YUNTE HUANG. Cribs. Tinfish. 2005. $13
reviewed by MATHIAS SVALINA
Cribs is a funny book, but
not a humorous book. The poetry steps through the surface humor, just as a
metaphor steps through the literal utterance into connectivity. Huang’s poetry
buzzes with delightful Steinian syntax. It has some
of the sharpest and most exciting language play I have read. It brazenly steals
large chunks of writing from other texts. In all of these ways Cribs is delightful, surprising and
funny. But these delights and surprises are only the techniques through which
Huang moves the book toward larger goals. Through these techniques, Cribs explores the multiple ways in
which language attempts to, and fails to contain. This containment is on the
levels of definitional role of language, the stability of the text and the
roles of cultural language use. Cribs is a book of
thefts and linguistic mutilations. It is a book of wrong speaking that feels so
right. And it’s a book that demands that
you not act all serious and morose when you talk about linguistic and culturally
political topics. In Cribs it’s all
right to be smart and silly.
Cribs begins with a full definition of the word
“crib” from manger, small space, and cards to theft, translation and cheating
notes. This definitional mode lays out a game plan for the entire book. A
dictionary reaches out into the malleable common usage of language and atempts to stably contain these multiplicities within the
single category of a word. Cribs
reaches into the world and pulls in examples of all of these definitions. Through these examples, all tied to a single
word, the book shows how language fails, importantly and creatively fails, to
contain experience. It is through this failure that language maintains
vitality, the ability to find new meanings not through story or information but
through the qualities of the words themselves.
Throughout the book
Huang forefronts a humor that ranges from knowing amusement to simply goofy. The humor is distorted but not erased by the
cultural effects of language that he brings out. Whether it is the removal of
Joseph Conrad’s Polish linguistic tendencies in “Polish Conrad” or the goofy
identity politics of “Tofu Your Life” there is a
uneasy relationship between dominant, correct speaking and the open,
misspeaking uses of language employed in the playfulness of Huang’s verse. The
funny poem “Think Haiku, Act Locu,” opens
take it
with a grain of MSG
what’s the memory size
of your abacus?”
This silly uneasiness points toward a
distrust of the stability of language that a person coming to English might
have. It is the bald use of the ethnic connotations of MSG and abacus that make
the poems fun. Knowing that Huang learned English in his
native
In Cribs Huang’s primary way of stealing
language back is through wordplay. His
wordplay, while obviously descended from Stein and Creeley
is of a vituosically pitch-perfect quality. One
important way in which Huang plays with language is to mine words for the words
they contain, like in this section from the first poem, endearingly titled “(A
Crib-ute to Gertrude Stein, who, according to one
critic, is ‘engagingly childish’)”:
how to describe
a scribe
who cribs
with ribs
or design
a sign
that sings
and sins.
Stein’s obvious joy
in the multiplicity of language informs Huang’s sense of play. It is the
exuberance of this sonic and semantic play that I find so thrilling. Many of
the contained words Huang mines are etymologically present in the meaning of
the containing word, as above. Others seems to jump
out of nowhere, as “ritual” does in this stanza from “For MIA, Made in
[I want to be the]
arc in your sarcasm
fund in your profundity
bank in your bankruptcy
ritual in your spirituality
mate in your
materiality
Huang does not
often politically use the wordplay on
a semantic level, in that he does not usually force it toward the ideas he
wants to rise out of them. Instead he
presents the play qua play, allowing it to stand as one use of language uses
among many in the book. However, when he
does push the political multiplicity of a word he does so quietly and to great
effect: “what is a good sentence/ like when you say/ what // what/ is a death
sentence.”
There are moments
of this word play that are groan-inducing, familiar puns like “nowhere” and
“now here” or howlers like “The Token Road” (dedicated to Robert Frost) or
“Pullet Surprise” share space with shocking new revisions of meaning, such as:
every year I
put a leaf
into the cradle
of the unborn
looking for
what is not
penned there
I think that it is
necessary to have the familiar and tired along with the new in this approach to
wordplay. The goal of the play is not
sheer novelty, but to show the multiplicity of meaningful permutations implicit
in language.
Huang extends this
linguistic violence to the stability of the text through his use of stolen
passages of other texts, creating a collaged effect that works to further
destabilize the possibility of a linguistic unit, a book in this case, to
effectively contain a singular experience. Huang pilfers, or cribs, from
Wittgenstein, uncited sources, literary analyses,
Reuters and calligraphic writing in Japanese. He writes in “The Token Road”
that “poetry is not derivative enough” and seems compelled to try and find a
more meaningfully self-aware derivativeness.
The poem continues,
I write in order
to pilfer epiphanies
every turn of the verse
serves as
reverse, converse, averse,
adverse
inverse, obverse,
traverse, perverse
but never universe
I call it nerverse.
This “nerverse”
approach to language and poetry is at the ideological heart of Cribs. The wordplay,
the silliness, the stolen language and the consistently extraordinary ear of
this writing all work to collapse the stability of language. They problematize the ability of language to contain experience,
cultural identity and even the definitional mode of reference. Each presentation of fragmented stanza or
poem adds another node to the systemic collapse.
Ultimately this
instability becomes a nervous yet energetic experience, an experience of being
an outsider to a language. But rather than creating an oppositional position
for the outsider this position allows for new forms of creativity. It is because of language’s inability to
contain and frame meaning that the new experience forms. But what is most fascinating about Huang is
that Cribs does all of this without
forcing the issue, without a performative identity or
dramatic crisis. Huang comes to ideas of
culture and language through a path laid out by Stein and Creeley.
And while this is not an entirely new prosodic approach, Yunte
Huang does things with poetry that I have never witnessed before. In case I did
not make this clear I want you to read this funny book.