12 or 20 (second series) questions with Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese.  She is the author of two books of poetry, My Funeral Gondola (Manoa Books/El Léon, 2013) and Water the Moon (Marick, 2010), as well as several volumes of translation of contemporary Chinese and American poets (Zephyr Press and Vif Éditions).  She lives in France, and works as an editor and zheng harpist.

www.fionasze.com

1.  How did your first book change your life?  How does your most recent work compare to your previous?  How does it feel different?

My work is modest.  To some extent, my debut book, Water the Moon, changes the course of my writing.  The second, My Funeral Gondola, is of a different aesthetic — and experience.  My editor and co-publisher from Manoa Books, Frank Stewart has been very much present when it comes to assuming its making.

2.  How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
By accident.

I was working on non-fiction pieces for some years before poems happened. 

3.  How long does it take to start any particular writing project?  Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process?  Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It is a slow process.  Drafts are private.

4.  Where does a poem usually begin for you?  Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem begins with a failure of sorts.  It speaks to me when I can feel its pulse.  I don’t write with a “book” in mind.  It’d empower presentation and result more than the intimacy of writing.

5.  Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?  Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I find readings meaningful when they resist becoming an outward performance / role-playing.  Or something that one does just to sell books or be seen in the literary community.  In short, I prefer readings that serve as a form of dialogue, with a precise social context to relate to.

7.  What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture?  Does s/he even have one?  What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I couldn’t help but think of Bialoszewski:

    First I went down to the store
    by means of the stairs,
    just imagine it,
    by means of the stairs.

    Then people known to people unknown
    passed me by and I passed them by.
    Regret
    that you did not see
    how people walk,
    regret!

8.  Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

More essential than difficult.

9.  What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Not sure if this is the “best,” or an “advice” — Begin from where you are.

10.  How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)?  What do you see as the appeal?

Difficult.  Appeal: to be immersed in another landscape.

11.  What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?  How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t write every day, but I work on the harp every day.  I also write letters. 

12.  When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Bach.

13.  What fragrance reminds you of home?

My grandmother’s herbal soup.

14.  David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes, most, if not all, of what you’ve mentioned: botany, music, and visual art. 

15.  What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Homer, Montaigne, Proust, Tolkien, Blixen, Rilke…

16.  What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Magic. 

17.  If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
Fencing.

18.  What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t know.

19.  What was the last great book you read?  What was the last great film?

I’m unsure about “great”…  but am happy to recommend Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945), and Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008).  Recently, I re-read a few of Jane Austen’s novels.

20.  What are you currently working on?
Phytotherapy and organic desserts.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Fiona Sze-Lorrain, My Funeral Gondola

Sixteen Lines, Autumn 2010

In past autumns, I saw the world differently.

Swans looked graceful

because their bodies were white.

Crows were soothsayers—black

wings, black cries.

In those autumns, death was a small affair.

One leaf fell.

Another.

This autumn, death gets even smaller.

Leaves tilted by wind, into ashes of the earth.

Swans grew fatter,

dropping two or three feathers

into water.

Crows, mouthing air in bare elder trees.

Look: a long sundown.

No more black and white.

The second trade poetry collection from poet, translator and zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain is My Funeral Gondola (Honolulu HI: Mānoa Books/Berkeley CA: El León Literary Arts, 2013). There is an intriguing disconnect between her lines, akin to some of the work that has been done over the years in the Canadian ghazal (John Thompson, Andy Weaver, Phyllis Webb and Douglas Barbour, for example). The disconnect allows for her poems to exist as clearly between the lines as through them, allowing the collision of the occasional disconnect and pause to resonate new and unseen connections. Through My Funeral Gondola, Sze-Lorrain’s is an attention to lyric detail, to smallness, and some of the poems give the sheen of koans, providing directions and the occasional wisdom. She writes a series of meditations on history, perception, memory, loss, experience, departures, music and ancient distances. “Grief cannot be quarantined – it must / be a battle.” she writes, in “My Death,” one of the poems that make up the first section, “The Title Took Its Life.” Throughout this section, poems write from a sequence of dark triggers, with titles such as “Notes from My Funeral,” “My Death,” “My Melancholy,” “My Nudity” and “My Funeral Gondola,” as well as the section title poem, a thread that exists throughout the collection, into the succeeding two sections.

Japanese Wayang

First, smoke. The elders grope

into the theater. Like hidden

bronze mirrors, midnight lanterns

glow. I don’t ask

when the play begins. Ocher moths

over the whiteness

of the screen where trees clutch

the hungry rain, running

after wrong spirits. Someone is making

room for the wind. Inexplicable,

long fingers of light drag up a torn

hero. Self by self, he steals

away from his body. Gamelan enters:

the neighborly dark

roams. Watch the shadows, not

the puppets.

Her voice is an authoritative one, and yet one that wishes not to be the only authority, exploring uncomfortable spaces and dark thoughts. Perhaps not entirely a darkness throughout the collection, there is certainly an unsettledness, highlighted through such as the first line of the poem “François Dead,” that reads, “Without improvisation, we empty the drawers.” There is a curious restraint in her densely-packed poems that highlight just how deliberately each word is placed, and yet, there is no simple way to discuss the poems. The final poem, “Return to Self,” is very much a poem of sentences, focusing the strength of her lines into self-contained sentence-stanzas in the most appealing way, nearly a lyric cousin to works by Lisa Robertson. I can’t tell if the subtitle, “not in order of appearance,” allows a clarity into the poem, or weakens it, somehow; perhaps, somehow, it manages both. The piece opens:

The whiteness of this page can’t appease my hurt.

In the Letter to His Father, Kafka wrote about Hermann’s threat, I’ll tear you apart like a fish. Writers copied it in their diaries.

My sister accepts her ordainment with joy. She learns that we are traditions, we will die. I believe in myths and write love letters with leaves.

Last night is always more poetic than last year.

A colleague plants sadness in her head. To continue her dark novels, to cry with her mouth gagged.

My government is eager to give me two passports.