TE: You’ve spoken previously about how your love of language derives partly from its sonic and imagistic possibilities, and how experimentation allows writing to move within an innermost world of absence, memory and spirit following your mother’s passing. Reading your poetry, I find myself thinking of elegy as a reaching-toward to enclose the distance between the present and originary points of touch, intimacy or knowledge without ever fully arriving. Can you reflect on this conception of elegy and whether it informs your approach to writing?
GYG: The more I reflect on it, the more the writing of poetry feels like a Sisyphean task. Why, after one poem about the dead, is another poem still necessary? Why can’t one poem be the be-all and end-all? I can return to what I think is the same person, the same memory, or the same moment of touch, but something in what I thought I was returning to always remains unattainable. That inability to say everything, to make language coincide exactly with what one imagined, is both the failure and triumph of language. By creating certain possibilities, a poem invariably excludes others, which can only be pursued in another poem, and the cycle continues indefinitely.
I think a large part of what fuels my urge to write is the frustrating experience of being caught between a desire for transformation and a dissatisfaction with a finished poem’s inevitable concreteness. A poem, once set down on the page, becomes a finite form, while the experience or consciousness from which it emerged remains larger, more fluid, still becoming. Each poem is an approximation of the initial experience and that approximation changes both what’s remembered and the rememberer. Perhaps I’m less interested in elegy as an attempt to close distance than in the strange way that every act of approach reconfigures what is being approached (the self and the other).
Sometimes it seems that the closer I come to the lost person or moment, the more acutely aware I am of the distance that remains. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that distance and proximity are inseparable experiences, the way light and shadow arrive together. What keeps me coming back to writing elegy is perhaps a stubborn refusal of substitution or closure. I don’t want the poem to replace the dead, resolve the loss, or stabilise my relationship to absence. I want each poem to reimagine that relationship, to keep it from hardening into something finished.
TE: I’d love to know more about the seminal influences that shape your poetic practice. Whether that points towards the poets you return to, your rituals of writing, or other forms of creative encounters, what sustains your work, and how have these changed over time?
Would it be presumptuous to say that one is influenced by Li Bai, just as it might be presumptuous to claim Shakespeare as an influence? Like most children who went through primary school in China, I was made to commit hundreds of Tang poems to memory before I could even write in full sentences. I realise that makes it sound like torturous rote memorisation, but it wasn’t: my father read them to me after school, and classical poetry was everywhere around me, in television dramas and popular music. Most of them are very short poems, between four and eight lines. But their brevity belies their emotional and imaginative vastness. Take this remarkably short poem by Li Shangyin (who has remained one of my favourite poets and is better known for his more deftly allusive poems):
As evening comes, I feel ill at ease; I drive my carriage up to the ancient plateau. The sunset is boundlessly beautiful— only, it is nearing dusk.
Classical Chinese grammar often permits extraordinary omission: pronouns, articles, tense markers, even explicit grammatical relations between subjects and objects can be absent. Li Shangyin’s original is no exception. There is no “I” or “it,” or any explicit tense, so we don’t know with certainty whose perspective we occupy, or whether the event is unfolding or being recalled, whether it is ongoing or already over. One senses that the sunset isn’t merely sunset, but something larger – a life, an era, a nation once at its height. The ancient plateau isn’t just a physical place, but a vantage point – perhaps a state of being – one has spent a lifetime arriving at. The poem seems to suggest all of these and none of them at once. What I love most about classical Chinese poetry is its reticence – the refusal to explain or resolve relations between things – and its abiding trust in the poetic image. Complex thoughts and emotions are displaced into and distilled through a handful of images rather than developed through rhetorical arguments or explicit conclusions. Even as a child, I could feel the poems’ emotional logic and interpretive multiplicity and carried that aftertaste with me long after the poem itself had ended. I remember going on a school excursion in Beijing, climbing to the top of a hill and looking down at flaming maples in the sunset, and recalling Li Shangyin’s poem. His poem didn’t merely feel like part of that moment; the freedom and melancholy I felt on that school trip seemed to belong to the same emotional-imaginative world, as if my own time and being were not separate from the poet’s. That sense of recognition – of a poem saying so much by leaving so much unsaid, and of that unsaid inhabiting my life so powerfully – is something I’ve never quite experienced with English-language poets, not even Dickinson or Plath, whose work I loved especially intensely when I first encountered them.
I’ve never been particularly drawn to the more rational, discursive, argumentative strain of English poetry, nor have I truly loved the Romantics in the way I was perhaps expected to (having had to pretend to be passionate about them in the essays I wrote for a British Romantic poetry class in university). My first great loves in English, when I first truly started learning the language at 14, were William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas. I wish I could read ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ for the first time again and relive the sheer astonishment of arriving at lines like “Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, / Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea” and “And pluck till time and times are done, / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.” There is a certain recklessness in these poems, a willingness to let music, image and feeling outrun reason, that draws me back to them over and over again. Looking back, I think even then I must have constructed an ideal poem in mind: one with Thomas’s wildness and Yeats’s inevitability. Dickinson’s best work seems to exemplify the ideal poem I was looking for at that time – supple imagination, economy of language, compression, and leaps that seem both to defy conventional logic and create a logic of their own.
I used to be a much more high-strung writer. For a long time, I felt I had to write a poem, or at least a few fragments, every single day, almost as if to reassure myself that I was being productive, that I was still improving at this thing called poetry – even when I didn’t have the physical or mental energy to write. I’m much more at ease with the process now. I’m more willing to wait for the right state of mind, to live a little between periods of writing, and to give the mind space to breathe, wander and explore. Paradoxically, that loosening of discipline has opened the work to possibilities and directions I don’t think I could have forced into being. Receptivity, trust and allowing experience to accumulate now feel more vital to me than relentless production.
