'Scribbler' transforming feelings, words into poetry

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

As a child, Cathy Song was "a scribbler." She appointed herself the keeper of the family travel log, documenting their experiences on vacations organized by her pilot father. She created her own magazine, "She," writing interviews, drawing fashion layouts and preparing regular features. As a teenager, she yearned to be a folk singer, composing her own songs.

She wasn't musician enough to fulfill that last wish, but from her attempts at songwriting came a preference for "the lyric — short, hyphenated, intense." In college, at the University of Hawai'i, Wellesley and (for her master's degree), Boston University, Song went to lengths to avoid the dull and the rote in her assignments.

From these roots came a poet whose fourth collection, "The Land of Bliss" (University of Pittsburgh Press, paper, $12.95), was just released. Her poem of the same name records her delight in the work:

Last night I climbed the ladder
to the loft, tired in a way the bones
liquify after a day of doing
the work one has set out to do.
I had worked mindful and steady through the hours
on a poem not quite done.
The thought that there would be
more work of the same to do
when I woke up,
that there would be
that poem waiting,
made me happy.

Song, 46, has found a way to be a poet while being a wife and mother of three, too. Every few weeks, she disappears for a weekend to a cabin she and her husband, a physician, built in Volcano on the Big island.

Free of the need to fix a meal or make a bed or run someone to a school event, she slips on the skin of her other being.

Or, as she says with a laugh, "I write like a nut case. I don't brush my teeth. I just roll out of bed in my sweats and start writing."

This practice has convinced her that, at some level, she is composing poems all the time and, further, that there is no need to fear the well of words will dry up. "It's an infinite supply," she said.

How should we read poetry? she is asked, and there is a long, thoughtful pause. "I don't know," she says. Then she elaborates: "not just with the brain but with the whole body. Read it aloud, get into the rhythms. People can understand poetry without being able to say, 'I can tell you what this poem is about.' In fact, you should never be able to say 'This is what this poem is about,' but you can experience it while it is happening."

The poems in "The Land of Bliss" span the years 1994 to 2000. There are poems that grew out of her mother's descent into depression and then vascular dementia, poems that speak of spiritual struggles, poems woven through with what she calls her own archetypal images. There are scenes local folks will recognize: the duty visit to an aging aunt, the funeral of the last great-uncle, the culture shock of moving from pineapple village to "townside."

Often, there is a speaker, a character or storyteller, lending a narrative structure to some works. Always, the language is gentle, but true and strong, too. A phrase from one of the poems here, "The Sister," is the name for a recent anthology, "The Quietest Singing." An apt description of Song's style.

Song said poetry is not merely a way to record experiences. It is a way to release and then transform them.

"On some level, everything is autobiographical; it would be silly to say otherwise, but when it becomes art it is more than that," she said. "Poetry helps to dredge out all the feelings so it doesn't just stay and rot inside of you. ... Once you decide to do art, you push it outside of yourself and you manipulate it and work with it and eventually, it stands on it own. And it's not just you or yours. The spiritual, the wellspring of love and compassion, work through you." Art without that spiritual component is "too much of the ego," she said