copper canyon poetry

Fort Worden State Park (Port Townsend, WA) is a patch of land set on a wind-whipped bluff high over Puget Sound, a former military base still dotted with white wood-frame officer's houses and military barracks. I remember it strongly from weekend church retreats and school trips as a child, but it's now becoming known as the site of one of the most acclaimed small presses in the country: Copper Canyon Press, a poetry-only publisher that's garnered a growing range of awards. The Seattle P-I has a good article on Copper Canyon today, telling the story of how a small press founded by a Marine-turned-conscientious objector several decades ago turned into a quiet powerhouse that now publishes Neruda, Carolyn Kizer, Hayden Carruth, Lucille Clifton, and in a triumphant steal from Knopf, W.S. Merwin, who won the National Book Award last year for Migration. They also make particular efforts to publish poetry in translation (though the P-I is wrong in stating they're the first Western press to publish Mahmoud Darwish; I have a nice little edition from Univ. of CA Press called Unfortunately, it Was Paradise, and I know there have been others).

Copper Canyon has a strong presence in bookish Seattle circles; I can't remember if it was at a bookstore or one of the various fairs/events where they've had a table that I first picked up some of their high-quality, artfully-designed books and chapbooks. My favorite of the ones I've bought is Spring Essence, by the eighteenth-century Vietnamese poet Huang Xuan Ho. She was a concubine, self-taught scholar, and poet who wrote vivid, sharp-tongued colloquial verse, often rather bawdy and irreverent (see some examples here), much of which has since entered the oral tradition in Vietnam. What is particularly striking about the volume, in addition to the gorgeous cover, is the multilingual typesetting: each poem is shown in John Balaban's English translation, in contemporary Romanized Vietnamese script, and in Nôm, the Chinese-like syllabic alphabet used to write Vietnamese in Ho's time, which is virtually extinct today. Here's an old NYT review of the book that discusses the painstaking academic and technical work that went into its publication. (Incidentally, Clinton mentioned the book during a state dinner in Vietnam; can you imagine Bush ever making reference to a work of 200-year-old poetry-in-translation in a speech? Me neither. Sigh.) But anyway, go acquaint yourself with Huong Xuan Ho; she has a lot of worthwhile things to say. Like this:

The Unwed Mother

Because I was too easy, this happened.
Can you guess the hollow in my heart?
Fate did not push out a bud
even though the willow grew.

He will carry this a hundred years
but I must bear the burden now.
Never mind the gossip of the world.
Don't have it, yet have it ! So simple.