Process Note #12 : Jenny Qi

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. These poems and process note by Jenny Qi is part of her curriculum for her Poetry Workshop at University of San Francisco in their MFA Program for Spring semester of 2023. https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sciences/programs/graduate/writing-mfa

 

 

 

 

In describing the process for my first poetry collection Focal Point, I’ve often said that I never set out to write a book at all. The earliest poems in this book were written sometime in college, when my mother was still alive. In 2011, exactly a month before I turned 20, she died from cancer, and a few months later, I graduated and started a PhD in cancer biology in a new city.

My mother and I had been very close, and she had been ill for nearly five years, during which I had graduated from high school and gotten most of the way through college and made all my decisions in the shadow of her worsening illness. For those and a number of other reasons, I felt so devastatingly, singularly alone in the world when she died. The only place I could find other people with experiences that felt even a little like mine was in poetry and literature, and so I kept reading and writing to survive. In retrospect, I might describe Focal Point as a tiny series of snapshots of my attempts to navigate the confusion of young adulthood in parallel with my most shattering loss.

Maybe a year into grad school, I started attending a weekly workshop run by physician-poet David Watts out of his office, and I tried to write my way out of the rubble of myself. After four years and probably a couple hundred poems, David asked me where my book was and helped me begin to organize my “best” poems into a collection. I put “best” in quotation marks because I still don’t know what that means. There are weird little poems that I didn’t like at the time and did not include, though David did convince me to add a few of those in. There are poems, such as the ones from college, that I added to the manuscript towards the end of the process because that made sense to me for the loose narrative arc of the book. So in this way, the book as a whole is also a snapshot of who I was in 2019 or 2020, when I submitted the final version, and what I thought a poem and a book of poems should be. If I were to assemble this book now, I would probably make different choices. In fact, I like to think I would, because that means I’ve grown.

When I started assembling my poems into a manuscript, I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I had to learn how to read a poetry book as a writer, consciously thinking about how the individual poems come together and how the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. When I showed my first attempt to David, I’d put all the heavy grief poems together sort of chronologically without allowing a reader to breathe in between. In a way, that felt true to the initial relentlessness of grief but didn’t make space for its recurrence and didn’t make a good book. The gist of his feedback was that I should consider balancing the poems in terms of theme and emotional tone and think about how certain elements show up in multiple poems. When I approached the book using that framework, I found that there were images I returned to, sometimes in unexpected places.

I titled the first version I will be somewhere else yesterday, and that iteration was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2017. I probably could have kept submitting that version, but between when I submitted the manuscript and when I received that call, the world had changed, and I changed. (At some point I even removed the poem that contains that line, so maybe it’ll be the title of a different collection someday.) In the years between that and the actual publication of Focal Point, I got more feedback from other people, read a lot of other poetry collections for inspo, took months-long breaks away from the manuscript, and sent out a few different iterations before I got to the final version. After I graduated and had some time away from the lab, I was also able to gain a different perspective on the ways in which I grew into and away from that life and how that was inextricably linked with loss. It was only then that I revisited the older “Biology Lesson” series of poems and some of the short “how-to” poems and thought about how those served as a manual for navigating loss and growth in tandem.

With each iteration of the manuscript, I had to distance myself a bit more and reimagine what my grief looked like and what this book could be beyond a retelling of my grief. When I started writing the poems that would become Focal Point, I was trying to write my way out of and away from grief. I didn’t realize until much later that I could grow to hold space for communal griefs—grief for victims of violence and injustice and disease, for people and cultures I will never know, for the intangible losses of a year in isolation, for precedented times. I began to understand that every grief is a love for something that has been or is in the process of being lost.

 

 

Point At Which Parallel Waves Converge & From Which Diverge

Researcher, prevention won’t save my life, tweets a patient
with metastatic cancer. I’m reminded of my mother:

Why don’t you want to study cancer? when I expressed
interest in HIV. In the hospital, call from a professor,

my mother clapping once then silence;
the roommate thirty years her senior

who called my voice lovely,
who called my mother lucky,

whom I resented because
she outlived my mother;

nights at a microscope in a dark room
where the lights turn off after ten,

sitting too still, turning a knob just so to focus
on the right field of cells; the eight hundred mice

I’ve sacrificed this year, injecting cancer, harsh medicine
into their soft warm bodies, hating them for biting me

but understanding, stroking their white fur in apology;
covering cages with paper so they can’t watch their sisters die.

But I can, and I see my mother in those graying eyes,
eyes I refused to donate because how would she see,

and I think how cruelly futile all this
erratically focused empathy, how brutal

to learn why I couldn’t save
what I couldn’t save.

 

 

 

 

 

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She has received support from organizations such as Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and Nashville and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She has been translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. and is working on more essays and poems in conversation with this work.

Maw Shein Win's recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn), which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. D.A. Powell wrote of it, "Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions, keepsakes. This piercing, gorgeous collection stands both inside and outside of containment: the porcelain vase of stargazer lilies is considered alongside the galley convicts, the children sleeping on the cement floors of detention cells, the nats inside their spirit houses; the spirit houses inside their storage units.…These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely, and resilient book." Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press); her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series on periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito and often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. mawsheinwin.com

Mark Scroggins : A Note to PEST (Zion Offramp 65-70)

 

 

 

 

I wrote the first sections of Zion Offramp in the late summer of 2015, thinking it was time for me to tackle a proper long poem. “Anarchy for the UK,” a medium-length serial poem, had formed the central part of my first collection Anarchy (2003), and I’d experimented with extended sequences of short stanzas in Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles (2011) and the title poem of Pressure Dressing (2016). But I craved a larger scope. While I didn’t—and still don’t—think of this long poem as open-ended, endlessly to-be-added-to, I wanted the sense of space, variousness, and possibility that I found in the canonical “big” poems—from the Homeric epics down through such modernist behemoths as The Cantos, Maximus, and “A”—and in the works of more recent poets, among them Ronald Johnson, Ron Silliman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Bruce Andrews, Anne Waldman, bpNichol, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue.

          Early sections were published under the impossibly pretentious title Capital; or, A Young Person’s Guide to the End Times, which had the dubious merit of pointing towards a particular Zeitgeist within which we’re very much still living. I thought better of that. The “Zion” of my title is neither a geographical location nor a geopolitical construct, but the Zion of the Psalms and Revelation, the Zion of the Protestant hymns I heard and sang in my childhood. It is something like Blake’s Jerusalem, Yeats’s Byzantium, or Larry Neal’s City of Zar (“right this side of far”)—a country of the mind, of plenitude and fulfillment and aesthetic balance. Always of course out of reach, just around the bend or dimly discerned in a fading distance. It is a Manhattan, a San Francisco, a Venice of the imagination. It is—in a pun borrowed from Ronald Johnson—Oz.

          And then there’s the “offramp”:  An American, growing up in a suburb in the South, I have spent probably a solid year of my life driving or riding on interstate highways, musing at times about what might lie beyond all those exotically-named exits I’ve never had occasion to take. The offramp is ambiguous: is it the exit that might lead to Zion, or is it a detour, a digression? Is there actually a principal highway to be traveled, a major artery, or is every road one pursues in some sense an offramp? Perhaps my primary mode in the sections of this poem is precisely digression, divagation, deferral.

          Zion Offramp is governed by—or perhaps reft by, traversed by—various themes, some of which have become evident to me only on re-reading. “Something happened,” the poem’s first words, index the sense of dislocation that lies at the poem’s base, and in some sense is at the root of the incessant travel—by car, bus, subway, airplane, even foot—that runs throughout it. There is a girl—or a pair of girls—in adolescence, of the cusp of adulthood. There are the continual voices of violence, of command, of persuasion, and of consumer exchange that fill our ears. There is an archaeological impulse, to dig back beyond the layers of contemporary appearance to some bedrock, some origin—or at least to some stratum in which might be found the evidence of how it all went wrong.

          Most of all, there is music. While I’ve been messing around with various stringed instruments since my middle teens, I don’t consider myself a “real” musician; but making music with others has been and continues to be one of the closest approaches to “Zion” that I have experienced. Music continually plays or is played throughout the poem, and music offers an experience emblematized at times as the “One”—evoking both Bootsy Collins’s admonition to “hit the root on the one,” and the singularity into which the members of a combo find themselves merging, as the music itself erases difference and division. (I’ve been tempted to dedicate the poem as a whole to all of the drummers with whom I’ve had the privilege to play; the guitar players, needless to say, don’t need the ego-boost.)

          ***

The six sections of Zion Offramp published as Pest were composed, as I note at the end, in the spring of 2020, under the shade of the COVID-19 pandemic—the coldest, most terrifying months of lockdown. (Section 64, indeed, begins with an extended quotation from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year—a classic to which many of us were turning in those days.) I wasn’t trying by any means to “capture” the lockdown moment, or to provide a running commentary on it. But images of contagion and lockdown and the psychic pressures of isolation inevitably manifest themselves in these sections, as in earlier sections had registered the shock of the 2016 election and other events of the historical moment during which the poem was emerging.

          I found myself in those cold and lonely days turning to various touchstones of my own language-being: the King James Bible; the words of diverse poets and writers who’ve impressed themselves on my imagination (some readers will recognize Auden, Bunting, Celan, Jonson, and others—though their words or cadences are present not as significant allusion, but as mere echo), and especially the works of Baruch Spinoza, whom I first read as an undergrad under the tutelage of the great early modern philosophy scholar Roger Ariew. (I remember showing Roger a perfectly dreadful poem I’d written called something like “Spinoza Dies in Delirium,” and his curt response: he doubted Spinoza indulged in the sort of drugs my verses evoked.) I first admired Spinoza, as I admired Blake, for the ingenuity of his systematic thought; as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to love him as an exemplar of one primary purpose of philosophy: to teach us how to live, and perhaps how to die.

          Zion Offramp does not invite, much less insist upon, decoding or glossing. A series of footnotes as to what I had in mind at each point would be I think no more than distracting. The poem offers itself as a linguistic experience, a series of images and thoughts and shifting word-kaleidoscopes that with luck will take their readers along on a hejira from one point of dislocation and disorientation to another, amusing, appallling, and hopefully offering them ambiguous pleasures along the way.

          Two brief notes: While the young people of the central portion of Section 68—Edmund, Peter, Lucy, and Susan—share given names with the Pevensie children of C. S. Lewis’s “Narnia” books, they are not to be identified with those characters, except perhaps to register my continuing disgust with Lewis’s cruel and sanctimonious allegory. “Gigi” in the final lines of Section 70, Disconnected Remarks, is neither the Canadian pop band nor the Indonesian rock group, but the Ethiopian singer Ejigyehu Shibabaw, whose recordings with bassist-producer Bill Laswell provided me with an ecstatic and mesmerizing example of the “One” towards which the poem as a whole strives.

 

 

 

 

Mark Scroggins lives in Montclair (New Jersey) and Manhattan. The publication of Pest (Zion Offramp 65-70) nearly coincides with the release of Zion Offramp 1-50 (MadHat Press) and his most recent collection of reviews and essays, Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour). His earlier poetry has been recently collected as Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (Dos Madres Press). His other books include a biography of American poet Louis Zukofsky and a monograph on British fantastist Michael Moorcock.

Stan Rogal : Why a Poem — a short essay

 

 

 

 

Why a poem, or: why is it I chose a life of poetry rather than a life of crime? The answer’s pretty obvious, I think. I can get away with murder in a poem without fear of anyone either knowing or caring, never mind suffer any sort of serious reprimand or punishment for committing the foul deed. Please keep back of the yellow tape. Nothing to see here, folks. Just another day at the office. Move along, move along. But, maybe that’s just me. What about those many others out there who have decided that the creation of a poem is a viable and worthwhile pursuit? After all, it’s an oft-recognized belief (if not a downright fact) that there’s a poet under every rock (or, at the very least, every other rock). And yet (also an oft-recognized belief, if not a downright fact) that the majority of these otherwise fine folk never bother to read poetry (outside their own spawn, of course, or that of their closest friends, who write in a similarly hermetic fashion), never buy a book — as my pal Kenneth Rexroth was so fond of repeating: “I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book” — claiming that they fear contamination that will prove detrimental to their own singular and original voices. My instant knee-jerk reaction to this type of attitude is always the same: Please! Do everyone (yourselves included) a big favour, and allow for some level of contamination (or, for the more user-friendly types, “influence”). Your voice is not as singular or original as you might imagine. I suspect that these same people also managed to avoid perusing T.S. Eliot’s pivotal essay titled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” wherein he states rather clearly that poetry should be “an escape from emotion,” as opposed to a wallowing in it. Further, that “talent is acquired through a careful study of poetry.” Plus, the added claim that Tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour.” This is sage and crucial advice (in my humble opinion) that often serves to separate the poet from the poetaster [nota bene: a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets. Specifically, poetaster has implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value. The faults of a poetaster frequently include oversentimentality, too much use of the “pathetic fallacy” (the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature), and unintentionally “bathetic” (an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness) choice of subject matter.]

This line of thought — “study and great labour” — certainly doesn’t appear to be lost by those involved in other artistic pursuits. Imagine all those aspiring painters who fill up the various Museums of Art every day and spend hours simply copying the Old Masters. Or novice musicians who practice the same chords or scales or riffs or fingerings or styles of recognized experts in their field over and over again. Or film students who watch the same movie repeatedly to understand how the various parts come together to create a satisfying whole.

Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith teaches a class called “Uncreative Writing” in which one exercise consists of students — rather than write an “original” piece in the “style” of someone, that is, attempt to get into, say, Jack Kerouac’s head space [here, Goldsmith  rightly notes that the student(s) would be better off “taking a road trip across the country in a ’48 Buick convertible, top down, gulping Benzedrine by the fistful, washing them down with bourbon, all the while typing furiously away on a manual typewriter. And even then…”] — being asked to retype five pages of their choice, exactly as written. I mean, what better way to get to — not only the “what,” but the “how”: the nuts and bolts, the gears and pulleys — of a writer’s craft than by giving the work itself an up-close-and-personal inspection?

What he found was that many students became “intensely aware of the text’s formal qualities and for the first time in their lives began to think of texts not only as transparent, but as opaque objects to be moved around a white space. Others said that it was the most intense reading experience they ever had.”     

So, what is it about the specific practice of poetry that makes [certain] people think they’ve sprung from the head of Zeus complete and in full possession of all their poetic faculties?

In part, I surmise, it’s the nature of the beast. Seems that, unlike a work of prose, almost anything can be labeled a poem these days, especially if it’s compact, heartfelt, contains some small amount of pat imagery, and maybe a simile or two tossed in for good measure. This simple description probably fits most of what we call “popular” poetry, and if that’s your particular cup of ambrosia, stick with it and more power to you. Whatever floats your boat, as they say. On the other hand, for anyone wishing to step up their game somewhat, and produce and publish poems of an advanced “literary” nature, more “study and great labour” is required.

Let’s (for fun) take an example of each and compare the differences.   

Rupi Kaur’s poetry (sorry I can’t offer an example since most of her poems are shorter than 5 lines and I don’t want to be sued for copyright infringement) is comparable to Hallmark Card greetings, or else those framed, sentimental sayings from IKEA, suitable for hanging on walls and later referred to by the owners as a source of either solace or inspiration: “Live the life you love / love the life you live” or: “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light” or: “Fight less / cuddle more” &ETC. Well, as H.L. Mencken once said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,” and Kaur’s books have gone on to sell millions.

Bring on Christian Bök’s 2002 Griffin Prize winning collection “Eunoia,” described as a univocalic lipogram which uses an accented rhyme scheme through the use of syntactical parallelism. Each of the five chapters — titled A, E, I O, U — uses only words that contain the single vowel identified by the title, and each of the chapters must refer to the art of writing as well as to describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage.

As you can see, we’ve moved well beyond poems that are mere heartfelt maxims and clichés, and into a realm of conscious theoretical construct and intentional word usage. Of course, it follows that — according to my sources at Wikipedia — the book has sold about 20,000 copies. A huge amount for a literary book of poems, but which hardly compares to the sale numbers of Kaur, Hallmark, and/or Ikea.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating that one is required to be an authority on such highfalutin literary terms as Glyconic: a verse in classical meter that can be defined as a logoedic tetropody cataleptic in syllabam; or Hemiepes: the first foot of a dactylic hexameter in Greek meter; or Phonosymbolism: the independent emotional significance that the phonic elements of a word or verse can assume, only that some basic familiarity with the history and tools of the “craft” of poetry might prove useful, even enlightening and/or — why the heck not? — enjoyable. After all, it’s nearly impossible to break the rules if you don’t know what the rules are in the first place. What I would suggest, at the least, is that aspiring poets ask themselves the question: why a poem? Why a poem rather than a plastic model airplane, or a hand-knitted sweater, or a marathon, or a degree in Psychotherapy, or a lovely home-cooked meal of sautéed liver with some fava beans and a nice glass of Chianti?

Why, indeed?

I’d like to close this short discussion with a prose poem — “prose poem” wha??? yes, definitely a hearse of a different choler — by Natalee “Nat” Slagor, a Danish poet now living in Toronto, which I hope will encapsulate some or many of the sentiments I’ve put forward, titled “So What If.” Please feel free to make of it what you will.  

So what if poetry is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional, notational & semantic content. So what if a poem is a form in which the skillful choice & arrangement of words achieves a desired emotional effect. So what if poetry is a chemical alphabet infused into a sequence of DNA which is then implanted into a bacterium. So what if poems express loving, healing & touching feelings which we can all relate to. So what if a poem forms when an emotion has found its thought & the thought has found words. So what if a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. So what if the poem is of the mind & the act of finding what will suffice. So what if poetry in this age of stark & unlovely actualities is stark directness w/o a shadow of a lie or a shadow of deflection anywhere. So what if a poem is a species of composition opposed to science. So what if poetry does not come naturally like the leaves of a tree, then it had better not come at all. So what if poetry is social lawlessness. So what if poetry is not simply a lexical preference but marks a shift in the conception of scriptive work from a fixed object of analysis or conception to an open, methodological field for semantic production. So what if delight is the chief & only end of poetry. So what if everything is a dangerous drug except poetry, which is unendurable. So what if poetry means the total removal of the poet by the poet. So what if poetry is a little life of dried tubers. So what if a poem is a piece of wood that discovers it’s a violin. So what if a truly perfect poem contains an infinitely small vocabulary. So what if poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. So what if poetry is a delicious pleasure of a useless occupation. So what if poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty & (unless incidentally) has no concern whatsoever w/Duty or Truth. So what if the more concretely & vividly we express the interactions of things the better the poetry. So what if a poem has its own life, that its parts form something quite different from a body of neatly organized biographical data. So what if the business of the poem is not to examine the individual but the species; to remark general properties & large appearances.  So what if poetry brings similitude & representation to configurations waiting from forever to be spoken. So what if the rational person is least able to understand poetry. So what if a poem is like a dog eating itself from the tail up. So what if a poem is a piece of writing that partakes of the nature of both speech & song that is nearly always rhythmical, usually metaphorical, & often exhibits such formal elements as metre, rhyme, & stanzaic structure. So what if a poem is not prose, meaning it’s not a short story or a novel or a screenplay, but what is it? So what if a poem is a bunch of words that captures a moment in time or a feeling in unexpected ways. So what if a poem is a bit abstract. So what if poetry obstinately makes no claims on originality. So what if a poem is characterized by a highly developed artistic form, & by the use of heightened language & rhythm, is able to express an intensely imaginative interpretation of the subject. So what if poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, meaning any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. So what if a poem is a verbal composition designed to convey experiences, ideas, or emotions in a vivid & imaginative way, characterized by the use of language chosen. So what if a poem is a form of literature that uses aesthetic & rhythmic qualities of language — such as phonoaesthetics, sound symbolism, & metre — to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic, ostensible meaning. So what if poetry is where sound echoes, where utterances concatenate, where, inevitably, all acts stall. So what if a poem is a language art form that we have used throughout history & is still an important part of our culture & uses sounds & images to express emotions & experience. So what if a poem can be about anything, from love to loss to the rusty gate at the old farm. So what if poetry is not a healing lotion, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. So what if poetry sometimes develops a greyness; the light can never get in; the surface is smudgy. So what if a poem is simply an anus w/teeth only capable of ejecting a waxy blue fart of hideous pain. So what if a poem is the creation of a creature covered in fur that breaks your heart. So what if poetry makes nothing happen. So what if writing a poem can seem daunting, especially if you do not feel you are naturally creative or bursting with poetic ideas; with the right inspiration & approach you can write a poem that you can be proud to share with others, in a class or with your family & friends. So what if poetry can inspire & make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race, by just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed. So what if for only pennies a day, a few dollars a month, you too can be writing poetry like a pro as well as be published by a reputable national publishing house (paving the way to global recognition & fame, plus high financial rewards as part of the booming poetry renaissance industry) in less time than it takes to fill out the simple attached form & answer this skill testing question: what lazy animal does the quick brown fox jump over? Don’t delay, act now, as spots are limited. For more information, call the number on the screen. Don’t miss your chance to be a part of this exciting & lucrative creative opportunity. & remember, your success is guaranteed. If you are not completely satisfied within 90 days, we will return your money (& your poems), no questions asked. Well, what are you waiting for? Call now, our agents are waiting. Be one of the first fifty people to call & we will send you an autographed edition of our one-thousand-page anthology, Favourite Poems for Everyone & Their Dog, a seventy-five-dollar value, absolutely free. Don’t wait, don’t even hesitate. Whether you have a hankering for haiku, a partiality for sonnets, or are fanatic about free verse, we have the tools & expertise for you to succeed. Our highly trained staff of professional editors & writers will have you rubbing shoulders with the poetry elite in no time. Best of all, you can do it from the privacy & comfort of your own home. This is an offer too good to pass up, so don’t delay, act now!   

Thank you, dear reader, for your indulgence, and remember: Live, Love, Laugh!

 

 

 

 

 

Stan Rogal [photo credit: Jacquie Jacobs] lives and writes in the city once referred to as "Toronto-the-good," now "Toronto-the-scandalous." His work is rumoured to have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. The alleged author of a dozen poetry books and several chapbooks (some with above/ground press, maybe). An amateur oenophile and autodidactic intellectual classicist [reformed]. Speaks semi-fluent English and controversial French.