LINE LEVEL #11
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses “My Therapist Talks About Biddle City,” from Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande, 2024) by Marianne Chan.
My Therapist Talks About Biddle City
She asks why I’m here, and I say, I’m having an interracial child, and I’m afraid she’ll be white. This is a rapid-access telehealth call. My therapist’s face is framed by a rectangle inside a rectangle. My therapist is a white person. She squints as I speak, never interrupts me. I say I’m afraid my child will reject me, choose my partner’s family, my partner’s personality, because he’s white and this country’s white. My therapist asks if I grew up in Biddle City. There are lots of Biddle Cities everywhere, she tells me. I didn’t know she knew about Biddle City. I thought it was a place I made up. I realize what was wrong all along. I say: I’m not an interracial person, but I’m afraid that I’m white. I’m afraid that I made myself white. That I’d chosen whiteness a long time ago. I see myself crying on a square on my computer screen. Like this, my face looks undeniably Asian. I try to relax so that it’s no longer crumpled in this way, but it doesn’t move. It’s frozen like this in its rectangular box.
Contributor’s Note // Marianne Chan
What makes a prose poem a poem? This is a question I am often asked after publishing a book of prose poetry. My answer, ultimately, is that a prose poem, like any poem, is an arrangement of language. In fiction, meaning is made primarily from the materials of plot and narrative. However, in a poem, meaning can be made through narrative, but literal effects are altered and influenced by other patterns of language and the shape of the poem on the page.
My poem “My Therapist Talks About Biddle City,” which appears in my newest collection Leaving Biddle City, published from Sarabande Books, might appear to be a piece of flash fiction, moving linearly through time, but it’s a poem because it’s arrangement is key to its overall impact.
This poem is about a speaker who is afraid of losing something, and that fear is emphasized through repetition. The phrase “I’m afraid” appears four times in the poem. The word “white” appears seven times throughout the poem, and within the block of text, the speaker and whiteness seem to coexist, trapped inside a box with one another, unable to escape.
The speaker is on a telehealth call with her therapist, and this is echoed in the shape of the poem. The speaker can see her therapist on a rectangle on the screen, and the poem itself is a rectangle. However, I think the metaphor of the poem’s form goes beyond its mere shape. Leaving Biddle City explores a speaker overcoming her own double consciousness. Growing up in “Biddle City,” a white dominated community, the speaker must become white, or as white as she can be, and as a result, loses and despises herself.
Like this speaker, the prose poem is poetry disguising itself to survive in our prose-centric world. (Even Charles Baudelaire, the father of the prose poem, wrote prose poems to conform to a society obsessed with the serialized novels.) And of course, being a hybrid thing, it’s a perfect form for exploring hybrid identities, like my own.
Craft Lessons from Poets of Color // Joanna Acevedo
We encounter boundaries all the time. Everywhere we look, there are rules. Starting from the time we are very young, we are told when it’s appropriate to speak and when to be silent, when to eat and dress and read and ask questions. We live in a world full of instructions. First we’re taught to read and then there are signs jumping out everywhere. It’s hard to navigate. We learn to say please and thank you. If we’re lucky we actually remember to do that. Maybe we’re nice to people around us and we respect them. Maybe we’re not and we don’t. We sit still in school, then work, and color inside the lines—or we don’t.
In a world full of rules, poetry can feel liberating. Suddenly, in the way of all these technical skills that are hammered into you in school, there comes along a form that throws all of that out of the window. Of course, when you dig a little deeper, it turns out that it’s not the absence of rules that defines most poetry; rather it’s the inventive and creative interpretations of the rules that shape poetry, with innovation in terms of new ways to handle language being the major driver behind new developments and trends in poetic and academic communities. For the casual observer, and even for the seasoned poet, the idea that you can devise your own rules is tantalizing.
Many of us who consider ourselves poets now found a home in prose at one time or another. It’s common for writers to move between genres at one point in their lives or another, sometimes more than once. The lines between poetry and prose have always been blurry. Poetry at its core was a kind of recording device—it predates physical writing, and it helped ancient humans pass information between generations, or else it allowed for entertainment, familiar stories which were shared in groups and passed down through the years. Poetry feels as if it has no rules, but it’s the oldest kind of writing, the deepest and most human in the kinds of demands it requires of the reader and the author alike.
As Chan notes in her contributor’s statement, and as we see in the below quote, the words and phrases “white,” and “I’m afraid,” continually reappear in this poem:
I say: I’m not an interracial person, but I’m afraid that I’m white. I’m afraid that I made myself white. That I’d chosen whiteness a long time ago. I see myself crying on a square on my computer screen. Like this, my face looks undeniably Asian.
This adds to the feeling of tension for the speaker, but the prose poem format of the poem allows for a kind of claustrophobia of emotion that Chan would not be able to achieve, or have a much more difficult experience with, if it was written in a more traditional kind of free verse. Chan’s prose poem allows for a kind of density of language which appears in all sorts of prose poems from all kinds of authors, who are usually trying to indicate some kind of desperation or urgency from the rapid-fire way the lines come together with no breaks, creating an emotional landscape that feels uneasy and afraid and anxious and speculative; we aren’t entirely sure what to believe and this kind of offhand introduction of mild speculation is one of Chan’s specific and trademark skills.
The poem is handling a lot—along with the speaker’s own relationship to race, we’re suddenly exposed to her repressed concerns of her partner’s race and the way they relate to each other, and she is worried that her child won’t be able to share this very important part of herself—her culture. It’s not race-specific but rather fueled by a desire to impart cultural history and pride and legacy. She doesn’t want her child to grow up without knowing where they came from.
In order to push this kind of hybridity into the public sphere, however, the writer needs a kind of public profile which will attract readers. An established poet like Catherine Barnett or Monica Youn can get away with long sections of prose in their books—both Human Hours (Graywolf, 2018) and From From (Graywolf, 2023) have long sections of what is essentially exposition. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen from 2014 is similar. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, published by Wave Books in 2009, is a formal experiment in how these kinds of questions can function when totally divorced from narrative and floating in an amorphous kind of highly stylized soup of obsessive focus on a single thing—in this case, the color, “blue.”
All of these books are departures, in a sense, from the writer’s “home genre.” In recent years we also see a spate of poets writing novels—from Kaveh Akbar to Noor Naga—and Anne Carson is the prime example of this kind of departure; trained as a classicist, her work becomes increasingly lyrical and narrative at some points in her career, then veers back into theory, a kind of oscillation, from serious to irreverent and back again.
Baudelaire, mentioned by Chan, brings a sense of rhythm to his prose poetry. He attempted the form in a response to needing money. His work was energetic and unexpected but it didn’t bring him the kind of riches he was looking for. His approach, however, was unprecedented, and his marriage of prose and poetry feels obvious now, but the lines in the sand were once much harder to erase, even if it had rained. In her note, Chan makes it clear that the tension and ambiguity of the prose poem is what allows her to access the ambiguity of the emotional space she is trying to access. Instead of combining to become stronger, the oppositional concepts like race, suburbia versus urban areas, and manifestations of the American Dream, are at odds with each other, and Chan uses the breakdown of this emotional wreckage to build the narrative back up in her own way, with her own rules. The final lines of her poem are telling of these goals:
It’s frozen like this in its rectangular box.
In prose poetry the block of text creates the shape of the poem. For some readers the block of text, the rectangle of the Zoom screen, might be a constraint. But for Chan is is a catalyst, a departure. For Chan, this is where it starts, and the disassembly of the line breaks in a traditional poem allow for manipulation of building up and breaking down that isn’t possible with any other form, accessible in any other way.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. After she earned her B.A. in English from Michigan State University, she went on to study poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she earned her MFA.
Marianne is the author of Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books 2024) and All Heathens (Sarabande Books 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Between 2017-2019, she served as poetry editor for Split Lip Magazine.
She lives in Norfolk, VA, where she teaches poetry and nonfiction at Old Dominion University.
Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo is the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. She is the author of three books and two chapbooks, and her writing in multiple genres can be found across the web and in print, most recently (or forthcoming) in The North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Cream City Review. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches workshops and creates resources for emerging writers on numerous platforms, receiving her MFA from NYU in 2021. She also holds degrees from Bard College and the New School. To learn more about her and her work, please visit her at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.
