On Thursday, March 6th, before we all went on Spring Break, the English Department was pleased to host poet Marianne Chan as part of the Poets & Writers Series. Chan read poems from her recently published collections All Heathens and Leaving Biddle City. She also shared a few poems that she is currently working on as part of her next collection. Her poems explored home in the Midwest, different forms of love, navigating racial identity, and the feeling of isolation due to race.
Marianne Chan is a Filipino American poet. She has received the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Ohioana Book Award, and an Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement. Her poems can be found in Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, American Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other places! She earned her MFA in Poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and currently teaches at Old Dominion University.
Dani Phillip.
Chan started writing her collection Leaving Biddle City during the 2020 pandemic. She was motivated by the waves of movements for social justice at the time, particularly the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the calls for support for Asian Americans amidst prejudice and misinformation about the origin of the pandemic. She was also influenced by the emphasis on home during the pandemic, since for many people life and work were confined to home. Chan brought to life not only the experience of living in her hometown of Lansing, Michigan, but also the complex racial and political history of the region.
Many of Chan’s poems were prose poems. I found it fascinating how she used the form of prose poems to convey the flatness of her hometown as prose poems are often blocks of text. Another interesting point that Chan made was that prose poems often exhibit more self-consciousness about their form than flash fiction, as flash fiction usually foregrounds plot.
Dani Phillip.
One of my favorite pieces that Chan read was “Love Song for Ayumi.” It takes the form of a run-on sentence about a classmate from her childhood–the only other Asian American student at her school–that was a rebel. Chan admired Ayumi’s independence, fighting spirit, and quiet strength to never speak to any teachers or classmates, including Chan herself. My favorite lines are the last few:
“…and she was a powerful girl, a fighter, never lowering herself, and
I loved her, really
I loved her, but I didn’t
want to be her.”
This piece is a haibun, which is a prose poem that ends with a haiku. I loved how the enjambment of the haiku at the end of the poem conveyed both loving (“I loved her”) and not loving (“but I didn’t”) Ayumi. The speaker seemed to greatly admire Ayumi, but wanted to fit in with her other classmates, rather than become an outsider like Ayumi.
Lastly, Chan read us a couple new poems for a collection she is working on. She noted that the newer poems focus on fertility, motherhood, and American military presence in the Philippines.
I greatly enjoyed the poems that Marianne Chan read from her published collections, and I am looking forward to her next book!