I never know where I am going when I work on a poem.
It usually starts with a line I hear in my head.
This time it was different.
The title of the poem came first.
“Memories of Charles Street.” I wrote it down in my notebook without any idea of what I would write. Two poems came to mind, neither of which was an inspiration: “18 West 11th Street” by James Merrill and “For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell. I had read Lowell’s poem when I was a first-year student at Boston University. It has stayed with me because many of the details he mentions in the poem are things and places I passed when I was child growing up on Charles Street:
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
Shows Hiroshima boiling
Over a Mosler safe.
The site of the Merrill poem is a townhouse where he grew up in as a child and where, many years later, a bomb that Vietnam War protesters were making exploded, killing all the occupants but one, Catherine Wilkinson. When I read the poem, I remembered being a student at Boston University and protesting the war, as well as knowing people, friends, arrested for their activities.
I knew from the beginning that I did not want to write description. This would be where I would go in a different direction than Lowell and Merrill.
A few weeks later, I began working on the poem. I was not sure how long it would be. Thinking of the poems by Lowell and Merrill, I wanted to open a space that was both fictional and based on memories and misremembering. Memories and perspectives change; we remember events differently as time passes. Nothing is fixed.
Once I opened a space, anything could happen in it. Not something fantastical, but something that was true to the story of my parents and me. I did not want the poem to be an observer’s description, but an experience. I wrote three sections and thought that the poem was complete. I believe the first line, an impossibility that could be possible, laid the groundwork for everything that followed both in this section and the ones that followed:
One day I wake up and my hair has turned white
And I am no longer Chinese
Growing up bi-racial, this was something asked (Are you Chinese?) or said (You look Chinese).
I finished the first three sections and thought that was the poem and saved it on my computer. A few weeks later I added the fourth section and again thought I had finished, but I was wrong. When I read the poem one day, I realized that I had nothing about the “father” in the poem. The last three sections have “father” in the first line. When I finished the seventh section I felt was complete, though, as I write this, I wonder if I might not one day feel the poem needs more. That is, I am sure, another poem.
The other thought I had when I was drafting this poem was that my immigrant experience was not typical of the poems I read. I did not want a neat ending, revelation, or resolution. I wanted mine to be funny, horrible, and more, like one’s childhood. I wanted there to be exchanges between the adult and child, but no conversation, which is to say no understanding, only different points of view. The poem I was thinking of when I authored this poem—but which I did not realize until now—was Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
