Article Index

Katabasis, Jay G Ying

Smith/Doorstop, 2020 £5.00

Personification

In about 2008 I remember being desperate to capitalise Time and Death and other such abstracts. But it was unfashionable — a real NO, even if you were going through a mild Milton phase.

It was with some envy and irritation, then, that I read Jay G Ying’s Katabasis which swivels deftly round a personification of (and capitalised) War.

It works. Doesn’t feel old fashioned but fresh. The imagery is excitingly grotesque. Here’s a cracker from the first page:

War’s lost heads cracking their jewels on hollowed-out houses
searching for a neck to hang from inside.

Gets more brutal with ‘Animal Vegetable Mineral’:

And God I stared at what I had brought up in that toilet bowl almost halfway back to life

My black phlegm was as rotten as one long civilisation just ended,
marbled by that crude blood inside, veins not flecks, a leaf, never a jewel

Dizzyingly vivid, Katabasis lurches through an underworld of ancient and modern, interrogating the monster of War through the context of the descent of Inanna (see next OPOI for more about this goddess), and by capitalising War, Jay G Ying adds authority and menace to the abstract.

Nell Prince

The theatre of war: poetry as drama

Katabasis — meaning descent, particularly into the Underworld, but also descents of other kinds, such as a gradual lessening of emphasis in a line of poetry — is a riot of settings, images and voices. Most notably, Ying juxtaposes the story of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld with notes of modern-day warfare in Iraq. (Inanna is the Sumerian goddess of fertility and war)

Approaching the work can be challenging. In addition to their foundation in an ancient mythology, the poems defy much of what might usually be expected. They’re mostly written in long, prose-like lines. They’re punctuated with a variety of rupturing devices such as multiple colons to break passages into chunks of phrases. They’re full of self-conscious erasures, such as the ‘unknown no. of lines damaged’ in the poem ‘...War, sweet is your praise.’

It may be helpful to approach the collection as a series of dramatic monologues or set pieces, almost akin to Mark Ravenhill’s epic cycle of plays about modern warfare, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. Many of Ying’s poems can be read as dramatic monologues.

‘Animal Vegetable Mineral’, for example, is spoken by a distressed narrator of possibly hybrid identity. Part Inanna, part contemporary equivalent, the speaker tells of the sickness that has accumulated within and without themselves — ‘my black phlegm was as rotten as one long civilisation just ended.’

The pamphlet is replete with vivid, theatrical imagery. In particular, it’s haunted by the image of turning, severed heads:

I witnessed three monstrous apples made
of metal, like heads in their dark display cases, turned
towards me
[‘Miniatures’]

The poems are also interspersed with italicised passages that tell Inanna’s story more directly. These act almost as chorus pieces. With their flow interrupted by the afore-mentioned colons, they take on a chanting quality. ‘Where is my child: Where is my man: Where is my Sister: Where am I: Where’ (in ‘...War, sweet is your praise.’).

Of course, as bardic tradition indicates, poetry and drama have always been closely interlinked. By creating a pamphlet which inhabits a borderland between the two forms, Ying has heightened the intensity, invoking a landscape of chaos, and vividly capturing the sick immediacy of a theatre of war.