Maxine Hong Kingston. To Be the Poet.

St. Andrews, B.A.

Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 2002. 111 pages, ill. $19.95. ISBN 0-674-00791-3

ENJOY Maxine Hong Kingston's To Be the Poet and accept with utter satisfaction that she has been awarded the rare title "Living Treasure of Hawai'i." This short, marvelous book records Kingston's contribution to Harvard's famed Massey Lecture Series on the history of American civilization, which she delivered in 2000. Once again, her work defies categories and genres, just as The Woman Warrior long ago obscured the boundaries between autobiography and fiction.

To Be the Poet delightfully discombobulates the well-intentioned genre police by combining anecdotes, drawings, marginalia, asides on Chinese poetics, formalist commentary, and (as always) ghosts and stories. Nor are we welcomed to some somber and rarefied Parnassus; there's rollicking fun here. For one thing, Kingston determines to attain poetry by burning offerings in the ting, by traveling physically and metaphysically, and by tap dancing.

By tap dancing? She sets down her intentions in measures as pure as any danced by the matchless Gregory Hines: "I'll learn meter, tap dancing / I'll get rhythm, tap-dancing / my whole body gettin' rhythm, gettin' meter." Finally, in a jazz riff, one beat between "baby," "Daddy," and "the deep blue sea," Kingston exults: "Gonna tap my way to poetry."

Much of Kingston's rhythmic language plays point/counterpoint with Chinese, Hawai'ian, and American English, providing great musical variety. Even her childhood nickname, "Ting Ting," comes from a four-word poem her father recited fondly: "Ting ting doak lup," meaning "Standing alone as a mountain peak." She has indeed surveyed distant vistas from that mountaintop of being.

For American-born Maxine Hong Kingston, this mix of cultures, languages, and images has been inspiring and explosive, and she is quite aware of the power inherent in this volatility: when she writes of the Hawai'ian mountains, translating "Leina-a-ka'uhane" as "place where souls leap off," she admits to feeling "superstitious in breaking kapu [by] saying those names aloud." Poets understand this trepidation; she bows to the power of language as well as to the volcanic powers of Pele.

Still, Kingston intends to alter nothing less than the dominant force in her creative life, that of "the longbook," the thousands of prose pages that have produced her fame and transfixed her stories. What she wants at sixty, however, is the immediacy of poetry, the quicksilver moment of the image, the rarified jewels falling into the poet's head and lap.

She then offers an anecdote revealing much about the processes of prose and poetry. She, Allen Ginsberg, and William Gass are sailing on the Li River. Softly and slowly, Ginsberg speaks a nearly perfect word-picture poem, on the spot. Turning to Gass, Kingston notes that she has worked on a "longbook" for twenty years while Ginsberg has, in moments, encapsulated their entire experience. With perfect equanimity, Gass replies, "It took him twenty years to learn spontaneous composition." This is precisely the magnetic draw of poetry for Kingston and others, and this is its terrible difficulty.

While Kingston may or may not be fully welcomed home by Erato, this collection offers a cornucopia for all writers. Each anecdote on poets caught (and released) in the act of language is informing. Each story of ancestors and critics and friends attending to their muses is engaging. Every Kingstonian musing on language extols both its elusiveness and its stony presence.

Reading To Be the Poet may recall Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry (r947) since whole passages seem made for memorization. This book, too, invites an intimate experience. Enjoy it as poets, one and all, and as readers who reverence the precise and pristine nature of the word. Maxine Hong Kingston, artist of "the longbook" and new initiate in the short form called "poem," offers this new, wide-angled view from her mountaintop.

B. A. St. Andrews

Syracuse University