Jay Gao’s The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber, out today from Nightboat, is a staggering book-length poem investigating the possibilities of the arboreal.
As Gao reflects here, “Trees are a finite resource, but trees in poetry seem imaginatively inexhaustible.” Documents of time, arbiters of dreams, and networks of communal life, this book discovers in them a poetics entirely their own. Gao’s endlessly inventive language feels like exploring a thicket of flora: dense, alive, and surprising at every turn.
Here, we discuss the world of a long poem, diasporic entanglements with nature, and the many places a list can go.
—Lucia Kan-Sperling
Lucia Kan-Sperling: The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is, in many ways, an exercise in length: the long title, the long poem, the long line. What draws you to extension?
Jay Gao: I see extension as one way of experimenting with the poem’s “world.” This attempt to prolong a title or line deranges (denatures?) the expected boundaries of a poem. I am drawn towards how long poems, and a “longform” diasporic poetics especially, might be experienced as a space-making or space-taking gesture. So much needs to be rethought in order to allow for poetic extension and extensiveness: the line/sentence; an anchoring image; refrain; the poem’s duration . . . How do you read a long poem? How do you make one? The long poem, to me, seems most generative when imagined as a tussle between sameness and variance, concentration and dispersal, and I hope The Dead One, by hinging between these and other forces, enacts that vibrant journeying inherent to all ambitious long poems. All poems have small or large ecologies circulating inside them—“There is another world, but it is inside this one”—but I do think the long poem really places that reality right into the foreground, which is what I find so compelling about the form.
Lucia Kan-Sperling: In this book, you investigate the possibilities of the tree as poetic form—an “arborescent grammar,” as you write early on in the book. How did you arrive at this project? How did it transform as you were writing?
Jay Gao: Four years ago I was reading a lot of tree literature. Everything from Old English riddles to contemporary Black ecopoetics. This thread I was chasing was concerned with letting the arboreal imagination guide a certain mode of dynamic and poetic thought, one that straddles nature and culture, dreams and realities. I also had recently finished reading everything by C.D. Wright, and her posthumous book about the beech tree, Casting Deep Shade, became an important compass for The Dead One. I started to gather a haphazard assortment of tree-poets and thinkers: Francis Ponge, Peter Larkin, Giuseppe Penone etc. Because so much has been and continues to be written about trees, fundamentally, this project felt like a book about reading and receiving others. Trees are a finite resource, but trees in poetry seem imaginatively inexhaustible. I wanted to make space in The Dead One for pockets of escape and transformation, for the long poem to dream its next unwritten part or sequence; I wrote the book imagining it were a long sentence or line or breath, with the hope that these unsettled woods could renew and unsettle themselves into future books and projects.
Lucia Kan-Sperling: The variety of linguistic play in The Dead One seems to draw from multiple poetic lineages, including both ecopoetics and diaspora poetry. Could you tell me more about your influences while writing this book? What connections did you draw between them?
Jay Gao: As I was grasping around for the book’s form I found shade under the influence of two Asian American ecopoets in particular, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim. One seems to be working with extension whereas the other with contraction—actually, if we imagine extension in the anatomical sense, then its pairing would be flexion: Kim’s work decreases the angles and spaces between parts . . . I wanted The Dead One to fold the long branching sentence and the lexical fragment together. Nature occupies a different ground for the imaginaries of racialised persons. I often return to the nomenclature we use to name, to talk about invasive species such as Chinese silvergrass or Japanese knotweed. In a poem that refuses the easiness of a poet writing about a tree, Lucille Clifton asks why “under that poem always / an other poem.” Drawing attention to that “an other poem” feels critical—as does that space between “an” and “other.” The experimental diasporic poetry I learn the most from is often concerned with the formal conditions of thinking through redress and this problematic of how to take up space as a precarious subject and body. When space is not a given, what does an eco- or geopoetics suddenly look like? When Celan describes the task of the poet as “measuring off the area of the given and the possible,” I sometimes think that for those in the margins (Celan included), we sometimes have to begin by measuring off the area of the withheld and the impossible.
Lucia Kan-Sperling: I was struck by your use of long, index-like lists throughout this poem, which seem to gesture at the way classification operates as a technology of power. Could you tell me more about your interest in taxonomic language?
Jay Gao: A few days ago I heard the poet Ed Roberson say that “a list always has to go some place.” Grocery lists go to the grocery store. The list of all the things we could have said to a lover goes nowhere. The list of trees in the medieval Welsh poem Cad Goddeu, they go to war. The propulsive core of a list—that its words go some place—seems to echo the larger movements of a long poem. Lists invite a different mode of reading. And patience. I find them fascinatingly incantatory and prosaic, oracular and mundane, and I love exploring how words and objects might be brought together in a list in radical ways. What if I let commas do the work of adjacency in a list poem? Obviously, as you mentioned, lists are a tool for taxonomy and objectification, a record of power, but I find that even in those lists there are ways of reading or poking holes through the ledger, through the gaps and disjunctions in order to let something else come through. The indexical can often be disturbing but can also be disturbed. Is it possible to resist taxonomy through this “an other list”? I would like to hope so. Dionne Brand does it phenomenally in her poetry. I think about her lists from The Blue Clerk all the time—those lists of blues and violets.
Lucia Kan-Sperling: Your arboreal poetics is interspersed with reminders of digital technologies, in phrases like “the key for spamming abundant interleaves” and the horizontal “glitch lines” that bisect the page. What, for you, is the relation between the ecological and the technological in this book?
Jay Gao: In The Dead One the eco- and the techno- are entangled; I was curious about how the latter might recode our way into the former. Sometimes I feel like I “arrive” at trees primarily through the digital interface. There are all those trees out there—the floppy ginkgo tree outside my window right now, for example—but there are just as many trees inside this room too. When the Sycamore Gap Tree, an English tree most people had never seen, was cut down in 2023, the digital spread of its felling triggered so much online outrage. Through my phone I receive stories about deforestation and wildfires. There is a search engine that plants trees when you click on its advertisements. And so on and so on. The tree, too, is a technology. It plants itself into our systems of language and thinking and, by extension, our gadgets and gizmos: logic trees; branching systems; root directories; decision trees; rhizomes and networks. In the domains of hierarchy, infrastructure, distribution, connectivity, the figure of the tree stretches itself into those spaces. And I wanted The Dead One to also stretch itself until it risked glitching, to let those natural and artificial wires cross, to let those lines cross.