Jeffrey Yang's An Aquarium and Vanishing-Line

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I recently saw an announcement for Jeffrey Yang's second book of poems, Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011), and thought I'd look it up. I discovered that it is his second book and decided to read both volumes of his poems. Yang is also an editor at New Directions Publishing, and he has also translated other books of poetry.



An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008) is a fascinating collection of poems about sea life, scientific knowledge, and philosophy. The poems are all fairly short (one or two pages), with titles organized alphabetically from A to Z.

Crab

Slantwise the crab advances. Poets,
philosophers, the body
politic share different aspects
of this problem.

The poems spin out meanings of the particular sea life described in the poem, making them stand in for other aspects of our world and of human society. I particularly like how you can trace different ideas and phrases throughout the collection, connecting poems dispersed throughout under common themes. The poet comes across as a very learned writer in this range of poems, offering highly scientific knowledge with historical tidbits, culturally-specific understandings of sea life, and overall a beautiful exploration of words' rhythms and sounds.

Manatee

Manatee Carib manati
mammary, Olmec sanctuary,
Guiana girl's grief morphed
watercow (what terrors un-
leashed on cows! to manifest mad
cow), gentlest of creatures, Columbo's
sirens, Colombia's most peaceful town.
Manatee, the world's happiest
vegetarian; skin's home to
algae and barnacles; mothers
nurse for twenty-four months; immune
system's inimitable; brain contains more
gray matter than humans', homo
sapiens their only natural predators
yet they welcome us with open limbs.
O Great Ancestors! Teach us
how to love our enemies.

Vanishing-Line is a very different kind of collection and ultimately harder for me to wrap my head around as a whole. It is made up of a series of longer poems, the last of which runs about fifty pages (the lines are short, though). The bibliographic note at the end actually makes a very thoughtful and useful statement about the poems and about poetry in general:

Poetry looking back and ahead could be said to have preceded the web link as endless connection into world-information, and yet the poems seem antipodal to such purposes: its means do not sever and isolate the reader from the realm of personal experience, but rather exists through a deepening of experience in the individual being: it seeks a furthering engagement. The poem, which no longer belongs to any particular area of knowledge, is difficult to net—it is already away, somewhere else, rushing ahead on its ongoing encounter with the real.

This statement is in line with my own definition of good literature—writing that is not only pleasurable but also spurs the reader's curiosity to learn and think and read more based on what the words on the page engage. Ultimately, good literature encourages us to see our familiar world differently and to explore aspects of the world we don't already know. (I said as much to a friend's English class last week when I guest lectured on Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood.)

The poems in Vanishing-Line exhibit the same level of deep learning evident in An Aquarium though its focus is much more historical this time around. The poem "Throne," for instance, wanders across historical eras and places in human civilization, pulling commentary from various writers about the state of civilization and barbarism.

king falls to bishop

bishop falls to caliph
caliph falls to khan
khan to sultan to sheikh
to prime minister regent colonel brig-
adier general president
these the descendents of power
that vanish with place

tho not the place
in people, who live
with the scattering
invisible to history, inevitably
transformed

Archival documents and phrases of others' writing surface repeatedly in the poems. Contemporary voices of the historical events related in the poems push against the poetic voice's making sense of things.

I am particularly interested in the last poem, "Yennecott," which is the indigenous name for Long Island. I'll definitely have to re-read it many more times to understand it better. The poem works through a lot of colonial material about first contact between the indigenous peoples of the region and different European powers. The fact that Jeffrey Yang is a Chinese American exploring this indigenous history certainly resonates with my interest in how Asian American writers broadly have turned to an indigenous presence in their literary imaginaries.