My piece “Embarkation”…lives in that world of imagining and reimagining. First conceived as a stage performance, I wanted the piece to have a life beyond the seven minutes it took to perform live.

Shin Yu Pai is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including most recently No Neutral (2023) and Less Desolate (2023), a collection of haiku comics. In 2020, Entre Rios Books published Ensō, a 20-year survey of her work across poetry, photography, performance, installation, and public art. Her poetry films have screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival, The Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Madrid International Short Film Festival, Tokyo International Short Film Festival, and other outlets. Shin Yu is host and creator of Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning, chart-topping podcast on Asian American stories, produced in collaboration with KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate station. For her work in podcasting and public radio, she has received recognition from the Signal Awards and the Asian American Podcasters Association. Shin Yu is currently Civic Poet for the City of Seattle.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS: Embarkation [excerpt]

EMBARKATION:
A QUINTET FOR THE YEAR OF THE DOG

Butter lamp, incense stick, bees wax
votive, the occasion of poem, rites I enact
to set the world aglow with the light
of desire, the fire of the mind
adorned in the colors of the eight
temples, the caretakers of the wang yeh
(gods) march through the streets of the
seaside town the lone envoy bearing a square
yoke, parades the wooden boat through
narrow lanes
until nightfall, when the barge is brought
to rest upon a bed of joss (paper)
earlier that night, men load the boat
with hand-written wishes, the misfortunes
and plague of the past year to be piloted
up to the heavens in a blast of fireworks
deafening the crowd that came to bear witness
to ceremony; we observe as each of us does
some of us bail out before a thing is done
to escape our ghosts; we watch it burn;
I can’t unsnarl the knot of unmet want,
so I sever it in heat, draw the cord into flame
to free myself from the clutch of haunting, to disembark
at the latitude of where I give up the ship

Right: stills from Shin Yu Pai’s “Embarkation” performance, Ampersand Live!, Seattle, 2019

Artist Reflection

I’m often interested in interrogating an idea that may take me through many iterations over a period of years. This approach has led me to write about the same gallery in an art museum over a nearly twenty-year period, in addition to writing poems inspired by visiting as many skyspaces by James Turrell as I’ve been able to see in person. It would be wrong to think of these works as duplicative, as they more closely resemble variations on a theme akin to what a museum or concert-goer might encounter in a visual or musical composition. 

I once printed words on the ripening skins of apples using sunlight, as part of a site-specific piece in an heirloom apple orchard that I loved to visit with my son. That installation couldn’t possibly survive untouched more than a day or two. Nor could it express the full magick of the orchard. So I engaged a friend to make sound recordings of the orchard throughout the four seasons that we used to mix with an audio recording of me reading my poem.

My piece “Embarkation” also lives in that world of imagining and reimagining. First conceived as a stage performance, I wanted the piece to have a life beyond the seven minutes it took to perform live. Perhaps this was driven by thinking about the boat-burning at the center of the film. Based upon a ceremony conducted in Taiwan every three years, the community involved in the ritual prepares for the event for more than a year in advance. The cycle of preparation ends with immolation. I wanted to capture all of that intention and labor in a piece that could reach beyond documentary poem to the metaphor of poetic ritual for the individual herself—to consider both the poet and the viewer.