Poetics of "Dangerous Innocence," Poetics of Architecture - Lynn Xu and Joshua Edwards

We were privileged to have Lynn Xu and Joshua Edwards do a reading last week as part of the MAE poetry series. At the end of the performance, someone in the audience commented that it was refreshing to hear a couple read and perform their work together. And, truly, it was. Edwards shared poems he’d written for Xu (one of them titled “Romance”). The kind of artistic partnership which Xu and Edwards have is striking. They were introduced as a team currently writing a sort of poetics of architecture, where poetry and life are inextricably intertwined, dependently caused, and eventually literalized as an actual house. They’re working with architect Allen Warren to build a house in Marfa, Texas—a house constructed from the materials of poetry. The book of poems they're working on will, it seems, serve as the architect's guidelines.

Xu and Edwards’ collaboration is obvious on some level: they write poems about or for each other; both play important roles at Canarium Books; and they’ve been working on a book of poems (mentioned above) which will be published soon. Xu and Edwards’ work isn’t terribly similar, or at least it didn’t seem immediately similar to me, but they seemed to share a common element of translation—Xu moves between English and Mandarin, while Edwards seemed to move between limits, lines, and a limitless, even abstracted space.

It’s not as though Xu’s work dealt primarily with linguistic concerns, however. She is known for poems which have a surreal element to them, a kind of “dangerous innocence,” playfulness, and a childlike logic. Some poems were English; some poems traded off between English and Mandarin Chinese, but many of them, particularly her series titled “Earth Light,” felt like lullabies or fairy tales, and not just because ghosts and Macbeth’s witches were “in” the poems. The sounds and rhythm of Xu’s work seemed to me more otherworldly than her poems’ content, and “language” seemed to be beside the point.

She mentioned that her bilingual poetry is translated very loosely (these are poems where one line in English is followed by the “same” line in Mandarin Chinese). In this performance, the question of “what happens to ‘meaning’ in translation” seemed to be the least of her concerns. Musicality marked her bilingual poetry, and urged the audience to listen primarily to sound rather than dig for meaning. It takes practice—an intellectual and even physical attentiveness—to hear poetry first and understand second. When Xu read, I heard English dissolve into ‘sh’s’ and round vowels: a lullaby indeed. Xu said that for her, sound and meaning have equal footing. While working in Shanghai recently, she found that even in her thoughts, no translation occurred. She simply wasn’t conscious of translating from Mandarin to English or vice versa. In this performance, I was a listener for whom meaning was primarily available via English; when she read her lines written in Mandarin, sound was literally detached from meaning. We were freed from the despotic instinct to hear meaning first, and sound second. It’s not that we in the audience weren’t challenged, though: the content we English-speakers could understand wasn’t exactly “safe.”

In Edwards’ reading, the experience was different—the poems he read in this performance didn’t have a bilingual aspect, unless we broaden our definition of bilingual. There was certainly an element of translation to his work--translation between "empty" space and constructed geometries.

He read from his 2013 collection Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling Press), and despite the familiarity of rhyme here and there, it was difficult to keep up—every word seemed to take us in a million possible directions, or beg us to consider a series of ideas. Questions of being and existence were packed into words only a few syllables long that tripped over each other in every line. Absolute wells of meaning arose one after another. But although questions of being and ways of knowing created a number of ripples in the performance, a language of geometry kind of became the compass for navigating the ambitious span of Edwards’ reading. One of the lines from his piece “The Sixth Lamp” went something like this: “On the edge of the forest is a map of your country—a place you will never return to.” His work was filled with angles, shapes, lines, concrete images that, like the above quote, seemed to provide instructions or directions.

I don’t have a profound statement to close out this post, no pretty bow that gives the sense of a conclusion, but I'd wager the lack of such a conclusion is truer to the poetics of Xu and Edwards. Xu after all said she likes that her work allows "an abyss between readability and non-readability." Maybe this will serve: I can’t wait to see the house they eventually construct in Marfa. Hopefully, pictures will be available somewhere online or, better, in print.

Lynn Xu was born in Shanghai. She's the author of Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) and a chapbook, June (Corollary Press, 2006). Her poems have also appeared in 6x6, 1913, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Critical Quarterly, and elsewhere. She's currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley and co-edits Canarium Books.

Joshua Edwards directs and co-edits Canarium Books. He's the author of two collections of poetry, Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling Press, 2013) and Campeche (Noemi Press, 2011), and a photography collection, Photographs Taken at One-Hour Intervals During a Walk from Galveston Island to the West Texas Town of Marfa (Edition Solitude, 2014). His third book of poetry, Architecture for Travelers is forthcoming from Edition Solitude in November 2014.

Denver Imaginary

Last week, Denver poets Oren Silverman, Noah Eli Gordon, Jesse Morse, and Mathias Svalina read their poetry at MAINSITE Art Gallery here in Norman.

The gathering was small and unpretentious. After they’d had a pint at a local pub across the street, the poets arrived just after seven p.m. We chatted for a few minutes before the reading began; the poet Crag Hill gave the introduction: “these poets are stateless; they inhabit multiverses of language…they are the future of poetry rather than the past.” The evening had a flavor of Americana to it, not least because at one point a loud whistle from a train passing through the middle of town interrupted Gordon’s reading. Small talk ranged from college football to an anecdote about the four poets speeding down Flaming Lips Alley in Bricktown the night before—windows down, blasting Flaming Lips songs. Apparently, too, the poets had been kicked out of a hotel at midday for no logical reason—and then promised the hotel manager’s son that “no one from the University of Oklahoma would ever stay there again.” If only you could’ve heard Morse tell the story.

It was clear, though, that these poets take their work seriously, even if they differ in how they define “work” and its relationship to “art.” The poets had been announced for a few weeks as “Denver poets,” words which already imply a kind of school of thought. As always, “schools” are misleading; in each poet’s work I heard differing approaches to poetics, ethics, language. Svalina holds the term “experimental” suspect because it borrows from science and implies a “finding.” What we got on Saturday was undeniably not a Western-enlightened “finding.” Instead, Gordon’s "The Next Year: did you drop this word" offered:

A poem runs the risk

of being meaningfully

  a little case study

     illustrating what

        one can fit inside

We heard critiques of romanticism and nostalgia, including that nostalgia fatal to poetics—the need to reduce a poem to a “meaning.” Gordon seems to have proposed a history of the lyric poem in his performance of “The Next Year,” a piece he’s described as “pretty much an unmasking and an ars poetica in one”:

The real

                    history of the lyric's

                 what we do with our

              runoff until a garbage

           truck rumbling by

              wakes our bird too early

                 with the thought

              a city's everything

           outside a citizen

In Svalina’s reading, I heard playful absurdism and a blurring of the line between prose and poetry (a line which became blurrier as the evening wore on). Svalina’s work seemed perhaps the most sparse—not in terms of depth or volume, but of space. The walls of the room we were in are a blank off-white, and the room’s small silver ceiling lights scattered shadows about the room, a perfect space to encounter “Red Plastic Cup”, in which a “body’s shadow flows over the asphalt / like water in my cupped hands draining out...As if, were I able to be any thing, / I’d be a red plastic cup.” Svalina also shared work from his newest collection The Explosions. In the collective imaginary built by the four performances, an imaginary which seemed to hold nostalgia suspect, I felt safe—perhaps because of lines like this from “Above the Fold”:

I will hide your grey

within my grey.

It was Ted Berrigan’s birthday, as Morse reminded us. “When I read Berrigan, I thought, ‘I can do this,’” he said before reading “How the Dead Gain Passage.” He shared new poems gleaned from the autocorrect feature on cell phones. While profound, these garnered some laughs. He lent us new geometries inspired by the grace of baseball player Eric Chavez, seeming to answer something of Gordon’s earlier question:

Is there ever a point in cultivating nostalgia? It's not something you water & watch grow. It just happens, hits like a thought. No, that's something you build. I guess I mean it's void of fulfillment, though even that's dubious ground & who'd want to stand outside waiting for the day's instructions?

Perhaps these questions are part of what Crag was getting at when he said these poets are of the future, not the past. But how does one dodge nostalgia in what appears at first glance to be a baseball poem?—this I found myself wondering when Morse read from his “Eric Chavez Sonnets” from Alive at the Center.

Eric Chavez in Portland

How fortunate life lies, Eric, my neverending

birth tonight in Portland, you on rehab

with the Sacramento Rivercats,

I a mere nine rows up!

I can see the contours of your face, your brow even,

the perfect zen in your crouch. Your precise

over-the-shoulder release. The fundamental straightness

of your back. Is that a little belly even?

Every move, every pitch, every waking

high thrust of my spirit simply yards away,

at third, all my lost dreams realized tonight

in your paced extension, gentle lean

slow gait, nervous twitch, gracious act

your glove, my heart.

It’s not really (or perhaps just more than) a baseball poem—it’s a meditation on chance and time and precision, a celebration of the body and its relation to all three of these elements; it’s an exclamation of renaissance in Portland. From each small movement of Eric Chavez spiral innumerable possibilities—“neverending / birth.” Perhaps here is a key element which tied together the evening’s “Denver imaginary” and its incredible heterogeneity: a sense of possibility—where romanticism is upset by delightful absurdity; where nostalgia, “void of fulfillment,” is unwelcome.

Somehow the reading became an ethical experience. There was an urgent quality to it, and not just because our finale was Silverman’s astounding performance—his reading might as well have been a dramatic monologue written for the stage; he spoke more than one voice and “played” more than one role. He voiced a relationship between art and law that spoke to the world in a way that the clearest prose will never be able to accomplish. I agree with Morse when he says that “a proper reading of a poem” must be “multifarious” and “continuing,” and each poet and his work seemed to “talk” to the others, making Silverman’s final poem not just the last piece of the evening, but a zenith of the evening’s intertextualities—a true finale. Svalina handed me a copy of his new book as we all headed to top off our drinks and make conversation. It was an immense privilege to have heard these four in one sitting.

November Poetry Readings!

Zheng Xiaoqiong

September 2013 Poetry Readings!

"The Leaves in Her Shoes" by J.L. Jacobs

Not only has J.L. Jacobs been a part one of the Mark Allen Everett Poetry Series in the past and delivered an alluring poetry reading; she was also one of my mentors and favorite professors of Creative Writing when I was a student at the University of Oklahoma. She sparked my interest and love of poetry and was an inspiration to all of her students. I saw this article posted on Facebook. Hope you enjoy it and I highly recommend buying her book, The Leaves in Her Shoes.

"I don't think I've ever read a first book of poems so haunted as The Leaves in Her Shoes. Reading these poems is like listening to snatches of song or overhearing half-sentences, mutterings, broken chants of a lost tribe. J. L. Jacobs assembles these shards into a startling and unforgettable collage." --Carol Muske
 
J. L. Jacobs' latest collection of poetry, The Leaves in Her Shoes, blends aspects of the everyday and the spiritual, infusing simple domestic rituals with a latent wonder. Spare but supple, this poetry manifests a life tied to the earth. Evoking earlier centuries, "hidden heirlooms," the poems provide a sense of the past's continuing presence. Bits of earlier poems reappear later, imitating life's circularity. In this poetry, all seasonal patterns and the human rites which match them, be they harvest time or "communion at two Eastertides," take on a certain mysticism. The human body exists as an extension of the earth, so that a woman's death is "a translation of her into landscape." The poems chart the geography of daily life, mapping not only "a land of bogs and swamps" but also the path of "a wagonload of flowering bulbs." J.L. Jacobs mixes with a deft hand the "voice above," the voice of the spiritual and divine, and the "voice below," that of the earth and life. 

J.L. Jacobs was born in 1967 in a small town in the rural South. She began her own "project" of collecting folklore, particularly that of womenfolks, at the age of eleven. She did "carry those bug-eaten books out of the barn," and they, along with the Matriarchs she learned from, are woven into her work. She has a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.F.A. in poetry from Brown University. In 1992, Leave Books published her chapbook Varieties of Inflorescence. J.L. Jacobs' work has appeared in many literary journals, including New American Writing, First Intensity, New Orleans Review, Five Fingers Review, and Talisman. She edited the 1995-96 season Of Chance Abstractions. J.L. Jacobs resides in Valliant, Oklahoma.

River geography at first hand
 
An error in geography
 
The timber they kept back
 
Things not explicitly remembered

Source: http://www.webdelsol.com/Lost_Roads/jacobs.htm  

International Poets Showcase - Wolfgang Kubin

Poet, sinologist, and public intellectual Wolfgang Kubin was born in Celle, Germany, in 1945. While more well-known as a leading figure of European Chinese studies, he is also known as a poet. His poetry was first published in 2000 with the title Das neue Lied von der alten Verzweiflung (tr. The New Song about Old Despair). Narrentürme (tr. Fools’ Towers) was published in 2005, and Schattentänzer (tr. Shadow Dancer) in 2004. Philosophical and political in nature, his poetry reflects on the places he has lived and his travels to Madrid and Salamanca, the US, and, of course, China, which has become a second home. In 2006 he published a collection of short stories entitled Halbzeit einer Liebe (tr. Half-time of a Love). In Kubin’s fiction and poetry, readers recall the impulse behind traveling, the push to discover the distant and unknown, and if not discover, then be closer to it.

Wolfgang Kubin on Contemporary Chinese Literature 

Chinese Characters and Roman Letters: The Art of Modern Poetry

Wolfgang Kubin on Ouyang Jianghe

Interview with Kubin