from Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light

Michael Leong

(Jeong Seon's Album of Mount Geumgang)

Jeong Seon began his career
in the low-ranking position
of adjunct professor
of administrative iconography.

Breaking with convention,

he diligently studied the birth of a brushstroke
by gazing at

the surviving itinerary of an unrealistic river, at the

rippling rapport of vegetation and rain.

He preferred to observe and preserve
the essential concerns of a superfluous calligraphy

and thus did not succeed

in his civil exams.
When he was thirty-six years old,

at the
northern border of poetry and astronomy,

Jeong Seon
repeatedly painted a series of eccentric circles
and so gained access

to the crystal bridge
between ink and atmosphere.

His artist name became
Magistrate of Waterfalls, and

Jeong was said to have annotated

the nine-bend stream of time.

Analysis of Jeong's preeminent painting,
The Four Horsemen at Big Dipper Pavilion

reveals
wished for figures in revolutionary mansions—

a remembrance external to its style.
Particularly noteworthy
is a spiked and turquoise perspective

and a diagonal

dismemberment of silk.
The painting was able to route

Jeong's identity around
a dominant focal point, along wavy and uncertain patterns,
and finally

through environmental conditions of blue.
One can grasp

his aesthetics of juxtaposition
as long as one is covered in mist, or enriched

by hemp-fiber clouds, but

not lost
horizontally in the heart of the sea.

In Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light,
characteristic

of his more mature style,

Jeong's command of a
rhythmically surging semicircle

evokes the overwhelming
articulation of

how a higher philosophical plane could be

so astounded by the mundane.

Here, the twelve thousand pillars of basalt

do not overwhelm the composition;

rather, they commemorate
that sunrise is a landscape's subsidiary entryway into the

verdant flow of the visible.

A yangban painter once
wrote:
"According to where he sits, Jeong Seon

resembles a rugged jar-shaped diamond,

an arrangement of Mi dots,

or a panoramic dichotomy in detail.

Now at age seventy-two he is
much more than an amplification of the massiveness of soil."

One especially

beautiful example of Jeong's expansive style
is today known as
A Documentary Record of Aristocratic Time Travel
which illustrates
the reinterpreted bodies

of a great-great-grandfather

and his great-great-grandchild

listening to the collision of dark energy.

Jeong's strong lines here

impart a wide-angle awe

that connects the flow of inner color
to outer air, a sense that even hawks could survive

in our world

of dissimilar forms.

Literati writing under a predated nom de plume

compiled ninety-six poems about the painting
and published them in the Album of

Liquid Astonishment.
By the time the colophon was written,

the appended poems
had been vicariously exaggerating

their own images
—as if they were looking

through the zoom lens of a camera

at a human eye.

Michael Leong reads from "from Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light."

About This Poem

"'Jeong Seon's Album of Mount Geumgang' is the third section of my experimental ekphrastic sequence 'Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light.' This sequence was commissioned for a reading at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in response to the exhibition Diamond Mountains: Travel and Nostalgia in Korean Art, which featured 'artwork from the eighteenth century to the present inspired by what may be the most famous and emotionally resonant site on the Korean peninsula.' The Diamond Mountains, also known as Mount Geumgang, are located in present-day North Korea and are largely inaccessible to contemporary visitors. These poems only draw on words found in the exhibition monograph Soyoung Lee's Diamond Mountains and mimic the book's structure from Daniel H. Weiss' 'Foreword' to the four art history essays by Lee, Lee Soomi, Chin-Sung Chang, and Ahn Daehoe that follow it. In remixing Lee Soomi's essay, which details how Jeong revolutionized Korean landscape painting in the late Joseon period, this poem pays tribute to the practices of both the artist and the art historian."
—Michael Leong

Michael Leong's most recent poetry collections are Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018) and Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? (Fence Digital, 2017). He is an assistant professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He lives in Albany, New York.

Poetry by Leong

Words on Edge

(Black Square Editions, 2018)

"Monologue for an Onion" by Suji Kwock Kim

"Untitled [1950 June 27]" by Don Mee Choi

"Water in Love" by Ed Bok Lee

August Guest Editor: Evie Shockley

Thanks to Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shockley and our guest editors for the year.

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Tuesday, August 7, 2018