[APPLAUSE]
Jeffrey Yang's An Aquarium is one
of the strangest poetry books I've read,
and I like strange ones.
With the creatures in An Aquarium,
Yang combines alphabet with science, war, metaphor,
religion, philosophy, translation,
politics, and colors.
He spins the fabulous into the realistic,
the hilarious into the horrible, and the scientific
becomes emotional.
Like a scholar with nitrogen narcosis,
like the son of a chemist and mystic,
he calls materials from diverse spheres,
then places them in the tank.
When I enter a Yang poem, I have no idea how I might exit.
An octopus, he starts, with a belief held
by the Tikopians, a Polynesian island community,
that an octopus is both "a mountain with tentacle streams
and the sun with its rays, so should not be eaten,"
and ends the poem with "mind ether spirit unhindered."
These poems fold into themselves,
transforming non-sequiturs into a meditation with backbone
with lyricism.
Listen to "Octopus" one more time.
Can you feel the echo of "a mountain with tentacle streams"
and "mind ether" as well as "the sun with its rays"
and "spirit unhindered."
These poems deliver the strangeness of our world
and how we might avoid inhumanity
by nurturing our connection to not only these creatures,
but also each other.
Jeffrey Yang is also the author of Vanishing-Line,
the translator of Liu Xiaobo's June 4th Elegies, Su Shi's East
Slope, and an anthology of classic Chinese poems
called Rhythm 226.
The editor of Birds, Beasts, and Seas-- nature poetry
from New Directions-- and co-editor of Two Lines's
Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, he
works as an editor at New Directions Publishing.
Please join me in welcoming Jeffrey Yang.
[APPLAUSE]