Wendy Xu’s previous collection, Phrasis (winner of Fence Books’s Ottoline Prize in 2016), was preoccupied with its own acts of poetic saying. “Phrasis,” Xu noted in an interview, is intended to invoke “half of the word ‘ekphrasis,’” thereby severing her poetry from the task of representing externalities.[1] In her new volume, The Past (Wesleyan UP 2021), Xu adapts her concern with the limits of lyrical representation to tell the story of her family’s immigration to the US from China, her navigation of a racist and racializing American culture, and her complex relation to nationhood and heritage. Xu’s poems present fragments of memory that seem to swirl around in what she calls, alluding to the false idyll of American whiteness, “the snow-globe of the past” (95). It’s this fragmentation that provides the interstitial openings in which Xu is able to conceive a space not limited by the historical conditions that determine her self-knowing. “I am not writing to photograph the past,” she contends in “Why Write,” “I am writing to sit inside the pauses of Uncle’s sentences, the commas of the dead” (80).
The dead do punctuate Xu’s poetry. In 1989, Xu’s family left China for the United States, just three days before the government massacred prodemocracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. She grew up in upstate New York and small-town Iowa. Her mother worked in a garment factory. Her father found a job with an agricultural subsidiary of DuPont, a fact Xu acknowledges while pointing to the company’s role in developing chemical weapons used in World War II. Xu studied for her BA at the University of Iowa, switching her major from business to English, before obtaining an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has simultaneously defied and fulfilled the kinds of expectations often imposed on first-generation Chinese Americans, publishing three full-length books of poetry and winning several awards before the age of thirty-five. The Past excavates Xu’s mixed feelings about her own sense of filial obligation, immigrant ambition, and ties to a historically privileged mode of autobiographical and confessional lyricism. Elegizing her melancholic attachment to and distantiation from a previous generation and its lost homeland, the collection asks: How can one hold onto revoked origins without becoming mired in them? How is it possible to retain connection to a past that has been filtered through imperfect memory and mediated by the distortions of an oppressive literary tradition and alienating society?
One answer is that Xu’s poetry makes itself about the very fraught process of personal and political identification in linguistic form. Naming, as Xu has commented, “is the way in which the government has been trying to identify me, or assimilate me, or erase me and document me in different ways my whole life.”[2] In “Names of the River,” Xu narrates an excursion involving her failure to describe a meaningful response to the sight of China’s iconic Yangtze:
I did wrong by all ideas of nation, haunted
by the after-
life of speech, public acts wagging
their dutiful tails
I sat down
in the crosswinds of a feeling, too wild
to write it out how the velcro parts
of me unstuck themselves
But do you too, alone, ever
feel incompetent? If in one hand holding
a wet tissue for dignity
when the Yangtze view
leaves you cold?
Somewhere in America a white boss
in a dandelion dress-shirt is raising
his voice again
A quick pivot to the page where
I stare down the verbs and am afraid
to make a recitation of myself—
am I unimitable, or, is this just another feeling?
(18)
Into this scene of emotional impasse, Xu interjects a tragic analogue for the experience of broken connection to her birthplace: “Somewhere in America a white boss / in a dandelion dress-shirt is raising / his voice again.” In the moment of failed identification with her homeland, that is, Xu hears the reprimand of a white supervisor; her error—failing to perform the expected Asian identity in her poetry—becomes doubled by a rebuke in the sphere of American professionalism. The complex feelings of shame and anger conjured by such parallel exclusions from both Chinese and American culture form one of the tributaries of Xu’s approach-avoidance behavior when it comes to verbal self-representation. “I stare down the verbs and am afraid / to make a recitation of myself,” the poem continues. But her blocked encounter with the Yangtze and the lost possibility of naming it also lead to an engagement with extratextual ongoingness and unwritten potential. A breakdown in the process of identification and representation, manifesting at the level of Xu’s frequently disjunctive form, seems to precipitate her understanding of the self as a flow of provisional fragments, a riverine processuality. Xu concludes “Names of the River” with a list of monikers that she would have recorded on the day in question if things had been different: “I would have made a record of everything / there flowing / from the mouth of the river: / ‘The Yellow and Deep Water’ / ‘The Big Mouth’ / ‘The Five Stars’ / ‘The Tao’ // One reminding me now of the next, heavier / than foreign air, / their yellow names soaking the page” (19–20). By reflecting on what cannot be or has not been stated, Xu’s language becomes inundated with a kind of fluidifying negativity. Negation, Xu once remarked, is something with which she hopes to always remain fascinated: “to say that something is, or for something to be, is fixed and determined. To not be leaves space open for everything that is still possible…for play and negotiation.”[3]
Befitting her interest in a productive kind of negation, much of Xu’s poetry is beautifully unsettling. There are frequent jump cuts, sudden shifts in time and place. Pronouns and other deictics remain ambiguous. Much is left out. Logics that would explain the sequencing of thoughts and images are often withheld (though in many places they are available for discovery, as above). Objects and concepts get personified or animated with synesthetic associations whose implications can be difficult to parse. Then there’s Xu’s penchant for non sequitur, anacoluthon (unexpected or ungrammatical turns in sentences), and other swings in rhetorical register. Consider the wonderfully disorienting “After Is Not Return”:
Outside the old house,
concrete aging
away from me: three men
in green jackets, dark hair
patching a sidewalk
Set the scene and do not
yet undo it (let it move
in the direction
of time: silence
to sight,
to inevitable
speech
to mood)
How many fathers past
and ambitious sons?
A blue parakeet singing
from the neighbor’s
gridded roof (escaped
from a cage at market)
Human words
move me towards
confession (memory a slim
blade slipping
the apple)
cuts towards unintended
flesh instead
The air was full of listening wires
buzzing for names
When I was once a private person
and wish
to be again (says the poem…
(35–36)
Here, as elsewhere in The Past, Xu’s writing is at once intimately clear and blurry, like memory is with its limited depth of field. And, like memory, her language becomes by turns photographic and exquisitely surreal. Always draped across her lines with precision, Xu’s sentences pivot from the concrete to the abstract, the descriptive to the editorial, and the symbolic to the purely sensory. Everyday images get tweaked with minute strangenesses. Sidewalk slabs fronting the “old house” appear as “concrete aging / away from me,” while later, “memory” is “a slim / blade slipping / the apple.”
While Xu interacts complexly with remembered histories, The Past is particularly concerned with intergenerational differences, with “the chasms between different generations of Chinese-American immigrants.”[4] Figuring the domestic as always couched in the political, her volume presents many intimate depictions of the life shared by Xu and her family. In “A Sound Not Unlike a Bell,” she describes a phone call with her father: “Last night on the phone, bored to death while Dad live-translates my new poems into Chinese / He probes the meaning behind phrases until I think ‘You just don’t get it’ / Later he explains to me the metrics of Chinese classical verse and I think ‘I just don’t get it,’ and we laugh together” (11). In “A Poem on My Mother’s Birthday,” she recounts sharing celebratory cake with her mom under the pall cast by her uncle’s passing: “We eat exchanging soft permission to touch the future, mysterious diurnal flower of existence, its irresistible center” (65). Later Xu writes in the pivotal “Notes for an Opening” that to honor her mother, she must “‘be twice as good as them to be taken half as seriously’” (96). Her book is partly an effort to recognize the ways her life and writing have been made possible by the struggles and triumphs of a prior generation. Here, however, Xu exhibits a significant cognitive dissonance with regard to filial conventions, one that also carries over into her experience of the inheritances of the lyric genre. “It is beautiful to please one’s parents,” she acknowledges, “Though somewhere it is written that piety is neither interesting nor progressive” (11).
Xu’s tendency to present what she describes in “Description, Repetition” as disjointed “granular thought,” coupled with her capacity for gorgeously estranging the familiar, both reflects and bolsters what we could call her honest ambivalence about the project of lyric autobiography (37). The Past is peppered with negative—or at least hesitant—allusions to lyrical conventions. “Coming to America,” the first poem in the book, opens with metatextual narration of the generic command that the poet “Speak first of the flooded interior,” before going on to reference desire for “further inquiry of the lyric self” (1). In “Writing Home,” Xu reports that “These days / the lyric’s sentiment floats / away from me, like a river someone / forgets to bless” (17). Xu isn’t the first poet to blend a tenuous interest in confessional lyricism with the formal techniques and poststructuralist theories often associated with the Language poetry movement of the seventies and eighties.[5] But what stands out about Xu’s writing is the way it sits so squarely in the middle of what one influential anthology called this intersection “where lyric meets Language.”[6] Add to this the critical intelligence with which Xu performatively maps an experimental will to disrupt the spatialized temporality of lyric expression—the ways conventional lyricism implies the uncovering of a self located beneath and before language—onto the problem of representing the immigrant and personal past in her writing. It’s by narrating this process that Xu transforms the space she carves out between realism and experimentalism into one in which the problematics of identification can play out in a particularly generative and moving fashion.
Alongside many poems that treat the difficulties of making a record of personal and familial history, The Past also uses its experimental formal conceits to remember those who have been wiped from historical memory. In this respect, Xu joins contemporary poets like Solmaz Sharif and Layli Long Soldier who have linked quotidian experiences of gendered and racializing erasure to the physical and legal nullification perpetrated by the United States against both its residents and foreign nationals. Whereas Sharif and Long Soldier employ their destabilizing of linguistic reference to respond to the abuses of US empire, Xu’s additional object of critique in The Past is the Chinese government’s surveillance of its citizens and censorship of history. In a central sequence called “Tiananmen Sonnets,” Xu encodes into her lineation a numerical allusion to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre (June 4, 1989), which is routinely detected and scrubbed from the internet by Chinese government algorithms. The “Tiananmen Sonnets” are some of the most intricate and allusive poems in the book. Here the idea that experimental poetry’s ambiguity—its saying by not saying—could be a means of evading domination takes on a more literal meaning in Xu’s poetry.
Xu has commented on her turn to writing about identity and immigration that the catharsis it provides is in part due to her long-standing reluctance to take up these themes in her writing. As an undergraduate, she was once encouraged by a white professor to make her work more readily about her ethnic identity, an exhortation that had the opposite effect. “Instead,” Xu explains, “for so many years afterwards, I wrote furiously away from anything that would mark me as racially or culturally Other in my poems. I was young and I took it as a challenge to write a poem so good and ‘universally’ legible that no comments would be necessary, least of all any about it needing to be more Chinese.” This doesn’t mean that Xu has come to identify uncomplicatedly with Chinese heritage in her poetry. “Now,” she explains,
I’m writing immigrant Chinese-American poems because I feel like it, and sometimes it hurts and sometimes it heals. The old fear is still there, that I’ve fulfilled somebody’s expectations of me, that I’m less-than because my flowers are a little more Chinese these days. That my white readers see me most clearly when I autopsy my immigrant pain on the page![7]
If Xu’s work is powerful, it’s because of the ways she so eloquently articulates this problem of wanting to honor one’s past without being reduced to it, a problem she links to debates about poetic genre while gesturing beyond them to the higher-stakes issues of surveillance, citizenship, cultural memory, and diaspora. Xu thereby deftly navigates a particularly tricky double bind of representation that has been at the heart of recent critiques of both confessionalism and experimental verse—a larger dynamic of the public sphere wherein minoritized writers must either negate their differences or risk being negated by rhetorics of invalidation. In so doing, Xu refuses the either/or logic that culture imposes on her, realizing in The Past a book that looks to the future as much as to history.
Notes:
[1] Wendy Xu, “Wendy Xu: ‘Poetry Validates the Emotional Realness of the Imaginary,’” interview by Kaveh Akbar, Divedapper, May 2, 2016, http://www.divedapper.com/ interview/wendy-xu/.
[2] Xu, “‘Poetry Validates.’”
[3] Xu, “‘Poetry Validates.’”
[4] Xu, “‘Poetry Validates.’”
[5] One could find a pre-Language precursor to Xu’s sociologically attuned love-hate affair with lyric in Amiri Baraka’s first two poetry volumes, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964).
[6] Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, eds., American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
[7] Wendy Xu, “Wendy Xu on the Impossible Complexity of Immigrant Love: Peter Mishler in Conversation with the Author of Phrasis,” interview by Peter Mishler, Lit Hub, March 27, 2018, https://lithub.com/wendy-xu-on-the-impossible-complexity- of-immigrant-love/.