Monday, April 22, 2019
EYE LEVEL
There is a stark beauty to this book. The themes so existential. The poems so precise. The book itself gives ample room for each poem to breathe. So much is dealt with in these pages, emotions of self-contempt, fear, guilt, "fatty grief," depression, all in conversation with the questions of perspective, of how our view frames our lives, our mind and our body and our actions and how we interact in the world. The reflexivity of the self, observing the world, interpreting it, and in turn being observed and interpreted. "The mind resides both inside and out." (1) This reflexive process happens at different distances, through travel, where the poet explores the anonymous observations of a traveler, "trying on each passing town for size" complicated by the awareness of being observed by those who are not traveling. At a close proximity she also points to how in relationship one becomes aware of being observed as we closely observe another.
The theme of ddistance repeats throughout, replicated in the pit of a date, both expansive and hand held at the same time, "where nothing is far from here" (76). At what distance do can we perceive ourselves? At what distance can we know our place in the world?
Solitude Study, which explores this distance in relationships also brings in another interesting theme in the book about bodies, bringing up questions of what is held in the body, how much can it hold: "Yet I know we can hold more in us than we do/ because the body is without core" (26) in Zuihitsu she asserts that "That without snagging on a storyline, The body can/ only take loss for ninety seconds. The physical body has its limits, is what I heard. the imagination can break through them" (28). It makes me move to the work of Bessel Van Der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) Rothschild (The Body remembers) and Peter Levine (Waking the Tiger) who write about how our trauma is held in our body, intergenerationally, and that it is through creative re-imagining that healing comes.
"A misfortune can swell/ for a long time in the mind..
Evolutionarily, it makes sense." (63)
There is a reason for those wounds. They help us survive. They also limit our perception of reality and define how we move in the world.
Lastly I want to address palindromes.
It took me awhile to figure out why this book cover got to me. it is the feedback loop of palindromes in a common phrase so banal I have never noticed before. This realization helped me frame how I read this book which I feel I could come back to endlessly. The Palindromes show up in so many ways in this book, pointing to the commonality of the human experience, replicated from generation to generation. Through time where "Before and after is just another false binary" (27).
"My screen faces my face./ Today the clean square cells of this city? Contain so many faces./ Each brightened by a fear/ which makes them commonplace." (54) The Palindrome of humans in a city staring into screens reflecting their faces back, illuminated and immobilized by fear.
"I only have to shuck/off these other minds/ to reach the first mind" (72)
and
" I must believe there is no need to believe in thoughts" (66) -the palindrome of our mind clearing to reflect on itself thinking in meditation...
The Palindrome of the reflexive relationship that "I" has to "we" and the world around us.
and where do we find this eye level? This insistent theme of self reflection about perception of the self and its existence in the world?
First we find it in the poem Melancholia, framing mistakes of the narrators life.
we find it in again Ongoing, "She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,/ but they were lower, they were changing all the time." Both poems seem to be wrestling with depression and intergenerational trauma.
I love this book. I will have to return again to it to know more. For know it is a beautiful space to consider my own eye level.
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I'm so glad you brought up palindromes because I've been thinking about the mind reflecting on itself as a paradox, like two mirrors facing each other, but 'palindrome' seems much more applicable to thinking about poems, because it's all words reflecting each other. I like that you introduced both the palindrome of the title in how it's spelled, and the palindrome of concepts within lines of poetry, like the screen facing the face facing the screen.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how eye level keeps getting lower, or keeps moving down, the angles always changing. there are palindromes in Xie's work, but they are always shifting. The palindrome of a line exists only as you read it, you keep going down the page and your sight becomes de-centered from it, what was eye level is now somewhere out of reach. There's a constant need to re-calibrate your focus on a self and a world that is always in flux.
Palindromes What a great observation about not only the two words in the title, but the body of work itself. A lot of Xie's meaning in her poems is conveyed through or using structure. I am thinking of the widening spaces in the first few poems in section two that expand and contract, and of how the widening of the spaces in between the stanzas created a feeling of slow and quiet isolation for me. The poems that Xie does not use periods in but either uses commas or capital letters to indicate spaces and pauses, often times using either single lines or couplets, like the poem "Alike, But Not Quite," uses only commas or the word "and" to both connect and separate the images she is both comparing and contrasting. Each line of the poem can be read like a sort of palindrome with the comma or the "and" being the center turning point without altering the impact of the lines: "Thin fish bones arranged on the bone plate, a bracelet." can be read as "A bracelet, thin fish bones arranged on the bone plate." While the way the poem lands with us and the imagery might be altered, the comparison still emerges. I too am going to be rereading this book. One of my favorites for very different reasons.
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