I Can Almost See The Clouds of Dust: Selected Poetry of Yu Xiang

Foreward: My Children Will Return Me to Solitude

ix My Children Will Return Me to Solitude — On the Poetry of Yu Xiang I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again. — Anna Akhmatova, “A Land Not Mine” Children — this is how Yu Xiang refers to her poems. Invested with affection and enigma, her rhetoric enacts metaphor and misnomer. Should one assume innocence or maternity in Yu’s poetry, reading “Satan” or “It Goes Without Saying” sets off an immediate mix of thrill and shock. Answerable to longevity, these children have an age that defies science. Within them, they carry life and muse. “Two birds are on the branch of a tree,” writes Simone Weil, quoting an Upanishad. “One eats the fruit, the other looks at it.”1 While Yu Xiang foretells her waning years, abandoned by her children in one poem, she metamorphoses into a sorceress of lofty age in another. The poetic “I” theatricalizes her age in order to liberate herself from time: a female artist in her prime of womanhood, Yu gives birth to many healthy lives, yet builds her memorial through self-mythology and imagined suicides. Are these children “dead” once they are “born”? Are poems “dead” when pronounced “read”? Time offers a more inward resilience when the beginning is a return to some end, and the end a lucid revision of the beginning. De mortuis nil nisi bonum — much as the poet resists elegy in which melancholia lays claim to the morbid guise of death, age as a conspiracy of time creates a foreign but forceful intrigue with narrative cues. 1. Weil, Simone. “Forms of the Implicit Love of God.” Waiting for God. Trans. Emma Craufurd. New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2001. 105. x Far from indifference, each of these poems is as an intimate address. Attentiveness is a virtue one finds in Yu’s writing. Peeling silence with verses, sheisalistenerwhoseeksnearness—andtheotherlistener.Criticshavenoted the deceiving starkness in her linguistic DNA, its minimalism — visual and musical — that invites a second visit. This restraint initiates a larger dialogue, one that enkindles earthly musings. In “The Key Turns in the Keyhole,” the poet champions, “I prefer a simple life, feeling unhindered.” Her yearning for simplicity becomes more audible when it recurs as a moral urge: A simple love We dress simply, love simply so simply that we fall in love once we meet — “Street” Contrary to popular opinion, a simple poem is a source of redemption. In an interview with Antaeus, Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said, “To see things with illuminating clarity — and, if they are simple, to describe them simply and to learn to live with everyday despair, telling oneself that perhaps one must write but that it is not necessary to publish.”2 In a parallel quest for clarity, Yu Xiang harbors a strange preference for “diseased” sentences — a linguistic oddity, but also an impetus for music from the imperfect language of our imperfect world. We live in an epoch of civic despair. Surely an honest language must reflect that anxiety, that mix of incoherence and intelligibility. Instead of rejecting technically bizarre or overly colloquial syntax, Yu makes a conscious attempt to work from everyday language that accepts errors, friction and edges. She pushes phrases forward. She lets words coalesce. She makes them tumble. “All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in 2. See Dobyns, Stephen. “Pacing.” Best Words Best Order: Essays on Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 135. xi smalldoses,”3 chucklesWisławaSzymborska,Herbert’scompatriot. Perhaps this is why for its most part Yu Xiang’s earlier work celebrates brevity, while her longer poems — notably “To The One Who Writes Poetry Tonight” — are viewed as a gesture of an écriture automatique in which random, quick lines with jostling surprises and disjunctive tropes perform a kind of black magic on the page. As it turns out, the use of diseased sentences is an external manifestation of Yu’s physical health. During her adolescence and young adulthood, she was fragile and prone to falling ill. Frequent visits to doctors were marked by periodic hospital stays. Over time, and in a playful way, she began to perceive the doctor as a lover. Between humor and parody, her poem “Doctor Lover” eroticizes the routine but feared experience with a doctor. I was also thinking of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Doctor Strangelove (1964), in particular the sadistically gleeful character, Dr. Strangelove...