The Notion of Distance: On Shangyang Fang's "Burying the Mountain"
Shangyang Fang | Burying the Mountain | Copper Canyon Press | 2021 | 112 Pages
Rarely do things ever feel settled in Shangyang Fang’s debut collection—arguments go unresolved, desires outlast their objects, absences endure, and the past, as Faulkner says, isn’t even past. As if to resist whatever tentative equilibria their maker arranges for them, these poems move restlessly from one postulate or image to the next, accumulating poignancy and import while rejecting any possibility of stasis. It’s a tendency that risks descent into formless musing, but Fang’s poetic intuition is too refined for that. His gentle touch is a guiding one, and he shepherds his subjects of love, loss, exile, and art through scrupulously melodic lines to challenging conclusions, yielding not closure but an awareness of profound irreconcilability. This unsettledness perplexes, and Fang himself is far from exempt, wondering in the poem “Red,” “In this world of red dust // how do you know you are / seeing the darkness rather than being / blindfolded?” Here and throughout Burying the Mountain, the locus of contradiction lies as firmly in the self as in the world at large, and it’s Fang’s struggle to give form to his own unsettledness that imbues his poems with their relentless pathos, sensuality, and elegance.
The collection is organized into four sections, each titled after lines in the quatrain which serves as the book’s epigraph, an excerpt from Du Fu’s poem “Deep Winter.” Rather than render the Mandarin lines into English syntax, Fang instead chooses to translate them character by character, so that the isolated words function as nodes in a matrix loosely evocative of each section’s thematic concerns: “Blossom - Leaf - Abide - Heaven - Volition” for the first, “River - Stream - Share - Stone - Root” for the second, etc. Prefigured by this approach is the juxtapositional quality of the poems themselves, which excel, as in the opening “Argument of Situations,” at connecting things as disparate as a Song dynasty painting and the speaker’s contemporary lovemaking, and from these proximities extracting such coy insights as “To walk on a mountain so long, he must desire / nothing. Nothing must be a difficult desire.” The same quality animates the several poems written in sections, of which “Preludes, a Blue Plume,” with its comfortably coexistent citations of Adélia Prado, Marx, and Tao Yuanming, is a particularly strong example.
Fang’s interest in tracing similarities by collapsing distances makes language its focus in the bilingual “… Is the Sound of Thunder,” which inserts onomatopoeic Mandarin characters throughout English text in order to interrogate not just the relationship between differently structured writing systems, but between linguistic forms and the natural phenomena they’re purported to represent, a quandary vividly expressed by the crisp and unpunctuated line, “If the river could speak, would the mountain understand its utterance.” Like so much else in Burying the Mountain, there is no easy answer.
Regardless, this perspective of tender scrutiny is what makes Fang’s poems so alluring, even at their most intractable. For despite their often pungent ontological flavor, they’re consistently arrayed in terms of the deepest sensuality, with the recurrence of certain key images—orchids, evening, the moon, eyelids, cemeteries, chirping insects, red dust—acting to anchor the poems securely in “this untranslatable / world.”
A foundational lodestar for Fang is art, which he returns to again and again with a devotee’s fervor. Under the aesthetic spell of his most cherished poets, painters, and classical musicians, some poems can at times seem to more closely resemble syllabi—the first section’s “If You Talk About Sadness, Fugue,” for instance, invokes Celan, Trakl, Brahms, Schubert, Akhmatova, and Pushkin, among others. Fortunately, this instinct to pay homage to inspirations is usually synthesized into broader considerations, in this case the risks of self-destruction and persecution that too commonly attend the artist’s urge to create in a hostile environment. And therein seems to lie another source of Fang’s unsettledness, if his references to communism and the repeated exhortations of the speaker’s aunt for him “not to be a poet” are any indication. His relationship to homeland is decidedly complex, as demonstrated in the longer “Meditations on an Authentic China.” Written over the course of three years and subject to a major revision shortly before the collection’s publication, the poem’s central dichotomy between an impoverished child laborer named Hu and a privileged high school graduate called Hugh elucidates the fissures at the heart of Chinese émigré life.
Although these fissures aren’t always made explicit in Fang’s poetry, they inform his craft to an appreciable extent. The final lines of “Meditation…” offer a vaguely Heideggerian summation of the dynamic at hand: “Proceeding to our tragic return & / having returned, we return only to find we were never there.” An attempted homecoming, undermined by the flux of the self or other confounding factors—it’s one of Burying the Mountain’s more prevalent motifs, frequently employed by Fang to bring a poem to its close, and is therefore a pivotal figuration of the unsettledness pervading this collection. Yet it remains, in all its effectiveness at conveying the liminal condition of Fang’s self, a variation on a more general theme, one having to do with his previously noted affinity for the poetic closing of distances. Along with its figurative utility in the context of juxtaposition, the notion of distance operates in a specifically spatial sense as well, emerging in the later sections as a dialectical force through which self-identity is both maintained and, in the intimacy of another’s presence, ever so fleetingly sublated. Consider the closing lines of “Two Cannot”:
[…] we discard dust - we river
the running : we violate - the violet, twisted in our
hearts, still crucial for the distance to be absolutely
meaningful : us galloping as we shatter and become[,]
which are immediately followed by the opening lines of “Thin Air”: “Watch: they hug, they kiss, they make love / as the distance wrings a black seam that swims / between them.” Here distance occurs as a basic condition of interpersonal relations, an understanding complicated by the shadow of death in the collection’s final poem, “Displaced Distance as a Red Berry,” where the red berries to which distance corresponds, “according to Chinese legend, / are the blood-tears of a wife, whose husband died in war.” This yearning that results from the unbridgeable distance between life and death is adjacent to other forms of yearning explored by Fang, whose skillfulness at depicting emotional distance between lovers in poems like “Lie Beyond” and “La Traviata” makes for some of the collection’s most touchingly enigmatic passages.
If distance and yearning form the emotional substance of Burying the Mountain, then its intellectual substance derives from Fang’s abiding fascination with perception and the nature of existence. Such concerns are touched on in “… Is the Sound of Thunder,” but fuller treatments in “Whether a Marble Confirms Its Feeling of the Field,” with its abstraction and overtly philosophical phrasings, and in “Reliquary Evening,” with its sly surrealism and fractured form, underscore the depth of Fang’s striving to comprehend his world. These efforts combine spectacularly with the other technical strands of his work—juxtapositions, invocations of revered and persecuted artists, ambivalence toward his homeland, distance-induced yearnings—in the sectional “A Difficult Apple,” the book’s longest poem and a powerhouse display of creative talent. Juggling several disparate topics yet interweaving their respective sections with the dexterity of a film editor, Fang muses his way through various forms, images, and perspectives as he tries to establish a stable interpretation of existence, a process focalized on the constantly shifting image of a “poor apple who doesn’t know it’s at the center of the world.” The apple’s exegetic variability seems to be the collection’s unsettledness writ small, and the limitations of each conflicting view of it that Fang’s speaker documents are ultimately revealed in the closing lines. The apple’s perspective is briefly adopted:
51/ Whose hand is it that wakes me from the tree?
Whose lips inlaid in my skin? For whom am I severing
my sweet limb into whose strange body?
52/ The apple before me / never attempts to convince me / it is an apple.
And so the poem ends with the speaker trusting only silence, or rather the sheer, self-evident, and inarguable haecceity of things as they are. It’s a stance of both acceptance and non-acceptance that by this point we’ve come to expect of Fang, and he manages the balance with characteristic grace.
The achievement of Burying the Mountain can’t be understated. Having arrived in the United States just ten years ago with, by his own admission, very little experience with the English language, Shangyang Fang has proceeded to craft a poetry collection of startling passion and exquisite sensitivity, leveraging a deep well of artistic knowledge and an ear for striking sonic arrangements to do so. Though he never quite arrives at sought-for resolutions to these inner and outer conflicts, it’s in the search that Fang locates his most fruitful materials, and from which he emerges as one of the strongest new voices in contemporary poetry. His success stems not only from the freshness of his images, the dynamism of his forms, and the subtlety of his language, but from his dedication to Poetry as a means of self-discovery—a dedication that, if you’re as skilled and as lucky as Fang, rewards the most terrible pain with the sublimest beauty.