“From weeping into weeping,” by Emily Lee Luan
What surprises me about Emily Lee Luan’s poem ”From weeping into weeping” (found in her book Return (Nightboat, 2023)) is how sadness is present for the poet. Like the poem is definitely sad, and it proposes a kind of physical being to it, but that figure is not physically with the poet. Sadness is remembered. And anticipated. The poet waits for what’s inevitable. Which is one of the ironies of the poem. Is an anticipated sadness any less sad? Is someone who knows they will again be possessed by sadness not already in mourning?
This conspicuous irony in the opening is so interesting to me, because there is so much of the poem operating on the poem’s poemness. Poetic irony. Poetic structure. Where the poet tells us sadness is absent, and then she addresses it like it were a lost lover. “When you come back for me, I’ll be among / the cornfields” And in sadness’s role as apostrophe, the poet imprints onto it what would make her saddest of all. To feel so alone, the horizon will seem like it doesn’t even exist. To feel so vulnerable, she’ll be naked and “swallowed by mosquitos” so her chest looks like a constellation radiating out from her nipples.
But even in these concrete gestural moments, I find I’m overwhelmed by the impressions from each sad moment. It’s an impressionism that washes through the poetic structure. Like I misplace the referent for the “you” about midway through the poem. It was clearly defined as sadness in the poem’s opening. But at the line, “Is it true what they say, that the best lovers / are always already inside of you.” I see the “you” differently. I should rely on the poem’s structural logic, making it where “you” indicates all lovers reside inside sadness. But I’m so taken by the expressive moment in the language I shift to think maybe Luan, in making sadness her lover, is saying sadness, as one of her best lovers, was always inside her.
What I’m trying to say here is that my continued reading of the poem leans, on one hand, on the poem’s narrative-based structure. The story of someone who anticipates sadness and feels its presence in the final image of dark smoke. On the other hand, I read the poem as a wash of impressionistic moments that saturate the poet with a sadness, even as she claims she’s still waiting for sadness to arrive. Sadness that will turn her into a lake, so she can “reflect wildly.” Sadness buckling in the poet’s body like history? Sadness as old as a moth. Luan’s imaginative reach for sadness is extensive in this poem, and I appreciate how it speaks to the deep cuts sadness would make. Which then feeds back to the story structure where the poet waits for sadness’s return. Perhaps it’s sadness’s elusive presence in the story aspect of the poem that sharpens what feels so real.
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