering spell!
A mournful alter ornaments the sky.
The violin trembles like a heart betrayed,
a tender heart unnerved by nothingness! 10
A mournful alter ornaments the sky;
the sun has smothered in its clotted blood.
A tender heart unnerved by nothingness
hoards every fragment of the radiant past.
The sun has smothered in its clotted blood. 15
In me your image—like a monstrance—glows.
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Appendix C: John Ashbery, “Pantoum”
Eyes shining without mystery,
Footprints eager for the past
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,
And what is in store?
Footprints eager for the past 5
The usual obtuse blanket.
And what is in store
For those dearest to the king?
The usual obtuse blanket.
Of legless regrets and amplifications 10
For those dearest to the king.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,
The usual obtuse blanket.
Of legless regrets and amplifications
For those dearest to the king. 15
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,
Of legless regrets and amplifications,
That is why a watchdog is shy.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night. 20
That is why a watchdog is shy,
Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night
And that soon gotten over.
Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying 25
Some blunt pretense to safety we have
And that soon gotten over
For they must have motion.
Some blunt pretense to safety we have
Eyes shining without mystery, 30
For they must have motion
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.
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Appendix D: John Ashbery, “Hotel Lautréamont”
1.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society
working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.
We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”
Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. 5
The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds
we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,”
or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.
The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds
the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé, 10
or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again.
The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé.
In any case the ruling was long overdue.
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again, 15
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.
2.
In any case, the ruling was long overdue.
The people are beside themselves with rapture
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure
and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future. 20
The people are beside themselves with rapture
yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria,
and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future.
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained.
Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria. 25
In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,
and night like black swansdown settles on the city.
In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.
Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward, 30
and night like black swansdown settles on the city.
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?
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3.
Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward.
Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside.
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? 35
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?
Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside,
when all we think of is how much we can carry with us.
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time. 40
When all we think of is how much we can carry with us
small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate.
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.
Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate. 45
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.
4.
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open 50
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages,
to end the standoff that history long ago began.
Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open
but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.
To end the standoff that history long ago began 55
must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?
But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.
You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?
Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her. 60
You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;
only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.
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Appendix E: Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Pantoun for Chinese Women”
At present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants
have been very serious. —The People's Daily, Peking, March 3rd, 1983
They say a child with two mouths is no good.
In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
Smooth, gumming, echoing wide for food.
No wonder my man is not here at his place.
In the slippery wet, a hollow space, 5
A slit narrowly sheathed within its hood.
No wonder my man is not here at his place:
He is digging for the dragon jar of soot.
That slit narrowly sheathed within its hood!
His mother, squatting, coughs by the fire's blaze 10
While he digs for the dragon jar of soot.
We had saved ashes for a hundred days.
His mother, squatting, coughs by the fire's blaze.
The child kicks against me mewing like a flute.
We had saved ashes for a hundred days, 15
Knowing, if the time came, that we would.
The child kicks against me crying like a flute
Through its two weak mouths. His mother prays
Knowing when the time comes that we would,
For broken clay is never set in glaze. 20
Through her two weak mouths his mother prays.
She will not pluck the rooster nor serve its blood,
For broken clay is never set in glaze:
Women are made of river sand and wood.
She will not pluck the rooster nor serve its blood. 25
My husband frowns, pretending in his haste
Women are made of river sand and wood.
Milk soaks the bedding. I cannot bear the waste.
My husband frowns, pretending in his haste.
Oh, clean the girl, dress her in ashy soot! 30
Milk soaks our bedding, I cannot bear the waste.
They say a child with two mouths is no good.
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Appendix F: Barbara Jane Reyes, “Sea Incantation”
Sages’ gardens, ginger root, siren
Glow of mist, jade tongues of light
Portents and smoke arousing hungers
Magnolia-plumed gold moonstone heart
Glow of mist, jade tongues of light 5
Collecting rain in turtleshell hollows
Magnolia-plumed gold moonstone heart
Shoals and shelter, stones that sing
Collecting rain in turtleshell hollows
Of coral, of wine, of luminous, unnamed 10
Souls and silted stones that singe
Of cinnamon groves’ veil of monsoon
Of coral, of wine, of luminous, unnamed
Moonless midnight’s milky stars
Cinnamon groves, veil of monsoon 15
The finest gold dust, tinder, mirror
Moonless midnight’s milky stare
Of angels’ tears and devils’ blood
A vein of gold dust, tender marrow
Cooing doves, a child’s fine bones 20
Angels tear and devils brood
Sugarcane, fistfuls of salt
My cooing dove, my child’s fine bones
A silk brocade of laughter, waiting
Sugarcane, a fitful assault 25
Pretense and smoke arousing anger
A silk brocade of laughter, weighting
Cages, cordons, ginger root silence
111
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116
Why Can’t It Be Tenderness
poems
117
Table of Contents
Ode to the Double “L” 119
I
Western History 121
Pastoral with Restless Searchlight 122
How to Use Microsoft Paint to Alter a Birth Certificate 123
Only Child 124
Ambivalence 125
Dementia 126
Across the Street from Foxboro Elementary School, an Inmate Escapes
California State Prison Solano 127
Vanishing Ship 128
The Elements Have Learned to Speak 129
Theory on Falling into a Reef 130
Customs 131
Between 132
Poem for My Twin 133
Our Bodies Were Once the Color of Our Masks 134
The Hotel Eden 135
Asking about My First Name 136
Debt 137
Poem for My Mother 138
Rootless 139
My Father’s Work 140
The Sky Will Look White 141
Pantun 142
Poem for My Maternal Grandfather 143
Ritual 144
Photograph Taken by My Paternal Grandmother on Her Honeymoon, 1944 145
Elegy without Translation 146
My Dead Live in Two Rooms 147
II
The Dissolution Paperwork Asks if I Need to Restore My Name 149
Late Summer 150
Sea Shanty for the Divorced 151
The Numerology of Us 152
Old Knives 154
The Tower District 155
This Poem Wants to Be a House 156
Fresno Laundromat without Air-Conditioning in Late July 157
Contemporary Artifacts 158
Portrait of His Ex-Lover at a Yoga Studio, Downtown Fresno 159
Incident between Two Exits 160
118
Why Can’t It Be Tenderness 161
The Sweetest Exile Is the One You Choose 162
A Name Made of Asterisks 163
Mistaken Ode 164
Love after Dentistry 166
On Waking When You’re Already Leaving 167
While You Are Gone 168
An anchor in the shape of an ampersand 169
Visitations with Unmarried Self 170
Glaucoma Test 171
Lullaby in Which It Becomes Impossible Not to Talk about Race 172
Notes 173
119
Ode to the Double “L”
after Aracelis Girmay
Twin shorelines
at the end
of my name, traffickers
of white space,
you could last on the tongue
forever, lolling, longing,
an endless drawing-out
of the little stream
between you.
Fill my life.
I drink from the narrowest
canal, flowing between
two countries
that, half of the time,
claim me. Double “l,”
bring me back
to the in-between
where my breath
has always lived,
without containment,
like two legs pointing
toward the ocean, or these arms
reaching into sky. From birth
you have doubled
my grief and my wonder,
shown me
the parallel
which can never touch—
the way I run
alongside my love
without entering
his true mind. Rivulet
of secrets, slim
as a eucalyptus leaf,
airplane runway
of the heart. Double “l,”
let my days
always move
in two directions.
Build me a channel
into which I can pour
this voice.
120
I
121
Western History
Sutter, California
Rusted horseshoes
on a rope above the porch:
clumsy windchime
when the air is strong enough.
Arrowheads can be found
in the yard; and yet,
over a shoulder, lost
again. Beneath the dirt,
one cement step,
then another, then
the underground cellar.
From the wooden beams,
meat hooks
hang in the dark,
question marks
for a century
and a half. The answer
is in the houndstooth
pattern of the brick
floor. The way out
is the same way I came in.
122
Pastoral with Restless Searchlight
Vacaville, California
I was raised with the ocean
over my right shoulder
and the jagged mountains filling
my left hand with teeth, while overhead
the military jets drew their temporary scars.
In this valley I rocked myself like a marble
at the bottom of a bowl. Then I gathered
my skirt of drought, of failing
plants. When I slept, the cropdusters laid down
their thin quilt, and my life shortened,
though barely. I counted my luck
amongst the deer drawn down the hill
by the prison’s lights. I wanted to
be like the dried grass alighting suddenly
on a summer afternoon,
a fire started by nothing
but sun: a helicopter’s oracle, foretelling
the blackened acre like a hole cut
into fabric behind which always breathes
the tangible dark. I wanted to
be like that, to swallow fences, to listen
for the animals crossing over,
the night’s highway crowded
with the footsteps of the anonymous.
123
How to Use Microsoft Paint to Alter a Birth Certificate
Spring 1996
Unfolded from its envelope, it is still white,
crisp; she wonders how long it has been shut
in the dark of the lowest drawer of her mother’s
nightstand. But on the glass of the scanner, the half
sheet illuminates in a moving stripe
of light—her name bright from one side
to the other, it spells itself through the page
in reverse. Minutes later, the record appears
in grayscale on the computer screen, and the only
tool she needs is the square that erases. Every swipe
of the cursor points an arrow at her birth
before it disappears: San Francisco, the middle
of the night. For a moment, it is blank, a grid
of possibility, binary code of her life smudged
out. But she can rewrite herself, where and when
she was born, and to whom, change
the names she was given before she could speak.
She prints out the cleared boxes, looks for stray
serifs, the dot of an “i” she’s forgotten, but she’s caught
everything, undone her mother’s arrival here, unburdened
her father, sent their planes backward,
uncrossing them over the Pacific. She sets them down
in their places. All of them can start
over now. She writes in her best cursive,
recreates a biography with dates and places
so no one will be able to tell how this began.
124
Only Child
With the mirror at my navel, it appears I’m walking
on the ceiling, house emptied of beds and chairs, all
reduced to fixtures. Everything above me, caught
in the reflection, becomes my path: the downward
slope of roof, recessed lightbulbs that could shatter
under my feet. I step high through doorframes, lift
my legs over the turning blades of the fan. Once,
I saw the planet itself turn upside down
on a screen in the back of an airplane seat, the map
scrolling east toward the island where my mother was born.
But the mirror is a lesser magic than planes,
I haven't gone anywhere, I am still in my father’s country—
my country—though it is reversed, a stretch of plaster
that no one has walked on before. I place my hand
against the wall for balance, a hanging plant shoots
its tendrils toward the sky. When I hold up the mirror
to show my parents, it all slips off the edge of the glass.
125
Ambivalence
as manacle,
joining this
with that.
It’s maniacal,
the balance.
Even my name
is an iamb.
So bail me out
of my veins.
One-drop
or the whole
vial, whatever
is viable.
My navel:
a cable
over the Pacific.
What I became:
my own enclave.
126
Dementia
The suburban development repeats
itself—houses in khaki,
seafoam, sky, sienna. Picture window
then door, door then picture window. Every garage
a jar’s seal on the mind. No one is left
to pace with a cigarette in front of the foreclosures
and their tall grasses. No one is recognizable
indoors with the air conditioning on, each face
the pallor of satellites calling from unfathomable
distances, with the laugh track louder than a key thrown
over the fence into the canal running behind our yards
and from which all of us drink, like horses
at a creek before the people came
to name the place where things had always survived
without language or memory.
127
Across the Street from Foxboro Elementary School, an Inmate Escapes California State
Prison Solano
During lockdown, we play boardgames
until the teacher rolls in a TV strapped
to its stand, the news coverage offering a view
from the outside. A camera shot
pans over our playground, basketball hoops
that seem high as watchtowers over the man
in a gray jumpsuit suddenly darting across
the courts. Children of Vacaville,
of cowtown, we run to the classroom windows
for a glimpse. What do we know of the world?
We sleep under a sky painted orange
as sherbet by the bright prison lights.
We make field trips to the jelly bean factory,
study its hall of presidential collages: the licorice
hair of Lincoln, Reagan’s face made from peach
and buttered popcorn. But we want to see
the inmate’s face, the tattoo under his eye
that meant he’d killed someone: the ink outline
of a teardrop, a deflated tetherball, a bubble
of gum hanging from our mouths.
128
Vanishing Ship
sculpture by John Roloff (1989)
On the glass surface, a line
of sap. How nearly I become
what I touch: a half-submerged
ship in the earth, crystalline.
Stern to sky, stilled rudder
underground, horizon as infinite sail
in the vast forest of witness.
Seen right through, the trees
cloud over; behind me, mouthfuls
of shadow, splintered sun.
My countenance waxes,
then wanes, between frost
and steam. Crumbling froth,
nitrogen-rich, I command all things
to grow around my life.
Hemmed in, I decide
which roots may break me.
129
The Elements Have Learned to Speak
Whatever it takes for sand to become glass,
I want that. To be a shard lifted
from the even silt poured from one hand
to another until it became mine. How anything
came to me out of the suffering
of my elders, I’ll never understand. As a child
in San Francisco, wandering the wharf,
I could stare into a barrel of oysters
all afternoon. The vendor’s sign promised a pearl
in each one, a grain of sand carried in a mouth
until heavy and beautiful. The tourists pulled them
out of the shallow water, ridged with salt
and algae, split them open in their hands
in search of something worthwhile to take.
What a waste, my mother would say
or I imagined she would say. We’d keep walking
past the living, symmetrical in their brokenness,
until the pier ended at the edge of the Pacific,
which was the only thing between us
and our ancestors, a ripped seam between two
hemispheres, on the end of the land’s tongue.
130
Theory on Falling into a Reef
I survived on clamshells, a shallow
hunger. Half my skeleton
appears in the sand; the other
stays mine. Pieces
of a bottle, lone button, jar
without its lid. What washed
away? Most of the letters
in my name. Beside the place
I last woke: a rusting nail,
and not the thing that came apart.
Newly discovered aerial photographs of Gardner Island—now Nikumaroro, in the South
Pacific—suggest Amelia Earhart may have died there, before its habitation and the arrival of
colonists.
131
Customs
At the airport, after a long journey, a mother
and father divide like a cell—foreign
and domestic—into their respective lines
for citizens and noncitizens. The child
is small enough to run beneath the ropes
that skim the top of her skull, which split
her family into two ways of getting back
to the same house. The girl can pass, from line
to line, beneath the gaze of the customs officer.
No one has caught her yet, going back
and forth; she swings like a spider
between two points, building something
nearly invisible. Go to the other side,
with your father, says the mother. As tall
as suitcases, boxes at eye level, the girl becomes
a piece of luggage in transit. She has nothing
that can be confiscated, she doesn’t even hold
her own passport: the adults slide it across
the appropriate counter for an off-center stamp
on an unmarked page. Already she no longer resembles
the child’s photo, iridescent and crosshatched
by the advanced security features covering
her face. Even her name has an expiration date,
when, someday, she is married and will change it.
For now, the child belongs to no one and no country,
everything is impermanent—her loyalties
might shift according to a game she makes
of jumping over the dark tiles in the airport floor.
132
Between
half my life grows quiet
the words crossed out by
a language what I do not have
I carry it like a corpse
or a doll blinking its morse code
sometimes my mother
her mouth opening and closing
a silence I cannot translate
other times my father
speaking static and English
my twin inheritances braided rope
whatever manages to clothe me
today the body I drag behind me
another self hair gathering dirt
everywhere I go this throat and its sounds
a music without meaning
so tired I cannot leave
I sit her up leaning against a tree
tie dandelions into rings
around all her fingers counting time
133
Poem for My Twin
Your name holds half of you: like a hammock,
from which your arm and leg dangle, consumed
by mosquitoes, while the rest of your body
is apparently unharmed. Are you marked
or are you pure? It depends
on the angle of the sun and the arrangement
of the trees, and the position of the watcher
who determines the percentage of your face
smothered in light or lowered in shadow.
You press your own palm to your skull,
which has never changed, except when you sleep—
and the watcher is only another tree,
while your breath makes a net strung between two places
that, together, manage to keep you aloft.
134
Our Bodies Were Once the Color of Our Masks
after Double Masked Heads (1974), painting by Susan Rothenberg
Two horses stand in profile, the one behind just barely ahead
like a shadow cast one second into the future,
or a self beyond the self. Made from clay, it is possible
to fake their symmetry, become collapsible, a partial eclipse.
Each of us is made of two bodies orbiting, both Castor
and Pollux, and you must give your mouths all the air
that they want. The outline of one is inseparable
from the other, stepping together in shadow
more than light. Fold your ears against the invisible, learn
to trust the wind, your truest context. Breathe as if
moving a hand toward a candle then away, flashing a slow message
across the distance. Bear to love one finger’s width
of anything at a time, then pull your face over your face
if it means surviving in plain sight.
135
The Hotel Eden
Break iceplants like dishes
or whatever comes between
your hands and touching
the earth again, even in another
hemisphere. In Borneo,
it’s already night. No matter
the names of seeds locked
in square packets. Cut a cross
section in anything that grows
here: notice how zucchini
seeds order themselves in a ring
even if lost in the mouths
of a family you’ve married
into. Make beds from any four
slats of wood you find, wait
whole weeks to remember
what you planted there, new
and curling in the fog. Slice
artichokes at the neck, let stalks
sway empty at your shoulder.
Even the thinnest fingers
of ivy unhook with time, leave
blank fences you’ll make
every effort to grow over
with carnations before I am born.
136
Asking About My First Name
Though my father says he only liked the sound
of it, the music box seems to offer a better reason
—a hummingbird moving counter-clockwise
on my seventh birthday—because it plays a song
sharing my name. When I wind the key
on the back, the tiny studs on a cylinder pick
a metal comb, teeth arranged from longest
to shortest. As it slows to stillness, I turn
this over, run my fingers across the raised dots
as if I could read them: I will say the only words
I know that you’ll understand. I can't grasp
the French parts, but the minor scale is enough
to tell me the song is sad, the way I listen
to my mother’s voice when she calls
back home in her own language, a tinkling sound
without meaning to me. Silent on another phone
in a different room, I wait for her to speak
my name—the one word I recognize—but here
it is foreign, like the wrong note played in a melody
I know well enough to hear the mistake.
137
Debt
The father takes down his careful alignment of heads
and tails—buffalo nickels, liberty dollars, half
pennies—from their balancing place on the beams
in the garage roof. He steadies the ladder between
the cars, lowers the books of coins in the dusted light. Lifting
them from their cardboard circles, he shows the girl
the ridged edge that adds worth to one, the rubbed-off
expression of a woman that subtracts from another.
There are letters for each mint—D for Denver, P
is Philadelphia—all of them places she’s never been to,
except S, the city both of them are from. Being a child,
she only wants the coincidence of dates: 1953,
when he was born; 1918, his mother. If he gets a bonus this year,
he’ll buy more, maybe a roll of silver dimes, or a better Kennedy
fifty-cent piece. He says that luck must be made, the money he earns
pressed down into smaller denominations, what he’s certain
will appreciate, while she collects any coin from any year
as long as it’s earlier than the one she was born in, as if that makes it
old, and valuable, as if it tells her what came
before, as if they add up to more than their face values.
138
Poem for My Mother
When I was sixteen I bought my mother a strawberry plant
with its many thin arms hanging over the side
of its green bowl, each ending with a little fist of white,
yellow, pink, red. She placed it in the front of our house
and even now it sends its vines through the earth
beneath a window that faces the street. Every time I visit,
like today, she shows me what new thing came up
yards away from where it started: a population that dies,
appears somewhere else. I didn’t tell her it reminded me
of the yard we left in San Francisco, the one she spent
mornings in when this country was so new to her
she didn’t have her job yet and I was too small to be sent anywhere
but there, beside her in the soil. Instead of this I just passed
the plant to her without a card, only the plastic spike with a Latin name
for something too awkward, too vital, to wrap in paper.
139
Rootless
Like a net my fingers skim
tap water, cleaning mung bean
sprouts the way you showed me.
From my palm I find the whole
ones, fetal curvatures with scalps
blossoming on tiny yellowed skulls.
My nail bisects the vertebrae
from primordial tail, roots
cast away in the sink.
Though I never learned
the purpose, it's a habit that reminds me
of a time you let me in.
140
My Father’s Work
Even when we move seventy miles outside
of San Francisco, my father drives back
on weekdays as if to pick up where I started
and he did, and his father, and another father
before him. This year makes thirty he’s spent,
developing the film containing other people’s
lives, in a drugstore on Ocean Avenue. He unrolls
the brown ticker tape where everyone appears
reversed, even our own family, those miniatures
still in their paper sleeves though he presses
the glossy prints into album pages under
cellophane. You could find heavy books of us
at the bottom of our hallway closet, every moment
that has passed through his fingers; and beneath
their shelf, the neat stacks of film in strips,
dark versions you could arrange in any order
or pick the one you like best, like my father did
in my first year, when I was barely able
to stand, but smiling. In the negative, how bright
our old house would seem around me,
window casting a shadow over my face.
141
The Sky Will Look White
You want to be skiing, like the girls in your class who come back
from winter break with photographs of themselves, puffed inside
their jackets. But you’re sitting by a window in the house of your grandfather,
a man you’ve met twice now. Here, it’s the monsoon season and you are
fifteen, already you believe you’re an artist, insisting
on only the black-and-white rolls of film your father sometimes gets
for free at his job in a drugstore. You’re alone in your mother’s village,
choosing to stay behind from a drive into the city, because
shopkeepers tease you for not answering America
to a question asked in the language you recognize
but don’t understand. You don’t know how to be grateful,
so you take pictures—elbows propped on the sill, lens pressed beyond
where a screen would be. In two weeks, your father will develop
this picture: the sky will look white, the jungle
canopy drained of green in a deep slope, telephone wires
like a chairlift up the mountain, the raindrops stilled and soft.
142
Pantun
Although my relatives are strangers
I sleep with him on their floors
in a country I’m only visiting.
A line of gongs through a window
wake me from sleep on the floor
on the morning of Gawai, the harvest.
Gongs line up past the window
without a screen to sift the ringing metal
so I know it is Gawai, the harvest.
At the sill I search for people gathering,
no screen to sift the ringing metal,
and expect his face in the distance.
At the sill I search for people gathering,
and because he looks like a tourist,
expect his face to appear, even distant;
the thin mattress beside me was empty.
In my life, he became a tourist.
His camera is unplugged from the wall.
The thin mattress beside me, emptied,
gives up the imprint of his body.
His camera unplugged from the wall
records my absence in photographs,
so I give up the imprint of his body
like a language I've heard since I was born.
He takes photos without me
while I am down the stairs, barefoot,
following a language I’ve heard since I was born,
stepping through mud toward the road.
I am down the stairs now, barefoot,
in a country I’ve only visited.
Stepping through mud toward the road,
I am a relative who is a stranger.
143
Poem for My Maternal Grandfather
Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo
I don’t know the words to say I’m here
in your kitchen with a bowl of fish
and rice, so I leave it next to the bent spoon
on the table. The wood is worn smooth,
but I have never seen you eat here. Through
the window over a gutter, I watch you
pick this over in your hands, in the doorframe
you built yourself. You stare at the path
that brings you what has been set
aside, already cold. Which house
does your wife live in now? Will she ever
return? You try to remember the last meal you ate
together, what it was that made this
final, the scraps and peelings
someone must have finally thrown away.
By now the dish is clean; you toss the bones
into the grass. In the evenings,
the fluorescent lights uncover who is here
and who is not, while the fan turns side to side.
144
Ritual
Daly City, California
You always stand in front of the gas flame
in my memory, five or six eggs rolling at the bottom
of a silver pot. Each week, while my parents are at work,
I watch the long, slotted spoon pull these up, drop them
into a ceramic bowl to cool. Back in the carton,
webs of broken shell mark one half from the raw
others. The mornings at your house are quiet,
and my grandfather lives with another woman.
You make this look easy—waiting, face above the turning
water, for something to finish itself, only to begin
again—a routine you refused to give up. I’m older
now, I know how we still lean into the stove like it’s a man
we loved, even after he’s gone. And how certainly
the contents of the refrigerator diminish, down
to the last oval swirling its single yolk. Somehow, I can’t
remember seeing you eat them. It must have been
in secret, the peeling of an egg, a handful of ivory
as you stare out the window into the yard.
145
Photograph Taken by My Paternal Grandmother on Her Honeymoon, 1944
I don’t want her secrets,
only the color of the dashboard
where she rests her bare foot
as her new husband drives
along the Californian coast—
the state where they married,
and will later divorce. The photo
is black and white, only the suggestion
of a window reflecting on her right
arm. There’s nothing to see outside
because it’s night, and the next town
is miles away. Still she searches for neon
along the road, and for the man
beside her to belong to her again
and not his own concentration
against the surrounding dark.
Twenty-four years is how long
they’ll have together, and how old she is
at this moment. A friend once said,
It may have taken years to learn
he was the wrong person, but it doesn’t take
years to leave. We both know
she’s wrong. She listens now only
to the ocean pulling towards the car.
146
Elegy without Translation
When everyone had left the room
to make a late lunch, you began to speak
words I did not understand. I called out
to the others for translation, but no one
could hear me over the hysterical plates
and cutlery. You talked over my voice,
my English like sand slipping under the last
message you’d give me, a length of clear water
pulling away. I listened though I did not know
the meaning, searched your face and found
only the blue of your cataracts circling iris,
an island that I would never visit, widening
then contracting with the changing light.
147
My Dead Live in Two Rooms
I stagger my visiting hours. I shuffle
my blood like a deck of cards I keep
passing across the table for someone else
to cut by half. In the afterlife
there is no international date line, no
jet lag. Still I crack the spine
of the phrasebook where it is written
that my only fluency is being
an outsider. I knock on the windowpanes
so they know it’s me, cousin to many
and nobody’s sister. The only time they talk
to each other is in my head. Somehow
we all speak the same language.
Or nothing is ever said, only
the thoughtful pause after someone
is kind, and there is no use rushing
into the lonely hallway of a single voice.
148
II
149
The Dissolution Paperwork Asks If I Need to Restore My Name
No, I’ve kept it, capitalizing
my father’s, block letters
on every sheet as if
they were my mother’s hand
in labor, braceleted white,
our new name a tattoo
in dot matrix repeating
narrower on my own
wrist. But I want the name
before I was named, and this
time I clip it off: turn back
to Borneo, padi gone to seed
in the field her father would
neglect, when she worked
carrying his name, knee deep
in water almost her own.
150
Late Summer
Tacoma, Washington
Lying on our stomachs,
anything can look infinite—
these fifty-three acres
of blueberries, or a love
nearing its end. Others
here before us
cleared the branches,
so we eat from our palms
what little is left behind.
I fill my pockets
with the unripe ones,
a handful of green
beads; I still believe
you’re a necklace
I could string together.
We run through rows
of blueberries until
we reach the city
fences, and watch
the scattering of the broken
blooms we pinch off,
feed to the wind.
151
Sea Shanty for the Divorced
A candle gives
the illusion of heat.
Water: movement.
How I planted my feet
and believed in
an onward, an infinite wick
but not enough
tallow, a boulder slick
with algae, painted
clear with salt,
what we’d try climbing
anyway. His fault
and mine. All brine
with longing and kelp,
I was more wave
than wax. Felt
the starfish cut
by stone, then grew
a new, a new,
a new, a new.
152
The Numerology of Us
I told you about it
over dinner:
that she found him
with her cleaver
in the kitchen, right
hand committed
to removing each
finger of his left
at the knuckle,
how many strides
it took to reach
him counting
losses. You were
numbed by these
stories I brought
back from my job
at the mental
hospital, could only
answer me
with fingertips
drumming
the counter whenever
we had to face
the daily effort
of making a living.
How could we
have known
then to number signs
in the patterned
linoleum, notice
divorce sprinting
through the door-
frame? I can’t
remember much
of that first
summer—what we were
eating, or how
we’d end
what we’d started—
just a meal
diminishing
between you and me
like words, like
153
the tally on the cutting
board.
154
Old Knives
A friend gives me old knives
sharpened by a butcher, after
I’ve moved out and the marriage
is over. Meanwhile, a funeral home
director in Tennessee went out
of business, left his last client
on a gurney staring into the blank
ceiling. I can empathize with one
who leaves the worst part
as he finds it. Once, I knew to run
my hands over pepper spray burns
with mineral oil first, then rubbing
alcohol. Still, no one will believe
how careful we were; or, when
we went down in the basement
looking for the fuse box, how my bare
foot arched over an insect that turned
back to what was familiar
and farthest. Everything undoes
itself eventually: for instance,
the way the body only takes
seven years to replace itself, cell
by cell. Those lungs were new, the wrists,
his knees—I took them while I could.
155
The Tower District
While we still live
in the same city,
I catch a glimpse
of you, midstride
on the sidewalk
as I drive past,
a moment long enough
to notice you pause—
and I’m certain now
you also recognize
me, my eyes
in the rearview mirror—
until your face
turns away
and you kneel
in the crowd,
growing smaller
over my shoulder,
looking down
toward the concrete
because something
I can no longer see
has just fallen
from your hands
156
This Poem Wants to Be a House
This poem wants to be a house.
Even that first line believes
it can be a roof for the others.
We are still here, though an eye
moves past us. There is life
in the periphery just as sound
fills a far wall within the plaster’s
dark. A sheet of cobweb lifts
like a silent wave without land.
Underneath everything—even
the ocean—is packed earth.
The moment I am discovered
to be a stranger, I also become less
of a stranger. Breath spreads a veil
over my face. Someday I will speak
in the doorframe of forgiveness.
157
Fresno Laundromat without Air Conditioning in Late July
No one is here, and you can use
a whole row of washers without
any guilt. You don’t bother
with a cigarette outside, the effort
of self-destruction no longer worth it,
because you are beginning
to accept that life is, after all, easy:
it is a level cup of soap flakes
diffusing in water, a matter
that solves itself. Even with the rattle
of water carving metal, the janitor
is so quiet emptying quarters
into the hollow of a cardboard box;
and when you rest against a machine,
he sweeps a careful radius around your feet.
158
Contemporary Artifacts
When the box I lower beside me triggers enough
weight, the seatbelt light blinks passenger
passenger passenger on the dashboard. Later,
the beams of the headlights will pass over you
waiting in our driveway, to help bring inside
what belonged to me, when I lived with someone
else. He gave me the partial list over the phone,
his voice as strange to me as the furniture
I saw daily for years, the room foreign
in its new arrangement, shelves leaning
into the wall, couch facing away from the door.
On the floor of his apartment, I picked through
the artifacts that say how it was then: a dress
that no longer fits, books I'd made plans to read
and never did. Meanwhile, he boiled water
on the stove in his kitchen, and we drank tea
after I was done, the objects contained and taped
over. As he walked me to my car, the neighborhood
darkened by increments, the sidewalks like lines
drawn between any two points at night. But now,
you carry this in your arms over the broken
porch step. In our room, this fits beneath the bed.
159
Portrait of His Ex-Lover at a Yoga Studio, Downtown Fresno
The tattoo of a flower on her left shoulder
enters my vision as we both turn
at the waist toward the window
beside each other. Outside, the gates
of the factory across the street
close for the evening, and the lamps
burn at measured distances. Now
we have an hour of our paired breathing,
the industrial district going dark,
an occasional train that comes close
then curves away. I watch her
whole body for clues on where to bend
next—shadow on the brick wall
larger than both of us—my movements
always a second after hers. I’d rather
hear her voice, know anything else
besides her neck arched to the raftered
ceiling when we lie down, edges
of her mat only inches away. Arms
outspread, we could touch.
160
Incident between Two Exits
While the seatbelt unfurls a lilac bruise
over my chest, ribbons of smoke
rise from the crushed hood, taillights
staining them in monochromatic reds
before releasing into dusk. The destroyed
horn sounds a single note announcing
my life’s continuation: skinned knees
below the dashboard, single-seated pew
and the abstract mosaic suddenly formed
across the wind -shield, all radio hush
in the cathedral of my brain. What words
could I mouth to the drivers tarrying
to witness, what could I possibly say
from the interior of a burst bloom
of silver? I was complete, I counted
my fortune on both sides of the center divide—
those innumerable sequins of glass.
161
Why Can’t It Be Tenderness
Follow any road in Fresno and it will narrow
to gravel, the line down the center
disappearing amidst the stripes of almond
saplings and grapevines for miles.
If you trace a trajectory long enough, it loses
its name. I left that life years ago
and I’ve been calcifying on the shore ever since.
Change your idea of brokenness. Today’s salt
is mine, and tomorrow’s. Look for me
on the horizon. I am as small and endless as sand.
162
The Sweetest Exile Is the One You Choose
Beyond the body. Beyond the car.
Beyond the wire pulled loose
on a fence still waving the flag
of torn things. Beyond the tall grasses
and the shorn hillside. Beyond
the dried-up canal, the empty tent
with the dead fire outside it, the broken
reflector flashing distantly
at the foot of a burned-out barn. Beyond
this valley. Think ocean, think
lost continent. Beyond the dead
and their failures: knowledge they took
nowhere. Beyond the point
of anything calling your name. Call
your own name. Beyond the voice
no longer ringing, like a hubcap flung
into stillness. Beyond the bridge
your words make, the heartbeat’s
trapeze. Beyond the radio tower
blinking its one red light. Beyond
the emergency call boxes
spaced like old hurts you gather up
for miles. Beyond the ordinary
narrative of being. Beyond
the bird’s nest. Beyond the bird’s nest
coming apart in the rain.
163
A Name Made of Asterisks
Mine contains one hundred
and seventeen, each five-armed star
a shut mouth. Los Angeles,
you say too much. From the Blue Line
this morning: a heap of empty bathtubs
taller than all the buildings in Watts.
When I imagine his life now,
the tops of the palm trees
spell something I can no longer read.
164
Mistaken Ode
I have made so many mistakes, lucky
to have been mine—oh how I relive them,
middle-of-the-night looped reels
of them. I call them back to me, I must
not leave any of them out, all the crayons
in the right place, I am working
towards a complete set, my shelves are filled
and alphabetized. I take armfuls with me
for company on road trips, we sing harmony
together the whole way to nowhere, I look
for mistakes hitching on the side of the highway
with tidy bindles of self-loathing, I commit
their stories to memory, I give them all
nicknames: Feeling That Wasn’t
Love, Doomed Marriage, Kicked Dent
in a Car Door After a Fight. I take them down
from a cabinet to polish them every Sunday,
I hoard them like animals, I keep photos of them
in my wallet and show strangers in waiting rooms.
My mistakes love me back with a feeling so pure
I get dizzy, how did I get so fortunate, no one
has mistakes like mine, people ask where did you
get that and I make up exotic locations
though I suppose my mistakes are as common
as Target-brand napkins, repeating patterns
on the tissue of my brain. My mistakes
are so absorbent I can wipe up a small one
with a bigger one and temporarily forget the small
one, but now my heart is a rag with no bleach left
in it, all the dark water of my mistakes wrung out
in a bucket, I wash my windows with them,
I set them out like jewelry in the evenings
in infinite combinations and they all turn
165
my wrists green, there is no use pawning them
because I’d buy them all back, I wear them
the next day, and the next and the next.
166
Love after Dentistry
With my mouth half-numb against yours,
the palm on my face might as well touch
anyone’s. I can’t feel your thumb pulling down
my bottom lip, index resting
under the chin, even though it’s a habit made familiar
to me now. I have to rely on sight
to know what you’re doing, your eyes closed
against the memory of another woman
for all I know. Beyond us and the wall
of the room, the grass stretches toward the end
of the yard. I could call up the fingers
of someone else, I’ve done it
before. It was a kind of test, the recollection
of the last man like a layer
over your movements so that, for a second,
the two of you blurred. And I would
do the work of finding you—the pressure
of your arm behind my back, your hip
on the inner side of my thigh—just to separate
your touch from his, and in this way
I could choose you over and over. Maybe
you’ve done the same, there may have been times
my body changed under your body, it’s possible
you did not know who I was until I returned
to you as myself, and whatever light
the day had left would uncover our faces
to each other. But this time I turn my head, run
my tongue over the raw surfaces in my mouth
for the first time, while the fence outside
the window arranges itself in parallel
lines. Here are the false edges and new spaces, the hard
plaster sanded over, my own teeth.
167
On Waking When You're Already Leaving
The slide of the bolt and lock, fingers
snapped at the end of a spell—your body
walking to the car under the inscrutable
graffiti of the stars—invisible garland
of your green bar of soap still
hanging aromatic in the dim hallway
outside the shower—the steam retreating
to the mirror's oval border, my face
appearing after yours in the cleared
center—the tiny light
on the coffee pot burning at the back
of the kitchen, a pinhole in the night's last
darkness—the pan you cooked eggs in,
the filigree of yellow along the edge
in a ring, lifted out whole like a crown.
168
Midwinter
While he is gone, all she can
stomach are tangerines, the globes
that give December a color. She inserts
a thumbnail, the peel moistens
cuticle, the fruit rips free from its zest.
She counts the segments, sometimes
odd in number so the halves come out
uneven. Bits of rind scale off
like a sun burn and her tongue loosens
the seeds from under the skin, drops
them into her palm. The curves
look pitiful: semi-circles half
full or half gone. Drawing out one
long bead of pulp at a time,
such small increments she can taste
the tartness, she wants nothing to replace
the memory of his mouth—not even
this bit of nourishment, the only flesh
she can bear to touch.
169
An anchor in the shape of an ampersand
“the experiences of exiles are incommunicable”
—Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation
and the wave
of your hand passing
over my face,
brief island
of morning,
in which nothing
existed
before, yet the wind
comes &
from some-
where,
the bedroom
window fills
the sheer
curtain with light,
blank
day all bedsheet
horizon, where we turn
like compasses,
toward something
unnamed
170
Visitations with Unmarried Self
You keep coming back: the maiden name
on grocery store mailers, special offers
from magazines I subscribed to
in another life. I hardly recognize you—
you don’t even know you’re a ghost,
slithering from mouths
and out-of-date medical records,
you pace waiting rooms invisibly
until I answer for you. You are still
registered to vote, believing you are part
of the future, where you cast your wishes
into the great uncounted. You are like the dead
who cannot understand how time moves
on without them. I tell you this in public
bathroom mirrors while I press
our faces together. Or you are like a child
following the mother absorbed
in the list of things she piles into a cart.
Her life is an eclipse moving slowly
over yours, which you can only watch
swallow the light, your one
belonging. It’s over, it’s over, the long illness
of being your own. Everyone gathered to say
goodbye, in dry cleaned skirts
and rented suits, confetti clutched
like ash. Over my shoulder I threw
to you flowers, but already you entered
me, and I was possessed.
I blanched then, white as a dress.
171
Glaucoma Test in the Postracial Era
I adjust for memory, the optometrist says.
E O T V
I say. Something with three lines, something
circling nothing, something flattened
by sky, something broken by gravity.
We talk to each other like this in the dark.
He tilts my head back; my pupils widen
from left to right. Then I’m alone.
Darkness, blurred, is not much different
from the usual darkness. In another room,
he tells his assistant the results,
in a lexicon that joins them together
in mutual understanding. I’ve been listening
to the languages of others all my life
and all of it’s a music that’s not mine.
How do you say my name in Chinese,
the kids at school said, pulling
their eyelids back. I imagine my face
would blur: lost precision of my life,
squinted at. It’s a poverty
to have only one language for grief,
a devastation to have two. At night,
while asleep, my love begins speaking
sounds that do not take the shape of words
in my first language or in his. In the morning,
I say, You were talking in a dream.
I don’t remember, he says, only you falling
asleep first, and the night somehow
passing with both of us inside it, unseen.
172
Lullaby in Which It Becomes Impossible Not to Talk about Race
All night, the rusted water heater
rocks gently on its side,
useless in the dried grass. I imagine
even ideas must sleep sometimes:
race, for instance,
has a recurring dream of a bathroom mirror
in which none of our faces are changed
by history. Meanwhile, most of my waking
life has been spent trying to remember
if the moon is waxing
or waning. At any moment
I can never tell if I'm disappearing
into myself, or at the edge
of something that could alter
the whole sky.
173
Notes
Ode to the Double ‘L’
With thanks to “Ode to the Little ‘r’” from Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay.
Vanishing Ship
John Roloff’s sculpture, “Vanishing Ship,” is permanently installed at the Djerassi Resident
Artists Program in Woodside, California. With thanks to Mari L’Esperance.
Our Bodies Were Once the Color of Our Masks
Susan Rothenberg’s painting, “Double Masked Heads,” is part of the collection at The Broad
museum in Los Angeles, California.
The Hotel Eden
With thanks to Joseph Cornell’s sculpture of the same name.
Asking About My First Name
“Michelle” is featured on The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, which was released in 1965.
Debt
Coinage produced at the San Francisco Mint bears an “S.”
Pantun
The pantoum was adapted from the pantun, a Malay poetic form.
Late Summer
Blueberry Park is free to all visitors, and owned by Metro Parks in Tacoma, Washington. Picking
season is from July through September.
The Tower District
The Tower District is a neighborhood in Fresno, California.
An anchor in the shape of an ampersand
The epigraph is from Édouard Glissant’s The Poetics of Relation.
Abstract (if available)
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Rosado, Michelle Brittan
(author)
Core Title
The pantoum across the Pacific: the circumnavigation of a poetic form; and, Why can’t it be tenderness (poems)
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Literature and Creative Writing
Publication Date
07/25/2021
Defense Date
05/06/2019
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Barbara Jane Reyes,Borneo,Charles Baudelaire,decolonial studies,Ernest Fouinet,formalism,hybridity,John Ashbery,Malay,malaysia,neoformalism,Nusantara,OAI-PMH Harvest,pantoum,pantun,Poetry,postcolonial studies,Shirley Geok-lin Lim,Victor Hugo
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
McCabe, Susan (
committee chair
), St. John, David (
committee chair
), Bernards, Brian (
committee member
), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (
committee member
)
Creator Email
brittan@usc.edu,mbrittanrosado@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-197865
Unique identifier
UC11662765
Identifier
etd-RosadoMich-7669.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-197865 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-RosadoMich-7669.pdf
Dmrecord
197865
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Rosado, Michelle Brittan
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
Barbara Jane Reyes
Charles Baudelaire
decolonial studies
Ernest Fouinet
formalism
hybridity
John Ashbery
Malay
neoformalism
Nusantara
pantoum
pantun
postcolonial studies
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Victor Hugo