Loneliness From the Outside-In

This book cracked something open for me. I'm going to use this blog post to try and articulate it, but I have a feeling it may not want to be extracted with the pliers of language quite yet... so I'm going to let this be messy!

I'm fascinated by how Jenny Xie blurs the relationship between the outside and inside worlds: "The mind resides both inside and out," she writes in "Rootless." This statement comes to mean many things over the course of the collection, but what I'll latch onto for now is the way that the mind (and the self) is shaped by the world around it.

The Phnom Penh Diptychs illustrate this state so gorgeously. Wet Season in particular is a collage of the external world - a bustling city dizzied by capitalism, "new money," and tourism - with only the barest of clues as to the speaker's personal predicament. We learn that she writes ad copy and infer that she is not from this city, merely biding her time: "I'm still where I am, in conditions of low visibility. / Why not wait until I've waited why out?" There are some other words and phrases that linger in the mind like "lonesomeness," "I am transparent," "you could say moving here was a kind of hiding," but these are only the bones of the poem. The flesh of the poem is in the brief glimpses it offers into the outside world "And now that the daylight turns viscous, a new wife buckles limbs / with a foreign lover at the Himawari Hotel"; "Someone sweeps thick cockroaches from the floor, someone orders oysters on ice."

These glimpses into the chaotic and unstable world around the speaker form the flesh of the poem. They give it a body. And this body can't be so easily distinguished from the "I" of the speaker. This poem in particular has made me think about how we can tell the story of a self through the story of a city. (Call-back to Natalie Scenters-Zapico as well....)

One of the other stand-out poems for me was "Inwardly," particularly the second and third stanzas:

                                          We have language for what is within reach
                                                    but not the mutable form behind it.

                                                              Or else, why write.


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


What do we think we are looking at and how do we know that it is outside of ourselves? What is the interior of a gaze and how can we put language to it? I also keep thinking about the final lines from "Tending": "Water pulls off the blindfold. / Draws forth what's been planted." How can language serve as water that draws forth "the mutable form" that has already been planted?

But this is the aspect that most affected me about Xie's writing: how it is both so personal and so abstracted; so able to assume an intellectual distance and yet so intimate. Reading the interview with her, I'll admit I was a little disappointed that the experiences mentioned in her poems are not strictly autobiographical that she is instead crafting a very deliberate character (and set of characters). I had felt such an affinity with the speaker (who I naively believed to be the author) and her rootlessness & sense of displacement & longing, so to discover it was a fiction was initially a disappointment. But thinking about it more, I'm so admiring of how Xie manages to achieve both this intimacy and this distance that allows for a kind of intellectual rigor & wisdom. So much of the time I write in present-tense, first-person and focus so much purely on sensations and the shaping of experiences directly on my body, and I'm curious about how allowing more of this incisive and reflective narration might allow for multiple forms of knowing & meaning & voice to emerge in my writing.