With her combat boots propped on her chair, Dartmouth'spoet-in residence this term, Adrienne Su sips Mango Madness Snapple and allows us a glimpse of life as a modern poet. Surprisingly, she never intended to turn her talent into a career; in fact, her parents envisioned her as a surgeon. But Su knew that she wanted to write, and after trying prose, she found her calling in verse.
While Su possesses innate talent, she chalks her success up to sweat, blood, and tears. Words may have spontaneously appeared on Shakespeare's pages, but Su definitely endured the artist's struggle to achieve a form of expression that she is most comfortable with. Combining her natural proclivity with learned skills such as meter and form, she creates very "accessible" poetry. Rarely dabbling in free verse, she prefers a conversational tone and true form. After all, confusion does not breed an audience.
A graduate of Harvard University, Su studied East Asian languages and civilizations instead of English. Thus, since her early childhood, writing poetry has been an adventure of personal growth and development.
In the past month, Dartmouth has helped to cultivate this artistic progress. The experimental poet-in-residence program provides Su with the flexibility that young poets often do not have; although she has given a public reading and regularly works with creative writing students, she still has time to spend on her own projects -- and she does not have to worry about her next paycheck. On top of this, Su enjoys exchanging ideas with her fellow poets among the faculty and student body. She commented that students often come to her for help because they feel more comfortable with a young mentor.
An excellent model for aspiring poets, Su has published many individual poems in literary magazines.A representative work, "The Doll's Talk in Translation," first appeared in Interim magazine: "My soul?/It's flat and spiritless as yours./The glass eyes/fell from a big machine./I am a ghost/that slipped into the wrong body,/an ill-cast porcelain/with pupils so dark and oriental/they are illegible. I am standard and crass /and tall as a man./Synthetic hands,/synthetic toes,/the hollow one. Wherever people talk /I am the other language."
She prescribes a general formula for aspiring poets: "read everything, and write, write, write!"Just by practicing, the least talented student can become the poet laureate of his class.
Some people imagine that professional poets make a living by writing greeting cards. Others believe that poets spew outbursts of irrational, neat-sounding words.
Artists like Su fit neither of these categories. As a writer in the '90s, she has overcome a lack of funding to pursue what she loves most. Intermittently working as an editor and interviewing children for scholastic magazines, Adrienne Su has proven that dreams can materialize into reality.
