Line and Light

The poet hoards nothing—acts with respect toward others
     and gains more, gives all to others and gains still more

This gnomic phrase from “Langkasuka,” a long poem on Malaysian themes in Jeffrey Yang’s collection Line and Light, is both a product of Yang’s immersion in East and South Asian cultural traditions and an ideal of collaboration to which his own work aspires. Line and Light consists of nine poems (including two pieces over 50 pages each) that use a larger, 7½" × 9" format to create a “memory space of shadows and light” out of words, photographs, art, and translation. This memory space is less personal reflection than collaborative art installation, with Yang employing lines of varying lengths to evoke how architecture, art works, and writings feel, like the dense cavernousness of Grand Central Terminal, the delicacy of Kazumi Tanaka’s tea-ink drawings, the witty knottiness of Jean Valentine’s poetry. A Yang poem emulates an art work’s phenomenological effects, while creating memory impressions of its own. As he says in “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home”

Who are you  ingrained in the cells?   Singing a song of
     the East   though
still in the land of the West    Encoding markers   
     making memory

The collagist’s desire to inventory reality sometimes leads Yang to present mere agglomerations of erudite research, as in “Langkasuka,” whose cultural overview of traditional Malaysian performing arts—“the granary of ten thousand things”—becomes diffuse as it ranges across stories, styles, and eras. When Yang focuses on a single artist or art work, he creates a version of ekphrasis with the wide-open sensation of a Light and Space or perceptual art piece, generously reimagining another artist’s vision through a dynamic sense of poetic syntax and line, as in the title poem’s incarnation of a Hudson River light installation by Melissa McGill:

Night valley emptiness, seawater tide, shored

Against wreckage, for a new form to live by

Runs the line, out, on and ahead, reaching toward, into

Now held by the light of the end, here