Poetry: “To My Very Catholic Father” by Ziyuan Tang
Ziyuan Tang attempts some pretty ambitious maneuvers in “To My Very Catholic Father.” Most poems about poems can stray toward the pedantic or else they’re academic, self-referential, and stodgy, but Tang is neither; the meticulous repetition and slick wordplay sometimes feels like Tang is just showing off how much control and cleverness she possesses, while the rest of us mere mortals page through our dogeared copies of The Bell Jar. Maybe they’re showing off. But really, she’s just that good.
This is an excellent example of the power of titles. Although the body of the poem is based in technical mastery, it’s the connection between the flex of the tricks and the vulnerable offering, so early and so obvious, that makes us as readers connect.
days trying to find the perfect
opening for every poem. It was dreadful
and it was for you. Not because of, for.
The difference being, the former is plain speech,
the latter, liturgy. Or, the former liturgy,
the latter plenary indulgence. I bought love
with lovely openings and the love felt so good
it felt wrong and nobody ascended
or avoided purgatory through an alternative mechanism.
But what I mean to say is, look
at how imperfect this opening is.
Look at how loose, hell-bound,
it is. It is not even an opening anymore
because the poem is ending. Or I can regret
ending the poem and make the ending
the opening of the middle and the middle
synonymous with eternity. Or the ending ends.
Ziyuan Tang
Ziyuan Tang is the 2025–26 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University. A poet, educator, and literary translator from Beijing, she is the recipient of the Hurley Prize in Poetry and earned her MFA in Poetry from Boston University, where she received the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Salmagundi, Oxford Poetry, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.
