Consider The Only Name We Can Call It Now Is Not Its Only Name as an exercise in logical elasticity. At least on the level of sentence, where the relationship is between rhetoric and logic, especially the rhetoric implicit to a sentence’s forward momentum. I’m making a statement. And there are ways the statement realizes a momentum, and, I hope, anyone reading the statement will anticipate the ending. And now make the statement “Autobiography.” The whole length of time an autobiography represents. That’s Valerie Hsiung’s subject matter. Her life. Or her subject is what it means to tell the story of your life. Or the subject is how pointless it is to spend so much time with your life only to realize there’s nothing to tell.
Or the reader who’s devoted to the Valerie Hsiung oeuvre (especially the clutch of books that have been published in the last four years) will recognize the subject is the different ways of telling anything, and what happens when the thing you’re trying to tell your reader about isn’t really accessible to the reader, or you don’t want it accessible to a reader, or the violence necessary to tell the story doesn’t really occupy language very well, or if it does occupy language, it might not be what people read as accessible language. And should it be?
Consider when sexual violence is part of the autobiography. How do you discernibly tell a reader about sexual violence so they understand its inextricability? Its influence? In the four books Hsiung has published in the last four years, she tours her readers through various methods of language. To tell the story? To imprint the poet’s confusion onto the reader? To live after the event(s), to know they keep living inside the poet, but to wonder what telling is supposed to accomplish, and who it would be best to tell. Is telling just a performance? I am fanning out into what Hsiung often does in her poems. Speculates. Elaborates. Interrogates. Her poems are typically portioned or segmented, and they are committed to discover whether this style, this poetics, this structure is authentic and revealing in a way that feels true. But, then, language is an elastic substance, and, for Hsiung, I would argue the rhetorical purpose of the poem is to feel unsettled with any purpose that might fix her past (both “fix” as in to repair and “fix” as in to keep in one place). Some prefer to fix their past so it doesn’t have so much influence on the present. Not Hsiung.
Fixed points are more a convenience. They can lend some access to the book’s subject, so The Only Name We Can Call It uses both elastic and fixed points in its construction. Like imagine one of those pin boards where you wrap rubber bands around the pins to form patterns. For Hsiung, each of these pins could be one of her recurring characters. There’s K, a friend. There’s the farmer who thought it would be good to see her pregnant. There’s the other farmer. There’s C in the quote below, who sounds like a friend. The characters matter enough for the poem so the reader feels grounded while Hsiung stretches her speculative meditations around them.
Tonight I want to wear my green dress out
because of an event that is ill, that is my unbirthday which I will tell you
all about but, C says, I hope you are celebrating
in your shark shirt and, rather than correcting C, I say thanks it gives
me fondness again to wear my wolf shirt. I make a list, I fail
this list, I edit the list and essentially make a list
again. (p. 21)
Given the book is a book-length poem with chapter-ish divisions signaled when verse fragments appear in the middle of a page, a moment like this provides a straightforward situation: the poet going out with C. There’s not a lot of context around C. And the context for this narrative fragment is more the poet’s seemingly normal life. What she maintains despite her disturbed history. And the book’s poems are interested in situations like this. By page 21 of the book, where this quote occurs, we are informed readers. When the poet would “rather not correct” her friend, we read both the kindness and how corrections like these might draw the poet back into significantly more awkward social situations. Of course, this fragment doesn’t need C to express social anxieties like this, but with C there, it grounds the poems.
And for The Only Name We Call It, it’s helpful to recognize where and how the poems. find factual grounding, though for Hsiung any gesture to grounding the poems will be destabilized by the elasticity of her language. The implication being that if language is elastic, so too must be fact. It seems like the most honest way of relating anything you might have heard about autobiography. Like how memories are unstable. How your reaction to events might not be the same as someone else’s. So, where C in the above quote might occupy a reasonably stable position, at least for relating that vignette about going out, Hsiung multiplies C later in the book.
C, who’s both the farmer owner and the owner owned by the farmer. Also C,
my full sister, but perhaps not fully here. In all this talk between myth and fact, I
almost left C empty. I did leave C in reality. So, it all begins with C. It all begins
with a half-sister, emptied. It all begins with C, on the farm, where we go to
another place. It might be helpful now to have some of B’s notes, some of U’s
notes, even some of R’s. But I can’t find them, these notes, or it would be a P to
locate them now. All week in bed I’ve been looking
at the moles on S’s back and then looking
up tumorous skin spots to study...ABCDE...
asymmetry, borders, color, diameter, evolving size (p. 49)
So who’s C again? Is it even safe to consider C a fixed point? Or in piecing together an autobiography the who has done what is not nearly as significant as the what that was done to the poet/speaker and how that affected her. And in writing poems about this where should the poet’s priority lie? Where is fact? Where is honesty? For me, this is the where I am always fascinated with Hsiung’s poetry. The language can carry so many vectors, because that’s really what language does. Carry vectors. And poets have so many different ways of aligning those vectors. And when it comes to autobiography, there are writers who use the act of writing as an opportunity to turn those vectors and see whether solutions arise. Or, as in the art of Montaigne’s or Lopate’s personal essay, to see if more interesting questions may arise by arranging the vectors.
And Hsiung is doing so many things, all of them revolving around what language does, even pulling it to language as a performance, or the tension of the poem on the page versus a performance’s transcription, and the political implications when words are recorded. In her case, her extended family in China could be affected by what she’s doing in a book of poetry published in the United States! Which is what makes the art of Hsiung’s book entirely fascinating to me. I can say with certainty that it’s willfully confounding certainty even as the sentences’ syntax lures its reader into a dream of certainty. But they won’t gather the solid ground around that certainty. And I imagine this could be the experience of living a life marked by violence or abuse. Recognizing language as a fool’s errand. And recognizing language as a salvation.
Kent Shaw, a poet and professor, earned his BA in English literature from the University Missouri–St. Louis, an MFA in creative writing from Washington University, and a PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Shaw is the author of Too Numerous (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) and Calenture (University of Tampa Press, 2008). He is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.