Endless Connection

Jeffrey Yang’s Planetary Poetics

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Roy Gumpel, October 31, 2011

What alchemy goes into making a poet? Though every writer’s cauldron is idiosyncratic, certain binding ingredients recur: an unusual childhood, a teenage infatuation with Romantic verse, an abiding passion for language and music. And then there’s the unpredictable quicksilver element—perhaps a short stint on a deep-sea research vessel.

Poet Jeffrey Yang made his debut with a literal splash. His first collection, An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, is an alphabetical sequence of 55 poems. Though the organizing principle is a marine bestiary, the creatures between Abalone and Zooxanthellae include not just Barnacle, Clownfish, and Dolphin, but Google, Intelligent Design, US, and Vishnu; clearly Yang’s aquarium has bigger fish to fry.

Graywolf just released his second collection, Vanishing-Line, an equally brilliant suite of seven longer poems on a staggering range of topics, both historical and personal. It’s a densely textured work, its magisterial sweep more suggestive of an elder statesman contemplating mortality than the cheerful 36-year-old who comes to the door in a slate-gray shirt, jeans, and well-worn cotton slippers. Yang’s bright smile is framed by a minimalist goatee; he wears a string bracelet around one wrist, and could easily pass for a graduate student.

He lives with his wife and two children in a suburban neighborhood near Beacon’s Main Street. Set back from the road, the house is fringed by a row of late-season tomato plants and a small koi pond. Yang’s writing studio is an outbuilding constructed by the former owner as a carpentry workshop, which seems apt: Beautiful things are built here.  Walls that once sported hammers and power tools are now lined with overstuffed bookcases. Loose books lie in front of shelved ones in untidy piles, pages bristling with paper scraps and small yellow Post-it notes. Several shelves are devoted to books published by New Directions, where Yang is an editor. The window above his desk frames a breathtaking view of Mount Beacon. Today its peak is obscured by low-hanging mists, clouds curling through trees in a way that suggests Japanese inkwash paintings.