Before starting this book, you should engage with a series of instructions. So you can understand the genre Hsiung is writing into. No. Her genre is not the instruction manual. More like what do you feel like immediately after you’ve read a set of instructions. Like how Frank O’Hara coins “Personism” for talking to a person on the phone, I am coining “Instruction-ism” for the feeling after I read insturcions, and then turn to Hsiung’s book. How much time should you let pass between reading actual instructions and reading Hsiung’s seeming response? It varies. You should consult your personal definition of “ascertain.” I think ascertaining, as an activity, takes the right measure of time. I think there are many other words that could take space in you while you ascertain a situation. Words like “anticipation,” “apprehensive,” “biding,” “clinging,” and “enthusiastic.” To ascertain is like when you’re reading a Naval Technical Manual, and there’s instructions at the top of the page that say, “This page intentionally left blank.” It’s concise and helpful and truthful. And it’s verbose, given what it’s actually explaining.
There should be instructions for reading longer poetry books versus shorter ones. Before starting a community. Instructions on how to write a letter. How to get along with people who would prefer not to get along with anyone. How to be effective. And not ineffective. I debate in my mind whether the carbon paper that would automatically collect your handwritten responses in triplicate were effective tools. Can paper be termed a tool? When I’m sorting through that general question, I think my brain is working the same as Hsiung’s writing. In fact, this whole paragraph is in contiguity with Hsiung’s writing style. It gestures towards thoroughness and simultaneously admits the impossibility of being that thorough!
This is what I call administrative fluency. The efficient and even tone of helpful instructions. Though, for Hsiung, there is an accommodating balance between “administrative concerns” and the mundane. Or what do you call the language running through your mind while you’re waiting in line, and you’re making a conscious effort not to look at your phone? Make that moment a verb. The mundane details you notice while you do something bureaucratic. And add some anticipation. Or anxiety. Just enough so that even the minutest detail kind of matters to you.
Do you feel boxed in by these instructions? That is Hsiung’s book. She belongs to a community. Or she’s not sure if she’s done enough to belong. Or she’s thinking she’d rather be the one in the community who sits in the corner alone. It’s hard knowing what to do when there’s community-driven, interpersonal, and commodified concerns on the line. Fortunately, Hsiung has a healthy administrative side to box herself in, and, at the same time, to ascertain what it would take to not feel so boxed in. That’s her style of writing. And I hope you’re familiar with when this style appeared before, because it means you and me are both avid Hsiung readers. Remember that part of To Love an Artist (see REVIEW: To Love an Artist (Essay Press, 2022))? There was the administration of a day. The comforts in a day. The toxicities affecting the comforts, and maybe the comforts aren’t as comforting, or maybe the comforts need to be prioritized. And it’s the poet’s administrative gifts, walking through circumstances like Gertrude Stein would expand on thoroughness of concept. For Hsiung, though, expansiveness isn’t carried by a bouncing syntax, like Stein’s. It’s more like living the continuous present happening in a lobby of the Comfort Inn. I’ve been to the one in North Conway, NH a handful of times. It is continuously present in my mind. Hsiung is interested in language generated by generative feelings about what all the things are in the present moment. Especially those very mundane moments. They need to be attended to. With long sentences that seem to grow longer.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.