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5 - Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The year 2009 saw the publication by Hong Kong University Press of Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho, a book by Hong Kong’s leading English-language poet. The consecration of the poet’s work by publication by an academic press says something about the institution of literature in English in Hong Kong, but so does the fact that the title refers to a tree, aquilaria sinensis, whose fruit produces the incense that gave Hong Kong its Chinese name (“incense port”), but is today, as the title poem says, an endangered species.1 The book contains work from three earlier publications, as well as a substantial body of new poems, from a writing career spanning five decades. The opening poem is entitled “Hong Kong Riots 1, 1967”, and the last poem, set as its title says only “The Other Day”, is about struggles of reorientation in “Ad hoc Australia”, a landscape that seems to the poet in exile to lack the landmarks of culture and history necessary to bring it into visibility. “Sun scorched land lost / Purblind / I lose / My cardinal points.” The story that unfolds between those riots and that reorientation is a poetic record unique in English, a Hong Kong story of colonization, decolonization, exile and diaspora — and many returns, happy and unhappy. Among the new poems in the collection is one called “About Turn”. Turning is always interesting to poets. The turn of the verse at the end of a line constitutes the visible difference between poetry and prose. Poetry works through a series 5 Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong Douglas Kerr* * This is a revised and expanded version of an essay, “Locating Louise Ho: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong”, in Douglas Kerr, Q. S. Tong and Wang Shouren (eds), Critical Zone 3: A Forum for Chinese and Western Knowledge (Hong Kong and Nanjing: Hong Kong University Press and Nanjing University Press, 2008), pp. 15–36. ch05(075-095).indd 75 25/05/2010 3:01 PM 76 Douglas Kerr of linguistic figures or tropes, a term deriving from the Greek word for “turn”. Poetic metaphor is metamorphic, turning one thing into another. Poetry is also, like Homer’s Odysseus, “polytropic”, many-turning, both inventive and devious. The poet’s craft is always a bit disreputable, like table-turning or turning a trick — “The truest poetry is the most feigning,” in Shakespeare’s words, and “The turn of a verse / a sleight of hand” go together, as this poem shows. Turning can be creative, it can disclose new possibilities, but we are also right to be suspicious of turning, and being turned and turned again can turn the head. “About Turn” is one of a number of poems in which Louise Ho reflects about poetry itself. But the trope of turning and being turned also turns out to be a way of talking about the context of the poetry, that of Hong Kong’s “return to China”. The turn of a verse A sleight of hand Two nations Each taking turns To turn us around Leaving us With many a confounding turn Here the balance seems to shift between a creative turning, and a deceptive turn practised by two nations on a helpless victim. The poem recalls the widespread sense that in the negotiations between Britain and China to decide the future of Hong Kong, Hong Kong people themselves were of little account: nothing much turned on their opinions or actions, before or after the return. The poem concludes: In the end We turned inside out And that was the end Of all that turning To be turned inside out means to be completely bamboozled or tricked. Of course it could mean to be eviscerated. But perhaps in the jaunty rhythms of the poem’s ending, and the active voice of the verb here (“We turned”) is another possibility, which reactivates the creative and poetic resonances of turning. At a moment of crisis in its history a community may turn inwards to discover a new sense of itself, before turning outward again to face the world. The unexpected result of being given its marching orders — “About turn!” — might be Hong Kong’s discovery of where it stands, its own identity and difference, its location. ch05(075-095).indd 76 25/05/2010 3:01 PM [107.23.85.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:43 GMT) Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The...