In fact, I still remember the day I read it in the office of my mentor David Till at Austin Peay State University in 1989. As co-editor of Zone 3, he took great pains to lay out each issue where the journal’s arc flowed seamlessly, thematically, holistically from poem to poem. Sometimes this process took him an inordinately long period of time, the managing editor ever pressuring him to give her the final copy.
That’s why, when a particular poet pulled a two-page poem at the last minute (days or weeks before the journal was to be sent to the printer?), he was distraught. This two-page poem was the perfect lead-in to the journal’s feature section, a series of poems by Coleman Barks, and now, possibly, he would have to reorder everything.
Then, in the way Till’s mind worked—sifting, parsing, mulling-over, making connections—he suddenly had a solution. He pulled me aside in the hallway and asked if I had been successful in publishing my poem titled “Good Boys” yet. He had remembered the poem from a batch I’d shared with him in some previous semester and wanted it for Zone 3. It wasn’t a two-pager, though, so he would still need one more page. He asked me to gather twenty pages or so and bring them to his office that afternoon.
I sat there as he poured over my poems, reading each one like a monk studying some ancient text. An eyebrow would lift, a moment of recognition or insight. He nodded, titled his head, sighed audibly. I had no way of knowing what he was thinking, nor did he say. He continued reading, searching for that one poem to fill the desired page in the journal.
That’s when I turned to a stack of submissions he hadn’t returned to the Zone 3 office yet. That’s where, in that half hour of watching my mentor decide on my own poems, I happened to pick up a submission of your poems and began reading to pass the time.
When I read “If I Were in Beijing,” I immediately knew. I knew this poem was the poem, the one I needed to hear, to inhabit, to think through. Though I was an English major, I was a Marketing minor, already struggling to reconcile these two disparate parts of my brain. “I live in a fat country / with salesmen who do their own / commercials,” the poem began. Everything is marketing, ideas, propaganda, and these—unlike a tank—make the enemies, or terrors, we face that much more difficult to notice.
I read the poem a second time. Then I read it a third time. I must have been doing my own David Till moment of living inside a poem, seeing it from every side, thinking through its music, its lines, its line-breaks, its logic, the leaps it makes, the argument unfolding. “Wow!” I finally said out loud. “This is the poem,” I said. “This is the poem, and it might be a two-pager, and if it is, toss my poem out and keep this one instead.”
Till said he’d already been through those submissions and hadn’t found anything. “You missed this one,” I said, a confident twenty-one-year old telling my mentor he’d overlooked a real keeper.
He set my stack of poems aside and said, “Read it to me,” so I did.
IF I WERE IN BEIJING
I live in a fat country
with salesmen who do their own
commercials, who don’t know what to do
with their hands—hang, point, hitch
a ride in the suit pocket. Usefulness
is a bitter mystery. And it is such a simple
country. Stars flag the sucked in black
hills of night. Summer stops
breathing when you listen. Or the stars are
a thousand deer tails lifted and
disappearing. You can sail down the tunnels of
radios from opera to blues. We would each
love a revolution. A better cause than just
the old dying. A priest said to my husband
the other day, “Frankly we’re all sick
and tired of hearing about the holocaust.”
I suppose he meant we must keep cruelty
alive to understand it. Keep it personal.
For him it’s Nicaragua. The abortions.
His country where the souls of the unborn
fester like sweet fruit we do not eat.
If I were in Beijing I would be the student
facing a tank. If I were in Russia
I would be the poet in the gulag.
If I were in Argentina I would be
sewing the names of the disappeared
into my shawl and wandering the plazas.
But too often I am in my own childhood,
its silent movies, its fish thrashings of light.
Too often I am buried in the clover of the silence
of my own house. I do not know how long
it is before the dead stop counting. I hold
my breath. Each heart must find the terror
it can deny is like its own.
That’s how your poem came to find a place next to my poem in the Fall 1989 issue of Zone 3.
I’ve lived with your poem now for almost thirty-five years, counting it as one the most central poems of my earliest influences. I often wonder about the mystery of how one poem as opposed to another crosses our paths. Would I have found your poem if another poet hadn’t pulled a two-pager from Zone 3? What is our “usefulness” as poets? What does it mean that “[e]ach heart must find the terror / it can deny is like its own”? Is poetry a kind of “revolution” against “a fat country”—the America of 1989 or the America of 2024—and if it is, can we ever really know what we’re up against?
How "simple" is our country now?
In trying to answer these and other questions, at least your poem all these years has been a constant companion so that whatever I face, I feel even more bold than I felt as a twenty-one year old.
Ever your fan...