Timothy Yu

After “Exile’s Letter” by Ezra Pound To Tom S. of Missouri, possum friend, clerk at Lloyd’s. Now I remember that you rang a silent bell By the foot of the bridge at the River “Thames.” With dull roots and dried tubers, you wrote poems and laments And grew more English month on month, bowing to kings and princes. Americans came drifting in from the sea and from the west border, And with them, and with me especially Everything was pig-headed, And I made hay from poppycock and painted adjectives, Just so we could start a new fellowship, And we all escaped our personalities, without expressing them. And then I was sent off to Rapallo, trailed by children, And you to your desk at Faber-Faber, Till we had nothing but China and silence in common. And then, when modernism had come to its worst, We wrote, and published in Po-Etry, Through all the one hundred kinds of shy and whispering silence, Into a poem of a thousand blank pages, That was the first heave; And into ten thousand poems full of Chinese reticence. And with chafing saddle and the bit in his mouth Out from the East came Confucius and his philosophy, And there came also the “True-man” Ben-it-o to awe me, Playing in the death-mask of Jefferson. In the botched houses of Europe they gave us more foetid music, Clanging instruments, like the sound of a myriad dying. My forefather Confucius got me drunk and I danced because my savage mind wouldn’t keep still Without his music playing, And I, wrapped in silence, woke up with my head on his lap, And my voice returning to me from every radio, And before the end of the broadcast we scattered like cards, or bombs, I had to be off to China, so far across my desktop, You back to your London-bridge. And our Roosevelt, who was brave as a rodent, Was president in Washing Town, and let in the usurious rabble. And one May he sent the soldiers for me, despite the long distance. And what with broken idols and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going, Over roads twisted like my brain’s folds. And I was still going, late in the war, with defeat blowing in from the North, Not guessing how little I knew of the cost, and how soon I would be paying it. And what a reception: Steel cages, two books set on a packing-crate table, And I was caught, and had no hope of escaping. And you would walk out with me to the northeast corner of my cell, Toward the Alpine peak, with clouds about it as foul as London air, With you whispering,and with a bang, not a whimper, With glasses like dinner plates, glowing grass-green in the darkness, Pleasure-fasting, with women, coming and going without speech, With the dandruff-flakes falling like snow, And the hyacinth girls eating lunch in silence, And the sea, knee-deep, reflecting white eyebrows — Eyebrows turned white are an awful sight in the sunlight, Hideously aged — And the sea-girls singing back at us, Drowning in seaweed brocade, And the wind twisting the song, and desiccating it, Covering our eyes with dust. And this is the way the world ends. With a bang, not with a whimper. I went up to the court for prosecution, Tried standing mute, offered a madman’s song, And got no conviction, and went back to Saint Elizabeths Committed. And once again, later, you stood at the foot of my bed, And then the visit ended, you went back to Bloomsbury, And if you ask if I recall that parting: It is like the hair falling from my hieratic head, Confused ... Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! What is the use of talking, until I end my song, I end my song in the dark. I call in the nurse, Hold the pill in my hand As she says, “Take this,” And swallow it down, silent.

To make a Chinese poem in English we must allow the silence to creep in around the edges, to define the words the way the sky’s negative space in a painting defines the mountains. —Tony Barnstone, “The Poem Behind the Poem” To make a Japanese poem in English we must allow the silence to creep up upon us the way the ninja stalks and strangles his unsuspecting victim. To make an Indian poem in English we must allow the waters of language to rise and drown us like the Ganges until we are reborn in a more accessible form. To make a French poem in English we must impale ourselves upon the Tour Eiffel until our bloodcurdling screams evoke that sublime je ne sais quoi. To make a Spanish poem in English we must let ourselves be gored by the charging bull of poesy as we run like idiots through the streets waving to our friends' cameras. To make an American poem in English we must level the mountains of language with dynamite and in the rubble build an ethnic theme park of charming accents and seething quiet. To make an American poem Chinese we must silence its creepy edges and raise an iron-built mountain that mirrors our own negation to us as if it were gold.

after Eleanor Goodman, "Boston's Chinatown" It’s easy to slam the Chinatowns of America. They’re just a lot of red lanterns. Yeah, there are Chinese people around, But it’s all for tourists. Their dirty alleyways remind me Of that strange beast called American culture. The peculiar smell of fish (how Chinese!)— I’ve eaten hundreds of meals there. So I move on to mock the shantytowns of Asia. They’re just a lot of plywood and scrap metal. Sure, I know there are poor people around. I’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire. I know the area pretty well. I’ve hung out in “bad” neighborhoods before Where the old men run their sketchy basement stores But they have mostly disappeared. And it’s all too tempting to denigrate The postindustrial towns of the dull Midwest. Of course I know there are unemployed people there. I heard it on NPR. Once I had to spend three hours In the Detroit airport, with its vendors peddling Chewing gum and soda. But people don’t really live there. Just don’t ask me to smash the glittering cities Of cultural imperialism. They teach English language skills And how to adjust to life in the States. Nobody really lives here. As someone involved in translation I’ve eaten hundreds of meals here. Nobody speaks Chinese.

after Billy Collins, "Monday" The Italians are making their pasta, the French are making things French, and the Chinese cultivate their silence. They cultivate silence in every Chinatown on the persimmon of earth— mute below the towers of Toronto, silently sweeping the streets of Singapore clear of noisy self-expression. The Americans are in their sport utility vehicles, the Canadians are behaving reasonably, but the Chinese remain silent maybe with a cup of tea or an opium pipe and maybe a finger puzzle or water torture is involved. Or maybe the Chinese are playing the Chinese game of ping-pong, the pock-pock of the ball against their tight-lipped mouths as their chefs dice scallions and bean curd. The Chinese are silent because it is their job for which I pay them what they got for building the railroads. Which silence it is hardly seems to matter though many have a favorite out of the 100 different kinds— the Silence of the Well-Adjusted Minority, the Girlish Silence of Reluctant Acquiescence, the Silence that by No Means Should Be Mistaken for Bitterness. By now, it should go without saying that what Crocodile Dundee is to the Australian and Mel Gibson is to the Scot, so is silence to the Chinese. Just think— before I invented the 100 Chinese silences, the Chinese would have had to stay indoors and gabble about civil war and revolution or go outside and build a really loud wall. And when I say a wall, I do not mean a wall of thousands of miles that is visible from the moon. I mean a noisy wall of language that dwarfs my medieval battlements and paves the Pacific to lap California’s shores with its brick-hard words.

after Billy Collins, "Silence" You have the right to remain silent. That is your job. A ball gag plugs your mouth, and the immigrant girl with her loud sewing machine has been deported. So tell us about the mind of China. We want to hear the silent blooming of its cherry blossoms, the quiet unfastening of its gowns, its songs of soy sauce and tiny bound feet. Its trains have been blown up by dynamite, its factories bombed into silence. Its mewling puppies have been smothered and its gods are suffocating inside specimen jars. Shanghai has been evacuated and each inhabitant issued an edition of Gary Snyder. So tell us about your ancestors, your grandfather in his bamboo cage, your grandmother drowned in the well. Let’s hear about the unmoving clouds, the stunted trees. Read the poem we have placed in front of you. The Pacific has been drained, and even Ezra Pound has burst from his grave, his moldering hand poised to translate what you do not say.

Race, friends, is boring.  Everyone says so. Hashtag all lives matter, the channel turns, we ourselves live and turn, and moreover the TV told me yesterday (unendingly) ‘Ever to talk about race means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no Inner Resources, because all I see is race. People have race, literature has race, especially great literature, Henry has race, with his blacks & whites made up as his feelings about love & sex & art, which have race. And our social ills, & sin, in Chinese drag are somehow a dog that’s eaten itself, & its tail miserably remains as our mirror, bone or breaker, heaving on tide: us, flag.