Review: Burying the Mountain by Shangyang Fang
Setting my eyes on Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) was a strangely familiar experience. Having had earlier encounters with Fang’s work, the cover image of his debut collection perfectly materialized the ekphrastic soul I had sensed beneath his poems. Delicately composed and balanced, they are a series of ink-wash mountains in various subdued greens—inlaid with dashes of pale pinks—set in stark relief against a grey blankness. Pay closer attention, and the mountains begin to resemble qualities of mist. At moments, the indefinite and impressionistic borders seem to double into clouds—or dissolve into the negative space around it—even as it asserts a formidable presence. This image is an ideal portal into Fang’s collection: it prepares us to enter a world of bewildering liminalities; where the speaker’s (meta)physical and metaphorical navigations into self, exile, history, objecthood, and desire are under constant complication, negation, and rearticulation.
Burying the Mountain is divided into four sections, with each section title taking a respective line from Du Fu’s poem “Deep Winter.” Refusing easy translation into the legibility of the English syntax, Fang instead opts to metaphrase each of the Mandarin characters (e.g., Blossom—Leaf—Abide—Heaven—Volition). In doing so, Fang relinquishes a straightforward and closed semantic circuit in favor of evoking oscillating, open fields of meaning. This translatory choice not only better mimics the uniquely rich features of Mandarin—the pronounced capacity for myriad matrices of meanings to be formed through contextual interactions between individual characters—but also underwrites the admirable stance of a writer who seeks to honor the overlooked ambivalences of thought and affect.
Fang’s attempts to give form to indefinable thresholds of experience is investigated further in poems such as “轰隆隆 Is the Sound of Thunder,” wherein the speaker revels in an alternative sonic space through the hybridity of onomatopoeic Mandarin characters woven into English text. Not only are the borders between differing language systems opened and troubled, but we are invited to consider how modes of perception can be reconfigured through this linguistic collision and interaction. As the speaker asks: “If the river could speak, would the mountain understand its utterance (?)” Prefiguring much of Fang’s broader preoccupations throughout the collection, there is a relentless search for a new, more expansive subjectivity by seeking and constructing oneself into a locus of unsettledness through language—an impulse which is illuminated in the poem’s closing lines, “But what is the ant’s onomatopoeia for the thunder…What is the petal’s onomatopoeia for the wind…Still, we keep hearing, hearing…”
The thresholds and liminalities to which Fang is so keenly attuned to also becomes a source of tragic haunting in the collection. In “Argument of Situations,” Fang stages an intimate scene between a speaker and their beloved:
I was thinking, while making love, this is beautiful—this
fine craftsmanship of his skin, the texture of wintry river.
I pinched him, three inches above his coccyx, so that he knew
I was still here, still in an argument with Fan Kuan’s
inkwash painting where an old man, a white-gowned literatus,
dissolves into the landscape as a plastic bag into cloud.
Here, intimate proximity reveals the very site of irredeemable distance between people. Even as the speaker “pinch[es]” the formally distant “craftsmanship of his skin,” this physical act of attempted bridging “dissolves…as a plastic bag” into the non-sequitur of a Song dynasty painting. Through austere metaphorical swerves—“The coastline of his spine, the alpine / of his cheekbone…periphery of skin, this cold, palpable remoteness / I held”—and a rootless chiastic logic—“The man must be lonely, I said. No the mountain / is never lonely. Burying my forehead inside his shoulder / blades, the mountain is making itself a man.”—Fang renders with aesthetic elegance a speaker who continually seeks, but fails, to trek the distances of “this untranslatable / world”, and in that failure, finds a solitude in which to persist—“a man made of brushstrokes / moving in a crowd of brushstrokes. The man walks / inside himself.”
Explorations of distance and desire open into broader settings beyond the intimate. In “Calligraphy” or “Time the Stone Makes an Effort to Flower,” there is a decidedly more elegiac cast, with direct addresses to dead beloveds who “boarded the forgetful boat too early,” as the speaker yearns to be touched again by “finger bones…synthesized with stems / of chrysanthemums…burning / for the two worlds to meet.” In other poems, such as “If You Talk about Sadness, Fugue,” the speaker re-situates themselves amongst broader histories of displacements—using difficult figures such as Celan, Trakl, and Russian Silver Age poets as nodal points—to re-examine contemporary tensions of Chinese émigré life and its exilic conditions.
Yet, despite all the varied displacements to the speaker’s sense of self, the displacement experienced because of their position of queerness is among the most devastating. In the poem “Satyr’s Flute,” what begins as a scene of “skinning a goat’s penis to prepare / the dish my mother had taught me” soon widens into a more serious reflection:
The thought of a penis, being nothing otherwise,
is not a penis. How my mother once saw
me with a boy. How she said, no. The n preceding
the choir of the o is like a castration
that severed me from her. O, am I anyway the penis
my mother once lost?...
In tersely enjambed and careful syntactical phrasing, there is a startling precision and rigor to how the speaker contours the transgressions against their sexual identity. More than mere confessionalism however, there is a clear sense of a cerebral deftness and earnest interior interrogation which guards against affective melodrama:
…The penis in my hand
is thick and emblematic, something I cannot
fully fathom. A device without the service
of its mind, how does that work?
How, in heaven’s name, can a mind bear to lose a part
of its form and stomach the loss as a thought?
In searching for an urgent position to speak amongst this state of troubled identity and exile, Fang turns to his artistic lineages as a North Star. Whether in “Nude Descending a Staircase” where he employs Duchamp’s painting as an illuminating “mirror” to “decod[e]” one’s own “small body / whose desire is not by nature’s strict design”, or in “Serenade Behind a Floating Stage” where the “odd, phonetic transcription” of the Surangama Sutra is used to discover a “power…in the sonance…the path of Q,” Fang seamlessly traverses the ekphrastic, imaginative, and literal to architect a novel space of visible alterity against the constant threat of erasure. Rather than just writing about queer desire as a subject matter, the poet actively queers desire through the agential force granted by his aesthetic principles and heritages, and in doing so, not merely contends with the precarity of his own existence but is able step into his “bruise / that is an open door” where it is “frightening to be alive with a song in you.”
Permeating this collection is also a deeply metaphysical and meditative ethos: an interest in not merely documenting the world, but also of attuning into what shimmers elusively behind the material landscape, and the transformations which occur in that encounter. In “Utterance of an Unfolding Fan,” a blinding display of otherwise imperceptible significances and relations is momentarily revealed in the mundane instance of a fan being open and closed:
….a fan is opened
by time : the orchid drawn out
of the sheath forges into a sword
cutting streamlines of water :
the fan is closed : plums fall, crickets
weave shattered scales : mayflieslive for descendants…
As with the cover image and section titles, there is a dissolution between both literal and metaphoric junctures. Fang transports us into an endlessly deferred threshold, not only imagistically, but also by enacting this grammatically. The poem unravels as a singular ‘sentence’ with no definitive breaks, woven together by colons—resembling visual embodiments of openings through which wind or breath might move—which pairs clauses together in a linguistically interstitial manner to trace the ineffable spillages coursing beneath and between seemingly material and normative moments of perception.
The keenness of Fang’s mind is fully displayed in the collection’s longest poem “A Difficult Apple,” whereby the speaker meditates on an apple until it is stretched to its historical, political, aesthetic, and epistemological limits. At once, a seemingly unimpressive object can become “with its skin red as a flag…a communist apple” or a “jailed soul” housing “four kernels…Four artists in Siberia’s concentrations camps” while simultaneously serving as “the center of the world” to demarcate the limits of human subjectivity—and later, a means of articulating queer desire by “conversing through the dark ignorant language of fruits.” At the poem’s close, there is an entrustment to the inscrutable ontologies of existence: “The apple before me / never attempts to convince me / it is an apple.” It is Fang’s inherent distrust of any semblance of authority, stability, and hierarchy in the human project for knowledge, which ultimately earns my trust as a reader.
Perhaps what is most impressive about the meditative and metaphysical tenor in Fang’s writing is that it remains firmly situated in the realm of poetry—adeptly avoiding the trappings of formless pseudo-philosophical musing or a lifeless over-intellectualization of subject matters. At the core of this collection is a poet who is deeply in love with language and the strangeness afforded by its imaginative force. Earnest to William Carlos Williams’ maxim of “no ideas but in things,” Fang transports and emplaces us into the “wounded openness of poetry,” where the world of ideas is viscerally alive and sinewed into lush forms. Thoughts swerve with the sensuousness of a “fish thrash[ing] like a lamb” or bloom from “absent space” like “springtime…azaleas tossing their enormous, roping genitals.” Fang shows us a mode of reasoning which begins as much in the body as it does in the mind—dissolving the reductive binaries of Cartesian dualism—and unifying the rich discordances of the being into a rounded, embodied, processual mode of thinking and perceiving.
In Burying the Mountain, we are shown that each distance, threshold, or suspension between our many worlds is not a pure void, but ultimately another world replete with its own refuges and abundances. With lapidary grace, Fang is a poet who teeters comfortably between precipices, who understands that even if “in this world of red dust…you [cannot] know [if] you are / seeing the darkness rather than being / blindfolded”, it is enough to keep your eyes attentive and open, to keep trekking boldly into the irreconcilable. Or, as Fang declares in “Thin Air”: “the border / is the beauty we live for. Is closest to our ruin.”
