Wendy Xu, The Past

 

We don’t remember how we got here, so have woven a beautiful story of
        replacement
You mispronounce my sacred name, always in front of others, there it goes
A fine white mist where once it held space for me
I didn’t write for the longest time because you were speaking for me
You had so many eyes trained on you, I wanted them only on me
In order for me to work towards an undoing of my condition, I must know the
        characteristics of my condition
In order for me to know the characteristics of my condition, I must not be made
        to feel alone in my perception of them
You are and have always been subject to randomness
Accept it (“A SOUND NOT UNLIKE A BELL”)

New York poet Wendy Xu’s third book-length poetry title is The Past (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), following You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Press Center, 2013) and Phrasis (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2017) [see my review of such here]. The Past is a book that frames itself around personal histories, attempting to reconcile her two poles of being, belonging and identity, as the back cover offers: “Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tiananmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in ‘traditional’ Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of ‘Tiananmen Sonnets’ to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.”

“I did wrong by all ideas of nation,” she writes, to open the poem “NAMES OF THE RIVER,” “haunted / by the after- / life of speech, public acts wagging / their dutiful tails [.]” Through The Past, Xu articulates a space that sits between two sides that often feel in conflict, or at least in opposition: how to be in and of two cultures, simultaneously. “The opening to another country was always inside / my father’s mind,” she offers, to open “POEM ABOUT MY LIFE,” “in many forms, in dreams: green swords // swirling in a winter mist, colorful moths, sometimes / a molar falling out, porcelain clattering onto the table // like a single rung chime.” She writes of how these histories, these particular elements of the past, can’t help but impact the present. “In our language the sweetness / of sugar mirrors heaven,” she offers, to open “TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WORDS,” but the tonal edge / slopes up gently, there and away / from my small attempts at public- / facing speech.” She writes of how such aggressions, micro and otherwise, and their ongoing attempt to reduce her to a foreign entity, even as she explores a poetry that articulates her present as a whole and singular entity out of multiple, complex and moving parts. “There was nothing / inelegant to say,” she writes, to close the same poem, “not a wound nor / opening to make, just the lowly / murmur of a threat hung quietly / between us. Impossible to the tongue, / I know. For the eye alone.” Xu works to articulate a conversation around history, one that is attached to her family’s country and culture; a conversation that wouldn’t be allowed had she and her family remained where they are; an examination that wouldn’t have been possible, even to research or examine as an archive. As she opens her “TIANANMEN SONNETS,” which are “built to evade algorithmic censorship / of the numbers 6, 4, 89, / and other references to _______”:

Dead air in air
The anniversary of language
holds you back against
bucolic dreaming, down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color, elegy

bursts like a ribbon in air
Thinking again of the Square today
Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud
Vegetation mutters in the Far West

A column of ghosts
going violet over time
Familiar song looping overhead
Lines pressed in air

There is something interesting in the ways she structures her stanzas, accumulating a structure not of lyric phrases or sentences but of thoughts set as individual stanzas. A four stanza poem, for example, holds four distinct articulations, allowing the poem as a whole to exist as the articulation of these four ideas in succession. The last two stanzas of the four-stanza “LINEAR TRAVEL,” for example, reads:

You honor me with your ongoing fearlessness, careful not to discolor what you believe in with too many examples. When they come for you, conspire first and most attentively with your dead, make faithful note of every imagined assertion of self in hostile spaces.

When the self cracked open there inside was a sentence cracking in tandem. Tell them there was a song in you then.

She composes poems-as-scenes, painting particular portraits of a combination of a scene and a particular moment, such as the three-stanza “A POEM ON MY MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY,” the middle stanza of which reads:

Uncle has passed, and Uncle before him, Uncle of the wind tipping baskets of squash blossoms from the balcony’s ledge, blossoms on the neighbor’s patchwork roof, lifting with summer air, without regard for melancholy, for death which follows speech but does not undo it, for the chlorine that crept into Uncle’s bones and stayed, greening there.

Xu’s poems are very much propelled by motion, however her lines are spaced or rhythmed; her poems are kinetic, sharp and so fast moving her lines appear still, akin to rushing water. The ending to “POEM ABOUT MY LIFE,” for example, allows the rush and flow of her continued thought, picking up speed as her lyrics unfold: “When as a teenager I borrowed the rusted Nissan, / drove it through a field and returned it to him with sudden // blue flowers tucked into its mouth. The bluest one / he saved. The wind that made those dull trees sing, blowing in // from the future. Somewhere my father has never been.”

Wendy Xu, Phrasis

Phrasis

Stilled as in image, at dawn sliding into

blue harbor, boats clang, where does he

the man I imagine gripping several ropes

return from. Is he conflicted, does he

perceive the sky oscillating like

a dimmer machine, a mouth, a war, language

not declaring its most

effective self. Bellum grazing ever nearer

to beauty, a possible apotheosis how

what is left of sense

is comfort. Not inebriated much anymore

I retuned a lawn to stand in, crueler

was always signing to our mutual forks,

knives. Our translation

of a subject drones

on unblinking, something black for him

returning, his forearms there laid

themselves down, ships gone out another

pale-plated night.

Produced as winner of The Ottoline Prize, as selected by Hoa Nguyen, is New York poet Wendy Xu’s second collection, Phrasis (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2017). Following her first collection, You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Press Center, 2013), Phrasis is built as a quartet of unnamed sections of short lyrics (the exception being a longer sequence sharing the book’s title, itself constructed out of short lyrics; one of three different poems within the collections that share the title). There is something intriguing about Xu’s use of the straightforward line; her poems are composed in a manner deceptively simple, and yet, include unexpected turns and twists, managing shifts as subtle as the slightest change in tone. As contest judge Nguyen writes on the back cover: “The poems in this collection play word against words, expression against frame. Is language a form of thought-bondage? How can poems escape and bring us closer to the personal and the possibility of intimacy?”

Maudlin, from Mary, the first word in lying on a couch to be alone with you, crying up no night’s sleep.

I read a book where one speaks for another beneath a balcony, some of wording love is for the idea of soul (“Phrasis”)

Each section opens with a short untitled poem, held almost as Greek chorus, setting the tone for what follows. Xu’s poems might, as the back cover suggests, revel in the fragment, but does as much in the small moment, composing less a fragment than a short burst that requires no further explanation. Her poems are wonderfully self-contained, yet interact in a way that the entire collection could be considered a lyric suite, composing a whole unit of smaller parts.

Black Warrior Review 40.1

HEAT

A row of little ovens waits on the cliff.

I can’t wait to get inside.

Mother me, dry heat.

Bake me into a baby. (Emily Kendal Frey)

While in Florida, we wandered through the occasional bookstore, and I managed to pick up a copy of the most recent issue of Black Warrior Review (fall/winter 2013; 40.1). There are so many American journals I’ve only heard of, and haven’t managed to yet see, a constant frustration of the international border between us One thing I didn’t know about the journal, as the colophon reads: “Black Warrior Review is named after the river that borders the campus of The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The city, river, and journal derive their names from the sixteenth-century Indian chief Tuscaloosa, whose name comes from two words of Creek or Choctaw origin—tusca (warrior) and lusa (black).” I’m struck by a number of the selections in this issue—writing from such familiar names as Emily Kendal Frey, Bianca Stone and Julia Cohen—as well as some names I hadn’t previously been familiar with, including Wendy Xu, John Zackel or Adam Atkinson, for his “jacket copy” series, three of which are included in the issue. Atkinson’s three pieces are strange, and strangely compelling and entertaining, even if every element in each poem might not work. They’re certainly worth the trip, and certainly intrigue; I wonder how far he’s planning on taking this suite of unusual poems?

Jacket Copy for The Cop Followed Frank Into the Diner

The definite article in this book’s title is to be eyed suspiciously. This poet highlights many and any cops, Franks, diners, and followings into. For instance: “The cop frankly dined on / the fellow.” Or: “It follows that Frank copped a feel.” Or: “Diner: 3 A.M. / Cops from the vice squad / with weary sadistic eyes / spotting fairies.” At times, it plays like bathroom humor, if the bathroom was at Stonewall Inn and stuffed full with lubricated bodies: “The cop’s forearm followed his fist / into Frank’s asshole. A fist appeared through a portal twenty years from now and nailed / a cop in the kisser.”

What really struck in the issue included some of the prose, far more lyric than what I’ve encountered in most literary journals these days, from John Zackel’s short story, “The Potential Energy of Mr. English,” to Ben Roberts’ “Snapshots from the Wedding,” which includes:

There were those who arrived in the early morning hours before the Wedding. Others had waited in that place some thirty and three years. Here is the appointed hour: three in the Post Meridian. No one who came even a minute after was admitted. The Wedding waited on no one but the Bride and the Groom. For it is written, ‘No one shall arrive late to the Wedding.’ It is as if you had not come at all.

Given how particular I am about prose these days, I’m intrigued in the flavour of the prose in the pages of this journal, most of which is far more interesting stylistically than most of the far-too-straight examples of prose I see in literary journals. A further highlight was Julia Cohen’s “I Cannot Name It, It Lives,” listed under non-fiction. Cohen’s piece begins:

You are the splintered cloud of wood. Hum of halogen, a stutter strikes your microcosm’s sharp connector thorn. Home & the uncut call?

The density of a word, its cellular level I poke intricately awake. Indigenous to repetition. A girl drains an object. Your full sink & floating asparagus tips.

Object painted with asthma attacks. Object between relationships. Frozen object taken out of the freezer.