Valerie Hsiung

clockwise- world’s smallest slinky, river rock, st. Hildegard pendant, homemade soap bar scraping, compostable straw

Readings

 The first poem you remember loving (and how you feel about it now)

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays,” (from A Ballad of Remembrance, 1962)

I can’t remember the exact first poem (I fell down the rabbit hole and fell fast) but I think one of the first encounters must have been Robert Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays." I found it in one of the English textbooks at school. I can still pretty much remember sitting in the classroom and being pierced in the abdomen by this poem. I couldn’t identify the feeling then, I just knew I had been pierced.  By cupid’s arrow maybe. My child heart. In this poem, Hayden writes about something that I understood in my bones, the coldness and fear and loneliness of a home, but had never talked about to anyone nor heard anyone else speak about, at least not in any way that felt real: feeling a kind of shame and then feeling a kind of shame for one’s shame. Up until that moment, I thought maybe I would just live my whole life in silence. Maybe what took my breath away was realizing that one could make something heard out of something so silent, without harming that silence, could send a message through the gap where no signals or wires are meant to cross or run. 

I’m looking at this poem again now after many years. And I still think it’s perfect.

A book of poetry that feels like it is a contemporary to your own work. (feel free to define contemporary however you like)

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, (Viking Press, 1962)

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I’m just re-reading it now so it’s hard not to speak about this one. Yes, I consider this a book of poetry and yes I consider this book contemporary to my own work. Perhaps in the sense that I believe Jackson was not interested in being contemporary in the slightest. And neither am I (at least anymore). There’s plenty of good poetry out there that may be considered contemporary and it serves an important purpose. But I guess when the fundamental guide is to serve any important purpose, sometimes it can feel like the writing is actually not an end in itself, like so much has been virtually foreclosed. Like, this is the war and here is my sword: poetry. Because I say “good” not as in fine, but good as in the opposite of evil. And because I’m quite numbed by this particular binary of warfare, and am more shaken by the pure wickedness of, say, a child, I don’t care so much right now for good poetry, for poetry that is one with the cause. There is too much nobility and clarity there and I prefer to dwell in the land of foolishness and bewilderment. Jackson takes me there. 

 A poet or book in translation or in another language

Ma Yan, I Name Him Me: Selected Poems of Ma Yan (trans. Stephen Nashef, Ugly Duckling Presse 2021)

What do I hold dear about this book? How it’s easy to swallow and yet hard to digest. It feels very informal and unpretentious but it’s also incredibly skillful and delicately attuned to the waywardness of common language. I feel Ma Yan’s sense of abandon, letting the instant itself lead her so that the familiar becomes strange, not by force, but by alchemy of time. Its wisdom feels arrived through the revolutionary risk of sensation. I’m talking to the friend I never got to meet, so intimate and personal, and yet always this presence of an avalanche. I can see Ma Yan’s breath making puffs in the cold air. She’s on the street, outside of my window, and then she’s gone. 

Writings

then
when it’s time to turn them in
to turn you in
and I am not anger
to rinse off
and sweat is stopped
by my sofa
from reaching the earth’s
core doing it backwards
wanting to sit here on my sofa
it’s not mine
but I’m protective enough
wanting to
not because I can’t face
beginning but my skin wants its destiny
out of shape running
meeting under a tree well no sofa there
the sofa being the least bay part
to not notice any aberration
because I can or can’t afford
(not) to
I have no answer
a thousand bags
finally curling

~

small but noble
door to something wider
in this era many believe
they do not have to suffer
shadows more than over the grass
as the walker walks over
all we have is pace
a direction
this is the style of our hunting
faces come so close
in this interrogating
whether this interrogation
is just a conversation
people are leaning
their heads behind them
for some just reason
not ready to be alone with a friend
I’d even call a dear
though we’ve been alone
before does she know
I’m here does she know
I’m watching
I cross my eyes
looking at first name
and surname
until everyone has
one name

~

I wish you could stop
asking me questions
along those lines
sometimes we share
instructions better
to someone with
everywhere to go by
shaking ourselves
there are two places
I could camouflage
enough
neither are with you
what does that give you
cut up my eyes
climbing
trees I don’t know
names of cut up my elbows
climbing over fences
laughing to conceal
good flesh that hurts
what our lack of neck-
laces have in common
is the construction site

~

when I am close
to my hunger closer
I am to myself
aimed
but if you take me over
when I am already over
the edge of my deepest pangs
then I cease knowing
myself then I am
neither in proximity nor time
end my life
is
integrated
in my existence
I see no other meaning
than to smear myself
then

Valerie Hsiung is the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, 2023), To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022), selected by Renee Gladman for the Essay Press Book Prize, hummingbird et partygirl (Essay Press, forthcoming), outside voices, please (CSU), Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), and e f g (Action Books). Her writing has appeared in print (The Believer, New Delta Review, Black Sun Lit), in flesh (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance,  Poetic Research Bureau), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works, and public streets and trails she has walked on and hummed along for years. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives between nowhere and somewhere.