Today, students in my Washington & Lee University Spring Term 2018 class in Prose Poems & Hybrid Forms were fortunate to participate in an hour-long conversation with poet and artist Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 whose book Echolalia in Script we have been reading and studying as part of our course reading list.
Sam very generously got up early (he’s in Eugene OR and we are in Lexington VA!), but everyone felt warmly connected to him through our FaceTime session.
He devised a short “program” of poetry reading, conversation, and both semic and asemic writing, which culminated in the entire class doing a group asemic (each contributing a couplet) on a beautiful red sheet of calligraphy paper that Sam had sent us in the mail last week.
To set the tone, Sam chose as opening poem William Stafford’s “A Ritual to Read to Each Other;” and I chose as our closing poem Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Shoulders.”
It was a simple but beautiful and profound experience for everyone.
Sam wrote a poem dedicated to my students; and here is the poem I wrote in class today as a response to his “Inner Wiring Exercise.”
Here is the prompt he gave us:
“If the heart had a mouth, what would it say? If the mouth was a door, what shape would its room be? Circle, square, or triangle? What shape are the windows? If a window has a taste, what would it taste like? If the heart had a tongue what would it say?”
Following my poem below is the poem that Sam wrote, dedicated to my students.
*
The heart would say please,
lay a trail of milk pearls
it can follow; a sheen that,
like the hand on the heart,
helps it see in the dark.
Who led it here into the well
of the wood, afraid it could
no longer call it child?
The houses and farms know only
of splintered skin that sang
away from the lip of a blade,
panes of frosted sugar laid
in place where the eyes could
no longer trust the weather’s
dictation. A fox runs sometimes
through the hills, stippling
the grass with the hair on its tail
as it goes. It pauses under a moon
that looks from afar as small as a heart:
it calls with its spiraling call until
the silver in the sky rains down,
until the spirits hear and gather
the coins it has spent to buy
your passage back from the dark.
~ For Sam Roxas-Chua 姚; and for my Spring Term 2018 students at W&LU ~ LAI
*
*
