Discipline
by Jane Yeh
Carcanet Press, 2019
Review by Matthew Valades
Jane Yeh’s Discipline is a wonderful book, full of delights and her best work yet. Yeh is a poet of imaginative transformation who creates worlds that borrow from art, fashion, the internet, and pop culture. Her ability to weave these threads into tapestries of high artistry has become sharper and more inclusive in Discipline.
Throughout her career, Yeh’s writing has evolved with her choices in subject matter. One way that she generates her work is by responding to art, broadly defined. Tracing how she handles and situates the many ekphrastic poems in her books outlines her development in miniature. In Marabou (2005), her first collection, she focused on canonical painters from European history such as Rembrandt and Watteau, bringing the paintings to life by writing as and about figures from them. In The Ninjas (2012), Yeh continued in a similar vein by writing on the work of Van Dyck, Sargent, and Manet. In both books, these poems are restrained but have an expansive vocabulary often arranged in long, end-stopped lines. In Discipline, the subjects and style are more adventurous and contemporary, the lines generally shorter. Yeh’s new art poems cover New York drag performers, Sleater Kinney, postmodern art, and films (both imagined and by David Lynch). An example from “Eight Scenes from an Exhibition”:
Big as a house,
Eyed up and down. A woman
Carved out of
A sugar block, gargantuan.
Around her heels bacteria form—
Slow and green, not a metaphor.
This stanza, which uncannily resembles H.D.’s “Oread” in its shape, has the flexible short line also found in the ekphrastic poems “A Short History of Style,” “Installation,” and “Turn It On.” There are poems on art in her typical long line, but the shorter-lined work has a compression that is in many cases more powerful. The title poem “Discipline” follows from a painting of the same name by Kirsten Glass and animates it into a palimpsest of active layers syncopated through short sentences, sometimes just fragments, interrupted by even shorter lines. This luminous poem alone makes the book worth reading.
Yeh stands out among contemporary poets for her small number of poems directly about real life, her own in particular. But in Discipline she includes a couple of socially-focused poems: “A Short History of Migration” and “A Short History of Violence.” “Migration” is a cartoon diorama of colonization with a deadpan voice that moves from “a seashell to ride across the waves” to children who become “meaner and fatter.” Looking past the surface, the poem is a critical history refracted through her aesthetic lens that has a bite below its apparent innocence. “Violence” is, on the other hand, much more somber. The poem has a running figure chased by indistinct, threatening objects: a string of lights, smoke, a bridle. Through the lines “the fear / is black and white” and “Boys are ten a penny / One less ain’t worth / Spilt milk,” the subject of police violence against young black men becomes clearer, though indirect. Yeh places these poems among the first in the book. This prominence shows their importance to her new work that takes bolder risks.
Many of the poems in Discipline are both precise and jumpy, shifting subjects between sentences or lines. These leaps in language are often anchored by a persona, though not always one specific to a single speaker. More than in her past collections, Yeh uses composite personae, one poem being a self-portrait as New York in the 1980s. In certain poems, Yeh leverages group speakers to haunting effect, as in this selection from “A Short History of Silence”:
In our house, all the clocks are turned off and the mirrors
Don’t work. We sit like bread in a stay-fresh wrapper,
Keep ourselves to our selves. Sometimes the speeches
Are so beautiful it hurts. On the porch where we can’t be
Seen to smile, the honeysuckle meshes with silent
Weeds. We rock back and forth, back and forth in our long
Black dresses. Mosquitoes taste our blood and find it good.
The syntax and sense of character are clear, but there is a useful ambiguity about who exactly this “We” is. Siblings? Lovers? Friends? Something that they’ll never comprehend? This draws a reader in by putting them in the position of seeking definition through details. That it is not fully solvable only heightens the intrigue.
Though it weighs in at a slight 54 pages, this is an impressive book that I hope will be influential and widely read. Continual surprises, when coupled with the compression of her best poems, are why Discipline reads so well. Yeh’s mastery of this tension rewards rereading over and over. Like a child at the bottom of a slide, I found myself wanting to start again as soon as I’d finished.