The Disappearing Line

All poetry of the page is visual, and much more so than prose, which merely fills the page in a predictable and unalterable manner. Poetry proclaims its visual presence, and it is the line itself, that simplest of features, that it uses to make this claim. Flip through a book that holds a poem only here and there, and the poems will jump off the page at you. Their general thinness and the jagged ends of their lines set the poems off as if in relief.

With this cultural baggage in tow, I read Eva Sjödin’s Inner China,* a single book-length poem, a jagged little narrative, and an unexpected hybrid of poetry and prose. The title itself is a wonderful bit of wordplay. In this case Inner China isn’t that part of China protected by the Great Wall, the part of China where the power and the vast majority of the population reside, or that part of China differentiated from the far-flung regions of an even vaster empire. Inner China is simply that playworld where the narrator of this book and her sister Edith live, a world only modestly detached from the grim and grey world where they find themselves daily. About one quarter of the way into the book, we learn of Inner China:

Everything fits, everything is about us, Edith and me, but in the book we have become two orphaned boys in inner china:

"They were named Tehseng and Laiseng, which means Receive Life and Come to Life."

At home we play Tehseng and Laiseng.
I put Tehseng in a box with some newspaper on the bottom and pull her on a cart to the orphanage.

Tehseng wails.
— Quiet, I say. Remember that you have been saved! That you were thrown to the wolves outside the city walls but that I saved you. You are a little troll, a changeling. You should be happy.

This sample from the book almost makes us believe that we are reading a succinct novel, one where the novelist has decided to use only the fewest of words to sketch out a dreamlike narrative. When we look at the text, we can see that the lines go on almost like paragraphs (and sometimes exactly like paragraphs), that they run to the right edge of the page and then roll over to the next line. But we can also see that each line of text is not alone, not a separate paragraph. Instead, these long lines of text (sometimes many sentences in size) combine with other lines to form stanzas. The text begs us to believe that it is a poem, though it simultaneously tries hard to keep that a secret.

Other visual features inhabit this text. Most often, each page of text begins at the top of the page, but sometimes the text begins a bit further down the page (for no reason that I can yet fathom). Each of the three sections opens with a definition of a lexical unit (moor, pine needle, dog biscuit) that then serves as a pre-echo to the opening of that section. Since these definitions appear within a formal dictionary entry (a quite visual type of writing) I see this as a significant visual trope, especially given that each is nestled at the deep bottom of the page. Occasionally, the paragraph-like lines break apart, making clear the effects and power a simple line break might have:

Still I know we were somewhere deep in that blackness: smiling we stand in front of the bright spindly cross, we have just sung and are empty inside like carbonation, and Edith has a gap between her front teeth, and

the wind is blowing.

Beyond its visual effects, Inner China is a haunting fragmented tale, told by a child with a flair for the poetic, but whose voice is often simply that of a child.† The story wanders, coming at us in spurts, like a picaresque novel that takes place mostly in the woods around a modest home. The narrator tells us what she wants us to know, keeping a few secrets tantalizing out of our reach while making sure we can see them quite clearly. This is the story of the two sisters. No father is present, and their distant mother (joined eventually by a boyfriend) steps into the story from time to time. The girls, especially the narrator, live their lives as if avoiding the reality around them.

The wonder of this book is its grasp of the dirty secret of childhood, one we know so well that it is hard to believe how easily we have allowed ourselves to forget it: Childhood is a hard slog. It has little to do with daisies and sunshine. It is more a story of the European woods of the authentic Grimm fairy tales, stories that accept and even celebrate in some dark way the nearly warranted fears of youth. This is a story of scratches, kicks, swearing, the dark mud of autumn, the pungent smells of the rotting earth, folds and dark crevices, and the real fear of being eaten by some grey ogre we can never see but always hear.‡ The narrative is almost naturalistic in its detail and focus on the sorrowful, yet there is something about the poetry of the lines themselves (whether languid or terse) that holds sway over our imagination, that almost holds out hope for the future.

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Sjödin, Eva. Inner China. Litmus Press: Brooklyn, 2005. $12. Available through Small Press Distribution.

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*Jennifer Hayashida (is there any more American name than that?) translated this book from Swedish, and she has done a beautiful job. I always believe that a translator of poetry must have the urge of a poet herself to do a reasonable job with any translation, and Hayashida has proved herself in this regard. She “grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco,” which has clearly prepared her for this project.

†Like Pat McCabe’s Butcher Boy (which took me three attempts to finally read it through to the end, following the current of the not-quite-authentic natural voice of the narrator) or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (where Faulkner cannot quite control his thirst for vocabulary), Inner China—at least in this translation from the Swedish to the American—is not a perfect success at replicating a believable voice. But it shares with Faulkner’s masterpiece a skill for finding the poetic in the almost-natural rhythms and phrasings of its text.

‡In my own unforgettable Portuguese childhood, our maids would try to get me to behave by telling me about giant metal machines similar to cement mixers but with sharp blades inside that would cut small children to bits. Fear was the primary motivator of children in my European childhood. In the German school I attended in Oporto, the primary text of my two kindergartens was Der Struwwelpeter, hardly the stuff of which sweet dreams are made. See in particular “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb.” That man with the scissors still lives in my brain, and I was not even much of a thumbsucker before we were introduced.

ecr. l’inf.