The Force of Matter
Alex Braslavsky
March 2023
The Force of Matter in the Poems of Shangyang Fang
An interview. A conversation.
Alex Braslavsky: Shangyang, thank you for joining me.
Shangyang Fang: Likewise. Thank you for inviting me for a chat!
A: My first question pertains to your scientific background. I note that you that you studied civil engineering, and I was wondering how your engineering background has affected your poetic work?
S: Studying engineering was a bit of a rice cooker, and I was that strand of steam trying to escape. The rift between vocation and avocation was intense for me at that time I was studying engineering. So, I think in that way, being unhappy as a prospective engineer forced me to pursue poetry more vehemently.
On the other hand, science instructed me to think about literature and poetry in a structural way. I was a sentimental person, easily lost in pretty sentences and meanings that rely on surface-level expression. I studied structural engineering and construction management in college, which taught me not only look at things, but the invisible lines and knots that connect them. So, my early process of composing a poem was no different than assembling an Ikea table. I thought, okay, the musicality, metaphor, imagery, and this sad, unnamable feeling are nice perks, but how can I build a world to contain them using an invented logic in poetry. Logic was an important lesson. Not the logic of this reality, but the kind of logic that allows the poem to breathe. My experience with engineering took me away from self-indulgence early on. Once I got myself out of the way, I felt I started writing. So, I am grateful for that, but, well, all the money I spent on tuition did for the most part go down the drain.
A: Yours was a very interesting turn to take, from engineering to poetry. Because I’ve met a lot of poets our age, who’ve started out really caring a lot about their craft, but then turned around and become engineers or decided to work for hedge funds or decided to study computer science and pursue more lucrative careers. And I just find it very interesting that you’ve had the opposite transformation.
S: That is a real thing. Just recently, I was talking to my artist friend, previously an electric computer engineering major, and we were joking that maybe we should just go to a bootcamp or get a master’s degree in computer science, so we can make more money in the big corporate world! Well, I think the reason that I went so fearlessly into poetry was because I was too young. I was not practical. I committed too much of me to passion. But then I think if I were given a second chance, I would probably choose the same path. I would still choose poetry. I don’t know if it’s because I remain too young too naïve, or I just love poetry too much.
A: It seems like you’ve been doing okay for yourself. That’s probably an understatement.
S: I’ve been lucky. I can’t complain, but it’s still hard. Especially as an international in the U.S.
A: I was wondering about what it’s like being an international and teaching as a Professor of English at Whitman College. I know English is a non-native language for you. It’s very interesting to me, what is teaching poetry in your second language like? Does teaching have an influence on your poetry?
S: Teaching is relatively new to me. I’ve had some great mentors in my life who have kindled my desire to be a teacher. I just think it’s a marvelous thing to have a community where you can talk about poetry. It’s very rare. But it is also strange to teach in the English Department when English is my second language. Especially when certain students see a professor speaking with a noticeable accent, unconsciously confusing tenses, and with a deceivingly youthful look, I am immediately met with opposition. Certain opposition is a good thing; it allows space for dialectic arguments, and as a result we break stereotypes, break boundaries. I don’t like my students agreeing with me all the time. I like the position of doubt and am accustomed to the position of being doubted. Not always a desirable situation, but that too keeps me trying.
I am not sure of how teaching influences my poetry, because so far, I have no time to write. It does affect my life. Thinking and talking about poetry becomes a way to live. I think of a past teacher of mine, Louise Glück, who’s almost 80 now. Whenever she talks about poetry, her fingers tremble with passion as she translates a world of uncharted vision in front of me and that passion is contagious. Seeing that, I thought, wow, you can do that for a lifetime! That intensity and dedication to art, unlike my tuition, never goes down the drain.
A: On the topic of fingers trembling before the world of poetry, I was wondering if you could speak to that special moment when you’re in a workshop and your instructor is laying wisdom upon everyone in the room. Do you ever see your teachers as prophets? Do you feel that poetry is a spiritual art for you? And I’m wondering about your religious and your spiritual background. I suppose I ask because I took a devotional poetry workshop for the first time this year and I work with a lot of poets at the Harvard Divinity School. So this question is often on my mind, where how do we extricate spirituality from poetry? Or can they be extricated from one another at all?
S: “Spirituality!” That’s a word I haven’t heard for a long time. Good to know it still exists. It seems most of us nowadays are so fixated by the idea of materialism and materiality that they barely look inside or beyond unless they’re forced to, meaning when crisis occurs to them or around them. I am not particularly spiritual in a way that people are adamant about astrology, for instance. Though when I was young, I self-studied The Book of Change extensively and practiced divination. Soon I realized I was with a complex I could not solve. I embrace the unknown, but I don’t want to be annihilated by the unknown, not now. Now, Poetry is my religion. There were times, as a teenager, I begged the Muse to visit me. At night, I would turn off the lights in my room, kneel in a completely dark room with my head on the floor and pray for the muse to come. It was a little ritual. A ritual I made to convince myself I must continue. I am not religious, but I do investigate religious texts a lot, especially Buddhism, because my mother is a Buddhist, and my best friend too. When I approach those sutras, I read them as philosophical texts, learning their ways to decipher our conscious existences in this reality, their use of language to form a revelation and then destruct it. And that influences my work.
I see my teachers as good humans with great minds and kind hearts, not prophets. And I personally don’t read poetry as spiritual. Writing a poem is a labor that furrows the mind. To me, it’s more material. You go to the grocery, you do gardening, you buy flight tickets with an app, then you write down a line or two and most likely delete it a day after. Every poem is a lived experience and an experience to be lived by the reader. But whether it is material or spiritual, it doesn’t matter to me that much.
Let me look up the word “spirituality.” I feel confused. The more I talk about the word, the more I feel I am losing the grip of it. So, here’s what it says online:
“…. referring to a religious process of re-formation which aims to recover the original shape of man”, oriented at “the image of God.” Wow, that’s interesting, though I have no idea what “the image of God” is and that definition is too Judeo-Christian. Is there a a sense of lost innocence in spirituality, a sense of return to oneself, or of becoming? With my associative mind, I think of the self, and the opposite of the self; I think of the etymological meaning of the word “ecstasy” and poems by Adélia Prado and Marina Tsvetaeva that manifest that word. Perhaps being spiritual makes one a better poet? I just don’t know.
A: At the beginning of your response, you mentioned materialism as a counterpoint to spirituality, and how it is a concern for poets these days and this is very interesting because I did write another question about how I see there being what I called a “material religion” in your poetry. I am thinking of the poems “A Difficult Apple” and “Whether a Marble Confirms its Feeling of the Field” how you take these centerpiece objects like the apple and the marble, and you allow these inanimate beings to speak and possess the page. It makes me think of this essay called “The Force of Things, Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter” by Jane Bennett. I don’t know if you’ve read it but allow me to read the abstract of this essay.
S: Please.
A: “This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfulness and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of “thing power.” Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of ecological belief, the logical applications of thing-power.”
You’re nodding. Yes, I see a lot of “thing power” in your work. And I know that in this era, we see a lot of posthumanist tendencies in poetry and an urge among certain poets to empower objects in the Anthropocene and try and see what transpires out of not focusing on the human and allowing objects to take the stage. I am thinking now of Matthea Harvey’s collection, which I just finished reading, Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.
I also recently watched the Marcel the Shell movie. It’s a documentary spoof about a shell who has a story to tell. I feel very strongly that you’re creating these still life pieces along those lines and in some of your poems these objects are possessed, emotive, animate, vivified beings. I see the apple and the marble as some in a series of icons or even idols in your work. I’m wondering, do you believe in thing power? Could you possibly speak to the meaning of attracting materiality in your work?
S: That’s a profound question. I also love that book by Matthea Harvey. Well, I was not aware of the literary community or the workshop culture before I started my MFA. Before that, I was in engineering school, learning how to structure bridges, but then in effect, a poetry workshop builds invisible bridges between people so may be the same thing. Anyway, one word from workshop that confounded me for a while and people loved to use was “objectification.” And I could not understand that word at first because what that word means is: by objectifying someone you reduce that person to a mere object. What’s wrong with being an object? We are the object; we are the other. What’s wrong is not empathizing with the object. We are conceding to the idea that a hierarchy of human beings as better than objects. Human-centric, o well, precious humanity. That justifies our destruction of nature, of the environment. And to “protect the environment,” “save the planet,” well, it’s really only us being concerned about saving humankind rather than the whole earth…
I’m just not from a culture that believes in that kind of thing—that objects are inferior to humans. In Chinese culture, Japanese culture, and East Asia at large, traditionally there was no monotheism. There were many gods and gods appeared through the encasements of objects: the god of the mountain, the god of peach blossoms, the god of the river, of the pebbles in the river, of moon and wine; there was a god with his head chopped off whose nipples were his eyes and bellybutton his mouth; many animals were gods—turtle, tiger, snake, fox, and imaginary animals, a bird with three legs was the sun, and the moon is either a rabbit or a toad, and you revered the god as you revered the environment surrounding you.
So, I don’t know if this “thing-power” is new. When humans are put in danger and realize we are not as omnipotent as we thought, we finally admit there are other things beside and perhaps beyond us—even with metropoles, we still rely on our earth.
I like how William Carlos Williams puts it, “No ideas, but in things.” I often ask my students to write images, objective description, focus on sensuality, which is how you interact with the object. And stay there; suppress the impulse to explain. Each object is a mysterious phenomenon. As a way to practice, I ask my students resist interpreting the mystery, but illuminating such mystery. There’s a beautiful poem by W.S. Merwin called “December Night.” Let me see if I can find it. Yes, this is the poem:
The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch
The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins
And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end
Tonight once more
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I find a single prayer and it is not for men
A: I love that Merwin poem that you shared and I love what you say here about teaching the image, which is supposed to be rendered raw and without the interference of consciousness. What strikes me about “December Night” is that there is a prayer at the end, but it’s not human. It’s not for any humans. Instead, the prayer reaches towards something beyond.
S: Right, what Merwin achieves at the end is a kind of dissolution. I often tell my students, “Just attend to the object until you dissolve.” I want to make their consciousness, their ego recede for a while and when it comes back from the object, the mind is transformed.
I am in no position to comment on American poetry, for I know too little, though from my limited reading experience it feels very “I”-centric, such as those necessary and brilliant confessional poets, whose influence remains prevalent. And I must confess that I, too, am infected. But there are poetry traditions aside from American and various ways of looking at the world. In Chinese classical poetry, it’s a well-known fact that there are no pronouns—there is just the “thing,” and the speaker is dissolved. But in Anglophone poetry, and this is a grammatical necessity that demands the “I” to be present and central.
A: Yes, it’s interesting to me that in your poem “A Difficult Apple,” the apple is the lyric subject, the speaker and the “I.” We can observe a mounting anxiety in that the apple, this object with prepossessing presence, doesn’t respond. If the apple is the subject, it is difficult to know what the apple is thinking. Maybe that has to do with the impossibility of making the apple speak in English, or expecting to supplant subjecthood into the apple’s being. There are these flitting moments throughout of the speaker wanting to export their voice into the object and then having that not manifest properly.
We of course know that the history of addressing inanimate objects is quite a longstanding one in poetry. I’m thinking now of how Jonathan Culler in Theory of the Lyric makes the point that apostrophe, or the poet’s urge to directly address objects like a rose or a dagger, is what charges the voice with its power. The voice is powerful by virtue of the fact that it is directed at something. But what I see as being different about your work is that you’re not, you know, a Romantic poet, posturing towards a rose. You’re actually framing the object as the host of the voice—and there is a glitch in the voice, there is a soundlessness in the voice in the sense that maybe the object is not entirely being addressed and at the same time, maybe the object is not addressing us. And I think that changes things, your morphing of the apostrophe. Instead, in your work, the object has a stochastic influence on its surroundings, such as when you write that “Wherever the marble moves, the field follows.”
I think that particular moment made me think of Mark Strand’s poem “Keeping Things Whole” in which he writes “in a field, I am the absence of field.” Though in your poem, the marble is the one moving, not the man.
S: Mark Strand is one of my private loves. I appreciate your liking that poem. It’s a poem that most people hate. They’re like, what are you doing with this marble? It’s so confusing. Why can’t you just say a thing clearly, they ask me. I don’t know, I like mental contortions. The apple is, too, well-disliked. And I think, even the book feels distant from me in time, when I was writing about objects I think I was also writing about the failure of the voice. The failure to communicate, to empathize, to form a relationship. The object is more powerful because the subject, the speaker is one who asks, desires, and commits, and what receives such commitment is nothingness. When I was writing that poem, I was thinking of Robert Duncan poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” in which he writes of the meadow as “a given property of the mind.”
A: The poem is very moving to me. There’s some humor there. You have some disturbing slapstick elements where I’m not sure whether to be horrified or to be amused. There is that kind of a choreography happening.
And I wanted to go back quickly to the word “objectification.” I wanted to ask about the poem “Comrade Mannequin.”
S: That’s an interesting one. And I just realized you picked all the unpopular poems in the book, for which I feel grateful. When I was organizing the book, people told me to cut this poem out.
A: I cannot believe that people wanted to take out this poem. As somebody thinking about the messages and flickers of an old Soviet existence within my family history, and the resonance of a Communist past and its legacy, this poem really struck me. I was also delighted to see visitations of two Russian poets I closely study, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, in the piece. There’s a sense of post-Communist understanding in the work. Going back to your concern with the term “objectification,” I wanted to look at the fourth section of the poem, where you address the eponymous interlocutor: “Comrade Mannequin, are you afraid to be, / let’s say, objectified. Or your greatest fear is to be / humanize. Have you voted / for the Popcorn President, who promised / a cauldron nation?”
Of course, I see Trump there. But I also see topics of objectification and humanization that we’ve been discussing and the challenge of typifying a person before the masses. Two of my close friends growing up were the daughters of Chinese immigrants, and as the daughter of Russian immigrants, our parents had this unspoken understanding. And I felt that unspoken understanding so palpably in your book, which I so appreciate. And I was wondering if you could speak to that idea of objectification within a political scape? I wanted to ask what it means for you to contemplate Marxism in your poetry and what it means to be living in a quote-unquote “post-Communist” world?
S: This poem is a love letter from a mad man to a mannequin in the shop window. And as you said, it does have that overcast of being set in a post-communist regime. And I don’t know if you noticed that there is the imagistic variation in the line “the mayor denies the egg yolk / of lamplight varnishing the tar of the river” was relating to a Mandelstam’s poem “Leningrad”. Thank you, Osip! The point of that section is that the greatest fear, rather than being objectified, is to be humanized. Or as Keats puts it, “Where but to think is to be full of sorrows.” That line concerns the existential aspect, but I was considering a socio-politically scenario—those who are not allowed to think.
When living under a Communist regime, you must trade your ability to think for a shred of your own existence. I don’t think China is strictly Communist anymore. It’s a heavily capitalistic society within a socialist political system. I think it was Borges who said, “Censorship is the mother of metaphor.” When I text my friends in China, we write sensitive words in codes. The Chinese government does not give you the words that can or cannot be used. You need to guess. And in guessing you fashion an entire infrastructure of self-censorship in your mind. When I text words like homosexuality, transsexuality, politics, democracy, etc., I must use phonetically similar or abbreviated approximations to offset censorship. Otherwise I may get my friends into serious trouble. And that censorship becomes a cultural code. I think that is behind some of my political writing in the poem in the book. And some of the most political poems are two of the ones you mentioned, “A Difficult Apple” and “Comrade Mannequin.” When in the editing stages, people asked: why are these poems so long, absurd, and elusive? And I realized: the reader is not from the world where I’m from, where things must be said in metaphor or in euphemism, and that is why the political poems in the book are absurd, elusive, and don’t get straight to the point. I carried censorship with me in my mind across the Pacific Ocean. An American might say, free yourself! But no, that’s not the point, when the people I love are not free. When my mentor was reading those poems, she critiqued that I was missing the target. But that was kind of the point. I thought to myself: Yeah, if you hit the target, you become the target. And that’s going to have consequences. I’m from a place where censorship thrives. And that informs a style, which some Americans deem unnecessary. The unnecessary ornamentation, distraction, detour for certain groups of people are life and death matter for others.
A: Yeah, when I speak to friends in Russia, it’s very clear right now that they’re not able to discuss the war against Ukraine whatsoever. And nor are they allowed to call it a war in public. And as we speak, we have this sense that we don’t know who’s recording this call. My friends can be arrested in an instant if we aren’t careful about how we put things.
S: Exactly. Even the notion of political correctness is so different in China from the United States. In China, to be politically correct is to be a patriot, not for the country, but for the party. So, if you deviate from that you’re politically incorrect. And if you utter a politically incorrect phrase you’ll be invited to the government agency for “tea.” When I returned to China recently, there was a red propaganda banner I saw in the street that said: “The mountains and the rivers are the people, the people are the mountains and the rivers.” The mountains and rivers in Chinese are very common metonyms for the nation. I was struck seeing that banner at how the masses is so easily cast in figurative speech. It’s quite a sophisticated metaphor. And it is also chiasmic via the reversal of syntax. I was in awe at such beautiful language in support of something so utterly false.
A: I think this is actually very intriguing, because I’m thinking now of the title of your book, Burying the Mountain. By extension of this metaphor, you’re also burying the masses, the notion of people en masse, and then instead you bring in specific historical figures in your book and you also throwing material objects into a kind of high relief.
Finally, I love the limpid simplicity of the poem “Through the Darkness” and I love how the lines are arranged. I was wondering if you could possibly speak to how you approach your line breaks, particularly when you’re employing a refrain like the one that occupies that poem.
S: I wrote “Through the Darkness” when I was drunk in my bed and couldn’t sleep and feeling alone, as if I was in a dark forest. I remember hoping someone would find me. Hence refrains in the poem like “find me” and “I promise.” In terms of line break, I’ve trained myself into a way of thinking whereby the object and subject are reversible. The one who finds and the one being found is reasonably the same subject. I remember what my teacher Dean Young, may his soul rest in peace, he just passed away weeks ago, said: “Do not think in terms of line break, but think in terms of line.” I also think of “You and I Are Disappearing” by Yusef Komunyakaa. At the beginning of that poem, he writes:
The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head.
I try to emulate that withholding process, that unfolding, giving the information at times, and providing surprise at each turn, but also maintaining the integrity of the line. And that’s why I feel poetry is exciting and requires skillful attention.
A: It’s that revelation in the unfolding it provides. Thank you, Shangyang, this was delightful. I have learned so much about how you’re thinking about your work and about poetry at large.
S: Yes, thank you. This was lovely.
Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004, pp. 347–72.
Merwin, W. S., et al. The Essential W. S. Merwin. Copper Canyon Press, 2017.
Burying the Mountain by Shangyang Fang
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Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and composes poems both in English and Chinese. While studying civil engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he realized his bigger passion lies in the architecture of language and is now a poetry fellow at Michener Center for Writers. He is the recipient of the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. His name, Shangyang, originating from Chinese mythology, was a one-legged bird whose dance brought forth flood and rain.
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctorate student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka were just released with World Poetry Books this month. Alex Braslavsky’s poems appear and are forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, and Colorado Review, among other journals. alexbraslavsky.com/
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