The Peter Stambler Issue

On Friday, February 4, 2000, the South China Morning Post published a review of Peter Stambler's selected works Coming Ashore Far From Home by Professor Shirley Lim, then the newly appointed head of the English Department of Hong Kong University under the title, "Coming ashore for a wander:"

"William Wordsworth composed The Prelude as a reflection on his growth as a poet. Today, many poets turn to volumes of their selected work to present the development of their craft and concerns. But what happens if that growth is neither unitary nor seamless?

"Coming Ashore Far From Home (Asia2000, $180) offers a sampler of poems drawn from Peter Stambler’s five books. Together they compose a puzzle: why is the selected volume published in Hong Kong by Asia 2000 and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and what is Stambler’s relationship to Hong Kong, so far from home?

"Home in the first book is rural Wisconsin. The poems from Wilderness Fires are linked by the history of the great fire in Peshtigo in which thousands died and millions of acres of wilderness were destroyed.

"A poem like The Silence and many of the first-person-voiced portraits of European immigrants, hardworking farmers and pioneering housewives are in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology is made up of stories of eccentric American provincial characters.

"Stambler’s bleak vision also draws on the graphic record of tragedies and deaths suffered by first-generation settlers in the desolate Mid-West documented in well-known publications in the 1970s.

"As much as Wilderness Fires is about Wisconsin, 'The air I came to, inhale, absorb, become,' it is also about a worldly culture outside of the Mid-West. These poems suggest the constant tension in Stambler’s imagination, between the gravitational pull of a domestic United States and the lure of 'other' locations.

"A major problem facing poets is the occasional nature of poetry. Lyric verse, still the most popular English form today, is conventionally 'spontaneous' and occasional. Epics and other long narrative poems can hardly find an audience today, except for curious productions such as Vikram Seth’s sestina series, The Golden Gate. Stambler has found a way to incorporate both lyric and narrative forms through the technique of linked monologues.

"Many of his dramatic monologues succeed in conveying scene, character, tone and irony, and the context of the evolving drama invests each separate 'poem' with extra-poetic meaning and weight. 'Barn raising,' 'Becoming native,' and 'The Acorn In The Widow’s Walk' are sharply sensuous yet intellectual achievements, for Stambler’s work is packed with learned and literary allusions.

"However, as the imagination loses its lyrical grounding in a natural world, it becomes more dependent on learning and narrative gloss in the later books. The poems in Witnesses are composed of cleverly 'found' passages, drawn from the writings of historical visitors to the United States. Unsettled Accounts tells the story of the marriage of Robert and Clara Schumann and the place of Brahms in this family, at the same time as the poems reflect on the nature of genius, love, loyalty and fame. The Shespak Letters, as the author’s note to the reader informs us, 'records the fictional letters of an Amnesty volunteer who strikes out on his own.' The letters concern a fictional prisoner, Vasily Vishnikov, and are addressed to a Soviet prosecutor. In this last book, the poet’s voice has moved even further from the lyrical, using narrative and drama to approach the oratorical and polemical.

"For all their topical materials, these verse inventions – whether we think of them as historical verse narratives, verse dramas, or verse epistolary fictions – refer back to Victorian poets such as Robert Browning. They remind me strongly of the verse novels of E.A. Robinson – no longer read today – whose preference for character and story goes against the modernist preference for image and word play. Interestingly, Stambler’s poetry works with traditional, even outworn, British and American forms even as it attempts to be experimental.

"So, what is this volume’s claim to a place in the Hong Kong Arts Development Council programme? How does it participate in the development of Hong Kong Arts? In the materials sent out by his publisher, I learn that Stambler has been teaching in Hong Kong for 10 years. But the volume’s chief relationship to an 'Asian'-based imagination is to be found in selections from his fourth book, Encounters With Cold Mountain.

"Stambler calls the poems 'encounters' rather than translations of poems by the Tang master, Han Shan. Western translations of Chinese poetry have been popular throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Disciplined by Han Shan’s brevity, allusiveness and lyricism, Stambler’s loose translations are different from the rest of his work. Just as he had put on the roles and voices of Wisconsin characters or the Schumann family, so here he adopts and adapts the voice and persona of the master himself.

"But Han Shan would never have recognised these poems as his in origin. Encounters is orientalist in its approach to Chinese poetry. It appropriates the original to enlarge on its own version of the East.

"Stambler’s version of 'Cold Mountain,' that mythic place the poems appeal to, is not so oddly of 'a state of mind' conforming to his own poetic practice. Through his 'translation,' Han Shan’s poems appear just like his: 'poems spoken by personae invented by Han Shan to explore realms of experience and emotion he observed but did not himself share.'

"Can poems that 'explore' emotions the poet himself did not share speak to us as freshly and convincingly as those that come from 'the voice that is great within us,' a phrase from Hayden Carruth, a very different kind of American poet?

"Stylised in the convention of Ezra Pound’s Imagistic free translations from the Chinese, these 'translations' left me cold, for I seldom encountered in them either the poet’s or the Tang master’s voice.

"Coming Ashore So Far From Home is a good reminder of Hong Kong as a cultural space for wanderers within and wanderers from without."

On February 17th, 2000, Michael Morrow, publisher of Asia 2000, asked the South China Morning Post to print the following response to professor Lim's review:

"On February 4th, the eve of the new lunar year, the South China Morning Post published the winners of the newspaper’s annual poetry contest. The prominent display of the three winning poems would seem to put the SCMP on the side of Hong Kong’s valiant English language poetry movement. To what purpose, then, did that same page also carry Professor Shirley Lim’s review of Hong Kong poet Peter Stambler’s Coming Ashore Far From Home Selected Poems 1981-98 with a picture of Stambler and the headline 'Coming ashore for a wander?'

"The main point of the review was to pose its own questions: 'Why is the selected volume published in Hong Kong by Asia 2000 and the Arts Development Council, and what is Stambler’s relationship to Hong Kong, so far from home?....So, what is this volume’s claim to a place in the development of Hong Kong Arts? How does it participate in the development of Hong Kong Arts?'

"Professor Lim, the new head of the English Department at Hong Kong University, can be excused her questions. She has spent most of her academic career in the United States – indeed, while sojourning here she retains her professorship at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In her Asian experiences, she is much closer to Singapore and Malaysia than to Hong Kong.

"The editors of the Post can be less easily excused for their sneering headline. It lends credibility to a review that not only disparages Stambler's writing but also questions his legitimacy as a Hong Kong writer and the rightness of a Hong Kong publisher and a local cultural body publishing or supporting him. Neither Asia 2000 nor the Arts Development Council has a case to answer, and the Post’s editors know it.

"As Marianne Moore has quoted Robert Frost, every poem is about 'the triumph of the spirit over materialism by which we are being smothered.' Nowhere do we know this better than in Hong Kong. Our poets, of whom there are too few, bring needed air to the classrooms, the cultural centers, the small pubs and the few other venues in our city that will have them. Peter Stambler, a winner of The Quarterly Review of Literature’s International Poetry Prize, is one of the most respected of our poets and one of the most generous.

"Since arriving from the University of Wisconsin 12 years ago, Peter Stambler has been continuously active as a poet, a public performer of poetry and a teacher of poetry. His free translations of the Tang poet Han Shan have not only been read publicly in Hong Kong and printed in international poetry journals, they have been gathered in a successful book, Encounters with Cold Mountain, published by the Foreign Language Press, Beijing. Peter Stambler has also been an active member of Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN), the international organization that defends the rights of writers, and has successfully worked for the release of Vietnamese writer-refugees and their families from Hong Kong detention camps. That activity influenced his fifth book, The Shespak Papers, which was published by Abiko Literary Press in Tokyo, and his radio drama, Golden Handcuffs, which was commissioned, producued and broadcast on RTHK.

"Coming Ashore Far From Home, his sixth book of poetry, is a selection of the best of Peter Stambler’s poetry, including the two books mentioned above; it is also the first collection of poetry published in Hong Kong where the author has taken the time and expense to record his verse so that the reader also has opportunity to hear the poetry performed aloud. For those two reasons alone, Coming Ashore Far From Home deserved consideration for publication by a local publisher and for support by a local cultural body.

"Professor Lim is a formidable scholar in post-colonial and feminist literature. One might expect her to inhabit different waters than Peter Stambler, a whale of a poet whose voice is epic, baritone and meant to travel the long waves of history. Professor Lim is entitled to her views, but we would be wrong to heed them, especially when they attack not the poetry but the bona fides of the poet. She asserts, for example, that 'ENCOUNTERS is orientalist in its approach to Chinese poetry,' that 'it appropriates the original to enlarge on its own version of the East.' This comment is at least mean-spirited and at worst racist; moreover, it reads into Peter Stambler’s work intentions that are not there. Peter Stambler appropriates the original to enlarge on his own experience. He does so without pretence or hypocrisy; he does so with respect. Coming Ashore Far From Home, inclusive of the Han Shan poems, demonstrates Peter Stambler’s development here from a writer with a middle American experience to one with a cosmopolitan experience. What is wrong with that? We should be proud to have Peter Stambler in our midst; moreover, we should be proud to call him typical of our community. We should be proud to publish and support him.

"Hong Kong’s is a vanguard society on the cusp of a rapidly changing post-modern world. The peripatetic and culturally promiscuous ways of Hong Kong’s population have come to define a new way of living. To recite a poem by another Hong Kong (and Asia 2000) poet Louise Ho:

A Chinese
Invited an Irishman
To a Japanese meal
By the Spanish Steps
In the middle of Rome
Having come from Boston
On the way home.

"Like Hong Kong society itself, Hong Kong literature involves the interaction of a Chinese cultural experience with other cultural experiences. This is particularly so when it comes to Hong Kong’s English language literature. Go to the small pub Visage Free in Central on the first Wednesday of every month and see for yourself. It’s the largest and most vibrant poetry scene in Hong Kong. This past month, in addition to Peter Stambler and a Hong Kong Chinese poet, the poets who read – to a packed house – included an Indian, a Sri Lankan, two Arabs, Australians, Brits, etc. Hong Kong literature has been and will continue to be made by people of various origins, races and backgrounds. To argue otherwise, is not only to argue against a cosmopolitan Hong Kong literature but also against a cosmopolitan Hong Kong society. I don’t believe that is what Hong Kong is or wants to be.

"Just as Hong Kong is a global port, so it can be a global center of culture and literature, but only if it has a much bigger vision of what is appropriate culture and literature than what I infer Professor Lim would have us adopt. This is especially true for English language writing and publishing from Hong Kong. English is a global language. Writers here should not have to go to New York or London – or Beijing or Tokyo – to find a publisher willing to consider their work. Nor should they have to pass some local test of cultural legitimacy to be published or supported here.

"If Professor Lim wants to lend a hand to Hong Kong literature she might start by adding more Hong Kong writers to the reading lists of the courses she teaches. A wide range of writers associated with Hong Kong are to be found at the Asia 2000 website, www.asia2000.com.hk.

"As for the South China Morning Post's editors, they should apologize for their headline and make clear that the support that headline gave to Professor Lim’s article, published so symbolically on the eve of a new year, does not signal the beginning of a cultural campaign meant to smother poets like Peter Stambler."

The South China Morning Post declined to publish Asia 2000's response unless Asia 2000 accepted the South China Morning Post's right to edit the response unreviewed. Asia 2000 refused. Since this exchange Professor Shirley Lim has taken an interest in some Hong Kong writers. The Hong Kong literary community continues to be the most cosmopolitan in Asia, but the issues raised in Asia 2000's response to Professor Lim's review also continue to exist. Of particular concern to Asia 2000 is the failure of Hong Kong's literary community, both English-language and Chinese to renounce the apartheid-like cultural segregation that bedevils it. Asia 2000 stands committed to the ideal that Hong Kong literature involve the interaction of Chinese cultural experience with other cultural experiences in pursuit of a much bigger vision.

<  >