An excerpt from my sequence “Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light” is today’s selection for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Many thanks to Evie Shockley, who is guest editor of the series in August, and to the staff at the Academy.
You can find another section from “Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light” here.
Michael Leong’s poetry career began in the sixth grade when he won his first poetry prize in Mr. Harrison’s class for a haiku about a snake. Since then, he has received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Rutgers University and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have been anthologized in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (Lake Forest College Press, 2013), and Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). He is the author of four volumes of poetry, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009), Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? (Fence Digital, 2017), and Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018), as well as a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books], 2009). His monograph Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2020. He is currently Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College.
Contact: michael.c.leong@gmail.com
Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020).
[“Refusing the isolation of artists and individuals in favor of interrogating social realities; refusing static categorization in favor of boundary-trampling risk; refusing the rarification of poetry in favor of the embedding of its practices in the larger humanities; and highlighting difficult works and works that have caused a stir, Leong’s volume shows documental poetry to be a messy, relevant, urgent, moving art.”
—Stefania Heim, Journal of Modern Literature]
[“…one of the most comprehensive studies of documentary poetry to date…”
—Sarah Ehlers and Niki Herd, “North American Documentary Poetry and Poetics,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature]
[“Michael Leong has given us a clear-eyed, usable account of what distinguishes and connects some of the most powerful–challenging, arresting, disturbing–works of poetry published in the twenty-first century. His discussion of ‘documental’ poetry as a poetics of and for this period of information overload is persuasive and compelling, written to reward readers interested in the aesthetic and the social lives of poetry. This is the kind of scholarship we need: the journey of a mind that is curious, rigorous, and generous, unfolding invitingly, fluidly, from the first page through the last.”
—Evie Shockley]
Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven by Vicente Huidobro (co•im•press, 2020). Translated by Ignacio Infante & Michael Leong.
[“Mystical, cosmic, exuberant, boisterous, otherworldly, operatic, epic, outlandish. These are just some of the adjectives that apply to this multilingual masterwork of one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. The Gods and wars and ghosts inside Huidobro’s language explode off the page, creating an affective experience that is vertiginous, that makes the body and mind quake along with the sky, the word, the image. Huidobro is a singular writer, a legend of the global avant-garde. This sumptuous new translation is a tremendous service to contemporary poetry and to literary history.”
—Daniel Borzutzky]
Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018)
[“Working out a necessary and constantly evolving counterintuition–uneasy, agitated, restless and ceaselessly inventive–Michael Leong’s Words on Edge clocks the alarm of those who ‘wake late’ in a world of fragments and found materials. Bricoleur of the ‘jagged, ad hoc equation’ that is the contemporary, the poet constellates a spacious, ever-enlarging structure from a heap of broken posterities to make space for ‘the first blossoms of wild meaning.’ The assertions are fresh, tragicomic, and engaging, and the ongoing effort to accurately describe (and affect) a transforming situation is thrilling: this is work that leads us toward ‘a future collapse into / a full state of wakefulness.’ Don’t wait!”
-Laura Mullen]
[“Michael Leong’s poetry is exquisite. We say something is exquisite when it is alluring and elegant, but also when it is razor-fine, when it has an edge, and that edge might be used to slice open a section of air and pull something out of it that hadn’t existed before, something that we did not know existed, something that existed outside of language and was conjured into being by an unorthodox employment of that very same language. This is called invention, and can lead to great and wonderful things, what André Breton would call the marvelous.”
-John Olson]
Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? (Fence Digital, 2017)
Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012)
[“Leong’s glowing hieroglyphs show that the poetic Word emerges––as irony from iron––from the whirled atoms of the World itself. Indeed, Leong redefines the space-time of the page as a furnace of pure imagination, where the cadaver of modernist poetics is smelted with black humor…”
-Andrew Joron]
[“…a periodic table of poetic koans rife with miraculous nutation.”
-Will Alexander]
[“smart, witty poems that are deceptively philosophical!”
-Eileen Tabios]
[“Leong goes his own way: Open to trying out all kinds of modes and methods, he is beholden to no one.”
-John Yau]
[“He’s got a wonderful sense of humor, combined with a magician’s ease and the biggest wand in three counties.”
-Kevin Killian]
I, the Worst of All (blazeVOX [books], 2009) by Estela Lamat, translated by Michael Leong
[“Leong’s translation of Lamat’s book…should be read.”
-Johannes Göransson, Exoskeleton]
[“Recalling the poetry of Ginsberg, Lamat knows how to set words free.”
–Handbook of Latin American Studies]
Teaching the Little Magazine (The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, 2019)
Police Lineups (Epigraph, 2018)
Li Po Meets Oulipo (Belladonna*, 2015)
Fruits and Flowers and Animals and Lands and Seas Do Open (Burnside Review Press, 2015)
[Winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest]
[“Michael Leong’s vocabulary is totally stuffed/ multiplying in mirrors/ scattered over hillsides/ bubbling right over the top, and he’s going to give it all to you—he’s generous. He’s generous and funny and a little troubled—and “a little troubled” is, of course, the most logical and authentic response we could hope for anyone who’s examining life and poetry and personhood and artist-ness. This book is so enjoyable—like I said, giving and funny, but also very unlike anything I’ve read lately. It promptly wins the reader over.” – Hannah Gamble]
Words on Edge (Plan B Press, 2012)
[Winner of the 2012 Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Contest]
[“This is work that rubs the found language of the web up against the language of the everyday world. Many of the forms are precise, inventive, and informed.” -Rob Fitterman]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF DECOMPOSITION / RE-COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION (Delete Press, 2011)
[“A more felicitous and compelling commingling of voices/texts would be hard to imagine. This is mash-up done with a surgeon’s skill.” -Evie Shockley]
The Hoax of Contagion (Naissance, 2010)
[“Michael Leong puts the oooh! into Oulipo in this constraint-based suite of pieces.” -Naissance]
Midnight’s Marsupium (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010)
[Editor’s Pick of 2010, Stride Magazine]
The Great Archivist’s / Cloudy Quotient: Experiments with N+7 (Beard of Bees Press, 2010)
[“…what particularly satisfies about Leong’s book is that the ‘cover version’ poems he produces, almost without exception, are really kind of beautiful and interesting in their own right, and go way beyond wacky or quirky into something rather pleasing and oddly profound.” -Chris Goode]
michael leong's poetry blog 
Hi Michael, do you have any plans for publishing the entire poem? Would love to read the whole thing. This was beautiful and hilarious. Russ
Thanks, Russ! I try my best to mix the beautiful and hilarious. If all goes according to plan, the full sequence will appear in my next full-length volume!