| Our scarred
mother: the poems of Su Zi
By Don Bapst It has become so “in” to care about the planet these days that it’s already out. Al and Melissa got their Oscars for caring, and Hollywood—its red carpet still rolled out and sprinkled with ten thousand dollar gowns, its million plus marquee bulbs still beaming—gave itself a velvet-gloved pat on the back for “going green.” People are driving hybrids now and recycling stuff and speaking with furrowed brows of how the changes in the weather are a “sign” that something is wrong. Hell, even W decided to bring up global warming in his State of the Union and no one fainted. Once the territory of granola-crunching artistes, the health of mother earth is suddenly on everyone’s front burner, and, frankly, this shift in national focus has left some of the smugger slam poets preaching to the choir. And then there’s The Tissue of Language, an unassuming collection of sixteen poems about the tragic state of the planet by Florida-based poet Su Zi. Wrapped in an image of a pod-like plant printed in subdued, almost somber shades of violet and olive, the text is all lower case, with only the occasional mark of punctuation. There is no red carpet entrance here, no self-congratulatory marketing copy. Even the titles of most of the poems are beyond minimal, bearing merely a number rather than a name, each representing the order in which the accompanying poem was first penned within the context of a much larger series from which they have been distilled like so many drops of the scarce water the poet says, “gives back to us in slow sweetness / that eats us.” Su Zi’s poems do just that. They do not celebrate the earth’s obvious beauty or satirize the most cynical aspects of capitalism that have led to her destruction. These poems call us to collectively mourn the concrete, immediate signs of her unmistakable and irreversible death: “now it is my belief that each airplane / leaves a cut / on the flesh of the sky,” Su Zi notes. “who looks for the millions of razor scars / under the garment of a / beautiful woman” There is never a question mark here, for if there is any question it is hypothetical if not downright ironic. And where there is irony, it is never a lashing out of wit but a dull ache of agonizing enlightenment. We are presented with the evidence of nature’s violation in a series of undisputable images but are never asked to find a recycling bin or to lobby Congress. Instead, we are forced to take a good long look at the graphic reality. Su Zi knows, like a trained surgeon attending to the last heartbeat of a dying patient, that the damage is too deep. “it is said ‘we recreate’… / but we do not re create, we take / … we numb her flesh with our endless cuttings” In reading these dense, deeply sad words, we feel we are standing in the presence of an expert witness testifying to the depth of the destruction we have caused—a witness who does not remove herself from the process but whose innocent intentions only make her more painfully aware of her heartbreaking contribution. “the cosmetics clerk whispers against my cheek / and aims the soft tail of some sorry weasel / who died for this caress” And just as the poet has contributed to violating the earth by being among the humans who have destroyed her, she is also a part of that earth mother’s flesh, cut both psychologically and physically. “but it was the raging purple and black miasma of my face / that finally terminated all doubt / of my new status” Su Zi at once mourns the sub-status that her human-inflicted wounds have brought her and recognizes the emotional freedom granted by the enlightenment it has afforded her. “it is good to bleed in this womanly way, / cleansing the holy caverns…” It’s an enlightenment that reaches its peak when she loses two of her closest earthly friends and says, “you find me learning the most raw of lessons” In finding the language to describe such lessons, Su Zi has woven her tissue… her testament to the life force that transcends human experience for an earthly one. She is only too aware of the fragility of this tissue, however, when she acknowledges how poorly it translates to the majority of the universe: what is the point of making the horsesThat the poet continues to weave her tissue—always confronting the problem of how poorly it will be received, not only among misguided humans but within the larger scope of time and space—is a personal testament to art’s potential for grounding humanity in the earth that bore us, regardless of what we have done to her. To order a copy of The Tissue of Language send $5 to P.O. Box 831544, Ocala, Florida, 34483; for book and spoken word CD from the same manuscript, send $10. The CD is available on cdbaby.com. For more information on the poet, visit her page here. Don Bapst (donbapst.com) is the author of several novels, dramatic works, and numerous features. His short film “A Haunted House,” will be appearing at Cannes’ Short Film Corner in May, 2007. You can visit his website, The Modern Marquis, here. |
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