2002 Gift Of Freedom Recipient

2002 Gift Of Freedom Recipient

About Jennifer Tseng
Jennifer Tseng doesn’t remember much about her first poem.

It was about a flying carpet. And imagination. And probably—like many of her early poems—it was about love, she remembers wistfully. A high school English teacher by the name of Mike Edwards (a female teacher, despite the name), encouraged Tseng to write her first poems. “She was the type of teacher who was always on the verge of getting fired,” Tseng remembers. “The administration didn’t like her, but the students loved her. She was unique. To me, it always seemed like she had another voice. And my writing has always seemed to me like that—like it has another voice.”


Mike Edwards entered her flying carpet poem in a contest, and Tseng won $100. The 33-year-old writer has come a long way since then, creatively speaking, and also in the size of her writing awards. Tseng, the first recipient of the $50,000 Gift of Freedom award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, is a writer, essayist, poet and teacher who recently completed her MFA and a draft of her first novel. The novel, Woo, is the imagined story of her father’s life as he immigrated from China to Taiwan and finally to the United States. She began work in February 2003 on a second book of poetry under the sponsorship of her $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award.

The daughter of a German mother and a Taiwanese father, Tseng says both her parents—who met at a dance in Illinois—were artists in their youth. Her dad was a poet and writer; her mother was a painter. Today, Tseng’s sister is an artist and sculptor in New York.

“I think my dad raised us to love the arts,” she says. “I think in China it’s more respectable to be artists, even if you don’t make money at it.”

Just the same, both her parents gave up art careers for the sake of family and money. “It was pressing in that era to give up those things to do something practical,” she says.

Her life as a writer began seriously after graduation from Colorado College with a series of residencies at writer’s colonies, including Syvenna Foundation, Cottages @ Hedgebrook and the MacDowell Colony. During those periods, Tseng completed her first poetry manuscript, The Man With My Face. Along the way she won several writing awards, including one for poetry. Her work has appeared most recently in Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review and Zyzzyva and is forthcoming in APA Journal, Artful Dodge, Barrow Street and Grand Street.

Tseng received her Master’s degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA and went on to be a fiction fellow for two years at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She then enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Houston.

She has lectured in Asian American Studies and English at UCLA and the University of Houston, respectively, and was the Spring 2003 Writer-in-Residence at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.


Although she also writes some fiction and nonfiction, Tseng says her first love is poetry. Also an activist, she finds she is most comfortable as an “activist” when she expresses herself writer. For instance, she is part of a group called Poets Against The War and was scheduled to read her poem pushing peace at the White House for a Laura Bush poetry reading this winter, but that poetry reading was cancelled.

Tseng plans to spend the two-year sponsorship under her Gift of Freedom grant working on a second book of poems, already titled Dark Logic. And the topics? Pretty much the same as they were 20 years ago, with a twist.

“I still write about love and imagination,” she says. “From the beginning, what I’ve loved about poetry is the quality of intimacy. It’s like someone whispering in your ear.”

Where her poetry differs from the flying-carpet era is perhaps where that intimate message is directed.

“My newer poems have a broader scope. As opposed to a poem addressed to one person, I love poems lately that double as poems written for a century, or for a country. I have a friend who says the best love poems are love poems also written for God. That’s what I’m looking for.”

Red Handkerchief
by Jennifer Tseng

I.

I am making this poem for you
in the manner of a handkerchief.
To shake at the sky, to fold
as your ship leaves the shore.

Red for the blood that covers
distance. Veins arbitrary, blood
yours. Square for the shape
of limits and four-fold returns.

Cut from your mother’s dress,
its smell consoles you. Palm
sugar in the cloth, for the sea
is harsh; the sea is hungry.

If I asked, you would claim
not to need it.
Yet there it is in your pocket.
There it is hidden.

Rain.
You lean on the prow and dream
of me: child with a mind like your own,
child who might write you a love poem.

How can you know that I’ll speak
in a stranger’s language?
That my poems will be more like red
scraps than the words that you love?

Fever. The sailors blow their noses
with their hands. Your hands are clean.
The red cloth, clean. But even in my poem,
mucus, raindrops, tears, the sea, darken it.

II.

I am making this poem for myself
so that I might watch you
sail the long sea toward me.
Fifty years and what have you lost?

Red for the complicated body,
which fruit-like, multiplies.
A square resembles the four of us
eating at a table.

The smell of my grandmother’s dress.
Tears that perfumed her manly face
and hands. Sweat from your endless
forehead, swept clean in a storm.

If you asked, I would claim not to need it.
Yet here it is in my hands, here
it is written. I have wanted
to be this poem in another language.

I have wanted to be the handkerchief:
red hidden in the dark
of your suit, an organ working,
red for the black duration.

Furniture District, Western Ave
by Jennifer Tseng

Sometimes walking early in the morning
or late at night, I peer in through the thick, glass
windows of a furniture store, those darkened
chambers filled with the trappings
of a life: No one’s iron bed, no one’s
wooden desk and embroidered chair.
Clean beige carpet no feet have touched,
glittering commode upon which no one sits,
silver faucet in which there is no water.

I see a figure in the bed, a shape in the comforter,
another sitting in the chair, reading.

As if in the night, an appropriate family had
come to live there. As if the men at Winchell’s
across the street, those without kitchens
who meet at all hours to eat,
had found a way in.