Analects on a Chinese Screen Glenn Mott Chax Press $16.00 / 80 pp / paper isbn 978-0-925904-61-4 www.chax.org

Review by Jeremy Hawkins

A third of the way into Glenn Mott’s first book, Analects on a Chinese Screen, a mock fortune of the kind you’d find wrapped in a cookie at the local Chinese buffet warns “To lose occupation but continue to make profession / is slow death.” This (mis)fortune is followed by a smiley emoticon and lucky numbers; the fortune itself follows a mock Chinese food menu complete with items such as “Lassitude with wet noodle.” It serves as a perfect entry into a book that struggles across fabricated cultural margins and resists traditional lyricism. In the fortune, the borrowed form, to begin thinking about the peculiar forces of Orientalism in American culture. After all, what is more American than the reduction of supposed Eastern philosophy into pithy fortune cookie maxims that one can collect to accrete one’s own personal Analects of The Happiness China King Restaurant? Naturally the fortune limits the lyricism possible in the form, but this single sentence also gestures to a deeper concern with one’s personal industry.

In Analects readers will find a book intent on grappling with occupation, profession, trade, and vocation. For Mott, a poet as well as journalist, the distinctions between the terms for how one spends one’s time are ripe. “The most practically important question had always been how I would get my living.” This statement comes on the heels of a section where he writes,

                                 America was once full of smelly amateurs

: and experts of indelible topics,
                                               tramping through the weeds to pastured cairns of obscure
                                      individuals.

& yet, everywhere, professionals deny they have professions.

Here, and throughout the book, notions of expertise, specialized training, and amateurism conspire to raise concerns about what one does profess by virtue of how one occupies oneself. What greater concern for poets in modernity, still negotiating the legacies of Eliot the Banker, Stevens the Insurer, Williams the Physician, and Johnny MFA the Teacher? Perhaps it has always been difficult for poets to legitimize what they do, but it seems apropos in an era at odds over finite energy supplies, climate change, and myriad fundamentalisms that poetry becomes more unlikely an occupation. In the end, is it enough for poetry to be a vocation, a calling?

In a sense, Mott answers these concerns with Analects. Part of naming oneself a poet requires some definitions of poetics; and any book worth reading makes some claim as to what poetry can be. This book suggests that poetry is not married to form, as Mott writes, “Do not mistake lines for poetry…” As such, this book finds its propulsion in the sentence, rather than the line: “The making of a sentence is a way of remaking the mind / in hesitancy & occupancy in residence FULL…” Rather than sheer economy of language, careful prose appears as a more natural model. Subsequently, a summary reading might caste the book as prosaic. Still, Mott demonstrates that his choices are deliberate and that he is quite capable of lyricism, as revealed in explicitly musical sojourns: “In the bee loud where the bumble suck’d / in the meadow’s slip stunned and struck we lie, tracing slugs of contrail shot against the sky / on stratospheric zephyrs” (Mott’s emphasis). Likewise, allusions to Yeats, Williams, Dante, and several more canonical lyricists suggest that the poetry doesn’t ignore context in tradition as it moves away from the pure lyric line.

Mott also takes pains to demonstrate that his poetics leave little room for navel-gazing or the American confessional mode. This fits as part of the turn away from typical lyric. The “I” of Analects speaks as a participant in a world that is distinctly social; the individual is less remarkable: “I’ll tell you, much the most interesting thing about me / is that I am in China.” This statement, of course, stands false, but the effect remains where the speaker defaces itself to turn its gaze elsewhere. Mott is often at his best where he leaves the “I” to the role of an implied observer:

At Yu Garden the smell of scallions perfumes the square,
In a crowd
                   photographers with chrysanthemums
beneath the Longhua Pagoda, “What do they call you boy?”
asks a big Western confidence man
                                                           in the same tone of voice
a man uses when he gives a Hopi kid fifty bucks to throw his goat
into the Grand Canyon
                                      instead of posing next to it for five.

The work takes on some characteristics of reportage, aligning itself with those concerns of the journalist that sneak into Analects, while remaining situated in verse. Still, the speaker is not passive and far from invisible. While the speaker consistently shows a tendency to resist overblown interiority (“If anything I’d say I know far too much of the interior to be of use to me”), the “I” is present as a transparent but definite agent in the world of these poems. It is this “I” that says, “I listen / in a wilderness, for a human memory of one billion…” this “I” presents the analects of the book’s title.

Of course, the Analects of Confucius serve as a useful and intended scaffold for considering Mott’s work. These writings, probably gathered by accretion, inscribe philosophies and psychologies in Confucianism that represent a China turned toward the community – the family — the social. The figure of Kung Fu-tze, much like the speaker of Mott’s Analects, operates in a decidedly social existence rather than a realm of internal meditation. Mott’s Master Kung advises, “a / person wishing to establish his own character also establishes the character of another.” Accordingly, the knowledge that is accumulated through the poems is about the relations of people. This aggregate wisdom, though, (both of Kung and Mott) is currently in negotiation with one of the most astounding periods of development in the history of China. The rise of “free market” practice, increasing contact with Western cultural exports, and rapid technological expansions are changing the faces and philosophies of the country. Mott writes:

In the years I was there the economy of Shanghai grew 19%.
It was like living on a theater set

constructed day and night.

This is the China that the Bush administration fears, one that grows at rates unimaginable in the United States. This China presents a political, economic, and cultural alternative to American hegemony. And even as Western-style individualism begins to set roots, Mott reminds us that the Chinese maintain a discrete sociality:

The common greeting Chi fan le ma?
                                                                     is a shibboleth of famine.
Have you eaten yet? Almost never: How are you doing? or Whassup?

The “self” of “how are you” is irrelevant. The wisdom inherent still relates more to the people than to the personal. Thus, the key to Mott’s cipher lies in a social poetics based somewhere between his home in New York, the mandarin film sequence depicting “a China of the Imagination,” and the Beijing of the 2008 Summer Olympics. What all three of these places might share is a general lack of concern with or ambivalence toward the incessant needs of the individual (perhaps with New York’s disregard being constructed of the cumulative effect of 12 million sworn individuals). Both business and history continue to carry forward and the individual fortunes we receive fail to alter the course with any particular significance. Accordingly, Analects on a Chinese Screen bypasses much of the self-interest rampant in contemporary American poetry journals. The book itself knows that America maintains a surplus of “personal” poets. In answer to those, Mott puts the words in the mouth of “A disciple,” who gives the half apology, “I wish I could appreciate what the world has done to you / but just now I am throwing rocks at tanks.”