Description
Clothes To Go Out In
by Margaret Chula
Clothes To Go Out In is a collection of haibun, a hybrid form combining prose with haiku. These thirty-one vignettes weave together a tapestry of Chula’s life—from clothes for all occasions to a collage of memories, experiences, and emotions that have shaped her identity. Both humorous and somber, the haibun in Clothes To Go Out In show us “how light and shadow are part of the same fabric, and the line between them is filled with wonder.”
Enjoy a video of Margaret reading from her new book:
Early Praise:
In Maggie Chula’s new collection of haibun, Clothes To Go Out In, she shares both love and loss in deeply sensory images. We meet hostile dream-ghost dolls, empathize with a fake philodendron, experience moments from world travels—Manila, Tibet, Montreal, Japan—and more. Linking all these poems are remembered clothes and fabrics: from the dusky rose satin dressing gown she “rescued” from a laundromat to the clothing her father and mother wore to go out in after death. These haibun, with their precise prose and startling leaps of haiku and tanka, are akin to colorful garments pinned together on a clothesline—often subtly linking to one another like renga verses. A wonder-full read!
—Penny Harter, author of Keeping Time: Haibun for the Journey
In Clothes To Go Out In, Maggie Chula invites readers to accompany her in recollections of a life fully engaged—days of budding promise, of loss and poignancy, of mysterious dreams and random acts of kindness. Readers meet the ten-year-old marble champion cradling her cat’s-eye; the young woman filled with rapture upon discovering a silk dressing gown; the world traveler finding vintage clothing in Kyoto flea markets or roaming monasteries and burial sites in Tibet; the experienced poet remembering lost loved ones and days once filled with “the taste of summer/ when everything/ was in living color.” With a clear eye and clear language, she digs below those bright colors to show how light and shadow are part of the same fabric, and the line between them is filled with wonder.
—Rich Youmans, editor of contemporary haibun online
Like traditional Japanese haibun, the haibun in Clothes To Go Out In do their quiet work through the clear language of distilled prose combined with their attendant haiku that shape each story with a further revelation—gently, or whimsically, or with a sharp sting. A mother’s deathbed, Emily Dickinson’s white dress, the homeless man in a parking lot, the synesthesia of a memory. The two forms resonate with each other in a subtle journey of re-imagining. Chula is a storyteller, songstress, seer.
—Joanna Rose, author of A Small Crowd of Strangers
About the Author
Born in Northfield, Massachusetts, Margaret Chula has traveled overland through Asia, lived in England and Japan, and now makes her home on the Portland skyline. She has published fifteen collections of poetry including, most recently, Weeding the Labyrinth. Her haibun memoir, Firefly Lanterns: Twelve Years in Kyoto, was awarded a 2022 NYC Big Book Award in Multicultural Nonfiction. Maggie has given readings and lead workshops at haiku conferences throughout the United States, as well as in Poland, Ireland, Peru, Canada, and Japan. She has also served as poet laureate for Friends of Chamber Music, president of the Tanka Society of America, and on the Advisory Board of the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University. Grants from Oregon Literary Arts and the Regional Arts and Culture Council have supported collaborations with artists, musicians, photographers, and dancers. Kim Stafford says of her work: “She has long been a word shaman connecting the wild world to the human heart.”
Terri L. French –
Reviewed by Terri L. French
in cho: contemporary haibun online, issue 21.3
I have always admired Maggie Chula for not only her poetry, but also her sense of adventure and personal flair. This well-traveled and cultured poet has undertaken a two-week silent meditation in a Sri Lankan monastery, lived in a bamboo pondok on a Balinese artist’s compound, and resided and taught in the outskirts of Kyoto.
But, in her latest book, Clothes To Go Out In, the author takes us back before all that. She stitches together memories, dreams, and experiences into 31 haibun and tanka prose pieces that, through images, symbols, fabrics, and textures, create a story quilt of poignant moments in her life.
Various themes run throughout the book. One, of course, is clothing—a whole closetful, from a satin dressing gown the author finds at a laundromat (inducing images of her strutting around like Lauren Bacall) to, in the title piece, the outfit that Chula wishes her mother could have worn before being cremated. (“I wish I had been there to dress her in a cashmere sweater and wool pants, to wrap a matching scarf around her neck … I would have slipped on a pair of soft slippers so she could go lightly into the next world.”) Other themes that run throughout the book are childhood, family, death, dreams, and birds. The following tanka prose includes many of them.
Dream Catcher
I’m at a friend’s house. Her daughter climbs a ladder and takes down a birdhouse. A chickadee, a bluebird, and a wren fly out. When she opens the back exit, an owl emerges, blinking in the sunlight. He flutters slowly to the ground. I kneel down, and he allows me to pet him with both hands. His feathers are gray and soft, like fur. Large yellow eyes hold my gaze as he tells me what I need to hear. When I awaken, I can’t remember a word he said.
cleaning out
my dead sister’s closet—
among hatboxes
shoes and fur coats
Mother’s ceramic owl
What is it, we are left to wonder, that the owl has said? I can only speculate. Perhaps it told her what she needed to hear from her mother, who (as recounted in the haibun “Shark’s Tooth”) “hated dirty things, like the shark’s tooth and animal bones and skulls I’d brought home as a child.” This brings up another of the book’s running themes, cleanliness versus dirtiness. This antithesis can be vividly seen in her haibun “Mud Dreams,” in which this time the dream is of a muddy pond filled with corpses “like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.”
I’m standing behind a man who is built like Paul Bunyan but dressed in the armor of a warrior. I’m in his shadow and he doesn’t see me. Other people approach but flee once they see what’s in the pond.
After they disappear, the warrior gives a signal and slowly, one by one, the faces begin to move. Arms grope through mud, feet stand. The corpses emerge from the pond like a black army. They will kill me as soon as they see me—the outsider—the only other clean person besides their commander. Do I jump into the pond and cover myself with mud or do I stay clean and be killed? The leader senses someone behind him and turns around.
from mud
the white lotus and I
turn toward morning
The haibun “Spots” speaks again to this idea, and the need to make things clean.
All my life, I have tried to make things clean. Washing popsicle sticks to build houses in the sand, sweeping up ashes from burnt-up wood, polishing Mother’s silverware, cleaning blood spots off the floor after my roommate slit her wrists. I called the ambulance to save her when all she wanted to do was die. It’s all your fault, she yelled as I wrapped my arms around her. And when they had taken her away, I spit out my anger in the immaculate kitchen sink.
again, that metallic taste
the doorknob I licked
to make it shine
Such poems are heartbreaking, Others, however, are hopeful and even whimsical. In “Philodendron” we are introduced to a fake plant that’s “next to the trash bin in the women’s restroom of the ARCO gas station in Philomath, Oregon.” The plant is dirty and seen as worthless, yet looks forward to the day it goes to the landfill and can “finally put down roots.” Even in the hardest circumstances, hope remains—as Chula makes clear in the capping haiku:
again she pitches
her tent on the sidewalk
dandelions in the cracks
The last piece in the book, “Encounter, 1969,” also ends on an auspicious note.
when I was seven
I found a whole patch
of four-leaf clovers—
that day I knew
I’d always be lucky
And we readers are also lucky to have such a deeply honest, engaging, and talented poet share her words with us.
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About the Reviewer
Terri L. French is a poet/writer and retired massage therapist. For the past four and a half years, she and her husband, Ray, have enjoyed the nomadic life of full-time RVers and are now building their forever home on a mountain in Huntsville, Alabama. Her newest book of haibun is kaleidoscope dream (Red Moon Press).