Sailors watch the sky. Trackers touch the ground. Dreamers listen to birdsong. The rest of us need a very good compass to follow the path that leads from Keats’ poetry of radiant empathy to Jenny Zhang’s poetry of oral sex and “comefarts.” Getting lost is half the fun.
Zhang’s debut collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find is a bedeviled read. It helps to know as little as possible about the author. Forget about her year in France. You’ll be tempted to remember that prose poetry is a French form. Learn about her Chinese heritage—the book’s title comes from her mother trying to learn English—and off you go to Eastern traditions where information in a poem isn’t released but rather kept inside an exquisite birdcage. Not to dismiss her pigskins from Stanford and the University of Iowa, but it’s almost easier to pretend that Jenny Zhang just suddenly happened. And what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it time that we stop complaining that half the poets don’t write out of a tradition while the other half are derivative?
If poetry is a labyrinth then Icarus was the first poet. Zhang’s labyrinth is a place of orderly chaos. The entrances aren’t illuminated, but there’s a secret place in the middle. Zhang goes somewhere with these poems. She takes us to a familiar place in the strangest ways. Our daily clutter of love and hate crowds our identities. To really know ourselves, some culling is in order. To know our arms, wouldn’t we need to chop off our hands? To know an image, wouldn’t we chop off its metaphor, its narrative, its lyric? Desire is what remains, but passion is a riddle. Zhang is asking, What do I want? What do you want? How do life’s messy circumstances take away the answer?

…It will be good to forget the oneiric
tragedy which asks us to worry about the afterlife—here I am
as shaken as the bits of gravel that came to us from Asia. Here I am
afraid, convincing others to be the same and the self-same
guilt is as ugly as the imagination that created me, created you,
created my fear of you and my wanting of you.

This fragment is a very small space to stow life-altering words like tragedy, afterlife, fear, creation, and wanting. Like Lorca, Zhang’s lines are wreathed in omens. Her voice is Desdemona’s speaking directly to us, apart from the drama unfolding on the stage, so that her gush, and the action framing her “aside” propel the conflict. Detachment is the close cousin of dismemberment. Another way Zhang detaches is the absurd way she titles her poems. I think many writers title their poems in ways that make them easily retrievable from their desktop. Zhang’s titles are like brief hand-written notes. The poem referenced above is titled “Relish This Moment. Hope It Will Comfort on a Rainy Day.” Other titles include “Seriously, Unless You’re Chinese, I want You to Fuck,” “The Worst Day, Now I’m Going to Kick Something,” and “Being Jealous for the First Time Today Since I Woke Up One Millisecond Ago.”
While the Geoff Dyers and Rick Moodies of the world titillate themselves over the blurring of fiction and nonfiction, Zhang blurs the line between poetry and theater. For her, theater is to poetry what nonfiction is to fiction. Her imitation of life is beautiful in its simplicity, the way a “stick figure” might compare to Brueghel. Her “confessions” are so matter of fact they can hardly be called confessions. These are personal poems where the “I” is an indefinite, larger-than-life presence. In “I Saw A Skulk,” the narrator sets the scene:: “This was back when I lived on a mountaintop/ It looked like a cone.” Zhang riffs on her associations—the balancing act, turning elements into water, changing names, alchemy, her brother wanting to be called “Sixty cents!” (When I bought a single carrot I thought of him)—and crawls back into the heart of the poem:

I walked into a room full of bromides
They were interested in me and I thought
Of course you’d be
They were shown a slideshow of a performance
of a scripted exaggeration of a theatrical interpretation
of my life and who I used to be

The toxic, fuming, reddish briny water of an audience (bromine salt) claps for her as she tells the story of living with her father on the mountaintop and meeting “You” at the bottom. Zhang’s subject-verb-direct object stanzas are balanced with stormy imagistic encounters that draw down the “story” into final lines and couplets of jaded, lonely remorse. “Skulk” ends with a blaring trumpet followed by a down beat: “We forge a history/ later, in meeting new friends, I forget all of this.” By undermining the drama, Zhang steps out of character but doesn’t quite look us in the eye. Her restraint draws the reader closer instead of pushing back with a marching band waltz.
Sometimes the story—the middle—is missing, and its absence is emphasized with repetition as if Zhang has shaken some pepper over an object and then removed it, leaving its spicy outline. In “Funnyshambles,”

Zhang later makes a connection between her good ear and her grandmother’s bad ear. Whence comes poetry, from the good or the bad? The poem spirals upward and outward while its speaker focuses tighter on the shot: “we are the stalks of life/ that bisect our vision on occasion/ and it’s like I see the top of you/ and the bottom of you/ and the missing middle is just a sunbeam/ wrapped around me like a water hole.”
The three sections of Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, “Motherlands,” “New York,” and “La France” vary more or less between poems of personal genesis, relationship portraits and the absurd. “Gluing Sprinkles on My Handbags” is full of “Hmmms.” These are the sprinkles, the confetti, a thousand question marks, except that they shower about in an expected ticker-tape parade during oral sex: “In the doorway you lick my face and arms and/ both of us are unimpressed by my cunt but you slobber over it and/ I think ? ? for a quick moment you are ? ?”
Jenny Zhang is a Romantic poet but to see her connection with Keats we have to dial back nature and beauty. Zhang's is not the Garden of Eden or some pastoral vision (although she has several shepherds in here). Nature is that small piece of gravel shook loose and sailing around the planet. Nature is not Time. It is the briefest moment. It has no middle. Blink and you'll miss it. Have polite speech and you'll miss it. Have a messy life that disguises your true yearnings and you'll miss it. And Beauty? Some say it's in the eye of the beholder. Put on your blindfold. Jenny Zhang is saying, Close your eyes and you will see everything.

© Barrett Warner

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