Glenn Mott
Analects on a Chinese Screen
$16
ISBN 978-0-925904-61-4, 80 pages, poetry

The Analects of Confucius, or Lun Yü in Chinese, are the selected discourses or dialogues of Kung Fu-tze as recorded by his disciples. And like its Confucian antecedent, Analects on a Chinese Screen is a collection of selected writings, miscellany, and passages whose subject is China. Just as readers cannot regard the Confucius of Lun Yü as wholly historical, since Lun is a term connected with the compilation of documents, so too the "I" of Analects refers to a protean self. The foundations of the poetry in Analects are not to be sought in the contemporary lyric, with its preoccupation with personal assertiveness and the interior struggles of a single personality. Rather, it is modeled on a form that reaches back to an earlier tradition of narrative and storytelling, one that is classical in structure, and able to speak of "bread and circuses." When Confucius spoke of restoration of the ancient order, he used it to sanction institutional innovation, and this work builds on those disrupted and self-questioning dialogues, whose aim was not individual, but social enlightenment. In Analects, Glenn Mott engages both sinister and pleasurable aspects of the social, yet throughout, his focus is on China in an era of national renovation, and the insistent connection of poetry with the external world.

Reviews

Read Jeremy Hawkins' review in Zoland Poetry
Read Hank Lazer's review in Golden Handcuffs Review

"A relentless global soul search, not for the profit of personal epiphany, but to think aloud ancient wisdom lost somewhere in the trafficking between a Platonic shadow-cave and a Confucian bamboo-screen. Reading this book is like sleepwalking in an echo chamber built of words mislaid, with one's guts or guilt turned inside out."
-Yunte Huang, author of Transpacific Displacement

"'Much the most interesting thing about me / is that I am in China,' we read in Analects. And this is not a China of poetry and philosophy only, like that of so much American poetry, but of finance, a booming economy, and clashes of culture. Yet the real constructions that crowd Shanghai's skyline are met in the poetry with Mott's constructions of being. If, as he writes, 'To be / is explanation,' then his riffs on the to be verb are many, taking the inside out and the outside in, composing an autobiography of the exterior. He comes, beautifully, 'to the jackals of sensitivity with something like love.'"
-Susan M. Schultz, editor of Tinfish Press, University of Hawai'i Manoa

"As a poet, Glenn Mott is an Auster-like Proust, a Sebald of China travel, Maimonides shorn of certainty in search of shadow as much as light. His Analects on a Chinese Screen is a book of humility rather than the falsely heroic, written by one as sensitive to the attenuations of life and the nuances of culture as any I've yet read."
-Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano