X: Jenny Xie

Le Temps Mort

I wasn’t sure what to do for X – there are a few poets in translation that I found but I struggled to find a dead poet beyond the Ancient Greek Xenophanes, whose work hasn’t survived antiquity. Then last week I received my subscriber copy of Poetry Review and found Jenny Xie, so it kind of felt as though the answer had landed in my lap. So I’m just going to do one, living, poet for the letter X.

This poem isn’t the one in PR, but one I found online, and you can read it here: Le Temps Mort by Jenny Xie - Poems | Academy of American Poets

Le Temps Mort

If you’ve read any of these essays before, you’ll know I like it when poets complicate things by introducing other languages into their work. So I think the obvious translation of this title (one which I checked with a French-speaking colleague) is “dead time” in the sense of liminality, the time in between significant moments. But I can’t help feeling that a clunkier translation suggests itself to the non-native French speaker too, and that’s the idea of “the time of death”. I like how titling this poem “Dead Time” and then translating that into French so that the reader has to translate it back has had the effect of adding more baggage to the meaning of that very common phrase. “Dead Time” is a cliché, which is to say it’s really a dead metaphor, a metaphor so overused that it’s ceased to hold its imaginative power, but the act of re-translation perhaps breathes some of that original multiplicity of meaning back into the dead metaphor. I don’t know if I’m making much sense here, perhaps I’m overthinking it.

Now the empty frames, the cream of margins,
the zero of the camera’s eye asleep, on the run.

It seems to me what we have here is a kind of abstract list of things which might figure the concept of ‘dead time’ hinted at in the title as ‘time outside of creative moments’. It’s a list of liminal things, in a way – spaces that have the potential to help us create meaning, or spaces adjacent to the spaces in which we create meaning, but nevertheless blank and meaningless when we isolate them. “Empty frames” I guess could refer to empty frames for artwork, or maybe empty ‘frames’ as in shots of film that don’t depict anything; ‘margins’ being the spaces on the page where we don’t write, and the camera’s eye when not in use being a ‘zero’, inert.

What does it mean to begin the poem with ‘Now’, and why is Xie pointing us towards these spaces where, by definition, meaning cannot be found? Is there maybe something elegiac hinted at in this “Now”? Like, “now” as in the moment after some cataclysmic loss, after which the idea of making meaning is impossible? Or is it a “Now” that is the necessary quite moment *before* gearing up to engagement with the world – “now” as in the deep breath before creation?

Morning’s slow mucus, and Sixth Avenue
opened, that strip of vowels and fever silhouettes.

I suppose these next two lines might push us towards that second interpretation of the “Now” – since morning is mentioned, perhaps Xie is talking about the dead time of waking up and preparing for things to happen. “Morning’s slow mucus” is a pretty unpleasant metaphor, but perhaps it’s evoking a kind of throat-clearing? And this is not just the speaker, but the city itself – I’m presuming New York with ‘Sixth Avenue’, which Google tells me is the Avenue of the Americas, one of the busier roads in one of the world’s busier cities. So the first four lines figure this as a poem about the city as a kind of organism that has its rhythms, and the ‘dead time’ signifies that we’re thinking about the kind of receding moments of the of ebb and flow of a city’s life.

While nerves of metal vibrate beneath asphalt,
registering sensation and ailment,
the action resumes on the other side, is always
resuming, and to this, even the dead yawn
out of earshot, off character. Out of scene.

Yes, so here it seems like the idea of city as organism is being figured more explicitly through metaphor. The nerves of metal vibrating beneath the asphalt must be a reference to the subway system. What does it mean that the trains running beneath the city “register” both “sensation” and “ailment”? The subway trains are the nerves of the city, and their movement is the thing that keeps it in touch with its rhythms, both good and bad?

Still, Xie seems to want to resist committing to this ‘meaning’ anything. We might expect the poem to move from its first four lines about inertia into a kind of waking. The action of the city resumes above, as below, but, what, this is boring? It’s not new, because the action is ‘always’ resuming, and it’s not interesting because “even the dead” yawn at the resumption of the city’s action. So if we thought the waking up of the city was going to move us away from the blankness, emptiness, margins, of the first four lines, we were wrong. And don’t think the dead themselves, yawning, are going to become the ‘subject’ of this poem either, because they are marginal too, ‘out of scene’.

The tone at this point of the poem is so strange. Everything is unfolding like a lyric poem, with its evocation of specific time and place, and with a voice that seems to want to point us towards things. But at the same time, the voice is kind of elusive. Who is this speaking, actually? It’s a speaker who also seems to mistrust the idea that the things being pointed to might be significant, which is kind of the point of lyric poems!

Keep watching, as only rods and cones remain.
And the only sound is the rustle of metaphors
crying out and the surprise is that nothing
we say or do not say or say again can hold
here in the crush of one thing into the other,
none touching the macula, in other words,
the perfectly ordinary mysteries.

The ending of the poem doesn’t provide any resolution to this tonal oddness, but perhaps we were wrong to expect it to. “Keep watching, as only rods and cones remain.” Hm. “Keep watching” again seems to be the refrain of the lyric poem. Keep watching, poetry usually tells us, and you’ll notice something. But here, we keep watching until only the apparatus used for watching – the rods and cones of our eyes – are left. Xie is taking us back to the beginning of the poem, where these rods and cones feel a bit like the empty frames and the page margins – things used to create meaning that are *not* being used to create meaning. I think Xie is also doing this with “the only sound is the rustle of metaphors crying out” – in this poem, even metaphors don’t tell us anything! Metaphors, the vehicles so integral to poetic meaning-making, are, just like everything else, making sound, but it’s a meaningless rustle, and their cry isn’t a coherent one.

I feel like my commentary here is dangerously close to dismissing this poem as an exercise in nihilism. The poem is called ‘Dead Time’ and Xie seems to have committed to evoking the concept by demonstrating the pointlessness of meaning-making. Maybe so. But I’m fascinated by the lines here towards the end of the poem – “the surprise is that nothing/we say or do not say or say again can hold/here in the crush of one thing into the other”. I think these lines are beautiful and bleak and they were why I ended up choosing the poem.

There seems to be such an injection of feeling into the poem at this late stage, it’s almost as though the dead tone of the previous lines was being used as a kind of prelude to this. There’s panic here, isn’t there? The ‘surprise’ at this moment of meaninglessness in a city of meaninglessness is that we continue to ‘say’ things and ‘do’ things and say and do them ‘again’, even as we realise that none of these things will hold. There’s something terrifying and sad about that notion, for me. It’s a bleak way to look at existence. Why is our apparatus for making meaning so useless – Is it because life is too much – the ‘crush’ of multiple meanings cancels out all meaning? If this is the case, are we foolish for continuing to try to use all this dead apparatus, or is there something tenacious and admirable about the way in which we continue on despite this feeling that nothing will ‘hold’?

Read the poem again: Le Temps Mort by Jenny Xie - Poems | Academy of American Poets