Pee Poems: A Poetry Reading with Lynn Xu and Joshua Edwards

2066 University Ave,Berkeley CA 94704

01 July, 2022

Description

Eastwind Books of Berkeley excitedly hosts the poets and translators of Lao Yang's Pee Poems for an afternoon of poetry, where each poet will read from their latest works as well as sections from Pee Poems, an iconoclastic collection that is the first of Yang's to be translated from Chinese to English. Pee Poems by Lao Yang and translated by Lynn Xu and Joshua Edwards is available here. Lynn Xu's book-length poetry collection And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight can be found here. Joshua Edward's latest work The Double Lamp of Solitude can be purchased here. Pee Poems by Lao YangLynn Xu and Joshua Edwards, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak. Chinese writer Lao Yang’s Pee Poems go deep and dark—with deceptive lightness—into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. If the world is in a blossom, then it’s in spit and shit too. You love to pick flowers, I silently suppress a turd.Pee Poems is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body’s most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In Pee Poems vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined. In this day and age What needs to be spoken Is the straight truthLao Yang was born in northeastern China. He founded one of China's first independent advocacy spaces dedicated to experimental music and sound art in Beijing. A recipient of a Jean-Jacques-Rousseau fellowship, he was a resident at the Akademie Schloss Reviews:"In the mythos of Chinese ethnogenesis, the sage king Yu countered the great flood by diverting it into rural irrigation. The contemporary Chinese poet Lao Yang adopts a more irreverent strategy for liquid transport, urination (with an emphasis on the nation). This apocalyptic book reads like the waste journals of a survivalist on the run from carnivorous leviathans, God, and the Chinese state. Calling to mind the work of Raul Zurita and Kim Hyesoon, Yang's PEE POEMS consist of crystalline scatalogy, expressions of a profane piety. I can't quite recall reading another poetry book that felt simultaneously this elemental and funny."—Ken Chen "In these irreverent poems, we see a fearless spirit in confronting the darkness and absurdity around the poet. An extraordinary collection."—Ha Jin "Burrowing trinkets of sound and fury, these poems shoot inward like velvet claws, evoking a courageous loneliness and despair that spits out flowers in return."—Rob Mazurek "These poems eat themselves. There's nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They're all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can't point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay."—Eileen Myles "These crisp, lean and clean words of Yang conjure up a landscape situated in uncertain times and with movable spiritual boundaries. Determined to resist the powerful tides of propaganda from political and commercial life, Yang's poems here, like his struggle in the real world, intrigue, provoke and challenge simultaneously."—Zhang Er And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlightby Lynn XuPart protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu’s book-length poem, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: Ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate. Born in Shanghai, China, Lynn Xu is the author of the full-length collection Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) and the chapbooks June (Corollary Press, 2006) and Tournesol (Compline, 2021). She has performed cross-disciplinary works at the Guggenheim Museum, The Renaissance Society, Rising Tide Projects, and 300 S. Kelly Street. She teaches at Columbia University, coedits Canarium Books, and lives with her family in New York City and Marfa, Texas. The Double Lamp of Solitude by Joshua EdwardsEmerging from walks taken by the author from the birthplaces to the deathsites of three poets (Friedrich Hölderlin, Federico García Lorca, and Miguel Hernández), Joshua Edward's The Double Lamp of Solitude is a collection of poems, prose, translations, and images that meditate on time, relationships, reading, society, and solitude. Joshua Edwards (Galveston Island, 1978) is the author of The Double Lamp of Solitude, Architecture for Travelers, Imperial Nostalgias, and several other books, and he translated María Baranda's Ficticia and co-translated (with Lynn Xu) Lao Yang’s Pee Poems. He directs Canarium Books and teaches at Pratt Institute and Columbia University.