A cup of fine tea: Anuradha Vijayakrishnan’s “Suicide Note” (2)

Anuradha Vijayakrishnan’s “Suicide Note” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #10 of Cha, this poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010.) 

-This post is written by Tammy Ho.

Also read Tammy and Jarno’s previous Fine Tea on the same poem here.

The frog in Anuradha Vijayakrishnan’s “Suicide Note” occupies a staccato moment in time. He is the summation of all sadness, a hinge upon which absence and presence rotate, and beside whom Vijayakrishnan collects a panoply of grief:

To the frog at my doorstep that sang all night
To the cicadas that held unbroken vigil and would not sleep at dawn
To the rain clouds that held back till they burst
(L1-L3)

Is it possible that, even in clouds, the awe that accompanies such brooding sentience turns suddenly to unease and disillusionment?

Suicide is not the preserve of the cleverest animal, after all. Some breeds of Asian bear, holes drilled to their bladders, are known to mete self-destruction on themselves and their children. Rumours of rats, horses and dolphins in similar predicaments, drift down through medical journals and the lurid press, and scores of dogs, made cynical by their status and comfortable living, have leapt to their deaths from the Overtoun Bridge in Dumbarton. Bright beasts, of course, and humanised by disillusionment, but a similar impulse for voluntary self-destruction has been noted in strains of salmonella, which, witnessing the advance of a superior bacteria, cling to a cell wall and await inhalation by their host, happy in the knowledge that the force and potency of this ire will also obliterate its rival. Pea aphids explode beside a threatening bug, skin macheteing the air, termites cover their enemies with the sticky pith of their mortal bodies and small squadrons of the forelius pusillus ant stroll out to certain war happily as long as, in so doing, they seal their families safely in the nest behind them.

Vijayakrishnan seems at once to know, to harness, and to lose her position as head of the agency of shared grief on this earth, and lose it she must, to make her parting address:

To glow worms that gave me fire for as long
as it was needed
To the drenched clumps of grass that smell of moth wings
and butterfly love
To the golden deer that lingered just beyond
my window
(L5-L10)

If not quite a happy loss, it is a satisfied and comfortable one. Suicide, decriminalised in England and Wales in 1961, has left a semantic bloodstain on the collective lexicon. The BBC, the Guardian and Observer and the Samaritans, have abandoned use the word ‘commit’ in their references to it (language theorists have suggest we ‘create’, ’induce’ or ‘chose’, for fewer criminal connotations).

Vijayakrishnan’s reader can witness a growing escape in this death, pain now a memory, auto-termination leading calmly to equilibrium and a renewable peace:

To the leftover noisiness of this marvellous day
To the shining lights of the neighbours and their last
ashen cigarettes
To broken glass trails that will show the way to strangers
(L12-L15)

The poem ends where we began: the frog, now exhausted, and a human life in the balance. It is as if Socrates has sipped of his hemlock, feels it slowly drowning his feet and knows it will head for his heart, but slowly enough to deliver his final dialogue on the immortality of the soul:

To the quiet beating of my amazing heart
To my shaking hands
To blue ink and black and bruises that may or may not heal
(L16-L18)

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Anuradha Vijayakrishnan was born in Cochin, India. She completed her Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from Calicut University, Kerala and her postgraduate studies in Management from XLRI, Jamshedpur. A trained Carnatic singer, she lives in India/UAE and pursues a full time corporate career while writing both fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared inMagma, Asia Literary Review, Mascara, Indian Literature and Nth Position. Her poem The epiphyte speaks from Magma 44 is due to feature in Magma‘s anthology that commemorates its fifteenth anniversary. In 2007, Vijayakrishnan’s novel Seeing the Girl was long listed for the Man Asian Literary prize.

“Shi and the Ten Stone Lions”: Riddle or Nonsense?

Editor’s note: We are pleased to announce that we are launching a new direction for A Cup of Fine Tea. In the past, we have devoted this column to critical analysis of works that have been previously published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. With this post by poet Red Slider, however, we are expanding Fine Tea to include critiques of classic Asian works. In “”Shi and the Ten Stone Lions”: Riddle or Nonsense?”, Slider provides a provocative interpretation of Yuen Ren Chao’s classic, “Shi and the Ten Stone Lions”. “Ten Stone Lions”, which is constructed entirely out of Chinese characters that can be transliterated as ‘shi’ in English, tells the story, in the form of a riddle, of the poet Shi. Although the piece has generally been characterised by scholars as a linguistic exercise demonstrating the difficulty of translating Chinese into other languages, it has also been seen by many as a ‘poem’. According to Slider, however, few, if any, critics have offered a thorough reading of “Shi and the Ten Lions” as poetry. In his essay, Slider not only seeks to address this oversight, but also uses critical poetic analysis to provide a convincing solution to Chao’s riddle. -Tammy Ho

“Shi and the Ten Stone Lions”: Riddle or Nonsense?
By Red Slider

A solution-set to the riddle of Yuen Ren Chao’s classic, “Shi and the Ten Stone Lions” (above), has eluded scholars, poets and general readers ever since its first public reading in Toronto in 1977 (and its original design, possibly as far back as 1934). The story, which is constructed entirely out of Chinese syllables which can be transliterated as “shi” in English and which was designed as a linguistic exercise and a demonstration of problems in phonetics and translation from classical Chinese, is referred to as ‘poem’ or ‘verse’ by practically everyone. However, at least as far as I can tell, no serious treatment of the work as a ‘poem’ has yet been undertaken. Instead, any quick online search reveals that the narrative of “Shi” is most often dismissed as ‘silly nonsense’ or treated to sarcasm or wildly improbable interpretations — this despite the fact that Chao was a gifted and renowned scholar, for whom poetry was an obvious interest and talent. In the last line of the narrative, Chao challenges us to explain the matter of the story and solve the riddle of “Shi”. By treating the work as a poem and using the ordinary tools of poetics and an appreciation of metaphor, perfectly plausible meanings for the story of the poet Shi’s strange odyssey are easily discovered, as are possible solutions to Chao’s riddle.

Purpose and Synopsis

What follows is somewhat superficial treatment of Chao’s work as poetry, written in hopes that it might stimulate other poets and scholars to take a second look at “Shi and the Ten Stone Lions” as an offering of competent verse, as well as continuing to see it through its already established character as a linguistics demonstration and exercise.

The next section will briefly outline three solution-sets to the riddle of interpreting the English text of the story. Chao ended his story by asking what its meaning might be. Yet a serious answer to that challenge seems to have escaped students and scholars alike. I present three fairly accessible interpretations that keep well within the bounds of ordinary interpretive technique. Not treated in this essay, but also suggested is that an additional focus on the work as one of the earliest examples we have of Language Poetry may be warranted as well.

Finally, a more detailed presentation of the metaphor used in one of the solution-sets is offered to illustrate that the work is subject to such interpretations in a thoroughly consistent and understandable way, and that further examination of it as a work of poetry may offer benefits that have hitherto been overlooked.

Solution-sets to “Shi and the Ten Stone Lions” (“The Lion-eating Poet in the Stone Den”)

In the full essay from which this paper has been excerpted, three solution-sets (interpretations of the English translation of the story) are discussed. The first, which I will discuss in detail below, treats the entire text as a metaphor for the poet and the process of writing poetry. A second solution-set (not treated here) examines the story as ordinary romance — poet is lonely, poet gets girls, poet insults girls, poet loses girls — and sees the work as a short and not too sweet cautionary tale about poets and their romantic fantasies. The third solution-set (also not discussed here) interprets the story in terms of traditional Chinese symbolism as a species of creation myth: ‘lions’ as protectors/guardians, ‘water’ as chaos/origin and so forth.

The First Solution-set

It is no stretch to presume that Shi, the poet in the work, is doing what poets do best — making poetry. Regarded in that light, one solution-set to the riddle of the “Ten Lions” is very close at hand. Shi appears to be someone engaged with poetry, as well as being represented through the construction of the poem we are reading. With a poet at the helm, it is a safe bet that the story will vector to one of the things poets are most intimately connected with: language.

This particular poet lives in a ‘stone house’. Within the realms of poets and poetry, this can be seen as an easy metaphor for the ‘house of language’ — the labyrinth of the poet’s own mind, where poets generally live, have always lived.

Shi’s principal occupation, then, is to ‘hunt’ words, bring them ‘home’ and ‘dine’ on them. We also read that there are ‘servants’ in Shi’s house. If the ‘stone house’ is the poet’s own mind, what could these ‘servants’ be that tend the house of language? His pen, ink and paper perhaps? His glasses, maybe. His voice, certainly. His thoughts, absolutely.

Otherwise, Shi seems to be alone, with his own thoughts. There is no hint of wife or family; no other voices seem to intrude. It is not hard to imagine him surrounded by old tomes and crumpled paper. He is looking for something to eat; something he particularly likes, swears he will get.

What do poets like to eat? Why, words of course. Delicious words; magnificent words, perhaps ‘lions of words’ if they get lucky. For some reason, he seems to want ten of them (from which it might be deduced that he is hungry but not gluttonous. Ten, after all, is a rather modest number of premium words for a poet).

Where does the poet hunt for these ‘word-lions’? At the ‘market’ — perhaps representing the places that words are most likely to be found, such as dictionaries, thesauruses, other books and writings, his memory. His shelves, desk, and books piled all around him on the floor make for a perfectly good marketplace for hunting words. Then, ten beautiful, golden, powerful words suddenly appear in the ‘market’.

The poem provides a precise time that he goes to the market, but we attach no special significance to that other than that it contributes to the concrete timbre of the poem and offers another opportunity to employ ‘shi’ terms. One might conjecture that ‘ten’ may have some special symbolic importance (see below). But that is only speculation and unneeded for the metaphor to do its job. We do know the poet has hunted ‘lions’ before (he ‘used to go to the market…’). Did he find other word-lions on those occasions? The story doesn’t say. But if he is a poet of any worth, we might presume so. Not all of his previous poems could have been so spare as to contain no word-lions.

In any case, on this particular day, he not only finds one lion at the market, he finds ten at once! He takes out his ‘arrows’ (his pen?) and ‘kill[s]‘ them (takes them into his mind; puts them on paper). Many of us know well the feeling of words skewered on the tip of the poet’s pen. The poet then takes his lion-words ‘home’. His stone house (of language) is wet, we are told: the floor dripping with emotion perhaps at the prospect of capturing ten great words? Tears, joy and excitement maybe? As any poet can tell us, it can get very wet (plain sloppy, in fact) when one finds ten perfect words on one hunt and brings them home. ‘Wet’ is a very good descriptor for what goes on in poets’ minds at the first blush of the creative process making a new poem.

The poet can’t eat his fresh words quite yet, however. They’re still in his mind, in a mess of damp sentiment and structureless, disassociated flux. It’s time to dry things off — to put his lions on the page and ‘eat’ them. He calls upon his servants (remember those?) They will work and rework, edit and revise, until the poem takes shape and the floor of his house of language is quite ‘dry’ once again. When the work is finished it’s time to ‘eat’ his lions, to savour the new poem.

Alas, after all that work, the lions have changed. The thrill is gone, too. All that effort drying (editing/revising) things out has also taken something else out of his meal. The very ‘lionic-vitality’ that was in those words is now gone. The ink is dry, and so is the poet. His once fresh words have turned to stone — durable, perfected, memorable perhaps. But stone, nonetheless; immobile on the page, used up and hard as rock. They are no longer the delicious lions (fresh meat= fresh words) he so desired; the once supple and ephemeral things that had rolled so deliciously on his tongue.

When one considers the material itself, the ‘stone’, from which both the house of language and the processed lions are made, the metaphor gets even tighter. ‘Wetness’ now figures as a solvent by which words are slipped loose from the stone walls of language, shaped into meanings and finally reworked as poetry, until they are ‘dry’ (used) and rejoin the general schemas of language, once again, as stones (at least for the poet who employed them.)

What is appealing about this solution-set to the riddle of the “Ten Lions” is that it is consistent with another interpretation that would view the entire work (in all its stages) as Language Poetry. For Shi, the poet, it is an exercise steeped in spontaneity, serendipity and vitality, followed by the application of effort, regulation and formality (drying out) which finally severs the poet from his original work and from all trace of any nourishment or enjoyment (voice and subject) that he might get from it. Not much different than taking a deeply nuanced set of Chinese characters, hacking off everything but their transliterated sound and then pasting them back on the page to see what you’ve got. In the end, the poet’s poem has become just another ‘perfected’ product; one as processed as Velveeta and as devoid of life (to its author) as stone. 

Conclusion

As you can see, it is not difficult to discover a very appropriate and consistent metaphor for the meaning of the story of the ten lions, and plausible solutions to its riddle. Using metaphors quite within the range of the story’s elements, and without introducing extraneous terms, contradictions or making improbable substitutions (e.g. ‘water buffalo’ for ‘lions’, or describing the lions as ‘wet clay’ turned to stone when ‘dried’), the riddle posed by Yuen Ren Chao is a valid challenge for which good replies exist but, as far as we know, have never been given before.

Most importantly, I believe it establishes that the narrative story (along with the processes of its construction) is indeed a poem, as it has so often been called by linguists as well as publishers and readers. Only the real attempt to examine it as a poem, rather than as an exercise or demonstration, has been missing.

My hope is that this little introduction will encourage other scholars and poets to reexamine the case of “Shi” as poem and Yuen Ren Chou as poet (along with his brilliant renderings of “Jabberwocky” in Alice in Wonderland), and to give him is due as an important contributor to the project of poetry, as well as for the contributions he made to many other disciplines and for which he already enjoys considerable reputation.

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Excerpted and adapted from the essay, “Shi and the Ten Stone Lions – A Reappraisal” ©Red Slider, 2012, All rights reserved. A copy of the full essay, including the two additional solution-sets to the riddle, can be obtained by making a request to the author at red@holopoet.com

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Red Slider, poet/writer lives in Northern California. His work has appeared in numerous print and online publications. He is active in many social and community projects directed towards creating positive change and new realities of sanity, health and sustainability for the people of world. Additional works may be viewed at his websites www.holopoet.com and poems4change.org- 

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A Cup of Fine Tea: May Dy’s “We”

May Dy’s “We” [Read the poem here] (First published in Issue #18 of Cha)

-This post is written by Benjamin Huang.

May Dy’s “We” ponders questions of travel and memory, history and desire. One sultry day, the speaker recalls a trip taken with her lover to Angkor Wat, the decayed ruins of which have led her to contemplate the dissolution of their relationship.

The poem opens with a prosopopeia: ‘The season cannot make up its mind, / It lingered in monsoon without parting with the sun. / Rain fell from the glowing sky’ (L1-L3). Already in the poem’s first stanza we are presented with indecision, paralysis, and separation. This meteorological condition reminds the speaker of an ‘impromptu trip’. Yet this casualness is belied by a reminder of mortality: ‘Where you said my fingers were like candlesticks, / They’d melt in the heat’ (L5-L6). Human flesh will itself dissolve in a grotesque anti-birthday celebration.

At the time of the trip the relationship is already over. ‘You weren’t afraid to have your heart broken’ (L7), the speaker says. She then describes her own heart as a timekeeping piece whose very operation rips her flesh: ‘Mine had in its place a clock that turns / In between bones and nerves’ (L8-L9) She had hoped that the passage of time might have brought relief. Instead, watching ‘Mango-skinned youths’ walking ‘on red dust’, she realises that the past never really is past; it is always revisited: ‘Watching them I learned time / Did not promise closure, disappearance is / The afterthought of grief’ (L12-L14).

After this she employs a striking metaphor: ‘And love is a finely carved stone’ (L15). Yet the stone does not signify permanence, but only the illusion of permanence. And the illusion is part of the cruel mechanism that continues to rip her flesh: ‘Sacred make-believe, immovable / Handmade for this clockwork heart’ (L16-L17). We must note that the ruins at Angkor Wat are Mahayana Buddhist, two of whose primary tenets are that permanence is an illusion and that attachment leads to suffering.

The seventh stanza turns to the ruins themselves. Dy alludes to four enormous carved stone faces at a temple at the site, which belong to a ‘venerable king’. Despite their being stone and reaching for ‘The heavens’, they are ‘reflected in a pond’ — hence, the king’s attempt to create a lasting monument to himself is shown to be something ephemeral and illusory. This futile gesture is parallel to the speaker’s own failed attempt to find something solid and permanent in their relationship: ‘I thought I held ours in my empty hand, / It was only you and a passing cloud’ (L20-L21).

She reflects that perhaps whatever a relationship is can only be constructed from the broken debris of what once was: ‘Perhaps this is what being together means, / Creating life around ruins, from stones, / Subsistence by thought alone, / Completion is monumental’ (L22-L25). Unity can only be achieved retrospectively, through memory — although any attempt at memorialisation is itself doomed to dissolve into a reflection or disintegrate into ruin.

The speaker despairs of any possibility of reconciliation or harmony. ‘We walk in as fragments and halves in spite of ourselves / Often I asked whether two sad people / could still be sad when they’re together’ (L26-L28). We then arrive at an epiphany: ‘I like to think I found the answer / In a new land, under strange weather. //We slipped on damp earth, / Gone on a boat ride to the other side. / Palm on palm, lotus eye, / The pleasure is in the falling’ (L29-L34). ‘Falling’, here, of course, first refers to the literal act of falling — ‘slipped on the damp earth’ — a treacherous misstep. But it also means ‘falling’ as both an emotional and a metaphysical experience — ‘falling’ as in ‘falling in love’, and ‘falling’ as ‘falling from innocence to experience’. So the poem’s conclusion suggests that even a failed relationship has some sort of redemption, due to the mere fact that it transports one to a different state of being — a ‘boat ride to the other side’. As painful as its consequences may be, the fall itself comprises a sort of joy.

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Also see “A Cup of Fine Tea: Greg Santos’s “Siem Reap, Cambodia”".

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May Dy  removed the beginning and end of her full name, Zeny May Dy Recidoro. She is taking up Art Studies (major in Art History) at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. After winning the Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio Literary Prize for poetry in 2011, she was encouraged to write more poetry and since then, her poems have been published in qarrtsiluni and Red Poppy Review. 

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A Cup of Fine Tea: Ricky Garni’s “The Tarsier”

Ricky Garni’s “The Tarsier” [Read the poem here] (First published in Issue #18 of Cha)

NOTE: Also read a creative response to Ricky’s “Literal Translation of Korean Ideograms” here.

-This post is co-written by Tammy Ho and Benjamin Huang.

If you read the Wikipedia entry under “Tarsier”, you will find that the facts conveyed in Ricky Garni’s poem about the animal are true. The tarsier is, indeed, native to Asia. It is small and carnivorous (in fact, it is the only extant primate which is purely carnivorous) and each of its eyes is equal in size to its brain.

What is striking about this poem, however, is that it does not merely describe its subject. Nor is it a simple catalogue of facts. Instead, it situates the natural world within a field of human associations.

Attempts to understand the tarsier quickly run up against the surprising and unexpected. To begin with, the tarsier ‘sounds so french. / it’s really from asia’ (S1). This alerts the reader to the discrepancy between surface and substance; the tiny animal is not at all what it sounds/seems. ‘[T]he tarsier eye is as large as its brain’ (S3). This unfamiliar body structure (to us, anyway) confounds our normal perception of proportion and size. We are also told that the creature ‘likes to go out at night and is oh so furry’ (S4) – it is a nocturnal predator but it is oh so cute and cuddly.

Thinking like a scientist doesn’t get us far in understanding the tarsier because suddenly ‘you see his cute little pink nose and can’t think like a / scientist’ (S7). The animal knows how to bewitch. And by invoking ‘the scientist’, Garni suggests how even the supposedly most clear-headed people are helpless in the face of the tarsier and cannot comprehend it objectively and reasonably. This unknowability wears a double aspect. On the one hand the tarsier is ‘cute’ (S7), but on the other it is ‘crazy’ (S9). It is ‘tiny’ (S7), yet it is merciless toward its prey – ‘it eats the meat of insects’ (S5) and ‘make[s] the insects scream and die’ (S12). For some readers, these lines will undoubtedly be associated with the stereotypical Asian femme fatale.

Being an animal, the tarsier is naturally excluded from human discourse – ‘try to make a tarsier apologise / it’s impossible / just plain impossible’ (S10). (If we continue with the femme fatale metaphor, however, these lines may assume a different meaning.) Worse, the tarsier transforms humans into its prey, especially since the reader is asked to ‘imagine being an insect’ (6). The speaker warns: ‘you don’t hear its scream as it jumps toward you / but make no mistake: it jumps toward you’ (S8), the ‘you’ here unmistakeably referring to humans rather than insects, although at this point there is a conflation of the two. Contemplating the tarsier is a dangerous act, for it leads toward self-destruction.

The last stanza (which is also ‘the point of the tarsier’) is haunting: ‘they make insects scream and die / and have big green eyes filled with trees’ (S12). Regardless of how we interpret the tarsier – literally or otherwise – the last image we have of it is that it has devoured its victims and other living creatures. What is reflected in its large brainy gaze is an eerily impersonal nature, in which the tarsier remains as cute and cruel as ever.

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See a tarsier munching a cricket here.

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Ricky Garni  [website] is particularly fond of manhood for amateurs. His poems appeared in Everygreen Review, Sixth Finch, The Bakery, Reprint Poetry and many other periodicals. His latest work, 2% Butterscotch, was released in 2012. His first, Peppermint, in 1995. 

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A Cup of Fine Tea: Ricky Garni’s “Literal Translation of Korean Ideograms”

Ricky Garni’s “Literal Translation of Korean Ideograms” [Read the poem here] (First published in Issue #16 of Cha)

Note: Also read a discussion of Ricky’s “The Tarsier” here.

-This post is co-written by Tammy Ho and Matt Shoard.

Sufficient time has now past, and the matter no longer so culturally sensitive, for the circumstances surrounding the providences of author Ricky Garni (whose poem “Literal Translation of Korean Ideograms” appeared at Asian Cha this March) to be made public.

Cha’s dissemination of Mr Garni’s poem online coincided with a visit to London by the Korean Ambassador Choo Kyu Ho. While tending to consular services for Korean citizens at the Korean Embassy in Westminster, Mr. Choo had occasion to read Mr. Garni’s poem on a vacant computer screen at the offices in Buckingham Gate.

According to the testimony of co-workers at the Embassy, Mr. Choo acted with “disbelief” and “barely contained rage” at Mr. Garni’s interpretation of certain Korean words. In his poem, Mr. Garni had interpreted ideograms for the word “No-Ryok” (hardworking) as a man folding chair, for “Ae-Jong” (sincere love) as a man dancing with a television set, and for “Yook-Goon” (military) as a religious frown protected by municipal lighting.

Mr. Choo’s distaste was allegedly such that he was unable to complete his visit with the consulate in London and returned to Heathrow to take an immediate flight home, without notifying his hosts.

Panic-stricken British diplomats, unable to reach the offices of Asian Cha sufficiently quickly, instead traced Mr. Garni to his North Carolina address, which is easily found online. They appeared to be intent on a programme of “character conflagration” against Mr. Garni, both online and in correspondence with the British Embassy in Korea, to which Cha was by now a correspondent witness.

E-mails from the British diplomats suggested that Mr. Garni’s poem was not the work of an ordinary Westerner, but of one with an abnormally enlarged corpus callosum (the region of the brain responsible for creative thinking). The poem, they claimed, was the result of an elaborate test – similar to the Rorschach “inkblot” test – staged by members of the Korean Embassy in London in allegiance with Cha and the Institute for Neurological Integrity (INI), in order to secretly assess the size of Mr. Garni’s corpus callosum and then remove him from the creative industries.

As an act of assuagement, Mr. Garni was transported by the CIA – apparently following encouragement by British foreign affairs officials – to a correctional facility within London’s INI.

But reaction from Korea suggested that Mr. Choo was entirely ignorant of Mr Garni’s poem, and very probably hadn’t seen it. The truth of his withdrawal from the Embassy, supplied by his administrative assistant in the following days, was that Mr. Choo had received bad news from home on his mobile phone, which drew him instantly to the nearest vacant computer, and to his email account for corroboration.

Mr Choo’s hasty departure and, in all probability, his appearance of “disbelief” and “barely contained rage”, were testament, said the Koreans, to the seriousness of the news he had received. He had closed his email account and repaired to Heathrow, leaving “Literal Translation of Korean Ideograms” blinking on the vacant computer.

In order not to compound their embarrassment, both the Embassy, the Foreign Office and the INI, have since maintained the story of Mr. Garni’s enlarged corpus collosum and his necessary removal to palliative psychological care for several weeks. Today (13 July), they released the following statement:

“Mr. Garni’s psychological coordinates, broken thinking, buried preoccupations and unhealthy motivations have not, until now, been subject to study. Ostensibly to generate a work of poetry, but actually to form conclusive evidence for the Institute of Neurological Integrity, Garni was presented with Korean hieroglyphics for what is known as a “creative writing prompt”. The INI believed Garni not only to be exceptional in the size of his corpus collosum but also, and as a consequence, to be a uniquely-placed danger to contemporary poetics, and to international literary interventions more generally. Indeed, the earliest reports of the INI have concluded that

Garni is ‘dangerously poetic’.

Some sceptics consider our tests pseudoscience, even suggesting they breach patient ethics, but we maintain they produce results with a validity greater than chance, and that areas of dispute (inter-rater reliability, the verifiability and general validity of the test, bias of the test’s pathology scales towards corpus callosum) are negligible. In this instance, we believe Garni’s responses provide direct insight into illogical, incongruous or incoherent aspects of his creative life.

Invariably with subjects whose cultural preponderance precludes the recognition of Korean Ideograms, the suggestion of enlargement in this area of the brain is erroneous. There may be a broader cluster of variables used to interpret Garni’s case, and tests are ongoing.

Previous reports have indicated that undesirable responses to ideograms were observed at higher frequency in the normal artistic population than in the non-artistic normal population, and this positive correlation in Garni suggests that corpus collosum enlargement in the normal population might be related to other poetic anomalies and offensive creativities.

Treatment here is as nascent as the diagnostics, but we are advised they include: re-creative programming, long walks, short bicycle rides, and intensive primetime televisual stimulus.”

The fact that much of the phrasing of the statement is identical to Wikipedia entries on the Rorschach Test is further proof, at least to editors of Cha, that much of the case has been inflated. Everyone at Cha and the wider creative community in London remain hopeful of Mr. Garni’s imminent release and return to creative life in North Carolina, of an apology from the Embassies and the INI, and a de facto pardon to Asian Cha. Mr. Choo’s next visit to the UK is scheduled for mid-November – an opportunity, we hope, for final explanation and for the situation to normalise.

Meanwhile, you can read Mr Garni’s now-infamous “Literal Translation of Korean Ideograms” here.
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Ricky Garni  [website] lives and works in Carrboro, NC (USA). He is particularly fond of manhood for amateurs. Some of his poems appeared in Sixth Finch, Red Lightbulbs and Reprint Poetry. 

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