“There is a haunting at the table of steam” writes Kan Ren Jie, indeed, never has a family dinner felt so foreboding. Exquisite imagery of food and memory are changed through Kan’s diction into something rich and seething. In this first feature of 2021, please enjoy these three elegiac poems, an interview, an illustration, and a critical accompaniment.
The Poems
Ingredients of a Funeral Song
after Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum
i.
There is a haunting at the table of steam,
groans of long-leaved spoons sinking clammy,
the bowls. These rims float clean:
the spectre of a man, caught in a paunchy curl
a tail drowning in brine. He eats pig. Flies
in frenzied dance; the glue of rice
congealed, cooled. The groan of a roving fan,
spitting rust. Chilli,
a garish red. Leathery bite
of pork knuckle. Slimy, speckled
salt dances across the cold
of the tongue. In the clink
we tense like that bony crush
of scars, sizzle: where words
squawk like a ritual, this dying sun.
Outside, mynah choirs groan
their alarms. Here, an evening
of dust, of claw-like emptiness.
The ceiling booms sterility,
a halo of light. Fly-corpses
dancing like empty husks, seeds
blackening rain. Translucent,
a hazy burn lounges
over my father’s hand. We inch
towards darkness.
ii.
Memory is dry-mouth, a roll
of involuntary tears. Memory
is a doll speared,
colons of unraveled thread
pierced then by blades. And mother
is a patient cry: the sniffles
of croaked voices, whimpers
to the gods of wine.
And all is sky. All the cotton sky,
groggy hands stayed
by the milk of weeds. Pregnant,
issuing measly portions of rain.
iii.
The random dribble of words from home. Marketing. A buying, emergence: where sweat-drenched shirts jostle with schools of ice-packed fish. To be home, where rays strike the clingy film of plastic. Bags too heavy, rotting in the sun.
Hoo-haa. Tension burrowed within the lines: dust like polluted seams, mystical roots stretching beneath the tiles. Form tendrils, out to bite their own.
Spin. Bundles of clothes drowning in their suds. My father-hands, hovering 45 minutes over a cycle 45 minutes, then 45 minutes more. Over the metal drum, over the rhythmic groans: we hear obsession, a grinding; cloth shrunk in metal. His forehead pools with sweat. A face bleeds technicolor.
Harversack. The scaly outer-shell. The glimmer of a fluorescent pour. Pair with the broomstick back of a shaved head. Pair with the grazing: when leaving, the bits of hair that poke through the thump of footsteps.
The hoo-haa. The marketing. The spin. Here, then gone.
iv.
In darkness: cicadas become their
cries, become restlessness become
soil. And the soil glimmers
with the ghosts of stalks. I shiver
in these stretching stares. I seed the soil
in his shards. I would breathe these hallucinations.
And the sun dips in sudden blackness; an eclipse
squeezing bitter drafts of rain.
v.
The boy sings his song. Sing, that brittle cries may dampen the bodies
red. Sing in high-pitched tones. Sing to drown the rampant fires
the glob of oil, this stain of pork-bones, wine tossed and carried
like bitter dregs. Sing as send-off. Now mother-bodies
glisten like ashes, a remnant of fire. The post-dinner water: white
columns of callused hands. She disappears, melding ever into foam.
And all is a roar. All a slimy hand, the son’s throat oozing in fat.
The pork-bone, cries bouncing of its sheen. Sing of long-road for mother.
Sing these threads of red, fermenting glassy,
in my father’s eyes. The twirl of a machine
spits rivers of soap, and all is foam.
Sour Plum Elegies, New Years’ Eve
Taste solid darkness, lollipops
drooling down deep purple:
this palimpsest
an apple, the throat.
Outside, the city fog
blurs bitter. Steam fingers
wash us grey: where souls sting
down rooftops, hovering like growths,
metallic gourds. My mother found
a coin once. A still head. A chicken killed,
for New Years’ Day: its half-beak tuned
to slaughter. The crowds peer
on memory, intruders soaked
like bloodwash, the reddened tinge
of a mouth, breathing cold.
In this rain, a wok scalds
chicken flesh. Oil that sears
our pasts. We grip
its neck, congealed pink, hotel whitewalls
that spray our limbs violet. In cockroaches,
a father; its polished head
scampering down crumbs: rye to mantou
to rigid bricks. Gorging, I think of late night grease,
teeth pulled like glue. I pause at re-runs,
home videos dredged when cleaning. Overladen
cheongsum figures. Cheap laughter
at a scraped elbow. Fireworks bloom
in rips, flattening these pixels. We flood
ourselves to forget.
Sun and Moon
after Eileen Chang’s “Love”
then darling I would curl you past the paper moon,
this grappling darkness: where the past cloys and cleaves.
My mother’s wrist burns imprisonment. The scars
my father’s hand. These years are bleached brittle:
collapsed as bones, curtains that twirl, spinning us
to ghosts. When we meet, the sun will bleed
to moon: half crystals, a collision we faintly hear
as shards. Jasmine, woven as threads. These waltzes
are shackles, lined tapestries.
We turn, a fall, ever to grasp.
Brief Interview
You mention that historical and familial background informs your writing. Can you tell our readers a bit about your background and how it relates to these poems?
Growing up in Singapore, I do realize that there are certain nuances and complexities to family life and local histories, that are often not represented. For instance: it is often tempting to reduce family to several cheap caricatures—of 2 parents, 2 children who strive hard at work and school, all contained within the neatness of a 4-room or 5-room flat. Alternatively, we do have depictions of dysfunction that focus only on ‘explosive’ events of quarrels, fights between family members—but not on the way that dysfunction can sometimes be like a slow, creeping rot we sometimes forget is there, mingled with strange and deep moments of intimacy and care. In the poems I shared, I am attempting to arrive at a deeper and more true portrayal of such experiences of living with others. I guess I am trying to push back against overly simplistic narratives of harmony and dysfunction.
There is a strong sense of imagery. Do you start from a memory or visual impression and build from there? Or is there some other way you work?
It does vary from time to time, but I do find myself increasingly attracted to certain images or sounds, and using these as starting points for my work. For my second poem (“Sour Plum Elegies, New Years’ Eve”) I found myself thinking about the line “Taste sour plums” for days on end: likely because of that strange sweet-sour taste of the plums, but also because a word like “Taste” seems to contain an inherent sense of tension—that slight lilt of ‘e’ at the end of the word seems to be preparing us for the object of taste, at the end of the word! I find myself drawn to visual and aural elements, and often find myself using these as starting points for my poems.
“Ingredients of a Funeral Song” feels quite personal, but you mention the film Red Sorghum. I’m curious about a few things. One is what you found in the film that became personal for you. Another is that the film is an adaption of Mo Yan’s writing, so we have a translation between mediums from novel to film to poetry. Do you have any comment on this?
“Ingredients of a Funeral Song” does serve as a classic case of the “visual and aural elements” that draw me into a poem, as I’ve just mentioned. For this poem, I found myself deeply intrigued by the final scene of Zhang Yimou’s filmic adaptation of Red Sorghum. The film ends with an eclipse, a father appearing dazed, and a boy singing a funeral song—all colored in this vibrant, haunting red. That scene lingered in my mind even a few weeks after. I really liked how it expresses themes of sorrow, death, longing and even victory, in ways that go beyond usual clichés.
Reading the novel also inspired me to consider the way that family life can be a rich subject of study. I attempted to read Red Sorghum in Mandarin, and in it, I found the richness of family life and its strange connections with larger historical events to be deeply moving. I think that the film and novel inspired me to react and respond to these themes of familial life, mourning, grief and dysfunction, eventually leading me to write out this particular poem.
Critical Accompaniment
Images, like people, are born and die in generations. I mean the sort of images that poets and playwrights use, details and gestures that say more than they “are.” Imagine this: an insult has been exchanged, and a glove is thrown down. The glove means that two men are about to get dressed to the nines and shoot pistols at each other. It’s not just a glove, but an invitation to a duel. Once that might have been a deadly serious thing. But now such an image is invariably comic, the melodramatic slap of a dandy. The image of “throwing down the gauntlet” has died and now lives in a perverse, comic afterlife.
Kan Ren Jie’s poetry is not very funny, but that’s not a knock on its quality. It’s elegiac, filled with the kind of tender appreciation of detail reserved for the poetry of memory, and memory is almost always tragic. But there’s an image pervading Kan Ren Jie’s poetry which is going fast to its death, which right now is at the outer limits of its function, teetering on the brink of comedy. I’m talking about the image of home video. The fuzz of a screen where the pixels are still visible, stacks of old cassettes mildewing in the closet, half-random shots of intimate memories, a father with camcorder in hand. It’s all there in the poems, or at least the first two—the father’s face “bleeds technicolor,” the narrator pauses “at re-runs, / home videos dredged when cleaning.” For now these images carry an appropriately tragic weight, shot through with veins of nostalgia. But this is tragedy at the end of its rope, an attempt at remembrance in a collapsing building. And that’s exactly why Kan Ren Jie’s poems work, and work so well. Home video will only become the exclusive province of comedy when everyone who has ever been in one dies. For the moment, briefly, it lives.
You see this tension in the way Kan Ren Jie’s words constantly cancel themselves. The first stanza of Ingredients of a Funeral Song examples the style. “Words / squawk like a ritual.” Here, the “words” are doubly cancelled. First as ritual, phrases that are not authored but repeated by rote, then as a “squawk,” which reduces the word to animal noise, a cry that only means itself. So too the “Slimy, speckled / salt” that “dances across the cold / of the tongue.” Salt—dry, crumbly—becomes slimy, speckled, and tasted by an indifferent tongue, so cold it might as well be dead. Every adjective in this stanza makes something empty or ersatz out of its object; the opposite of an elegy, which makes something for the living out of the dead. Kan Ren Jie makes explicit this reversal in the second stanza: “Memory is dry-mouth, a roll / of involuntary tears. Memory / is a doll speared.” Memory is the cancellation of something which is already dead, which perhaps was never alive. The strange morbidity of a dismembered doll, which once seemed on the verge of life, and now has revealed its emptiness.
This is what I mean to refer to when I talk about the dying aesthetic of home video, the characteristic flavor of Kan Ren Jie’s poetry. Ren Jie observes with the wandering eye of the amateur cameraman, who captures objects not in their characteristic manner, but just as they lie, scattered randomly, the detritus of a life. He aims at the abject state of the everyday, the detail that is subsumed and flattened into a pixelated mess where each image is flattened beside the others, and whose meaning, concatenation, form finds its ground in a recorder who has died or gone away.
Kan Ren Jie’s great success is to hold open this tense place between life and death.
—Jack Calder
Kan Ren Jie writes poetry and fiction. He studied Literature and Creative Writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and currently works as a Global Writing and Speaking Fellow at New York University Shanghai.
In his writing, Ren Jie explores questions regarding faith, religiosity, and the intersections between historical narratives and familial relationships. His work has been featured at Alluvium (Literary Shanghai), The Parliament Literary Journal, and 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. He is currently working on a poetry collection that imagines new histories surrounding artifacts about Christianity in China.
Cover art by David Huntington
Interview conducted and edited by Deva Eveland
Critical Accompaniment by Jack Calder