The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng [by Angela Ball]

Birds of Passage

We roll out of bed before sunrise, put the two pull bags in the trunk, crank up the engine, and back the car out of the driveway; we have a two-hour drive to the airport in Memphis to catch the flight to Japan. We cross the Yazoo River Bridge, pass Baptist Town where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison, turn left onto Route 7. We cross another bridge in a few minutes, pass the cypress bayou that looks eerie with thin mist floating above the water, and then pass Avalon where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds. Now a thin line of dawnlight is shimmering in the low sky, and I start to speed up, but right after a curve I must slow down to catch this gorgeous flight:

crack of dawn
thousands of snow geese
honk off the fields

--Jianqing Zheng

We were afraid we would be late for our flight to Japan so I began to speed after I drove out of Greenwood, but seeing the snow geese really was a sign to slow down. Upon returning, I wrote several haibun about Japan, and when I wrote "Birds of Passage," I thought of borrowing O'Hara's way of telling about doing small things before approaching the end for the death of Holiday. I published 'Moonlight'--my first haibun—in 2003 and returned to haibun writing in 2010. A big challenge as the prose part and haiku have to complement each other or juxtapose each other. Now I seem to write more of it than free verse.
--Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and Enforced Rustication, editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia and four other scholarly books, and recipient of grants from the NEH, Fulbright Programs, and Mississippi Arts Commission. His forthcoming book of poetry is The Dog Years of Reeducation from Madville Publishing, 2023.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” is a masterful example of haibun: a form invented by seventeen-century haiku master Basho that pairs the levelness of prose with the levitation of haiku.

The poem’s drive toward Memphis calls out places sacred to the blues and encompasses a succession of flights: the poet’s flight from his home to Memphis Airport, his imminent flight to Japan (home of Basho), the bluesmen’s flight into legend, and the snow geese’s (sonically linked to the car’s horn) timely but timeless migration, that becomes, in the closing haiku, the flight which the poet must “slow down to catch.”

Zheng’s polyvalent treatment of space in “Birds of Passage” recalls Frank O’Hara’s navigation of NYC streets in “The Day Lady Died,” in which landmarks (“the bank,” “PARK LANE liquor store,” “Ziegfeld Theatre”) compose a poetic map. “Birds of Passage” travels faster, by car, (“rolling out of bed” prefiguring its wheels); crosses “Yazoo River Bridge”; passes Baptist Town “where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison”; crosses another bridge; passes the “cypress bayou” “eerie with thin mist floating”; passes “Avalon [in legend, the “earthly paradise” King Arthur was carried to after death] where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds.” Zheng’s “thin line of dawnlight” “shimmering in the low sky” recalls the charged horizontality in O’Hara’s poem as Lady Day “whispers a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron.”

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Snow Geese are possibly the noisiest of all waterfowl. Their main call, made by both males and females, is a nasal, one-syllable honk given at any hour of the day or night, at any time of year, in the air or on the ground. Distant calling flocks are reminiscent of a pack of baying hounds.”

The cacophony of geese both drowns the car’s hurry and “honks off” the tragic history witnessed by land that produced that earthiest art form, the blues—music that consumes its own impetus, as Lachey Doley avers in his song, “The Only Cure for the Blues is the Blues.” Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” ends in bluesy glory and stunning uplift as, through opening daylight, a flock of geese sounds.

--Angela Ball

Comments

[George Drew]

Not only is Jianqing my editor at Valley Voices, but we also share the same publisher,
Madville Publishing, about which I am delighted. So, too, delighted about both his poem
and Angela Ball's incisive analysis. I have read A Way of Looking and recommend it highly.
His book has introduced me to the haibun, which I wasn't at all familiar with. Thank you,
Jianqing!

[Annette C. Boehm]

The play with 'flight' is pleasant to contemplate. It would be nice to be able to fly again, soon.

[Jon Peede]

Having just moved to the Mississippi Delta, I must say that waking to the sudden cacophony of the snow geese takes a moment to get used to before a pattern of sounds becomes clear. Zheng captures the environment--land, creatures, people, and tangled history--so well here with understatement.

Like another commentator, I knew haiku but not the haibun form, which Zheng excels at here and in his collection A Way of Looking.

[Susana Case]

Wonderful haibun. Congratulations!

[Olga Ponomareva]

It is a pleasure to read the work by such a talented poet as Dr. Zheng and such an insightful analysis by Angela Ball. Especially it is lovely to read about the places which I have seen and I can picture them in my mind very clearly. Thank you!

[Angela Ball]

Thank you for your comment, George Drew!

[Angela Ball]

Yes, Olga Ponomareva, Jianqing Zheng is great at describing the delta, that he knows so well.