Marilyn Chin: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Marilyn Chin

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Marilyn Chin

Five Poems

KALIFORNIA (A portrait of the poet, wearing a girdle of severed heads)

Marilyn Mei Ling Chin

You are a Goddess

You beautiful swine

You necklace of heads

You girdle of past deeds

You have a castle

With a vestibule

You have your fresh lovers

O how you wear them like nipple-rings

You have your listlessness

Its dull ache

You have your fine breasts

Your hard maids

You have your strong presences

Better than absences

Better than abscesses

You have your coital fire

Behold, Great Mother

Your black rope of hair

Behold: breasts, crotch

Scrotum, harbor, sun

Your poems will write themselves on parchment

Your manuscripts will illuminate

Any moment now

The diasporas will form a new dialect

Your tears will turn into saltlick

You can walk forever naked

On the island of Caucasus

Without harm

You have your disciples

Fair and ephemeral

You have your death

The inevitable long drive

They will paint you black

They will paint you white

They will paint your yoni attached

To his blue lingam

Refute that a woman’s body

   Is impure

Refute that a woman’s body

   Is filthy

Although a woman’s body

   Is filthy

They adorn you with garlands

If God is a woman

Why does the world remain

Smug

And male?

Slouched on the blue-cloud divan

The lord of sleep

Flips the channels

Of conscience

A clapboard city in flames

A thousand arms of the marauders

Lowered again, again

On a bloodied cranium

If you hate

There will be a smoldering silence

If you love

There will also be

A purifying furnace

For poetry makes nothing happen

It survives in the Bethesda Boys

Of its making

Where bankers tweet on boughs

And Humvees on their backs

Pray for transcendence

You have a surfeit of choices

You have no choice

A boon of blood-red hibiscus

Stains the burial grounds

The hurly-gurly orphan bands chant

Reverence to her

Reverence to her

And your flesh ignites

Into screams

TONIGHT WHILE THE STARS ARE SHIMMERING

(New World Duet)

A burst of red hibiscus on the hill

                                                A dahlia-blue silence chills the path

Compassion falters on highway 8

                                                Between La Jolla and Julian you are sad

Across the Del Mar shores I ponder my dead mother

                                    Between heaven and earth, a pesky brown gull

The sky is green where it meets the ocean

                                                You’re the master of subterfuge, my love

A plume of foul orange from a duster plane

                                    I wonder what poison he is releasing, you say

A steep wall of wildflowers, perhaps verbena

                                    Purple so bright they mock the robes of God

In Feudal China you would’ve been drowned at birth

                                                            In India charred for a better dowry

How was I saved on that boat of freedom

                        To be anointed here on the prayer mat of your love?

High humidity, humiliation on the terrain

                                    Oi, you can’t describe the ocean to the well frog

I call you racist, you call me racist

                                                Now, we’re entering forbidden territory

I call you sexist, you call me a fool

                                         And compare the canyons to breasts, anyway

I pull your hair, you bite my nape

                                                We make mad love until birdsong morning

You tear off your shirt, you cry out to the moon

                                                In the avocado grove you find peaches

You curse on the precipice, I weep near the sea

                                    The Tribune says NOBODY WILL MARRY YOU

YOU’RE ALREADY FORTY

                                    My mother followed a cockcrow, my granny a dog

Their palms arranged my destiny

                                                Look, there’s Orion, look, the Dog Star

Sorry, your majesty, your poetry has lost its duende

                                                            Look, baby, baby, stop the car

A mouse and a kitty hawk, they are dancing

Yellow-mauve marguerites close their faces at dusk

                                                            Behind the iron gate, a jasmine breeze

In life we share a pink quilt, in death a blue vault

                                    Shall we cease this redress, this wasteful ransom?

Your coffee is bitter, your spaghetti is sad

                                                            Is there no ending this colloquy?

Ms. Lookeast, Ms. Lookeast

                                                What have we accomplished this century?

I take your olive branch deep within me

                                                A white man’s guilt, a white man’s love

Tonight while the stars are shimmering

GET RID OF THE X

My shadow followed me to San Diego

   silently, she never complained.

No green card, no identity pass,

   she is wedded to my fate.

The moon is drunk and anorexic,

   constantly reeling, changing weight.

My shadow dances grotesquely,

   resentful she can’t leave me.

The moon mourns his unwritten novels,

   cries naked into the trees and fades.

Tomorrow, he’ll return to beat me

   blue—again, again and again.

Goodbye Moon, goodbye Shadow.

   My husband, my lover, I’m late.

The sun will plunge through the window.

    I must make my leap of faith.

For Mitsuye Yamada on her 90^th Birthday

They say we bitch revolutionaries never go out of fashion

Wearing floppy hats and huge wedgy shoes

A feather bandolera and a lethal python

Sometimes we wear a fro-perm cause we hate our straight hair

Sometimes we wear it straight to the ankles like Murasaki

I bleached mine purple to look like Kwannon Psylocke

Maxine’s beaming, like the Goddess of Nainai temple

A cross between Storm, the X-girl and Ahsoka Tano

We love our laser eyes, our Yoko granny glasses are dizzy!

Short women poets unite! Revolution ain’t just style

It’s destiny!

~ 

We will make a comeback, we always do

You and Nellie and Meryl making a rad film

Janice in a mini-skirt testifying at Glide Church

Hisaye still svelte with her bluesy magpie clarinet

Wakako dancing to a Taiko drum and Sheila E

Rats!  The FBI ‘s rifling through your garbage again

Bastards are after your studded bellbottoms and a raison d’etre!

Boys, you can have them, even my embroidered hot pants!

We’ll all drag it with Cher, sporting black bangs of resistance

We’ll emolliate our bras at the Atlantic City Boardwalk

Listening to Buffy Saint Marie and fusionist Jazz bash

Angela Davis and Che, spinning revolution in our brain

When an album was a symphony

Not a blip on a Spotify Lumumba

We’ll lip-sync to Marvin Gaye and mash to Soul Train

And stage a sing-along-sit-in with Odetta!

Forget about Dylan, he’s a whiner

Where’s Jamie Baldwin, where’s Dick Gregory?

Soak our gall with Bell Hooks and Barbara Christian

Oh, sweet Jesus! Allen G’s chasing your nephew around the Bodega

Imagine the long march with Mao or MLK or Harvey Milk

Study the physiognomy of foreheads of twisted fate

I was a naïve girl-poet wearing wet nappies

While you were fighting the WRA

And Executive order 9066

Where is Manzanar, where is Topaz, where is Tule Lake?                                                 

Wherefore, Gila River and Heart Mountain?

Sound like vacation hotbeds

Where rich white retirees play bingo and waltz!

They whisked your father away deep into the night

Auctioned your house off to some sleazy Hollywood exec

Hell, nobody knew

We were sucking on the tithes of the early Renaissance

Drove a pink Buick to a poetry camp called Woodstock

Ate hashish with Sylvia Plath’s ghost at an Irvine bus stop

Binged on Neruda’s psilocybin odes at Bullfrog

(Meanwhile, let’s mock a Whitmanesque praise poem at the Iowa workshop)

They say don’t write political, girl, just hang yourself with abjection!

Let’s bum rush a haiku party with conceptual artists

How long can you stare at a Urinal, for god’s sake!

What’s the difference between the old regime and the new regime?

The new one has lite sabers and a bona fide Wookiee

I confess, I was faking it, I was a revolutionary freak!

Did a hunger strike with Cesar Chavez cause he’s sexy

Mao was a new crush, Marx whetted the yoni,

I was just a horny girl poet, please forgive me

I binged on duck noodles on Clement Street after sucking down a bong

Wrote ten-thousand letters for Amnesty International high on schrooms

But I confess that on the second day of a relapse

I threw up alphabet soup all over my slutty girlfriend’s Austin Healy

She thought she was a dikey James Bond, oh really!

I lied that the dog did it!

For your 90^th birthday, my dear Auntie Mitsuye

I write you this silly poem

not counting syllables, accentuals or diphthongs

not making it sing or pulling a long conceit

out of a colonialist’ ass-

anine simulacra, or trying to rap with the youngsters

wearing a Compton cap.  Or break-dancing

for an endstop

Jeremaiad

Not trying to make a hybridity lipidity sonnet

the volta is loving     my vulva     lapping vodka     on the Volga!

not a long religious rant about a pussy Jeoffry,

nor dogging the dogma dharma

who left her yellow mark all over the doggity diaspora

not lifting a hind leg       but squatting in the morning glory

like a real Asian Diva

They paid you

20,000 for your civil liberties

A mule and ten acres of scorched paddy apotheosis

They slapped a cruel judgment on the new century

There will always be another brown girl to hate

Rape her village, burn her wedding veil, shoot her in the face

Plant a black flag on her sweet soul

Strap her down with a ticking heart-bomb and show no mercy

Auntie Mitsuye

No more redress, no more reparations, no worries about legacy

Let’s live raunchily and have the last laugh

Somewhere in a faraway kingdom

We shall eat that magical pill of immortality

You and me and Emily D.

Gnawing ganja cookies, dreaming on our backs

And Bessie’s crooning her heart out on a crappy 8-track!

Lockdown Imprompku (folio 2)                              

*

A creepy ghoul moth       a good-for-nothing-cat

      rub against my leggings

*

Half a life    is not an unfinished life      she murmurs

*

Migrant sparrow       on bamboo scaffolding      coughs

*

I sit and sit           until my ass is rotten

      (can’t sanitize my mind)

*

She’s addicted to “Dae Jang Geum”

      I’ve succumbed to “Moonlight Resonance”

*

She says    I love you I hate you      You have wasted my life!

I我愛你，我恨你，你浪費了我的生命！

*

At Yonghe Gong       I burnt incense at the Great Buddha’s toenail

*

Perfume of sick mother       bleach of departed father                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

          A scent like sea cucumber                                                

*

Death haiku                                                    

           Won’t you change your strategy

Interview

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Marilyn Chin, Poet, Writer, Translator

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: In an interview with the Poetry Society of America, you stated that “I can’t really teach anyone how to become a great poet. They must suffer and play in their own way through the process.” Could you describe how that journey started for you? When did you discover poetry and what events or people inspired you to stay on that path?

MC: My path in poetry started in utero. I heard poetry when I was a toddler in Hong Kong. My Granny used to carry me on her back and recite ancient poems and songs. I loved reading poetry in grammar and high school. I wrote poems for creative writing classes taught by recent Reed College graduates in Portland. At fourteen, I discovered poets like William Stafford and Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Romantics by roaming in the library.

I took workshops as an undergrad with Ai, James Tate—from whoever taught those days at UMass. Simultaneously, I was a Classical Chinese Lit major. Go figure. Somehow, the spirits created a plan for the journey. I took a Translation Workshop in the Comp Lit department and got into the MFA program at Iowa. In addition, I worked as a translator for the International Writing Program. I am so lucky to have found an art form that I love and, frankly, am obsessed with. You must be totally “into something” to be excellent at anything. Ultimately, it’s a quest for excellence.

DG: If I had to use one word to describe your work, it would be multitude. In your collection, Sage for instance, you’re able to weave in Chinese literature, Phyllis Weatley, women’s suffrage, and current American politics to create a beautiful tapestry out of different things—organized in such a way that they become, in fact, no longer dissimilar. Are you able to achieve this because of how widely you read or do the unbroken transitions come about, more so, as a result of wanting to work with certain themes and then systematically connecting them later?

MC: I am inspired by different ideas, genres, styles, both ancient and modern, along with what in hell is happening in our government. I’m a total news junkie. I'm in touch with the world. My hubby and I listen to a wide swath of music and political pundits. I take Latin dance classes so that I can hear world beat. Living in SD, the border is very much in my consciousness, if not tempered by perfect weather and animals. The “tapestry”of influences coheres organically. On the craft level, I make sure that each individual poem is well-made and has something interesting to say—no matter how long or short. 

I must say, you are right: It’s kind of hard to put a book together. The prevailing poetry scene wants to have a concept, then fill in the blanks. However, I grow the book one lyric at a time. The tendency is to let the individual poem find her way into the larger design.

But I tell my students, you must know how to write a great line before you write a bad epic. One must make each piece a worthwhile experience.

DG: You’ve mentioned reading Chinese poetry every morning and I want to connect this to your work in translation. I’m interested in the concept of using one language to push the boundaries of another. In Russian, for instance, blue (голубой) and light blue (синий) are not mere shades of one color, but totally different colors, they way orange and yellow are. I’d hence like to ask two questions: First, to what extent does immersing yourself into unique aspects of the Chinese language shape the way you present your pieces in English and how do you approach translation in this context—as a direct rendering of the original text or more so a creative extension of your own work?

MC: Regarding translation—I don’t want to be too reductive, but, basically I do two types of translations: The first kind are “Faithful to the original.”

I begin with a word to word trot of the poem with the help of dictionaries. Then, I study the personal and social and historical context as well as the psychology of the poem. One of my best translations in this vein is the sequence of quatrains by the Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong. I believe that I remade that sequence both as word to word faithful—as well as infused it with a vibrant personality.

Then, there are the reinventions: Sometimes, the original text.

In “Kalifornia,” I inhabit the fearful form of a Hindu Goddess to express what’s going on in my life. I call it a “reinvention.”

But I love the process of transmogrifying the ancient text to a completely new context. My “Chinese American” quatrains are informed by Du Fu, LiBai, Wang Wei—all those great ancient lyricists. The Tang poets are  my mentors; I can’t shake them. They’re in my blood.

I always approach the art with joy and integrity and good intentions. I imitate, reinvent, all out of deep love for the original.

DG: In your 1994 collection, The Phoenix Gone, there’s a poem called “Double Happiness,” which tries to overcome the divisive distinctions that often characterize how we think in the West—local vs. foreigner, good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, and so on. Could you speak a bit more about the title and, in addition, to what extent the challenges of navigating terrains associated with cultural multitude have become more difficult in the present day?

MC: “Double Happiness” is a tale in my fiction book “Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen.” In any case, I am very aware of all the contradictions that have created this Chinese American poet. This polarized society sucks. The world has always been tribal and divisive. Rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed, citizen/foreigner, men fighting with women, dog hating cat, light-skin/dark skin, etc. There’s always some big thing trying to kill a little thing. Red state/blue state. We can’t seem to resolve our differences. I try to acknowledge the binaries and injustices. Multiculturalism offers complication and struggle and sizzling conversations in our poems.

DG: Are there words or phrases in Chinese that express sentiments you wish English could communicate a little better?

MC: There are endless allusions that cannot be understood without pages of historical explication. Tonal rhyme schemes are impossible to render in English. And a feeling of Chinese nostalgia that is heart-breaking to the edge of hysteria. So much is untranslatable. But I love the journey of trying to tease out the possibilities.

DG: You’ve talked about taking Chinese poetry back from Ezra Pound—in other words, devoting the necessary effort to keep him from having the “last word” on it. What are fundamental aspects that potential readers should know and where is the best place for them to start?

MC: I see myself as a child of the lineage “imagist.” Great Uncle Pound doesn’t practice what he preaches. He writes long and digressive lines, which violate the idea of precision and compression. My favorite poems of the Imagist era are Pound’s “River Merchant’s Wife …” and Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird.”

I want young poets to read  Pound’s essay, “A Few Don’ts by the Imagiste,” in the Poetry Foundation website. It was published in 1913; and I believe it is an important blueprint for all poets.

DG: In your life you’ve seen no shortage of hardship and your poetry is certainly inspired by that. At the same time, you’re an activist committed to change and your work has done so much to champion the voices of those who have no means to speak for themselves. Would you say that your impetus behind sitting down to write is equally driven by the need to honor the past as it is by the desire to shape the future that comes from it?

MC: I am a flower child of the seventies, perhaps with a naïve conviction that poetry can save the world.  I am also raised by second wave feminism that say personal is political. I can’t describe my life in a poem without critiquing or examining the world around me. The speakers in my poems have strong opinions and all amount of flash and pyrotechnics can’t silence them. However, first and foremost, I see myself as an ambassador for poetry. You can see the history of this beautiful and everlasting genre in my poems. I hope that a poem can speak on multiple levels.

DG: Your work doesn’t shy away from profanity. So many poets are self-conscious and afraid of really saying what they wish. Do you remember the first time you used an expletive in your work, and if so, to what extent you felt anxious, then, about using it?

MC: I can be totally respectful, employing formal mannerisms. After all, I had a Confucian/Buddhist upbringing. But I am a wild girl poet at heart. West Coast rocker and outside agitator. I crashed a B.B. King concert at the age of 14.

And as a Californian poet, I am definitely inspired by Ginsberg and the Beats—they used profanity and bodily juices for shock value. I listen to Rap, which can be dirty and nasty, especially, for instance, the diss tracks. I love to be “street” and raunchy, but all of it is grounded with purpose and elegant form. None of my yawping is gratuitous. I use the whole spectrum of language to make the work vivid.

DG: You were born in Hong Kong, raised in Portland, attended grad school in Iowa, and settled in San Diego to teach. Has geography influenced how you approach writing, or does this stem from something more internal?

MC: I am a restless nomad. Although I have an address in San Diego, I’ve been teaching and performing all over the world. Home is where the hubby’s cooking and where the poem is brewing—I don’t feel that I need a visa to roam. But definitely, travel has made me a smarter, more compassionate writer.

DG: You’re now professor emerita at the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Is there anything you miss about teaching?

MC: I miss those annoying young minds—their arrogance and insecurities, their brilliance and ignorance, their beauty and silliness. They represent the future of poetry. I really miss my students, despite the fact that young people are rambunctious!

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

MC: I just put away a difficult Cantonese-inspired opera—can’t seem to finish it. I’ll leave it for a few months. I’m working on random poems and stories, also re-reading favorite books. The best thing about retirement is having ample time to read and write and not worry about what the academic world thinks.

It’s thrilling to just throw paint on new canvases.

Author Bio:

Marilyn Chin is an award-winning poet and her works have become Asian American classics and are taught all over the world.  She has published six books of poetry and one book of fiction. Her newest book of poems is called SAGE (W.W. Norton, 2023).  Her best hits collection is called A PORTRAIT OF THE SELF AS NATION: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (W.W. Norton, 2018) She has also published a book of wild girl fiction called REVENGE OF THE MOONCAKE VIXEN. 

She has won numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the United States Artist Foundation Award, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, the Stegner Fellowship,  A Lannan fellowship, two NEA grants, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award,  a Fulbright Award to Taiwan, and others. She was recognized by the California Assembly for excellence in Education.

She has translated the works of Ai Qing, Gozo Yoshimasu, Ho Xuan Huong and others and is presently writing a Cantonese-American opera.

She is featured in major anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of 20th^hCentury Poetry.  She was featured in the PBS special “Poetry in America.” She was the Holmes Visiting Poet at Princeton for 2022-23. She was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2018 and serves as a Professor Emerita at San Diego State University.

Adrienne Rich on Marilyn Chin’s work: “Marilyn Chin’s poems excite and incite the imagination through their brilliant cultural interfacings, their theatre of anger, ‘fierce and tender,’ their compassion, and their high mockery of wit. Reading her, our sense of the possibilities of poetry is opened further, and we feel again what an active, powerful art it can be.”