There is so much beyond words. There are actually no adequate words for the full complexity of human feeling, for the arcane details of a distant memory, or the colors of the sky. Blue doesn’t really cut it, but most often it’s the best we have. Poems, then, are the last stop before silence. After that, the train goes beyond words, and often beyond any form of representation. All of which has something to do with the necessity of poetry, the necessity of a poet’s urgent and never-ending attempts at making poems. To write is to fail, but to fail well is our only hope, and the good failures are our greatest books. It’s one of the reasons that poetry often arrives in fragments, offering glimpses and snippets: Not only because memory is always an incomplete invention, but also because a poet might wish to dispense with the crude reductivities of plot and setup. The poet wants to take us straight to the shattering moment, or to the essential emotional crossroads, or the livid fact, or the vivid flash of action or perception that changes everything.
Dong Li has written a book that demonstrates these things with skill and artistry. It’s tremendous. The Orange Tree is his debut collection, but it feels like this poet arrives fully formed, as if he has been traveling a long time. This book tells the story, in deeply compelling fragments and flashes, of a family torn apart by the politics of twentieth-century China. A family fractured and splintered by the pressures of the Communist Party and by that mysterious fatal dice-roll that casts some as poor and others not. Here’s the sound of its title poem:
In a yellowed family photo, there is an orange tree, leaves burned.
The oranges are green, but we are already starting to look alike in the photo.
By the orange tree is Grandparents’ house.
We all once walked over its threshold to pick oranges.
The poem crosses seven pages, and the lines are all laid out like this, like strands of hair, each one ending in a sentence. Each one a kind of poem itself. No line breaks. The lines sailing out like assays and meeting their ends at the period. So it’s as if, with each line, the poem starts over. But also builds. And then starts over.
The local Communist Party factions were still fighting for power.
Grandpa was wounded in a street fight.
Or later:
Mother was four.
She survived famine on orange peels.
Thirty-eight million people died from hunger.
Or this:
Father joined the Red Guards.
At school, they tortured his teachers.
They traveled across the country to meet other young activists.
And through it all, the orange tree remains, weathering and blossoming, its existence and beauty both a part of and apart from the pain and drama that swirl around it. The tree’s quotidian quality renders it paradoxically luminous. Style: The poet must set forth the facts, directly. Lithe. Clear. There is no need to interpret the facts on the poet’s part, for they are drawn with such exactitude and lyric sharpness that they call out from history, often with great pathos. The tears are there in the writer, but they are felt—and they are deeply felt—in the reader by way of the poet’s style and form.
And there are so many formal experiments in this wondrous book! It is restless with its articulation. Poems in short squares of text that paint a picture of the atrocities conducted by Japanese soldiers invading China. Poems of very short lines, centered—and bracketed, as if nested, or cupped between two hands—and falling waterfall-like down the page. There are experiments with calligraphy and typography. And they range nimbly through history, often through a history of “oustedness”—a history of being driven out—out of families, communities, dignities, schools, lives, and, of course, nations. Dong Li writes and translates from a variety of languages, publishes with the University of Chicago, and lives in Germany. In his introduction, Srikanth Reddy calls him “transnational.” I wonder if he could be called a post-national poet, a traveler-cosmopolitan in the vein of W. H. Auden or Vénus Khoury-Ghata.
Which is not to say the richness of the deeply local is not everywhere in these poems. They lie down in the dirt of particular places. The bell of the far-off is tolling, and it pulls us toward its particularity:
tang dynasty poet zhang ji has been dead for a long time
ousted by his emperor and wasted
floated along yangtze and moored
stumbled on rock slates by shore …
Dong Li’s poem, echoing the ancient, stands for a new voice but an old soul. A voice from a consciousness always outside the structure, whatever that structure may be. And that’s a position—outside of it—that inevitably calls on the structure to answer for itself.
JESSE NATHAN: Could you talk a little bit about the “line” in poetry? The poetic line. How do you think about it, in general? Probably it’s case by case, poem by poem. What is the difference, in your mind, between a line of poetry and a line of prose? What about between a line and a sentence? (And why are a few of the lines in your book handwritten?)
DONG LI: Thank you for your question of questions, Jesse. Doesn’t every “I” contain a multitude of lines? I stand up and straighten a line. I lie down to level another line. I move to set more lines in motion. I sit to slant the line as a glint of language splices a sound into the silhouette of a looming form. The line comes naturally to the “I” as a shiver of thought or a flick of feeling funnels through the flecks of consciousness. Once embodied, the line strikes. A scream across the sky. A sprout in the silent earth. The line lengthens its fingers into the soil of its source. The line stretches its arms for the illumination and its photosynthetic transformation. The line opens its own field of light and night. Language launches it into the relational knots of time and living. The line holds its own bit of breath. I follow the line. I mull over the line to locate the means and meet the material. If a line is a tree, then a poem is a forest. The larger and older trees provide shades and prevent the burn, while the younger and smaller trees reassure the health of the forest and renew the ecosystem. The trees need room to grow. I leave space for the formation of other alignments and passages. In the poem “The Orange Tree,” I want to test the lyrical limit of the sentence. I end each line with a full stop, which turns it into a sentence. I double-space the lines to let in the imaginative expansiveness. I let the explosiveness of the line brush the unassuming sentence. If the unexplained calligraphy by Xu Jing suggests a poetic gesture, then the handwritten lines are obliquely condensed translations that point toward the emerging form. I foreground the sentence as a unit of storytelling that summons another reading. I highlight the white space pressed between lines, whose wordless presence echoes poetry. Where lines fall into the void, “I” forgets the language and looks the mute intensity in the eye. I disrupt a long line with spaces as an invitation into its lyrical depth. I dispel the myth of the poetic and prosaic divide. I want a line of poetry to run on for ages and pages. I want a line of prose to pause in its glorifying smallness. I want poetry to shine in the punctuational use and the syntactical confinement. I want prose to stand still and naked in the screaming silence of all that surrounds words. The line is part and parcel of a pattern; the sentence is a wholesome step of a path. They come from the same skin of language. When they lean into each other, there’s a doubly inexplicable radiance that I call the silver lining of poetry.