2024 Shelley Memorial Award

Rather than citing a writer as the greatest influence on her “poetic sensibility,” Shin Yu Pai credits her mother, Noko Pai, as the “creative virtuoso [who]…created a language that I wanted to know and enter into.” Before her mother immigrated to the United States in her early twenties, Shin Yu recounts in her visionary and groundbreaking book, Ensō, that her mother studied visual arts and worked as a graphic designer in Taipei. Noko Pai’s devotion to diverse art practices—many self-taught—and to retaining her cultural heritage outweighed her interest in studying the English language. One can observe similar resistance choices throughout Shin Yu Pai’s multidisciplinary career, most notably, perhaps, her disinterest in conventional life-writing narratives. For years, Pai’s poetry has wrestled with complicated issues of food and agriculture, ecology, climate change, environmentalism, motherhood, and performance. She is multidisciplinary in the truest sense. Pai challenges herself with the release of each book. Her readers can chart not only her artistic development but what feels like genuine pleasure in the making of these poems. Though she studied photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, Pai has for the most part intentionally separated her photography practice from her poetry practice. However, she has long given us innovative visual poems such as those in Sightings: Selected Works 2000-2005. One discerns from reading Pai’s poetry the deep, intricate thinking that inhabiting the particular spaces of visual artist, essayist, and bookmaker brings. All the while, she honors her teachers—from Naropa University to the citizens of the City of Redmond, where she served as Poet Laureate—not merely in epigraph, but in the way she scrutinizes and reimagines poetry and the poet herself. One could commit to reading Pai’s earliest works (Equivalence, Unnecessary Roughness, Adamantine) to her most recent publications and never want for complexity, humor, playfulness, and evidence of a life beyond “craft.” As Pai has noted: “Once, I believed that I had no ambition. Or, rather, I misunderstood it entirely. I thought that the privilege of the gift is to simply practice, whether or not that work circulates in the world. But there is much wrapped up in the sharing of one's creative and cultural practices, as they can express the best parts of being human, the wisdom we have the opportunity to glean for ourselves and transmit to another.”