Herman Fong, Cohen Award
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best short story and poem published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners -- each of whom receives a cash prize of $600 -- are selected by our advisory editors. The 1999 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 1998, Volume 24, go to Chris Adrian and Herman Fong.
Herman Fong for his poem "Grandfather's Alphabet" in Spring 1998, edited by Stuart Dybek & Jane Hirshfield.
Born in Los Angeles in 1963, the fifth of six children, Herman Fong was raised in the San Fernando Valley. Each of his parents' families had fled Canton for Hong Kong, where his father and mother met and married. They immigrated to the U.S. in 1956. However, his family history in the U.S. began decades earlier, when his paternal grandfather labored as a busboy and then a cook in Chinese restaurants on the West Coast; he served as a U.S. Army cook in Europe during World War II, then returned to Los Angeles and opened his own restaurant, The Far East Terrace, which had become a landmark by the time he died in 1985. Fong's father was himself a chef at The Far East Terrace until 1986, when the restaurant was closed.
Fong originally wanted to study architecture, but ended up majoring in accounting at Biola University in La Mirada, California. After graduating in 1984, unable to find work, he enrolled in a prep course for the C.P.A. exam. "I grew bored," he says. "I would sneak out to the movies, frequent bookstores, or hide out at the Cal State-Northridge library, reading poetry and literary journals." He failed the C.P.A. exam. His next plan was to get an M.B.A. at Cal State-Northridge, but during the first week of registration, he decided he just couldn't go through with it, and transferred to the master's program in English. His first poetry workshops were with Eloise Klein Healy, Lary Gibson, and Dorothy Barresi, who encouraged Fong to go to her alma mater, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for his M.F.A. "The idea of living somewhere wholly different and so far from where I had lived my life was wonderfully liberating and terrifying," he says. He graduated from UMass last September after working closely with James Tate, Dara Wier, and Paul Mariani.
His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, and Northridge Review. He has received two awards from the Academy of American Poets, as well as an Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Award. He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lectures on writing at UMass. He is also an events coordinator and publicist for author appearances at The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley. He is now in the process of sending out his manuscript for his first collection, Lightning Field.
About "Grandfather's Alphabet," Fong writes: "I have written more poems about my grandfather than about anyone else. But my grandfather never read my poems; I didn't know how to show him them, and, in any case, I didn't think of myself as 'a poet' until years after his death. (As was the Asian custom, my grandparents lived with their eldest son, my father, and my grandfather was the looming patriarchal figure while I was growing up. It was his approval we all sought, his disappointment we avoided.)
"Until 'Grandfather's Alphabet,' the writing of previous grandfather poems fell within two periods. The first came during college, when, declining in health and grown impatient, he argued with me about my future. Those poems were bitter. The second was after his death. Weighted with grief, these were poems about the morning he suffered an aneurysm, about yellow chrysanthemums brought as a gift during his hospital stay, his cemetery plot, afternoons packing his belongings and giving them away, and the ghost of him that visited in sleep. Then I stopped.
"About the time that 'Grandfather's Alphabet' was written, I was reconsidering narrative and lyric poetry: how to create a narrative -- tell a story, tell a life -- without narrative, and how to convey and control emotion strictly through imagery. When I began the poem, I didn't know that I would write about my grandfather. Taking a cue from the title of Olga Broumas's book, Beginning with O, which I was reading at the time, I started the poem as a simple list-things that resembled an O, things that O resembled. Soon I realized that I was naming things belonging to my grandfather. I hadn't wanted to write about him again, but then felt I had to offer something balanced, more embracing: O as a whole and as emptiness, O as completion and as a continuing cycle."