There’s this part in Andre Breton’s Surrealism Manifesto that praises conversations for their back and forth. There is sense in the single self, and there is sense in the simulation of two selves in dialogue. Where language is like a tidal force, moving back and forth. And Breton is especially enthusiastic for the conversations based on strident contradiction. It makes composing a “conversation” out of automatic writing a little easier, however performed the contradiction might be. Because if you listen to the space between two disputants, whether they’re directly addressing the same subject, or it’s a play with being arbitrary, there is an implicit point connecting Character A’s statement and Character B’s. That point is why automatic writing can be so valuable. It speeds the writer into saying the next thing rather than giving time to carefully assemble what’s said. You can construct a dialogue, or you can storm your way through it.
There is something to Wong’s poems that have contradiction at their center. Or there’s contradiction, and then there’s also the the tightened poetic phrasing based on torqued enjambment and slashes in the middle of lines. Wong’s poems are enthusiastic for and keen to juxtapose as many variables against one another. This combination of contradiction and tight phrasing draws me in when I’m reading Wong’s individual poems in magazines, but I struggle with it in the fuller context a book provides. In particular, I’m not sure how to tie the personal poems to the recurring poems that address or give voice to female musicians and composers. Is it about creative women being misunderstood? Is it the gap between Wong’s knowledge of these women, which is based primarily on their music, versus Wong’s personal life, where people in the poems are seldom interacting with her based on the poems she makes? Is it that these composers didn’t have children, and Wong feels the need to address this question in her own life? If this is the case, the book’s dedication to her mother and grandmother would be especially poignant. It could also speak to the title.
To form a more concrete bridge between the personal poems and the women composer poems, I keep looking for who the poems say this poet is. Did she attended a “university of / spoiled children” and find herself alienated when everyone got together at the lake? Does she settle for an online date with someone who’s “too pretty / to war with” and who also tells her “you should always watch your back / around girls who look / barely legal”? The poems regularly occupy contradictions like this. And in the course of a single poem, that contradiction plays out as two different energetic layers in harmony. Another recurring series of poems “a List of Games the Buddha Would Not play.” And here, an earnest consideration of a Buddhist term, which operates with a detached objectivity, plays up against another layer driven forward by the poet’s impatience with cultural norms.
It’s this intense investment in contradiction as a binding poetic device that makes me more curious about how to relate the person poems with those that are about women composers and musicians. There are twelve of them. The last poem in the book is one of them. Michael Leong’s essay about neo-surrealism in John Yau and Will Alexander would encourage me to think of these “dramatic monologues” as fixed points the poet might be using to perform a cultural critique. But, again, I’m not entirely sure the point of view anchoring the poet as she shifts to these monologues. If the conversation’s Character B is a certain type, and Character A is progressively unfolding a tightly modulated lyric self, what brings these two in conversation with another? The personal poems succeed most in their insinuation and ambiguity. But what is the nature of connection with women famous for their music compositions?
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.