A Review of C. Dale Young’s The Day Underneath the Day

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 A Review of C. Dale Young’s The Day Underneath the Day

 

ETA:  I did not realize this review would get out into the world so quickly.  I apologize for the typos in the initial post, but I am still very much in the editing stages of the review =).  
 

One of the challenges wrought by the emergence of ethnic studies and the positing of specific racial designations as a way to institutionalize ethnic studies has been the problematic of mixed race.  Such issues have certainly been an issue in the arena of Asian American literature.  How does one posit the work of someone of mixed-race background without eliding it under the rubric of a racial designation?  When C. Dale Young was included in Victoria Chang’s anthology on Asian American poets, Young’s work immediately brings to mind the problematics of “identity” and “race” as taxonomies for literary bodies.  Further, the content of his poetry cannot be subsumed under strict questions of his mixed-race background.  Instead, both The Day Underneath the Day (TriQuarterly Books 2001) and The Second Person: Poems (FourWay Books 2007) seem most influenced by Young’s background as a physician.  He embarks more broadly on what I would call “medicinal poetics,” employing the body, anatomy, and other such related signifiers as terrains upon which he can deploy his crystalline lyrics, but reading either poetry collections solely through this lens would fail to capture its complexity. In an interview with Dan Wickett conducted on 5/21/2005, Wickett asks Young about the label of “Asian-American,” to which he responds, “I never think of myself in terms of labels, but others are more than happy to do that for me.  Hence panels such as the one you mention.  I am C. Dale Young.  That is good enough for me.  Latino, Asian, Indian, Gay, whatever.  Those are terms others foist on you.  I always live in many worlds, even when it comes to work.  How schizophrenic to try to label everything you do.  I don't stop during the day and say: ‘Now I am a doctor, and now a teacher, and now a poet.’  That is absurd.  I am proud of being Latino and Chinese and East Indian and Caucasian.  I am proud to be a gay man, a doctor, a poet, an editor, a teacher.  I am proud to be a son, a partner, a brother, etc.  But none of these labels take precedence over the fact I am me.”  This understanding of “me” resonates throughout both collections as the lyrics explore issues of genealogy, death, love, and other such major thematics. 

 

From the very beginning of The Day Underneath the Day, readers will observe the centrality of the body, in which the very first poem, “Home to William Carlos Williams” is separated into three parts, the first entitled, “The Body,” the second, “Corpus,” and the third, “The Body in Bloom.”  However, the body quickly becomes a metaphor one kind of landscape of meditation, one that arcs out within the collection to scenic vistas.  Indeed, it is the lyric speaker’s relationship to these various places wrought with such incredible detail and precision.  Take for example, “The Field,” which is reprinted here in full:

 

The hum of wood lice,

the way it

approximates

 

the frequency of C#,

the way it is heard

only in close

 

proximity

to the rotting tree

that stands alone

 

in the field;

the wildflowers,

their colors, the fact

 

they are nothing

but weeds, their leaves

prickly like weeds,

 

the grasses, greens

easily separated

by the trained eye

 

into celadon, civette,

patina, veronese, reseda,

the common leaf-green

 

or shoe-bottom mold;

only with such detail

do I love you—

 

the paper-thin curls of bark

on our shirts, the dry grass

falling from our hair (12).

Characteristic of Young’s poetry is the way an exterior landscape serves as a dialoguing apparatus.  In “The Field,” the various scenes that the speaker observes allow him to meditate on love and its relationship to what he can see, what we can remember.  The poem’s poignancy appears with the turn of the lyrics, “only with such detail/do I love you,” the sense that memory in all of its intricacy remains there because of affectual resonance.  The enactment of this metaphor where the field’s description stands for the speaker’s depth of love succeeds through the vivacity of sound and sight, especially of color.  The poem reaches a sort of climax by the different ways in which green is described in an array of shades, then we understand, all the shades of love. 

 

            Young’s poetry does not shy away from his unique mixed race background, especially as it posited through the Caribbean.  The second half of the collection moves more firmly into a transnational context where the United States is placed in conversation with Jamaica.  The “Footbridge in Summer,” roughly located halfway through enacts this “bridging” of anatomical bodies, loving bodies, to racialized bodies: 

 

The Footbridge in Summer

 

The shadow that is mold, dark and crusted

like the scum on the frog’s back, has been encouraged

to run the railing and the rotting stump,

 

and I have pushed the sky out of the picture,

banned every cloud so as to free the lake

of the broad, slap-dashed reflections.

 

Even now the sun darkens my face,

darker still in this shimmering mirror

where herons see the hymn of the common bream

 

darting in pairs around a funnel of water.

What my grandparents left to me, the sound

of the Caribbean, its repetitions, is disappearing.

 

Ruckus of algae in later afternoon, ruckus

of the anhinga moving out over the lake,

the air beneath its wings sounding arcs across the water (27).

 

Here, the external landscape much like in “The Field” acts as an apparatus for the lyric speaker to meditate upon a particular situation or instance.  Images of light and darkness are key to this poem suggesting where there is a desire to see into a genealogical past, to grab hold of what is left.  This loss is felt keenly in the lines, “What my grandparents left to me, the sound of the Caribbean, its repetitions, is disappearing.”  One wonders though by freeing the lake of clouds and making his reflection more “clear,” how was it that the lyric speaker supposed a kind of recovery?  The way in which nature exists as an overwhelming force draws attention to the difficulty in establishing the quietude the speaker requires to find “himself,” as both the mold and algae are becoming ever more plentiful, even suffocating.  The darkness of the “face” does seem to resonate against a possible racializing metaphor, that is not completely uncovered until the later poems, where the lyrics move us directly into the Caribbean.  If this loss of the “sound/ of the Caribbean” is occurring, how can such loss be interrogated, challenged, or even overturned? 

            I leave this review with Devon House, the poem that takes as its subject matter the historical monument in Kingston, Jamaica.  The Devon House was home to one of the wealthiest African Caribbean millionaires during the 1800s:

 

“Devon House”

 

--Kingston, Jamaica

 

Lamps have begun to light as evening,

alluvial, fills every crevice in the courtyard,

 

fills Devon House, alone with its marble columns,

its verandas and esplanades empty,

 

the plantation gone, and the fields,

the courtyard a tourist attraction now:

 

glass ashtrays etched with boys

too large to be clambering coconut trees,

 

statuettes of women too smooth to be burdened

with baskets of fruit on their heads, stoneware

 

with doctor birds captured in the shallowest bas-relief,

key rings carved in the rough shape of the island;

 

and now even the hummingbirds are spoken of as jewels

where once everyone drowned in leaf-filtered sunlight (53).

 

This poem immediately generates a temporal dissonance between a period of time in Jamaican history where the Devon House might have been home to a different population with highly stratified social conventions.  Bodies have literally become replicated in artistic form that allude to this past, but yet aestheticize them.  Particularly important to the politic of the this poem appears with the lines “statuettes of women too smooth to be burdened/ with baskets of fruit on their heads,” a sense then of a laboring past that goes unnoticed.  Why would such a history be forgotten?  A quick survey of the internet sources exploring the Devon House serves to introduce it as a perfect tourist destination, a place to be observed for its beauty, rather than for the history it might invoke.  Practically all the guides avoid the fact that the Devon House was a former slave plantation, instead concentrating on other qualities, like the fact that you can visit there and eat its famous ice cream.  Young’s poetics recover this past, reminding it was a place “where once everyone drowned in leaf-filtered sunlight.”  The dissonance between the beauty of Young's poetry often clashes against its very grave content, amplifying the collection's affectual power.  Yet another essential addition to the variegated body that is "Asian American" literature.  

 

Buy the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Day-Underneath-C-Dale-Young/dp/0810151111