This era’s most magnificent exhaustion
You Jump to Another Dream by Yan Jun
Vagabond, 2013
As I was flicking past burning with an incandescent lamp you turned off the switch Like youth will I not drop away?
Yan Jun’s poetry works through his experience of contemporary China by employing an aesthetic that is traditionally grounded in observation of the momentarily significant. He is captivated by the dazzle of a new consumerist culture only when that dazzle is spectral and fleeting. In an interview with Cristen Cornell (‘Lost in the Supermarket with Yan Jun’, Artspace China blog, University of Sydney) he decries the consumption culture’s take on art as a ‘production process’ which removes ’the possibility for uncertainty’ and what is ‘unknowable in individuals’. He comments on the inextricable logic of cultural monuments such as the Forbidden Palace being preserved while the traditional living areas, the Beijing hutongs, are pulled down, symptomatic of a daily life becoming ‘more and more deprived’.
This experimental sound artist and poet, who has performed in Beijing clubs for many years, is a master of juxtaposition of image, using his vision of the contemporary, of nature and of mood, in an exciting new way:
Life permits narcissism
and sings it out
using all of the speakers on the entire street
but it should allow me to be folded into the background
to bring in new autumn rotting like fire
(Spiritual Life)
Jan Yun prises apart contemporary modes of connection to bring nature in, as in ‘Material Life’:
There should be swallows in emails and there should be air
In ‘We’, spatial transpositioning overwrites what is seen as ‘fantasies of prosperity’ where ‘The whole world is shivering’, with a kind of Imagist trace hanging over, re-creating the world:
I will be you in the water deep blue economically developed you I’ve come from us become lightning-quick Now I can only remember the burning traces of blood on lips
The poet does some exciting work with flight and air, demonstrating his interest in, and mastery of form, whether it is in response to the contemporary in the same poem:
We are melting soon to be swallowed by honey We can fly We can issue an IPO can become the one grain of light at midnight
or as a variation on Buddhist imagery in ‘October 9th’:
Those weary angels are dying and so are we Every day ten thousand secretaries disappear inside our bodies
or as depiction of the purely formal in ‘September 12th’:
Inside the steamed corn a Bodhisattva is only a Bodhisattva white porcelain bowl black porcelain bowl water dripped on his forehead it seems light yellow a moving dune an ear of corn has how many kernels a sand dune has how much water becoming droplets
Yan Jun also creates a sense of continental space on a large canvass in ‘August 10th’,
In Norway seabirds return from the polar daylight shouting toward the bike in the early morning There’s no rain no words I suddenly wake up
but also draws us into an apprehension of the mood of landscape in ‘November 20th, Watching the Rain in Taipei.’
On occasion, in pieces designed for performance, the poet moves away to declarative but finely wrought poems reminiscent of Ginsberg as in ‘Against All Organised Deception’. The contemporary world and what Yan Jun refers to as ‘the supermarket of language’ resounds in You Jump to Another Dream as fleeting phenomena. I’ll conclude this brief survey of this volume, brought out in translation by Vagabond Press, with the poet’s preferred mode, as seen in the classical detachment and swift movement of ‘July 7th’:
These few days holding books wandering in the air and staring at it I watch how the crows hide themselves One afternoon the other day I watched the Lancang River take shape and slacken The fog broke free of the temple the courtyard My friends no matter what you’ve seen these days are no longer mine
