To Be the Poet by Maxine Hong Kingston
**Overview of "To Be the Poet" by Maxine Hong Kingston**
“To Be the Poet” is a reflective and innovative exploration of poetry by Maxine Hong Kingston, drawing from her experiences and insights as a writer. Presented as a series of lectures at Harvard, Kingston's work emphasizes her journey toward embracing a more playful and liberated approach to poetry, contrasting it with the constraints of prose writing. She advocates for a poetic life characterized by spontaneity and joy, proposing that poets should revel in the freedom to express themselves without the burdens of rigid structure.
The text is rich with personal anecdotes that blend her daily life and memories, creating a tapestry of experiences that serve as inspiration for poetry. Kingston also engages with the wisdom of established poets, seeking their guidance on the creative process and how to transform life’s moments into poetic expression. Her exploration includes various forms of poetry, from brief, impactful lines to vivid imagery drawn from her surroundings. Ultimately, “To Be the Poet” invites readers to appreciate the art of poetry as a natural and joyous endeavor, while showcasing Kingston's unique voice marked by honesty and a keen awareness of societal expectations.
To Be the Poet by Maxine Hong Kingston
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 2002
Type of work: Nonfiction
The Work
The title of the work defines its contents: This is not Kingston celebrating herself as a poet; rather, it is her own journalistic “how to” study based on personal efforts. Ironic, witty, self-deprecating, and at the same time mocking the pretensions of the academic establishment, this work must be read aloud to be fully appreciated, for its prose sections have driving poetic rhythms that will be missed in silent readings. Based on her 2000 William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, To Be the Poet proclaims Kingston’s wish as she moves toward retirement to finish the long-running prose books that have consumed her energies and her life as she has crafted them in every spare moment, writing and rewriting to force them to say exactly what she means. Instead, in defiance of the Western tradition of the suffering poet, she asserts a very Chinese conception of poetry, one expressed playfully and teasingly: to relax, be happy, and write short, easy poems that flow naturally from the spirit and need not bear the marks of hours of self-imposed slavery to the computer.
In the first section, “I Choose the Poet’s Life,” she asserts that poets do as they please, unconfined by the rules and strictures that restrain prose writers. A poet’s day is “gladsome”; a poet’s life is that of a “skylark,” not a “workhorse.” When she takes a day off from work, she proclaims herself to be “already acting like the Poet.” She looks forward to replacing the social responsibility of the prose writer with the social irresponsibility of the poet.
In the second section, “I Call on the Muses of Poetry, and Here’s What I Get,” Kingston explores the advice of friends and acquaintances who are recognized poets about how poets create poetry: Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Fulton, Fred Marchant, and Clayton Eshleman. Their advice leads her to try to turn her daily life into poetry—musing on her dead parents, personal travels to England and to Hawaii, and daily events in life (such as ordering a burgundy and getting served white wine instead)—and trying day and night in different locations and different moods to produce poetry. She asks if diary-like notes are really Zen poems or just notes. She revels in the spontaneity and imagery of poetry but has the prose writer’s desire for more story.
The final section, “Spring Harvest,” reveals the range of her efforts. In a Chinese tradition, a poem can be a single word, but one whose character carries a complex history or implications. Kingston tries her hand at brief images, at four-word line poems, and at extended imagistic descriptions derived from personal experience. However, her personal experience is not the bucolic world of lambs gambling and birds singing madrigals; it is the shuffling, Darwinian world of the giant elephant seals at Año Nuevo Beach along the California coast (a hilarious prose poem). While much of her effort is unfinished and not always satisfactory (she observes, “Word or picture cannot show the Reality of Cow”), what lives in the memory is Kingston herself: a brutally honest, self-deprecating personality, wholehearted in her friendship but wise enough to see through pretension and cant. Her final poem versifies the story of her Woman Warrior, Mu Lan, transforming that familiar prose tale into a most effective poem.
Bibliography
Crow, Charles L. Maxine Hong Kingston. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 2004.
Huntley, E. D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Janette, Michele. “The Angle We’re Joined At: A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston.” Transition, no. 71 (1996): 142-157.
Lee, Ken-fang. “Cultural Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingston’s and Tan’s Ghost Stories.” MELUS 29 (Summer, 2004): 105-127.
Royal, Derek Parker. “Literary Genre as Ethnic Resistance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.” MELUS 29 (Summer, 2004): 141-156.
Shu, Yuan. “Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston’s Woman Warrior.” MELUS 26 (Summer, 2001): 199-225.
Woo, Eunjoo. “’The Beginning Is Hers, the Ending, Mine’: Chinese American Mother/Daughter Conflict and Reconciliation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Studies in Modern Fiction 9 (Summer, 2002): 297-314.