I-Ching for Immortality
Serrina Zou
COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards – 2nd Place, Poetry
Author’s Note: This poem is in a form invented by K-Ming Chang and named after a
Chinese method of divination. Each stanza takes the shape of an I-Ching hexagram, and
can be read left to right starting with the first line, or left to right starting with the last line.
The stanza titles and numbers are also the names and numbers of the hexagrams.
Chang’e
{Moon Goddess}
Ascending
46.
Xī Wángmǔ
{Queen Mother of the Western Skies}
Providing For 16.
Nüwa
{Mother Earth}
Concording People
13.
Writer’s Notebook
When my school teachers introduced me to poetry, it was always frozen in archaic Shakespeare or infantilized in nursery rhymes. It wasn’t until I discovered K-Ming Chang’s poems two years ago that I witnessed what it meant to be unapologetic in solidifying entire unsustained histories into permanence; through her poems, I received a masterclass in doing so as well. The moment I stumbled across her original I-Chings in Connotation Press, I was overcome with warm shivers of wonder; here was a form that she alone invented from an ancient Chinese divination method that controlled the narrative masterfully while experimenting fearlessly with artistry. I decided then and there that I would write a set of I-Chings myself. Like K-Ming Chang and Ocean Vuong (another one of my greatest inspirations as a poet), who both center their poems around marginalized people of color, I wanted to concentrate “I-Ching for Immortality” around the mythical Chinese women warriors whose stories I grew up with to show that we are worthy of Literature with a capital L—that our voices and visions can be immortalized against the human enemy of time, against erasure, against our present cacophony of solitude.
Judge’s Notes
"True to form, I begin, here, at the end. Depending on the direction in which one reads the final stanza, “I-Ching for Immortality” either ends with “I create” or “give birth.” I point to this as exemplary of the author’s command of K-Ming Chang’s form, and to their enactment here of poetry as ritual—in a form that invites syntactic play, we nonetheless never lose sight of what is being summoned, or why. & that’s to say nothing of the reverse-order enjambments at play, how “I create” in one reading is a full-stop, yet in another, prompts the eye back upward: “I create / want.” This poem is rife with the ripe goods of earth, & each section’s reducing caesuras push us towards even lusher & longing-ridden embodiment. Lyrically gorgeous & situated in a rich ekphrastic lineage, this poem seems a blessing for our collective future—each hexagram a dark bloom on history’s waters.” – Raena Shirali, 2021 Poetry Judge
about the writer
Serrina Zou is a Chinese-American writer from San Jose, California. She has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program, the Poetry Society of the UK, and Frontier Poetry, among others. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, AAWW: The Margins, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. When she is not writing, Serrina can be found feeding her Philz Coffee addiction or devouring a tower of novels. She will attend Columbia University in the fall of 2021.