Welcome to Jill Chan’s website

by Jill Chan

Jill Chan’s These Hands Are Not Ours, her third book of poetry, explores the deep and sometimes uncanny relationships between our human experiences and our wider, more tenuous though, at times, no less ambiguous experiences of the divine. These poems are written in an almost subliminal language filled with beautiful tension and silent immensity.

Welcome to the new address of my official website, JillChan.net, where I post news about books, publications, appearances; new poem drafts, works in progress, essays, thoughts about poetry and poetics; and other updates as they come.

My new book, These Hands Are Not Ours, has been awarded the 2009 Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize. Thanks to Michael O’ Leary. The book is available now from my publisher, Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop.

Please mention that you learned about These Hands Are Not Ours from the author when you order a copy via the link below:

http://www.earlofseacliff.co.nz/TheseHands.htm

Or if you want to order via online bookstore, just click below:

These Hands are Not Ours

These Hands are Not Ours

Or you could order online from Academy Books, or South Pacific Books.

Listen to readings from the book at http://audio.jillchan.net

I make new posts here or tweets on twitter.com (displayed in the left sidebar) here every day. The posts start below the five poem drafts in this message. Some posts, especially new poem drafts, may be password protected. I usually take poem drafts down when I have another I want to post. The poems and prose must not be copied, reproduced, saved, reprinted, or reposted in any medium, electronic or otherwise, because they are copyrighted material.

Hope you visit from time to time.

Thank you very much.

Warmly yours,

Jill

On Metaphor

Now that I am ready to write about the world,
the metaphors hinder like love,
like the love of body.
Now that we are ready to describe the world,
who will believe anything here?
The world, not as world, but as the body of the world.
Death is reduced to security for the ones around the dead.
Life is a living.
Truth doesn’t appear but figures itself,
now countable, now spent like love is undertaken.
A goal like everything else.
To get to passion.
To kick compassion into a bruise.
And poetry is useful
and too small like the world
and its cover.

(published in DenverSyntax)

Luc Simonic, the editor, was kind enough to email me regarding submitting to them.

The Making of Myths and Legends

If anything, we could thank you
for not being relative.
You could make any truth
see through the dark of you.
Stories built of nothing grand,
just daily misgivings—
not craft, not art—
mislaid and taken up
like the memories you couldn’t wait
to make of us—
the accumulation of everything alterable
the photographs we already are
in your frozen mind
not cold from weather
but habit.

Testament

When we first arrived here,
you kept dropping hints
about wills and testaments.
Today, another part of you,
someone else similar,
wanted to take away
the air out of this room,
to suffocate the will and the body
as if you own the air
the way you own the water.
Some things cannot be said.
And this is language
but not a metaphor at all.

Just To Make Sure

It is funny now

that we look back

at how foolish we’ve been,

to be better than we are capable of becoming.

Like the people we believed

but afterwards reviled for letting ourselves believe them.

The worst is when we could never choose to love.

For example, a mother or a father who isn’t your mother or father at all.

We who have been thanking them all our lives

now thank them for being the people they really are–

human like we are,

only less to themselves as we all are to the others who live in us,

those beautiful strangers

we never get to be

now laughing along with us.

Thanksgiving

Sometimes we thank You
for no reason at all.
A life is a reason to be thankful—
how they sometimes take for granted
the things You’ve given us.
We are all that.
We are Your making.

Some learn this too late.
They continue to want
the people they love
to live and die for them,
forgetting they themselves
may never be able to live again
though they breathe.

Because in this other dying,
they know to breathe,
having taken so much that is Yours
that is never theirs.


All poems, and other written material where noted, on this website and blog Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved. For your private and personal reading only. Copying, reproducing, saving, reprinting, or reposting in any medium, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited.

Doubt: A fictional diary, Part CV

Just to keep things in perspective: I have lost close to 30 lbs the last 3 years. Anyway, of course it is not a natural progression. I have no known illness. It is all a matter of the illusion of illness, and the illusion of prescription. That sounds like a description of the state of the world we are in! Not to extend a personal predicament too much into further realities but I just had to mention it. Maybe this suggests my frustration, both at the world, and at relations and what people do to one another.

Never mind though. I am still able to write and report. That is something, under the circumstances!

 

(to be continued)

Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved.


Doubt: A fictional diary, Part CIV

This is a sort of cheating. The pains I feel in my body don’t call for it. Earlier, they were bearable but crying out for justice. Now, they are even singing out of alleviation if nothing else.

But I decided to report nonetheless. Perhaps as a warning to myself not to take more than I could take, or not to decide on suffering anymore than one suffers.

Anyway, please do not be alarmed. I am even OK (compared to previous alarms and so far, frail emergencies).

You’ll hear from me next time the pains start again and I can still report.

(to be continued)

Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved.

Doubt: A fictional diary, Part CIII

Report from the front:

I am remembering a scene in a novel my sister loves where a man tries to choke a woman.

Don’t know why I think of that now. Probably because of the symptoms I’m feeling the past few weeks, pain in different parts of my body.

And the choking, I actually felt it as I described in 98. And a little of it today.

Hope it doesn’t continue, or else I’ll have to report here again next time. If I can still type, that is!

Yes, danger is everywhere.

(to be continued)

Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved.

Doubt: A fictional diary, Part CII

I had a few symptoms today. Also still losing weight. Could see my bones sticking out everywhere on my body.

Also, a few bruises have started appearing. This has happened before.

Still I’m alive though I think they are doing it so slowly and insidiously, it might take awhile for them to be successful.

You will hear from me again next time, either to report if anything more major comes up, or if the pain becomes unbearable.

(to be continued)

Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved.

Doubt: A fictional diary, Part CI

Reporting from the front:

Today’s not too bad. Had a stint of numbness of my neck and arms, and spine earlier today, and also pain on my right side again as mentioned in 100.

Otherwise, I was able to write a little and think of some stuff.

Since my pains have abated a little, I will refrain from reporting unless something more major happens. If the pain is bearable, I will keep quiet. Silence sometimes works wonders.

You will hear from me again next time.

(to be continued)

Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved.

Doubt: A fictional diary, Part C

Spent the day. What else do we do anyway but use it up?

On the front: Relatively quiet today except for a few instances of pain on my right side where my liver, and where my kidney is. What we breathe and what we eat are still foremost culprits I think, in this case. Also, I am getting ever thinner, both physically and emotionally. Spiritually, the opposite effect. The curious unhappiness of the body balanced, just so, with compassion.

But I couldn’t complain. I enjoyed the day and managed to wrestle it into some form of joy.

You’ll hear from me again tomorrow, I expect. If not, you know why.

(to be continued)

Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved.