This article appeared in the Jan. 29, 2003 Cambridge Chronicle.

Shin Yu Pai to discuss poetic development at CCAE tomorrow,

teach this spring

by Susie Davidson

CORRESPONDENT

Poet and visual artist Shin Yu Pai received the only literature project grant this year from the Cambridge Arts Council. Tomorrow, Jan. 30 at 10:30 a.m., in a talk entitled Journey of a Poet, she will discuss, in a visual presentation, the evolution of her written work as well as pay tribute to those who have helped shape her creative path.

In addition to the CAC grant, Pai has received many other scholarships and awards and has completed Artist's Residencies at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Ragdale Foundation. She will be in residence this May at the MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire, a colony founded in 1906 whose artists have included Edward Arlington Robinson, James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Jules Feiffer, Frances Fitzgerald, Studs Terkel, Barbara Tuchman and Alice Walker.

Pai’s work largely encompasses themes of Asian culture, history, and tradition. “It is about many things, about duality, about neither one thing or another, sometimes two things, sometimes neither,” she said. “My work is also very process-oriented. It is like Buddhism in this way.”

At the CCAE, she will read from her first full-length collection of poetry, Equivalence, to be released this fall by La Alameda Press, a small press publisher based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers, her volume of ancient Chinese poetry translations, was published in 1998 by Third Ear Books, then in Boulder, Colorado and currently in South Korea.

Pai, who holds a master’s of fine art degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a bachelor’s degree in English from Boston University, and studied at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, will also be teaching The Decision to Publish: A Course for Poets at CCAE in March. The mutual appointment was an evolution in itself.

"I wanted to start teaching more around Boston, and sent several proposals to adult education centers around the city," said Pai. CCAE hired her to teach, and later, to participate in their 2002 Stories Visible exhibition. “The Director of the Center and my Program Coordinator also wrote a letter of support for my Cambridge Arts Council application,” she noted.

Pai will also be a panelist in April in CCAE's popular Writer's Life series which is facilitated by local poet and Cambridge resident Charles Coe, who coordinates music and literature grant programs for the Massachusetts Cultural Council. 

Pai plans to complete Equivalence, which she has worked on since finishing graduate school two years ago, at MacDowell. "Going through the process of completing my first book has profoundly changed my life and solidified my commitment to poetry,” she said.

“Equivalence is about drawing lines of connection, exploring the connection between the visual arts and language, Eastern and Western cultures,” she explained. Photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s series of cloud images, Equivalents, which he described as a living sky, inspired the title.

She attributes her poetic direction to her Taiwanese immigrant parents, who encouraged she and her brother to assimilate iinto their Southern California environment. It took creative communication to bridge the generational gap. “I grew up with my parents’ unique brand of immigrant English in my ear that continues to inform my sensibilities,” she recalled.

The Taiwanese culture, she explained, is highly syncretic, reflecting the Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch occupations of the island, as well as the practices of Taoism, Buddhim, and Confucianism. “All atheistic worldviews and religions blend together seamlessly,” she said. “This has deeply informed my sensibilities – the way that I use space, economy of language, the deep image, and explore themes of history, desire, and longing, time and timelessness (or the internal time of the poem).”

La Alameda Press also publishes the work of poets Nanao Sakaki, Renee Gregorio, Joseph Somoza, Carol Moldaw, and John Brandi, as well as others with whom she studied. "It means a great deal to me to me to be part of a lineage encompassing writers such as Joanne Kyger, Andrew Schelling, and Anselm Hollo, all of whom made a tremendous impression on me during the early stages of my development as an artist," she said.

Pai has been in conversation with Boston painter David Lukowski on a possible future collaborative work. A family ancestry piece is also on the horizon. “It will be a prose project in the form of an unfolding ox-plow book with archival images and family history,” she said.

“Pai’s poems have broad appeal - to literary and poetry enthusiasts, to art lovers, to the Asian American community, and to individuals interested in multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work,” said CCAE public relations director Will McMillan.

Painting to hammer a nail

Hammer a nail into a mirror.

Place the pieces

in an abandoned lot

with an unobstructed view of

the sky.

(From a longer poem entitled "Yes Yoko Ono", in the forthcoming book Equivalence, by Shin Yu Pai)

Shin Yu Pai will read at 10:30 a.m. at the The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, at 56 Brattle St. Cost is $2 ($1 for seniors). For information, please call 617-547-6789 ext. 1 and/or visit www.ccae.org.