Day 11, Poet 11: Mia You

Photo by Hugo van der Velden

From THE BOB PERELMAN QUARTETS
 
II. OR WAS IT AQUIFER?
 
Lagoon. Aquaphor. I made the fatal mistake
of bringing two "civilians" to the reading,
an anesthesiologist and a product designer,
and now I am trying not to laugh, at Avik,
the designer, sleeping with his head jerked back
his mouth hanging open, and at Nick,
the doctor getting more and more annoyed at
the 20-year-old bespectacled poetry student
rhythmically nodding (and not asleep) in front
of him, and above all at the profound seriousness
of this event, how we are all swept up with
E=V=E=R=Y=S=I=N=G=L=E=W=O=R=D
as an object of explosive meditation except instead
of explosive its sort of a depressing deflating that
makes my heart swell with pity, no never mind,
that's just the beer I've been drinking since the
morning, I am pretty sure I am going to get diabetes
after the last 24 hours in which we've been drinking
fancy coffees and eating rosemary doughnuts and
doing all that stuff you're supposed to be doing in
New York, taking only occasional breaks to see
some pictures at the MOMA, which for me was
far more poetic than sitting here with these vintage
store blazers and facial hair and girls who can't
decide if they’re hippy pixies or French cinema
femme fatales, and I know that I look like a dentist
on holiday in comparison but I can't help it, I grew
up in Silicon Valley, played an instrument, did a
sport, volunteered at the local retirement home,
and I never did anything on the weekends because
my mother was sure that if I hung out at the mall
or wore shorts in public I would be raped or, worse,
kidnapped by North Korean spies. No, I exaggerate,
she only worried about North Korean spies when
I was in college and did study-abroad in Europe.
You know, the one time my father wrote to me years
later when I was pregnant and again in Europe was when
he saw the movie Taken and then, he said, he knew,
he knew exactly how Liam Neeson felt. But now I’m
ahead of myself. So my mother wasn't wrong that Kim
Jong-Un was in Switzerland, but I was at Oxford,
that’s where I had that cat lady as a poetry tutor,
I can’t remember her name but she was championed
by another poet whom I don't recall either, one
of those guys the British get all excited about and
the Americans feature in Ploughshares. Anyway,
homegirl told me I should write about being Korean
if I wanted to “market” myself as a poet, so I wrote
a poem about T. S. Eliot riding the London
Underground as my version of saying FUCK YOU.
You can see I’m not really good at showing people
what's what. Is this totally narcissistic to be thinking
about my own poetic formation while being at this
reading or is that what this nodding kid is doing too,
composing his On-the-Road-in-“Post-Free”-Verse
(“Aren’t we all post-free?”) with a section like
 
4. CIGARETTES
 
CIGARETTES
CIGARETTES
CIGARETTES
                        CIGARETTES
CIGARETTES
                        ARETES
                        on yo' ASS!
 
but I don't think he would be cool enough to end
with ASS, alas, pigeons on the grass, I think that
is my beer talking again, and then the next
section would be about DNA sequencing because
there's, like, all these converging registers in
the bureaucratically determined code of language
you know what I mean? And I'm not really sure
his nods are aligning with the rhythm of anything
being read aloud here, and Nick is now staring
into his manly cocktail drink, one of those cocktails
that's just some hard liquor on top of another hard
liquor, and I don’t get that because cocktails are
supposed to hide what you’re drinking, right? So
I had to order it for him by repeating each of the
syllables I thought he said but apparently came back
with the wrong thing, which he still likes. Vivisection
of my rotundular enigma. I am not even sure these
are words that were in the poem, I am forgetting
all of them as soon as they are spoken, they are all
so soft and round and abstract and don't cohere
and I now think vivisection is probably too
vivacious to have been there and the real problem is
that I would probably like the poet if I knew her,
she looks smart and earnest and not at all like
these affected pixie bitches. I am even sure
I just read something by her in an anthology
and must have liked it because I don't remember
hating it and felt a flicker of interest when I
saw homegirl’s name on the program, so now I
am imagining how all these words she keeps
lobbing at us might be laid out in an interesting
way that would make it make sense. Or maybe
there's some procedural framework like she cut up
Alberti's De Pictura into a bunch of triangles and
threw them on the floor like an Arp collage. Yes,
maybe that's the problem with me, I want it all
to make sense somehow, but someone is trying
to pull out their rolling suitcase from next to my leg,
I think it's Jennifer Scappettone but I don't really
know her, and since I am looking around I see
Bob Perelman's bald head near the front of the room.
Any normal person who knows Bob Perelman
would just go up and say hello after the reading, but
I am filled with dread, any unexpected social
encounter fills me with dread, but I also know if I
sneak out without saying anything I will regret it
because what kind of freak who knows Bob Perelman
and studies poetry and knows he is a nice man
would not just go say hi to Bob Perelman?
So I look over at Avik for reassurance, and he is
practically snoring, and it's funny how he keeps
saying "homegirl" for any woman whose name
he doesn't remember and how he can pull it off
even though he normally doesn't talk that way
at all. I am pretty sure I can't pull it off now that
I've tried a couple times. Phosphorescent illusion.
Proliferate. Is summoning. Once there was a time
when we were all in college that my friends
thought I was as smart as them and even asked
my advice on their papers, but now I am in
my 30s and I am still writing those papers
and watch The Office and feel jealous of these
people with paying jobs and cubicles and
benefits and know my friends are spending this
Saturday afternoon in a small dark basement bar
listening to experimental poetry because they want
to show they are interested in my interests and
happy to spend any kind of time with me because
I just had two kids and haven't been doing any
writing but managed to get out of the house for
24 hours alone in New York and now I want to cry.
I want to stand up and say to the poet, It's not you.
It's not your poetry. It's me. Me. Me. But everyone
is clapping, and she is already gone, replaced
by a girl in a flouncy embroidered blouse and
blood red lipstick, the kind of girl you imagine riding
through the East Village on a bike with a wicker
basket, in which she stores her thin cigarettes and
artfully arranged wildflowers, and Nick listens to her
introduce the next poet and says, "What a bitch."

​
Previously published in I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press). 

Mia You was born in South Korea, raised in the United States, and currently lives in the Netherlands. She is the author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Currently she is completing her PhD in English from UC Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Gertrude Stein, and teaching creative writing at the Universiteit Utrecht. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Hairpin, Jacket2, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Offing. With Chloe Garcia-Roberts, she is the co-founder/editor of A. BRADSTREET. She is also on the editorial board of Perdu, an experimental literary podium in Amsterdam, and a contributing editor at The Critical Flame.