#45 Backstory of the Poem “Sungmyo” from the poetry collection CELADON by Ian Haight; published by Unicorn in 2017
Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was fist conceived in your brain until final form? To be fair to the process of “Sungmyo,” I have to start at the very beginning, which was the decision to take poetry and writing seriously, and to that end I enrolled in Goddard College’s MFA program. I was reading a lot of different material at the time, trying to understand all the incredible possibilities there are in poetry and how those possibilities are realized. I had been reading the poetry of Gary Snyder, and as a reader, had been experiencing a love-hate relationship with him. On the one hand, his poems felt technically and thematically simplistic compared to what I thought poetry should be; on the other, when I closed the last page of his book, The Back Country, I had a jolt, which I have never experienced with any other poet. The jolt was feeling like I had lived his life—or a life. I realized the power of Snyder’s poetry for me wasn’t in any single poem, but the tonal evocation of a united collection. For the record, after reading many of Snyder’s books and more fully appreciating his range, precedent, and lineage in poetry—which I think goes back to Wordsworth, at least—I believe he is one of the truly great American poets of the 20th century.
I was thinking about how Snyder made a collection live, which for me came down to the question of how he made apoem invoke life. There was nothing necessarily extraordinary about the incidents Snyder was writing about. The topics felt common and everyday (walking in a forest, walking in a city, working on a house, attending a meeting), but the attention to detail and the reflective perspective in that detail is what created a point of view that I as a reader could engage with. Ok, so if I admired this approach to writing so much, what if anything could I use in my own writing?
At the time of all this poetry exploration I was living in Pusan, Korea, and I was and still am married to a Korean woman. (RIGHT the Couple in Pusan in 2004) Traditionally in Korea, males of a family are supposed to visit the graves of their deceased parents or grandparents during Chusok, which is a kind of Korean Thanksgiving. My wife’s parents had no sons—only daughters, five daughters—and so this custom fell to the husbands of the daughters. My mother-in-law was still alive but my father-in-law had died soon after my wife was born, so there was a need to go to his grave and perform a ceremony. Because I was American I had no hometown in Korea to visit during Chusok. It fell to me and one of my elder brothers-in-law to carry out the ceremony.
We lived at the base of a very small hill-enclosed valley, and my father-in-law’s tomb was near the top of the valley. I felt like this ceremony, in the spirit of Snyder, might be a piece of life worth writing about. The process of the poem is straightforward: I wrote about going to the gravesite, conducting the ceremony, and a noteworthy incident on the way back.
LEFT: Ian’s father-in-law’s burial mound with three daughters and one nephew present.
In terms of craft I breath-broke the lines to make them reflective of life. Looking at the initial draft of the poem I am surprised by how much it resembles the final draft, even though I went through more than twenty versions. Expansion of details and the title were the chief revision issues. I particularly struggled with the title because I couldn’t figure out how to succinctly inform a non-Korean reader regarding the what and the why of the poem.
Where were you when you started to write the poem? And please describe the place in detail. At the time of the poem’s writing, we lived in one of a collection of four-unit condos. My family was a bit young then. My two sons had been born but they were both under the age of eight, so although our three-bedroom unit was small by the American standards I was familiar with (about 1,200 square feet), it was livable for our family size. Because I was doing graduate work half of one of the rooms was my own.
There was space for a bookcase or two of books and my computer desk—that was it. I did all of my writing on the computer. The walls of the room, like all the walls of all the units, were concrete, but papered with some standard flower print on a white background. The floors had a plastic surface, which emulated a shade of wood. The sliding wood-framed windows were barred, large and opaque, but opened to a view of the forested hill. I could hear birds; I was happy for that.
RIGHT: Ian Haight family photo – wife is pregnant with their daughter.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Looking at the file dates that are still intact, I had to have written the first draft around September-October 2002. Chusok is annually held in September.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? I may have drafts with markings on them, but if I do they are in storage, so I will attach the earliest draft of the poem and the most recent draft for comparison.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? There’s only one line that got cut. In the fifth stanza, line 3: “and red berries” was deleted because I felt like it was too much detail and made the poem clunk. To me it felt like a detail that was not entirely necessary in comparison with what was rhythmically gained by losing it. The first line lost the phrase “Yellow fin” to describe the kind of fish for the same reason, and because it wasn’t authentically true. People laid out all sorts of different fish.
LEFT: Ian Haigh in October of 2002
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? That we are all capable of entering and being received by different cultures and communities no matter what we look like or what skills we may/may not possess. It doesn’t always happen but it can happen to anybody and everybody regardless of identity. This gives me hope for humanity. Maybe also that there’s a lot of love in this world. It’s not always easy to see and it might be different from what I am used to experiencing but that does not mean the love is not there.
BELOW: Ian Haigh’s father in law wearing the neck tie
Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? The Ending, for sure. To see thatpheasant rise and then to place it in context of the poem…I got what that meant when it happened but I didn’t really feel it until I re-read it in the finished poem. It’s spiritual—and very Korean. I love that I can deeply feel what that moment means even though I am an American white male. I also love that Korean people understand and respect my authentic experience.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? Quarterly West and Barrow Street both published it in 2003. I think Quarterly West accepted it first and when I notified Barrow Street they said they were going to publish it anyway, regardless. The publications came out pretty quick after that so there wasn’t much more to be said to either journal. Funny how that worked—I wish I experienced poetry publishing that way more frequently.
Anything you would like to add? Thank you again for inviting me to participate in this. It was fun to look back and revisit not only the poem, but where I was at as a writer and the life I was living at the time.
Ian Haight’s book, Celadon, won the 2016 Unicorn Press First Book Prize for poetry and was published in the fall of 2017. He is the editor of Zen Questions and Answers from Korea, and with T’ae-yong Hŏ, he is the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems of Kyun Hŏ and Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim—finalist for ALTA’s Stryk Prize. Other awards include Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Translation, and grants from the Daesan Foundation, the Korea Literary Translation Institute, and the Baroboin Buddhist Foundation.
https://www.ianhaight.com/contact
001 Backstory of the Poem
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#002 Backstory of the Poem
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#003 Backstory of the Poem
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#004 Backstory of the Poem
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#005 Backstory of the Poem
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#006 Backstory of the Poem
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#007 Backstory of the Poem
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#008 Backstory of the Poem
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#009 Backstory of the Poem
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#010 Backstory of the Poem
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#011 Backstory of the Poem
“After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
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#012 Backstory of the Poem
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#013 Backstory of the Poem
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#014 Backstory of the Poem
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#015 Backstory of the Poem
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#016 Backstory of the Poem
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#017 Backstory of the Poem
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#18th Backstory of the Poem
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#19th Backstory of the Poem
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#20 Backstory of the Poem
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#21 Backstory of the Poem
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#022 Backstory of the Poem
“Studying Ariel”
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#023 Backstory of Poem
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#24 Backstory of the Poem
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#025 Backstory of the Poem
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#26 Backstory of the Poem
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#27 Backstory of the Poem
“Carmen Polo, Lady Necklaces, 2017”
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#28 Backstory of the Poem
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#029 Backstory of the Poem
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#030 Backstory of the Poem
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#031 Backstory of the Poem
031 September 24, 2018
Mark Lee Webb’s “After We Drove”
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#032 Backstory of the Poem
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#033 Backstory of the Poem
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#034 Backstory of the Poem
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#035 Backstory of the Poem
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#036 Backstory of the Poem
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#037 Backstory of the Poem
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#038 Backstory of the Poem
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#039 Backstory of the Poem
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#040 Backstory of the Poems
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#041 Backstory of the Poem
“Dog Sitting”
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042 Backstory of the Poem
“Mountain”
by Haroldo Barbosa Filho
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042 Backstory of the Poem
#43 Backstory of the Poem
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#44 Backstory of the poem
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