Waterfall Plot: After Wang Wei

Author: Andrew Zawacki

Publisher: Greying Ghost (2019)

The format of “Waterfall Plot” is lifted from the “Wheel-Rim River” suite by eighth-century Chinese poet, painter, musician, and politician Wang Wei. His poems comprise exactly half the Wangchuan ji, or The Wang River Collection, a series written collaboratively with his friend and fellow Tang dynasty poet Pei Di. Zawacki's loose variations are informed by—and in turn deform—Pauline Yu’s The Poetry of Wang Wei: New Translations and Commentary (Indiana, 1980), Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (Asphodel, 1987), and especially David Hinton’s translations in The Selected Poems of Wang Wei (New Directions, 2006). The accompanying large format photographs—shot with 4x5 film, to replicate the aspect ratio of Wang’s poems: four verses containing five characters each—were taken at a compound of disused chicken coops in Athens, Georgia. The site has since been dismantled altogether.

4.5 x 7 chapbook. Covers printed and pressed on #100 French cardstock. Midnight blue sparkletone endpapers. Insides printed on high quality #24 copy paper. Hand-numbered in an edition of 100.