Abstract: Gary Snyder's “Mu Chi's Persimmons” represents what Mu Chi depicts in his Six Persimmons, namely, a journey of enlightenment through Chan about the concept of “form and emptiness as interbeings.” Through a careful reading of Snyder's poem, written in the 21^st century, in comparison to Muqi's painting, Six Persimmons, created in the 13^th century, we will discover that the poem adopts the mode of Zen koans to insinuate the multi-layered implications of Chan, and that its strategy to prepare for the enlightenment, however, seems quite similar to the French artist Duchamp's attempt to open the fourth dimension in his The Large Glass one hundred years ago. While The Large Glass depends on what Duchamp terms “delay in glass” to let the imagination fly, “Mu Chi's Persimmons” relies on words and sounds to provoke enlightened readings, urging readers to “delay” in reading and ascertain “undertones.” Poets in the 21^st century, as Marjorie Perloff, an American critic, points out, seem “much more attuned to the ready-mades, the ‘delays' in glass and verbal enigmas of Marcel Duchamp.” It is hard to define what this “delay” means without engaging any works of literature and art. Analyzing Snyder's Chan poem in the 21^st century based on the concept of “delay” may kill two birds with one stone: While clarifying the essence of Chan, we can also figure out Duchamp's avant-garde idea about enhancing the poetics of “strangeness” and applying it in probing into the fourth dimension.

Key words: Gary Snyder, “Mu Chi's Persimmons”, Chan, Duchamp, “delay in glass”