Discipline

Jane Yeh

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781784107079
• eBook ISBN: 9781784107086
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Discipline, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted poems explore what identity isn't and is, as performance, as struggle, as change, as art with penetrating wit, channeling the voices of outsiders, artists, misfits, and others. Discipline inhabits the space between the real and the surreal, a mash-up of deadpan humor and heartbreaking imagery where novelty T-shirts and lady astronaut centaurs can coexist.
The poems are triggered by videos, paintings and installations by contemporary artists, animals and city life. Imaginary landscapes converge with episodes from recent history: power, resistance, and the structures of oppression are seen inexorably in operation. These miniature dramas perform their own autopsies: 'Sweet, then sour. My lips the colour of Doubt.'

III

Self-Portrait as a Spinster

The macadamia nut of sunset blanketed with a strawberry breeze.

Such moments are infrequent in our sugar-substitute days.

Like the texture of a shiny wallpaper, without good taste.

So melodious in the pima cotton night is the song of the maidenhair cat.

To be unloved is like listening to a progress report on courgettes – for months.

My feelings, propelled in a Victorian swimming cage over a rocky beach.

I decanted my sincerity into a carefully-labelled trunk.

I wilted like a leftover chicken wing in the crispy light of day.

It was awful to be unloved, like having an embarrassing disease.

(Somewhere on the moon, a Clanger emits a distant, mournful chirp.)

I pretended to be carefree yet salty, like a seaside wench.

The Bakelite earring of summer swayed to and fro, to and fro.

It was okay to be alone, like a sausage in a garden full of flowers.

In the caramel air, a Labrador stared kindly at my meaty display.

Why I Am Not a Sculpture

To be a statue carved by Bernini

Lounging in a climate-controlled museum in Rome is luxury

Like the luxury of a personal pan pizza with unlimited free toppings

Or the luxurious feel of a premium eye pencil used to draw bisons on the walls of a French cave

To be so white and glossy is unimaginable

Like how I imagine a plate of eggs painted by Velásquez or the lid of a designer toilet cistern

In a European magazine (I could be European

And wear a dashingly arranged scarf or sip oddly-named liqueurs that taste like semen

In a Neoclassical palais) but in the scheme of things

Where I am marble and still my wrist will be a marvel

Like the marvel of an isthmus whose name can only be pronounced if you have a lisp

Or the marvellous sausage that saved a man from the Inquisition in 1582

It is definitely marvellous to be as attenuated

As the casually extended leg of a greyhound reclining on its very own velvet settee

To be so thoroughbred is an accomplishment

Like the thoroughl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright