Bái Bǎn (白板): A Poem by Ryan Wildstar
From My Upcoming Book of Poetry - A Jovian Dream
To celebrate the first day of National Poetry Month in the United States, I would like to share a poem from my upcoming book of poetry - A Jovian Dream. The book has been a long time in the making and will be a collection of 44 years of poetry written from 1980-2024.
The poem I have selected, written around 1990, is called “Bái Bǎn,” which means blank slate or tabula rasa in Mandarin Chinese. When I was 16 years old, I moved to Los Angeles to go to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and pursue a career in the theater. Not long after my arrival, I purchased a small, cream-colored writing notebook with the Chinese characters for Bái Bǎn in large black strokes across the cover. It intrigued me and somehow seemed to speak directly to my situation at that moment. I was starting a new life in a strange new city, which soon turned into a rollercoaster ride through the streets of Hollywood.
I subsequently filled that notebook with many of the poems that have made their way into A Jovian Dream and this is the first poem I scrawled into that precious cream-colored journal of my juvenescence.