Poet Xiau Yue Shan, recently of Tokyo, currently of Victoria B.C., born in China in 1993 . Photo Credit: Ahlum Kim, Poetry Magazine.
I write poems…to say grace.
Xiao Yue Shan from Minutes, Sea-Sight Journal Day Nineteen, June 29th, 2021 from her website shellyshan.com
the ocean is a gateway, a gentleness that contains and understands rage. almost fata morgana. the water is the ink by which the story of the land may be written. memory that may be projected into the future.
Xiao Yue Shan from her journal entry Minutes, Sea-Sight Journal Day Four, January 12th, 2021 from her website shellyshan.com
when the reality of undertaking sea-sight occurred to me, it initiated an unprecedented fear of inability; I do not know from where poems come. I do not know how my hand proves the tangibility of idea. I have started and ended so many poems not knowing where I have been inside them—only that I trusted the underlying vision that held me in its thrall during those wonderful moments. now, with this new undertaking, I would have to be servile to the volatility of my thinking. I would have to trust that I could do this work, this work that I do not set in order, but that which holds me, fleeting, in its absolution.
Xiao Yue Shan from Minutes, Sea-Sight Journal Day Twenty, June 30th, 2021, from her website shellyshan.com
details escape
returning to the place where memory goes
which resembles most closely the stagger of stones
needling the hem of land at minoura’s feet
water work of the inland sea interlocking past
I think I had to take more than one deep breath
to commiserate with the animal we named silence
beaten under depths rest good fruit car crashes
invented grandmothers more sunrises than reality
who is the owner of unremembered moments
would they open their great book
if I stood
at the door
and begged?
Xiao Yue Shan from Poetry Magazine, April 2021
Okay, I am gob-smacked. Woke up this morning and soon after read that Xiao Yue Shan (Shelly Shan) had won Tupelo’s Press’s Berkshire prize today. Saw she lives in Victoria, B.C. an hour from where I live. What? I had never heard of her. Wondered who she was. tracked her down through her website. Saw she was born in China in 1993, is involved as an editor in four literary journals including one based in Beijing and one in Tokyo and has been getting poems published all over the place for the past four or five years.
And I found her poem, above, published a few months ago in Poetry magazine. And I ran face-full into her images and an animal called silence and felt the utter delight of that silence being full of unremembered moments and then the sheer surprise of those moments being a great book and then Xiao’s utterly important question at the heart of all poetics:
would they open their great book
if I stood
at the door
and begged?
Now, I have another expression for what it is I do as a poet. I face the animal called silence, all the unremembered moments held there and beg silence to open the great book where those moments are held.
AND NOW, WHAT BLEW ME AWAY!
And then, the the utterly unexpected surprise of finding Xiao’s blog Minutes on her website where I discovered her very current twenty-day journal where she writes about and explores two coastlines in Japan and Canada, ten days each. The Japanese trip (when she was living in Tokyo) in winter in January 2021, on the east coast of Honshu to its tip through the Fukushima nuclear disaster zone. The Canadian trip, on both sides of Vancouver Island this past June! These journals feel like dropping into ocean waves and being given to the sinews and muscle mass of something huge and barely fathomable. Full of wonder. Full of wonders seen through a poet’s eye.
What a discovery! This journal inside Minutes and also other entries in Minutes with a wealth of poetry links to poem and books. Xiao (who has anglicized her name to Shelly) has a wealth and width of poetry knowledge that amazes me. And some of it show up in her sea-sight journals. I think part of the surprise for me of finding Xiao’s journals are that half of them take place where I live and specifically in a geography at oceanside I seek out as much as possible. But she with her eye from away as well, brings this geography newly alive for me. Places like Botanical Beach near Ucluelet I visited such a few weeks ago. Seen as if for the first time!
Here is her excerpt from her day nineteen at the northern-most reaches of Vancouver Island at Cape Scott:
I am cocooned in the floating world, in-between air and water, simple in the way it lands and touches, hosting invisibility by way of its quiet power. all around is white. the figures walking in the distance are malickian ghosts. the sand at my feet the only certainty. I have never seen such a vivid, striking image of emptiness.
wind does not hold, so the fog eventually disperses its temper, sending cloud-tendrils listless into a floating world. apparelled in celestial light. if we are bound, as wordsworth alludes, to wander always in adulthood in search of the same intimations of immortality that we had discovered, in childhood, amidst all the ordinariness of daily things, I am always glad in my sureness that the task is not an impossible one. the gleams that occasionally report to the vision will always come from afar. perhaps a poet is more susceptible to them—for she is searching—but it is not even that the pursuit of poetry has brought me in body to this place, but some irrational wonderment that pushes diagonally through the cracks of daily methods. the sense that sublimity can always be coaxed from the beyond—even if we are not always the ones looking. I write poems . . . to say grace.
the abstract, light figures written with the wind as instrument is language. wordsworth, rilke, harjo. in winding curves something disappears, but is never erased. because we can never once think again of the truly forgotten—the mind holds in itself all the possibilities of the real.
Xiao Yue Shan from Minutes , Sea-Sight Journal Day Nineteen, June 29th, 2021 on her website shellyshan.com
In her entry for Sea-Sight Day Twenty Xiao reflects on the journey starting with her funding proposal for the project:
There is something strikingly vulnerable about the coastlines in which these islands pledge their faith, their livelihoods, and the foundations of their lives; should the earthquakes come as long predicted, their forms will be relinquished into the ocean, and what has been carved at and shaped for centuries into a infinitely rich world will be lost. The ocean, and its conjurings of the abyss, are at once something to be revered and feared. In tribute to own the coastline as it is in this moment, its shapes and crevasses and holdings in which thousands of stories congregate, I’d like to dedicate the poems to this landscape.
Then she goes on to say:
when the reality of undertaking sea-sight occurred to me, it initiated an unprecedented fear of inability; I do not know from where poems come. I do not know how my hand proves the tangibility of idea. I have started and ended so many poems not knowing where I have been inside them—only that I trusted the underlying vision that held me in its thrall during those wonderful moments. now, with this new undertaking, I would have to be servile to the volatility of my thinking. I would have to trust that I could do this work, this work that I do not set in order, but that which holds me, fleeting, in its absolution.
it has been a little over half a year since. in that time, I’ve driven the two mirroring coastlines. the fishing docks, the seawalls, the austere torii facing westward under january snow, the insistent tide, the morphic moon, the firs, the stones, the quiet bones of seashells, the illuminating forces of blue. I crossed the pacific with more ease than it takes to cross a single framed image in the mind. I’ve spent twenty days chasing the sea. to write about these places with the ink of the moment, with the mind tangible as it coerces itself into the singular vantage of perspective, it has been an immense, generous privilege. I will remember it my whole life. days become in themselves eternal.
before me there is a notebook—its pages are forced with salt, the writing unravelling in places under sea-spray, the lock of wind, the sear of sand,. they were written upon cliffs, by the dim glide of lighthouses, by the vibrating percussion of riptide. by dunes, by basalt, by mountains, inlets, shipwrecks, places of worship, stolen land.
from where I am the whole world is frail with illusions. of the self, of love, of home, of the temporal, of memory, of the soul—it is all invented again and again, without extraordinariness, without even much thinking. but to have been at the places where the land meets the sea—
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
I live always with the tender belief that poetry is the gathering place to which these truths arrive.
here marks the end of the journals.
Xiao you Shan from Minutes, Sea-Sight Journal Day Twenty , June 30th, 2021 from her website shellyshan.com
I took a breath when I realized I would be visiting the Fukushima disaster zone through a poet’s eyes and heart. Here is an excerpt from Sea-Sight Day Four, January 12th, 2021:
I want to see oragahama lighthouse which is right in the middle of the nuclear explosion zone, and we are predictably stopped at every turn by men in strips of reflective neon. I notice a fluorescence of pink ribbon tied to branches, to poles, to strings stretched across the stark strips of wooden fences—they are warnings of what has been preserved longingly in the stream of time. it has been ten years. it has also been, in many ways, yesterday. I am not afraid of the radioactivity, but of perpetuating in this monumental human mistake. I drive down streets that grow ever heavier with thinking, with consideration, with memorial. I feel strange, as if invading. I feel a sadness that does not give its secrets away to words. I do not feel the presence of ghosts. what I feel is the presence of people. there are clothes hanging still in shops. pots still false with the memory of flowers…
along the coastline there are the preserved ruins of ukedo elementary school, so we move there in the dying day. I am very tired. the greyed-out expanse skyward seems to me very tired as well. the long thin road leading to the wreckage is ominous, replete with pits and falls, but the vehicle tumbles along the path, and we arrive at the edges of what had once been a structure meant to serve.
it’s all blue. (alice oswald: be amazed by that colour it is the mind’s inmost madness) the column that reaches up as if gasping for air. the blown-out gates and crushed steel. I can see into their splintering internalities, and I don’t fight the urge to look away. there is nothing in me that gets off on tragedy. nothing here is pronounceable. trauma fragments and nothing coheres it. we walk along the perimeter, towards the seawall. the snow threads a thin linen. beyond the barricade the ocean is a gateway, a gentleness that contains and understands rage. almost fata morgana. the water is the ink by which the story of the land may be written. memory that may be projected into the future.
Xiao Yue Shan from Minutes, Sea-Sight Journal Day Four from her website shellyshan.com
And now here’s an excerpt from her visit to Botanical Beach about a three and half drive from my house.
SEA-SIGHT: DAY TWELVE
sea-sight
jun 22
northward the vancouver island coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
we send the night back to the place it came, but it lingers in sparse shadows and rivulets of dimness. L and I make our way to botanical beach with the illusory palms of fog drawing its gestures over the sky, embalming everything in a thin sleet of obscurity. the sea here churns into a livid bath of textures and volumes, as if chasing the substances of its own being, as if unknowing as to what it should do with all these hands. the black stones that mosaic this ragged coast occasionally bore themselves from the flood, like evidences of wreckage. it is all so astoundingly otherworldly, as if we have unknowingly stumbled into some process of creation in its halfway—the uncertain point in which you are not sure if something is disappearing or reappearing, the hushed crowd of pines subsumed in mist, the land slick with water. what grows in between these gasps of pools is a world whose epochs are daily, as what these small swallows of land collects must always be given back….
and the sea is truly terrible. enthralled in its own violence, the cold unseeing depthless grey that courses with it the jade-green and heron-blue. slathering into pale-yellow foam that flirts up against the white stir it speaks with a million voices—L and I shout towards one another with the mere metres between us, and the fragments of sea that make it into the air merge with the words we speak to each other, consuming them in a great symphony. I know it is perhaps old and tiresome to speak to one’s tiny figure in the seamless infinite fabric of greater things, but to feel it, truly feel it, is a profundity that cannot be undermined with plenitude.
Xiao Yue Shan from Minutes, Sea-Sight Journals Day Twelve from her website shellyshan.com
What an unexpected journey I embarked on this morning when I thought I was finding a poet, a few poems of hers, and no more. And now look! I found Xiao’s journey on the littorals of two islands! Have they ever been married like this before? I wonder. And I found an extraordinary writer and generously curious human being. And I have found a woman who I think will become known as one of the great writer’s of her generation.