In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet, Kimiko Hahn. She is the author of ten books of poems, including: Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020);The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996); and Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992). As part of her service to the CUNY community, she initiated a Chapbook Festival that became an annual event co-sponsored by major literary organizations. Since then, she has added chapbooks to her publication list: Write it!, Brittle Process, Brood, Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect, The Cryptic Chamber, and Resplendent Slug. In 2017, she and Tamiko Beyer collaborated on the chapbook Dovetail. Hahn takes pleasure in the challenges of collaboration: writing text for film (Coal Fields, 1985 experimental documentary by Bill Brand, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She-Thing 1995 MTV special, and Everywhere at Once 2008 film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau); writing poems for visual arts (2016 art-book poetics and 2017 photograph-broadsides with Lauren Henkin).
This episode includes a reading of her poem, “The Dream of Shoji” featured in our 2022, 2023, and 2024 Get Lit Anthology.
“The Dream of Shoji”
How to say milk? How to say sand, snow, sow,
linen, cloud, cocoon, or albino?
How to say page or canvas or rice balls?
Trying to recall Japanese, I blank out:
it's clear I know forgetting. Mother, tell me
what to call that paper screen that slides the interior in?