By Jonathan Chan
Coming to Willie Lin’s collection Conversation Among Stones, I was drawn, intuitively, to the modesty of its title. It offered no apparent grand conceit or declarative, but seemed unassuming, meditative, concerned with the task of image making. The stones speak, suggesting an ontology of objects, a perspective that proceeds from the concrete or, perhaps, the deep processions of geological memory.
To me, the collection seemed to echo the works of other poets: Chandran Nair’s reaching for stones (2010), Yeng Pway Ngon’s Stone (2020), Kevin Young’s Stones (2021). The book’s description fashions it as “a meditation on memory and identity” and tellingly, as speaking to “the inanimate” and to “the voices in our daily lives.” If it can seem that there is a slipperiness to Lin’s subjects, one might assume that Lin refuses to have her work be “about” anything per se. Lin’s focus is on lyricism itself, a conduit for complex meditations on the functions of memory and day-to-day juxtapositions of transcendence and materiality.
Lin draws her epigraph from John Webster’s Jacobean drama The Duchess of Malfi (1613), itself concerned with the slippage of the fleshly and inanimate. This is depicted vividly in the wax recreations of the eponymous Duchess’ husband and son, both in the play’s text but also its stage adaptations, figures sculpted to make tangible visions of their deaths, to induce mental duress in the Duchess. The quote Lin borrows comes from the Duchess herself, right after she has touched these cold wax effigies, asking her servant to tell her a story that would make her grief seem miniscule by comparison. It reads:
Thou art deceiv’d:
To hear of greater grief would lessen mine
This, perhaps, provides one schema to understanding Lin’s poetry. A meditation is underpinned by an awareness of suffering, of death. An agglomeration of sadnesses is carried into each day, bringing its own weight. Take, for example, the poem “Little Fugues”:
When you read, you are full
of someone else’s sadness
⎈
Here is Greg writing ghost
where he’ll later write soul.
The wind lashed—pushed,
tore down, until we felt
acted upon by what was not
force but presence. God
is direction, someone said.
Someone wept, the weeping
was full of its own sound.
We were not lost but I was lost
among them, someone said.
It was a conversation among stones.
Lin’s style is both conversational and intimate. It moves between perspectives, from the “you” to a “we”, from to the immediacy of a named person to the unnamed “someone.” Lin’s speaker displays the muscle, the reflex of empathy, experiencing “someone else’s sadness” through reading, just like an experience of the grief of the Duchess of Malfi. There is the seeming decentering of the self, buffeted by a wind defined by verbs – ‘pushed”, “tore down”, “acted upon by.” A sense of the sacred is roused by the mention of “God” both as “presence’ and “direction,” an invisible, perceptible influence. A weeping is solipsistic, “full of its own sound.” A conversation about being “lost,” a contrast to the “direction” of God, and by extension all of the utterances by the poem’s various someones are a “conversation among stones.” The stone here ceases to be a mere object – it becomes a metaphor for those the speaker encounters. Does this signify an absence of animacy? A numbness from grief and listlessness? The speaker goes on:
We thought the light passing
over us left something in us,
as it had the valley. We walked until
the light became a memory, trailing
over paths like shadows, unable
to lift our heads.
Clumsily, as in dream, we moved:
rural fog, black meadow-grass, sudden field of swans.
And that was one conviction:
that we must be to one another
what the world is not
to us. That every poem
should open to a field of swans.
⎈
It is time
to see in full what you’ve understood only in profile,
turned slightly away, as if
toward a source of light, some idea of god:
An invisible force takes the form of light. The experience and memory of the passing of light gives way to an experience of sorrow, leaving the speaker and their companions “unable / to lift our heads.” It is this stupor of sadness that seems to follow them across landscapes. A sense of being trodden upon by the world. Herein, perhaps, lies Lin’s ars poetica: “That every poem / should open to a field of swans”. The sense of a capacious light is reminiscent of the poems of Seamus Heaney or A. R. Ammons. The invocation of “swans” echoes the imagination of Mary Oliver, of the capacity of poetry to open to the possibilities of beauty. And the turning away, “as if / toward a source of light” draws to the mind Evangeline Paterson’s sunflower that arches toward the light, or R. S. Thomas’ bright field, drawing a speaker’s devotion. Lin’s placement of the colon after “some idea of god” suggests a divinity in motion, incomplete, restless and straining toward something fuller and more holistic. A sense of rebirth after every little fugue.
This reflex of meditation characterizes many of Lin’s poems throughout the collection. They take seriously questions of and yearnings for the sacred, but demonstrate remarkable restraint. It is perhaps this that prevents Lin from spilling over into obnoxious zeal or indulgent devotion. There is a sense of searching that recurs in Lin’s writing, a skepticism toward fixed answers in the shadow of melancholy. Take the poem “Interpretive Trail,” for example:
I asked for a sign.
I traveled and waited.The heat humiliated me.
I asked for a sign that I should
before I woke. And light
arrived from a great distance,
from a great remove.
How is it that you know
what you know, I asked.
I saw the day waste away
in the corner of my eye
while clinging to a hymn, a hem
of bread. Dust gathered,
sweat matted my hair.
Like sugar dribbling down
the chin and gathering on the collar
was a sign, maybe, of
gluttony. Birds and branches
swept all one way, guided
by nature, by virtue?
Vulgar sound. Vulgar emotion.
Was this how you ordered?
Give me struggle, bruise
me with orthodoxy, if that
was your sign, I needed
to know. I ate livers and hearts.
I woke up with questions,
with eyes of bitumen.
Apophatic notions become secondary to hermeneutic frustration. An ability to discern divine instruction becomes muddled by the ambiguity or complexity of a frustrated, daily semiotics. These are matters of epistemology; Lin’s speaker asks “How is it that you know what you know.” Desperation patterns this searching, Lin’s speaker “clinging to a hymn, a hem / of bread” reminiscent of the mother in the biblical narrative who begs Christ for a scrap of bread. The speaker’s struggle seems Promethean, eating “livers and hearts” like a predatory bird, asking to be bruised “with orthodoxy.” Divine absence is coupled with images of personal disarray – “sweat matted my hair,” “sugar dribbling down the chin.” There is a kind of exhaustion to these lines. This seems to persist in Lin’s “Birth”:
Already, the crops are failing.
The crows shuttling back and forth,
breaking branches, dropping stones.
How easy to read sadness
into the empty room. It is yours.
All season the family has been filling
pots and jars with river water
heavy with red silt. They are tired
of that color. Cover the moon.
It is good to be inconsolable.
It is good to leave the fish uneaten,
to sing a little, sweep the floor.
Traces of breath, abundant as winter,
the uncreated memory of you.
Lin’s agrarian imagination is defined by death. The poem’s first line undermines the premise of its title. It speaks of a falling apart. Again, the “sadness” recurs, this time imputed into the cavern of an empty room. Again, there is a shade of R. S. Thomas in Lin’s lines. The speaker frustrates an interior reading with a focus on observation and action: families that tire of the “red silt’ they collect, the motions of singing and sweeping and leaving the fish. The anaphora of “it is good” seems reminiscent of the poems of Ilya Kaminsky, themselves skilled at holding together great joy and intense suffering. The poem’s final line holds an aura of mystery. Who is the “you” the speaker addresses? Difficulty lies in the ambiguity of its interpretation. I am reminded of August Kleinzahler, writing in “Land’s End” of “the electric of you.” It is like the inchoate subjects of her later poem “Figures in a Landscape,” which concludes:
I’d place us there now,
in the shape and remnant of burning.
Lin’s poems reflect a plaintive, pensive disposition, holding an envisioning of the sacred at their core.
Across Lin’s collection, there are three sets of poems that bear the same titles. One might imagine them as disparate sequences – the “Apologia” sequence, the “Teleology” sequence, and the “Memory” sequence. Each sequence is scattered across the body of the collection, each revolving around notions of agency, decisions, the past, and the future. An apologia is a form of written defense. The poem “Apologia (Book IX)” is a mirror of the Odyssey, interspersing quotes and paraphrases of Samuel Butler’s translation. Spanning four pages, a latter portion of the poem reads:
Heavily, the hand of heaven was laid upon me
⎈
To carry or relinquish without
seeming to—that was the shape it took
Admit nothing,
touch nothing—that was the shape it took
Mostly, there was no choice
Who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus,
which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about homeWas it virtuous—and why—to long to return,
and terrible to eat of the flower of forgetting?The question was the shape it took,
which she turned, disbelieving, until it left its mark
The narrative of the Odyssey’s Book IX describes Odysseus and his sailors being blown off course to the land of the Lotus-eaters, with the ingestion of the lotus plant causing Odysseus’ men to lose their memories and desires to return home. It is a salve and sedative. In Lin’s hands, the narrative is pliable, no longer valorizing the vanished desire to return home. Forgetting the past, ceasing to represent a lack of nerve. The poem’s unnamed “she” recurs throughout the poem. Perhaps an unnamed “she” who reads the Odyssey, “disbelieving” the choices of its characters. An apologia for a reader suspicious of simple conclusions when reading works of the Western canon, one replicated in the ekphrastic poem later in the collection “After Masaccio’s The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.”
“Apologia (Failure),” by contrast, speaks not of a reader response, but of questions of mortality. “I died in my sleep last night,” the poem begins, before it asks the reader to “imagine a birch branch.” Attention is shifted away as quickly as it is demanded. The poem proceeds in a series of vivid images “persimmon trees, walnut trees” and a “wasp nest.” In the speaker’s pocket, a wasp’s wings look at her. She asks:
They see what? An essential driftlessness,
recklessness. They shudder.Pity the bruised persimmon, the green walnuts stitched
to my pockets, my nail-marks in the pith.Too much reverence
is granted to the dead. I diedso I can say this. Tides mend the morning
and the rest of the day.Why did the moon go mad? It heard the word once
and took it as its name.
A sense of an inchoate self, meandering and aimless, seems a paltry way to memorialize the deceased. Something of this listless disposition is reminiscent of the work of Boey Kim Cheng. The lushness of the natural images, as one might imagine in the poems of Li-Young Lee, is subverted. “Apologia (Failure),” then, is a defense of death, or the right to speak ill of the dead.
The final poem in the series, “Apologia (Fire),” seems a defense for a perhaps sadistic tendency. An abject desire for destruction. A corrosive inclination. The speaker recalls:
In the city where we lived, there was a place—torched,
what remained of a church—more
idea than architecture, nothing
but the walls standing
Its interior of ivy and stone more real
than any memory—I’d wanted to be there:
stand in it, mean laughter and drink,
watch the night sky needled with light,
the fireflies like drowning bits of starsWhatever was left of living then forgettable
as breathing
The detritus of a church is what survives a fire. This elemental encounter with a religious structure is what the speaker yearns for – to have been present in the midst of the building turned to cinders. Lin’s three “Apologia” poems are bound by a sense of exploration, a feeling around the contours of an idea, a narrativization of the idea of a self-defense.
This is not dissimilar to her “Teleology” sequence – three poems titled “Teleology” that variously describe, “This is the only world. And I am to it undifferentiated / as a lump of stone,” a female speaker who does research amid “the humid scratching of branches,” and deep snow “like Nebraska”, “a little funeral for you.” Each plays with the idea of having a telos: the first with the speaker’s sense of function as a “student,” the second of the speaker’s ecological inquiry, and the third of the passing of the seasons. Lin’s “Memory” sequence is much sparser – where the poems in the previous two sequences could stretch up to 70 lines, Lin’s “Memory” poems are between 3 and 11 lines. Again, they resist the simplicity of definition, in favor of the imagistic logic and intelligence that characterizes so many of Lin’s poems. Take the third “Memory” in the sequence, for example:
Where two met, one marked
the other, left evidence of the meeting.
Always that was the case, one upon
another, and itself touched, marked
in turn. Not ruined by it.
The hard edge of one thing against
the resolution of another.
Only the face of god remains unchanged.
Let me not fear my sorrows.
There is brevity and elegance and obfuscation in this brief poem, memory described by the subtlety of being “marked.” The poem is elevated by its elliptical quality, of sharpening resolutions and the desire to resist a “fear” of “sorrows’. I was reminded of W. S. Merwin in how these poems display both a sense of movement and of musing, contemplating the limits of particular concepts in compressed form.
Across these poems, Lin seems to somehow both center and decenter a subject – foregrounding an interiority and subjectivity, while perhaps sublimating too strong a sense of the assertiveness of a self. In doing so, Lin has been able to avoid the pitfalls of many a confessional lyric in her examinations of the self. Lin was born in Beijing and is now based in Chicago, but the bulk of her poems resist the tendencies of overt engagements with parental memory or diasporic poetics present in so many of her Asian American contemporaries. Yet, there is one poem in Lin’s collection that confronts the question of a racialized subjectivity, “Brief History of Exile.” It is the longest poem in the book, detailing the speaker’s memories of “long ago / in another country,” a “weight to be carried / when living, as I once did, in a town between two graves.” The speaker’s memory of a split upbringing is mediated by “the half-light of childhood / remembered in photographs.” The poem speaks of a kind of racial melancholia, to borrow the idea foregrounded by scholars David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, where the immigrant subject is confronted by the psychic pressures of displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. This is illustrated vividly as the poem describes:
The speaker resists an assimilative pressure, disillusioned with the monotony of a small town, unimpressed with the trappings of Americanness, while still suffering scorn and humiliation. Whiteness pokes its head through in the description of “blonde Julia.” Yet what this rouses is not a retaliatory anger, a lashing out, but perhaps the internalizing of a kind of sadness and a growing desire to leave. The sudden eruption of pinyin, to demarcate the speech of the speaker’s mother, perhaps, is the most conspicuous marker of “Chineseness” in the entire collection. A warning about how there’s nothing good about riding a bicycle. Here, race intersects with class, of the kind of shame associated with riding a bicycle amidst cars. In the speaker, this becomes something “dormant” that “sprang when you woke.” The speaker describes children “memorizing the humiliations they’d all learn / within this lifetime.” The “denouncements and recriminations” they suffered as “the truth did not belong to them.” The speaker describes this as “the terrible raiment of childhood.” Yet, despair gives way to renewal: “Light lifts and it is / as if the world starts anew.” The poem concludes:
There is no romance to the sight of the speaker’s hometown. There is an emptiness to it, a resistance to an admission of wrong, and a sense of the town’s aging. The mere “ugliness” of the sight of the town is enough to hold the speaker’s attention, while perhaps serving as the genesis of poetry: “language, ignited.” These memories of childhood hold “no color.” The simile of “ash” creates an association with cremation and burning, but also with a pollutant waiting to be blown away. As in Boey Kim Cheng’s poem “Clear Brightness,” the ash is a cipher for memory in a way, though for Lin’s speaker it is the unpleasantness of an upbringing in an insular town.
The final poem of Conversations Among Stones, “Box of Stars,” concludes the collection in apt fashion:
Another season flown through. I have the one word,
the one branch I will continue to break to prove
it is mine. And I can make something of suffering
the way I can make something of elbows.
Rather than a passivity of grief and sorrow, the speaker moves toward a display of agency. The ability to speak, the ability to act, the ability to claim. The comparison of the utility of suffering to the utility of elbows is played to uncertain effect – not quite humor, but not quite seriousness either. To make something of elbows is, to perhaps, recognize its place in an individual’s motions, the myriad functions of an arm. Lin returns us to the root of all melancholy in suffering, but presents a desire to resist its finality. A grief may be diminished beside a larger grief, but is addressed through an interior move toward agency. Lin’s collection is poised and polished, unsparing and complex, lyrical and capacious. Hers is an astonishing debut.
Conversations Among Stones is available from BOA Editions Ltd, Bookshop, Laguna Beach Books, Longfellow Books, Third Place Books, and Unabridged Bookstore.
Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He is the author of the poetry collection going home (Landmark, 2022) and Managing Editor of poetry.sg. More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com.