"A Species of Magic": David St.-Lascaux Interviews Kimiko Hahn

At his website, David St.-Lascaux has posted a lengthy interview with Kimiko Hahn. It's the first installment of “Their Own Words,” a series of interviews with New York poets and others in the poetry community. The interview is divided into three sections: "On Poetry," "On Teaching And Scholarship," and "On The Future."

The interview was conducted on August 6th, 2010 and published on August 6th, 2011. August 6th is Hiroshima Day. The interview opens:

St.-L: Today the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, perhaps poetically intoned to the citizens of Hiroshima:

For many of you, that day endures as vivid as the white light that seared the sky, as dark as the black rain that followed.

Today is a day of remembrance and mourning, the anniversary – an inept, if apt word – of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at 8:15.

Is poetry a palliative, or is palliation inadequate to atone for humanity’s destructive forces?

KH: Well, I think poetry can do a lot of different things, I don’t think art does any one thing.

It can alleviate pain, but it cannot alleviate genocide or horrible catastrophe or horrible events. You have people responding as a community to art also. It’s a very large question. Art can inspire, soothe, it can irritate. What it really, hopefully does, is move people. Sometimes it will move people to take action, “or go to sleep.”

St.-L: Today’s theme will be about regeneration. You wrote “In Childhood”:

things don’t die or remain damaged
but return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.
Later this vision is not True:
the grandmother remains dead
not hibernating in a wolf’s belly.
Or the blue parakeet does not return
from the little grave in the fern garden
though one may wake in the morning
thinking mother’s call is the bird.
Or maybe the bird is with grandmother
inside light. Or grandmother was the bird
and is now the dog
gnawing on the chair leg.

After Hiroshima, camphor, chinaberry, willow, black locust, palm trees, azalea, oleander and wildflowers – plants – were said to regenerate, to bloom first after the bomb. What does this mean?

KH: I think one of the themes of the poem is how a child looks at death, how a child discovers death. On the regeneration, I suppose that could be an element of that as well. I don’t think that artists are the best people to interpret their work. I think it’s about death.

And then, a bit later, on what inspired Hahn to write poetry:

St.-L: What inspired you to write poetry, to set down poems?

KH: I come from a family of artists. So my sister and I were given a lot of diverse art forms to participate in. So the idea that feeling and the idea of expression in the arts and expression in general were always paramount in our family values. I discovered more and more that language for me was what paint is for my father or enamel jewelry making for my mother. So words for me are tools, I could almost taste them in my mouth, I could almost most feel the texture of words in my mouth. So it’s both a delight in the medium and also in the need for song.

Read the complete interview here.