A Hawaiian of Chinese and Korean ancestry, Cathy Song centers her verse on island themes and activities and understated pastoral settings. Her language is standard English inset with words and phrases from Pacific and Asian sources. She has gained credence for lifting the mundane from homely backgrounds to produce a lyric strangeness offset by teasing and, at times, startling analogies.
Song was born in Honolulu on August 20, 1955, to airline pilot Andrew and seamstress Ella Song. Their marriage, a “picture bride” arrangement, and the resulting closeness with her grandparents, influenced Song’s concepts of male-female relationships and the tri-generational home. Coming of age in Wahiawa, Oahu, she began writing in high school and pursued a career in writing. She obtained a B.A. in English from Wellesley College and an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. At age 21, she published a short story in Hawaii Review and continues submitting works to Greenfield Review, Tendril, Dark Brand, Asian-Pacific Literature, and Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly.
A first collection, Picture Bride (1983), which won the Yale Younger Poets Award and a National Book Critics Circle award nomination, personalizes the slow assimilation of women into society. Song draws inspiration from modern Southwestern painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower portraits. Song names each section for a flower and exalts O’Keeffe’s work in “From the White Place” and “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe.”
After marrying medical student Douglas McHarg Davenport, Song composed a second anthology, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988), which develops her meditative vision while furthering themes of family history. With island poet Juliet S. Kono, she coedited and contributed poetry and prose to Sister Stew (1991). Three years later, she published a third volume, School Figures (1994). Her writing has earned the Hawaii Award for Literature and a Shelley Memorial Award.
