Cathy Song and Georgia O’Keeffe: the “volume” of resistance

A SYTYCB entry

Critic, all-around literary mucky-muck, and unintentional racist Richard Hugo begins his introduction to award-winning poet Cathy Song’s 1987 debut collection, Picture Bride, with several encomiums to the (and I quote): “passive,” “receptive,” “tribal” (cringe)  and — last but not least — “colorful, sensual and quiet” tone of her poems, which Song — as he goes on to consummately man-splain —  “offer[s] almost shyly as bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most.” Are you rolling your eyes yet? If you haven’t already guessed, Hugo has  just successfully deployed the infamous “Asian Woman as Flower” simile and, by casting her as a Rare Bloom of precocious literary talent, manages to both praise and belittle her gifts in the same breath as gratuitous tokens from the Muses that, we must suppose, the delicate Song has passively accepted as fringe benefits of her “tribal” heritage — rather than as the expression of a poetic technique, style and voice that Song has taken the time to develop and perfect herself.

Song’s collection — each section of which is named after a Georgia O’Keeffe painting — is profoundly influenced by the relationship between the visual and literary arts and, in several poems, boldly channels the voice of O’Keeffe in the first person at various stages in the artist’s life. In fact, Song’s original pick for the book’s title was O’Keeffe-inspired. She intended to call it From the White Place (after O’Keeffe’s painting of a rock formation in Abiquiu, New Mexico), but was persuaded to change it to the name of her collection’s first poem, “Picture Bride” (which refers to the 2oth-century practice of matchmaking immigrant laborers in Hawaii to women from their native countries through the exchange of portraits) due to its promises of a  guided tour  to the “exotic” topography of her Chinese/Korean roots. But to see Picture Bride in this myopic way — as a work of simple culture-voyeurism — is to deny the subversiveness of Song’s poetry, which not only claims identification with a white female artists’ space, but ownership over the voice of O’Keeffe. In fact, as we read Song’s “O’Keeffe” poems, we should be invited, as readers, to more closely examine the legacy of female “mystique” in the arts — which at the end of the day is often assigned to  “she who lives her life the loudest,” and operates on the assumption that certain ethnic groups must be excluded from this legacy as a default of their ancestral “quietude.”  It is intriguing to note that, for O’Keeffe,  a constant source of frustration was the tendency of her critics to equate the subjects she preferred early on in her career  —  flowers — with overtly florid female sexuality. For Song, as an Asian-American woman, just the opposite occurs: perceptions of the floral imagery that she regularly employs in her poems shift to accommodate preconceived notions about the role of “flower-like” passivity that Song is expected to play, and morph into symbols for Asian femininity: aesthetically pleasing,  fundamentally inexpressive beings that are restrained by their very natures from disturbing the surface too much.

Yet I agree with Hugo that it is in Song’s “quietude” that her “strength lies” — but not in the way that he thinks. I think that this feature of her poetry speaks more to her technical skill as a writer, and the subtlety with which she forges a connection with other female artists,  than to the essential “shy receptivity’ of her poetic voice. Cathy Song uses what is traditionally perceived as the “voice of passivity” — a voice that dispenses with typical sleights-of-metaphor in favor of solid, potent imagery and simple language that mirror the directness of the impact of visual art — in order to reframe the tone of resistance, which, she reminds us, can deliver “loud,” radical messages with quiet diction, and has more to do with assuring women a place in the canon than does any sort of superficially flashy, Male Gaze-directed “mystique.”