UnknOwing as triumph; An interview with shangyang Fang

Conducted by ali nasir, editor-in-chief

Shangyang Fang is an acclaimed poet from China, though he currently resides in the US, where he was one of the 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellows at Stanford University. His debut poetry collection ‘Burying The Mountain’ was released this past fall by Copper Canyon Press. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, New England Review, Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Guernica Magazine, Triquarterly, and many more. He is a winner of the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before the release of his debut.

A/ I’d like to ask what purpose you believe poetry serves, or rather, who? The question might sound tired, but every poet seems to have a different approach to it. Carl Philips said in an interview “I don’t know if I can speak definitively for what love is, ha! If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t write”. Do you think poetry is just grappling with that conundrum? Is it an attempt to materialise something from shapelessness and give ourselves meaning?

S/ O dear, I have no idea. This is too big a question. I won’t even attempt answering, because I know I’ll fail. I think the beauty of profound questions like these is that they don’t seek for answers, but rather they open up a space for constant thinking, musing, hovering. But thank you, I’d like to keep these questions in mind as long as possible, and be transformed by this inquiry, for poetry itself is a form of inquiry, without ruining it with any self- aggrandizing, definitive statements.

A/ I read your poem ‘A Bulldozer’s American Dream’. What struck me was the clever use of syntax. ‘At the construction site the bulldozer works days & nights / No, it is the man inside who works’. There are certain poems which are laboured over, written and rewritten, while others come quickly. What kind would you say this poem is—are the rapid & contradictory sentences a look into your mind? Could you talk about the impact syntax has on a poem and how you utilise it?

S/ Yes, contradictory, or paradoxical. I think in poems like this, the process of “correcting” the sentences/lines is also a process of “correcting” the situation, and eventually, reexamining the very mind that receives the situation. It proposes a doubleness of perception and questions on how we assert the reality as it is.

Syntax, of course, is essential in any writing. It is what Robert Duncan described beautifully as, “She it is Queen Under The Hill / whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded.” But I have no idea how it works in my own poems. The writers are, at least I regard, the worst readers of our own writing. Well, if I have to say, I like to use long sentence structure, hypotaxis, in longer poems. Not because it has much significance, but because it’s just fun to try out how far I can make that sentence go until it exhausts.

And the longer poem, being so magnanimous, provides such space for me to do so. I use more parataxis in shorter lyrical poems, for its efficiency to create resonance between the concrete imagery and the abstract mind. But it is always a mixture, a mess, which is exciting.

A/ What can we expect from your debut poetry collection? Did you use any transitive poems to progress the book’s tone?

S/ You can expect poems!—many words. I write poems individually. I can’t write a project book. But I think at a specific phase of one’s life, there are certain recurrent themes, subject matters, and forms the poet is obsessed with. So that might make the trajectory of the book cohere.

A/ When do you think your path as a poet began? How can one know where they stand in an art so fluid, so wholly unpredictable and subjective?

S/ I grew up memorizing and reciting classical Chinese poems because both grandfather and my father are fervent lovers of poetry. So, I’ve always loved words, poetry, and language.

Hahaha, I have no idea how one knows if they are capable of being good at anything. I’d say, stop worrying, just start writing! W.S. Merwin has a poem in tribute to his teacher John Berryman, at the end of the poem Merwin wrote, “I asked how can you ever be sure/ that what you write is really/ any good at all and he said you can't/ you can't you can never be sure/ you die without knowing/ whether anything you wrote was any good/ if you have to be sure don't write.”

The fact is that we don’t know; that mystery is exciting. I hope we keep that “unknowing” in front of art and poetry as a humble gesture. Art is risky and often born out of failures. Luckily, the Merwin poem also gives us “solution”. He quoted Berryman, “Passion was genius.” If one is passionate and obsessed about something, it hardly matters whether it succeeds or fails, and anyway, that’s for time to judge, not us.

A/ What poetry have you read recently; anything that stands out?

S/ I am returning to many writers who were the early love in my life. For contemporaries, I am rereading Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons, which I think is just magnificent. Sandra Lim’s The Wilderness is a pure gem. And mostly I am reading works and manuscripts from my friends, and those have been lifesaving.

Well, life inspires me, as much as I dislike it. Conversation with friends, music, food, drinks, the construction noise outside my window on a Sunday morning, in general, anything that pokes my existence to be restless.

A/ Ocean Vuong says he writes about 4 poems a year. How do you think a poet’s productivity can be measured—can it?

S/ I don’t count how many poems I write each year. My files and documents are a mess. Sometimes I lose my poems; they just disappear, and that’s not regrettable. I heard Cavafy is said to have written some seventy poems a year, but he only kept four or five, and destroyed the rest. I also heard Lucie Brock- Broido only wrote in October on days that are raining. It sounds like a myth to me, but my friends keep telling me it’s true.

I don’t think in terms of productivity much, it’s a very industrialized idea. I mean I am not “producing” anything; I am not a factory of poetry. It’s not up to me, but I do my duty—I sweep and clean the temple of mind daily, in case that poetry would appear at any second.

A/ Where will this path take you—does experience as a poet mean growth?

S/ Wherever this life takes me. To become better poets, we must improve our souls. ⬥