Eye Level

"I'm sick of peering at the ego.
No, my ego's tired of peering at me-

It's she who awakens me into being.

So it goes: the seer mistaken for the seen" (53).

Such quietly powerful poetry that left me breathless, at times blinking from the brutal starkness, and rereading lines that hit me between my eyes, and my I's. There is an isolate beauty to Jenny Xie's work. A feeling of being alone while traveling even in the most busy and crowded of places. I had a feeling of sharing an unspoken, unnamed place with the author. One that encouraged silent introspection for me. One that turned my gaze inward; turned my eye to my I, both internally and externally. Xie asks us to consider both by beginning the book with a quote by Antonio Machado:

The eye you see is not

an eye because you see it;

it is an eye because it sees you.

I replaced each "eye" in the quote with "I" and found it an invitation to use Xie's poems to look inwardly at the self through the self's eyes, and to look at the many things that have interacted and touched the external self and been processed through the internal self and then projected outward. There are two very different images that exemplify this process, the first from the poem, "Origin Story,"

"I let everyone who entered my life enter through me" (41).

And the second from, "Tending,"

"And pink worms, out of sight,
                              with their dim impulse
                to let the dirt churn through them" (59).

The visual world outside of ourselves made up of people, places, smells, experiences, photographs...taken in and processed through us at "I" level. "Visual Orders" is one of the best examples of this. The imprint of the outer visual on the inner screen, passing through us as our experience of life, Xie also speaks of what is left behind and shapes us inwardly in the poem, "Hard-wired,"

"A misfortune can swell
for a long, long time in the mind.

While goodness shrinks
down to a hard shell" (63).

The poems about outward travel, like places to Greece, Cambodia and China balanced with the journeys inward to memory and past. The two diptychs about Cambodia connect the inner with the outer, "The zippered notes of bike engines enter/through an opening in my sleep" (7), and "The compass needle points to where nothing begins" (11).

The poems invite us inward through the experiences and processes of her own interiority. She asks us to go where the mind can go and see what the mind can see. We can travel with her overseas or back in time but the journey is our own, if we turn around on the streets of Phnom Penh, Xie, having led us there, will not be there. We will be alone with the experience her words touch within us.

"I grow adept at tunneling inward, a habit I have yet to let go of...
The physical body has its limits...The imagination can break through them" (28).

That is one of the things I loved best about the diptych's about Phnom Penh. The poem titled "Zuihitsu" (27-29) fit the definition perfectly, as I had to look it up, and because the title of the poem is actually a genre of poetry, according to Wikipedia, "Zuihitsu is a genre of Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author's surroundings. The name is derived from two Kanji meaning "at will" and "pen."" This added another layer of it for me because of the intentionality Xie used in constructing the poem.

I always love to look at form in poetry as well as content, and how one informs the other. There are once again poems that catch my eye because of not having any punctuation, like "Old Wives Tales on Which I Was Fed"(25) and "Epistle" (22), and also ones with commas but no periods, like "Alike, Yet Not Quite" (30) and "Lineage," (36), which actually uses capitalization in lieu of the periods. Again, this has the effect There are also poems that have a rift down the middle like, "Letters to Du Fu" (70) and "Exit, Eve" (60). "Melancholia" (52) I read out loud to myself as if both sincerely asking and answering the question asked.


"...The mind resides both inside and out.
It can think itself and think itself into existence" (1).