seeing with Eye Level

In reading “Eye Level” by Jenny Xie, I really felt the heavy, slow-motion loneliness that radiated from many of the poems. The feeling of looking inward, of sitting on a train alone for a long time.

The form of “Melancholia” is very strange. Two voices seem to talk to each other, one asking italic question - “And then?”, “how so?” - and the other offering matter-of-fact answers - “Slow and fast, fast and slow” (52). The call and response feels so eerie. Is there really more than one speaker, or is this an internal dialogue of sorts? Phrases like “I pry open the crooked jaw” certainly don’t help ease tension. And then, the poem closes with “What points the finger? /All of my eye’s mistakes./ And what were they? / Level” (52). Not only does this poem include an allusion to the title of the work - which I always assume is somehow important or central if the author lifted it out of countless options for the title - this seems to hint at a central theme, the fault in seeing. “Visual Orders” is another poem that tackles the subject of sight. One stanza reads:

“The seductions of seeing ensure there is that which remains unseen. Evading / visibility in its own fortune. If to behold is to possess, to be looked upon is to / be fixed in another’s sight, static and immutable” (47).

Whenever something is visible, that means that there are also things that are invisible. To look at something is to “possess” it, so to be looked at… the speaker suggests that being looked at is not quite to be possessed, but to have a “static” perhaps reductive image of oneself permanently sealed away in someone else's sight. This idea is especially interesting to me coming from a writer, a poet. Reading this made me reconsider everything I had read so far, the paintings that Xie had painted in my head through her words. So many of her poems felt like diaries to me, like travelogue. From Phnom Penh, to the island of Corfu, to Manhattan’s Chinatown. I had felt transported to these places, but now I remember that I was only seeing through Xie’s eyes, through her point of view.

This passage also reminded me a bit of our closing remarks from last class. It’s complicated to select works because when you are seeing (or reading) one story, of course there are going to be stories unread, unseen. This theme was set up right from the beginning, with the Antonio Machado quote after the table of contents; “The eye you see is not / an eye because you see it; / it is an eye because it sees you”. The things we look at are not always just objects, oftentimes they look right back at us.

I very much enjoyed all of the strange details, moody descriptions in Xie’s writing.

“On the night train / cherries wrapped / in newspaper crackle red” (50). Or, from “Chinatown Diptych” , “there’s no logic to melons and spring onions exchanging hands” [...] “I lean into the throat of summer. / Perched above these streets with whom I share verbs and adjectives” (37). Eye Level gave me the vibe of a very seasoned seer. Someone comfortable with watching, traveling, noticing, and being alone.