escaped schoolchildren pinching 9:的;<= ?着
screaming sparrows rolling toward @A的BC D向故F
hometown G H的I天 <校LM
Ah the summer of the era schools 电O院关着R ST荒V
closed W球YZ挂着]喇_
theaters closed weeds in parks 革a 用cdef
loudspeakers hanging over basketball g有i
在j的klZ
courts mm地op qrrstuv
a revolution full blast in Mandarin wx yz{v来}o~的
only teenagers on the bank of ;5 向-在木
an ancient river
到 色的焰
felt the call they opened their
pants
gripped that little thing that
had always brought them
pleasure like cavemen drilling
on a piece of wood
till it spurts white flame
(Yu 2004b) (Yu 2003: 106)
The most salient typographic device, and a fundamentally defining
element of modern written poetry, is lineation—the technique of
ending a line before it reaches the right margin of the page. “So Hot
Then” is, of course, lineated as a free-verse poem. However, Yu
supplements the standard poetic practice of truncating lines with the
insertion of intralinear gaps. A device found throughout Yu’s poetry,
and one that he refers to as “long-short phrasing” (Van Crevel
2000: 23), these gaps allow Yu to parse his sentences without the clut-
ter of standard punctuation symbols. The spaces, however, do not sim-
ply replace commas, semicolons, and periods. Just as often as
punctuations, these gaps function more actively by creating line breaks
withina line. These breaks within breaks make for a doubly enhanced
sense of discontinuity; that is, they offset the text’s syntagmatically
generated forward motion and simultaneously compound the aware-
ness of a montage-like accretion of phrases and images, each poten-
tially linked to others around them. Such multiple elements of
typographical mechanics prompt the reader to go on an omnidirec-
tional search for manifold levels of similarity and difference and in so
doing sense the repetitions that generate a synchronically realized,
spatial structure among the poem’s different parts.
Moving from the typographic elements to the poem’s verbal
content, another level of spatiality becomes apparent. Repetition—
here in the form of parallel syntactic structures—defines three separate,
simultaneous, and thematically juxtaposed worlds. The poem moves
172 John A. Crespi