Poetry this instant

June 19, 2013 In January 2013, I received an email from the Board of Directors of the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, inviting me to participate in the 44^th annual festival in June. Two months later, in March, festival organizers Bas Kwakman and Correen Dekker visited Yang Lian in Berlin. Yang Lian offered up his idea for a Rotterdam – ArtsBeijing International PoetrySync Festival, of which both Bas and Correen highly approved. Both sides agreed that such an event would be a meaningful addition to the Rotterdam program, as well as a landmark moment in the history of poetic dialogue between China and the rest of the world.

In specific terms, the Rotterdam Festival official website will, with the assistance of translators, post Chinese versions of a selection of poems by its participating artists, effectively putting Chinese readers into contact with poets from around the world. The site will also post up-to-the-minute audio and print content from the festival itself, ‘syncing’ it with China. Simultaneously, twenty Chinese poets, selected from the multitude that participated in Artsbj.com’s International Chinese Poetry Prize, will each have one poem translated into English and posted online, accompanied by a short bio, picture and recording of them reading it aloud. This streaming-audio poetry reading will become an important event in the festival schedule. Chinese poets who compose in construction workers’ tents, and other talented-yet-unknown amateur poets, will have a chance to participate actively with poets and readers at one of the world’s oldest, most influential artistic events. In my view, the activity itself can be understood as one richly imaginative lyrical epic. 

After careful discussion, we selected twenty poets from the thousands of participants in Artsbj.com’s online competition. Several different considerations influenced the composition of the final list. For instance, thirteen-year-old Zhu Xiani stands for the newest voices of Chinese poetry. Her entry in the First Individual Collection category included some good poems, and received significant attention on the website’s discussion forum. Her recording of ‘Jesus’ reminded me of a once-forbidden painting of Christ I had seen in a St. Petersburg art gallery, which supposedly had the ability to create high-frequency vibrations in the brain. We all hope that Xiani’s poetry will “constantly change,” just like “the angle of [Jesus’s] smile,” in a way that “sandals are powerless to prevent.”

Liao Hui is one of China’s best female poets, yet her work has never gotten the critical attention it deserves. Her poetry blends old language with new to make smooth, natural tonal patterns, while her free imagination builds astonishing images. Here, she brings us a Taoist poem called ‘What is Not’ that ventures into the realm of meta-poetry. She says, “I understand too little ‘what is not’”; “not the small bend of a tune's half note/nor any struggle, nor before nor after”; “not the wind-blown rolling clouds”; “the not surrounds the boundary of certainty”; “not might not be the not at all”; “from out there where it watches,” and so forth. These lines may be interpreted as referring to the nature of poetry itself. Over the last hundred years, modern poetry seems to have existed in a state of constant conflict – with classical traditions, imported ideas, social history, popular culture . . . The feeling is often that new poetry argues with everything, not finding stability even after a hundred years, but maintaining an independent existence, which is one source of its strength.

Of course, there are those followers of new poetry, whether poets, critics or theorists, who feel compelled to bestow official confirmation on new poetry by classifying its nature and direction. On one hand, the Tao Te Ching reminds us, “Resilience is the Way in action,” meaning the free creative power and endless possibility of new poetry may reside outside “the boundary of certainty.” On the other, “not might not be the not at all”; poetry is a serious artistic discipline, not a free-for-all game of simple refutation. Of course, my own understanding of Liao Hui’s ‘What is Not’ carries my own prejudices. The work itself refuses exclusive interpretation.

Meng Chongzhi, who lives abroad in Canada, engages with old literary tradition. His poem ‘The Puzzle of Jade Stream,’ exhibits the care of an academic, the insight of a psychoanalyst and the imagination of a poet. In it, the poet converses with the great Tang dynasty esthetic poet Li Shangyin, journeying down the rabbit hole of that poet’s tangled imagination to reflect the inevitable tragedy of the poetic life from several perspectives. The poems by Shangguan Nanhua and Meng Chongzhi featured here, ‘Eye of the Storm’ and ‘The An-Ding Gate Tower,’ are both selections from their aforementioned works, which also hold up well as independent poems. In ‘Allegory of R City,’ “you” is generally used to refer to different characters in turn, most of which have real-life archetypes, while “I” is an invisible, omnipresent narrator – yet the “I” in ‘Eye of the Storm’ appears to indicate the poet himself. If R City is a storm of language and reality, the poet himself is located in the eye of it – an enchanting yet terrifying position. ‘The An-Ding Gate Tower’ deals with the traditional Chinese practice of climbing, shifting focus from the Li Shangyin poem of the same name to Wang Can’s Deng Lou Fu (Ode on Climbing a Building), then to Chen Zi’ang’s Deng Youzhou Tai Ge (Climbing Youzhou Tower). Meng Chongzhi recognized the poetic significance in the ritualistic act of climbing, in which the “self-I,” mired in the suffering of reality, climbs upward to interact with “other-Is” out of history, and thereby discover the “universal I”:


I would like to point out that Youzhou Tower was only ever a purely linguistic structure. Chen Zi’ang’s famous poem, first recorded in a biography that was written for him by his good friend Lu Cangyong, is prefaced only by the sentence, “As the tears dripped down his cheek, [Chen Zi’ang] sang,” with no mention of a title. Moreover, ‘Climbing Youzhou Tower’ is not to be found either in anthologies or Chen Zi’ang’s own personal collection prior to the Ming dynasty. A search through the Si-Ku, the complete encyclopedia of classical works compiled during the Qing dynasty, reveals that no one before the Ming dynasty scholar Yang Shen even put words “Youzhou” and “Tower” together; it first appears in Yang Shen’s own collection Sheng Yan Ji (Sheng Yan’s Collection, eponymously titled after the poet’s appellate), in which he names “Climbing Youzhou Tower” as one of Chen Zi’ang’s poems. A biography of Yang Shen in the Si-Ku Tiyao, the index to the Si-Ku, states, “In his discourse on textual history [. . .] he often did not go to the primary source, and thus committed many errors.

Being confident in his talent and ambitious, when he encountered an obstacle [to his argument], he would invent titles as supporting evidence.” It seems highly likely that the title ‘Climbing Youzhou Tower’ was Yang Shen’s invention. Yet, considered from another angle, this knowledge provides a brilliant addition by inspiring the poem’s central idea and greatly enhancing its imaginative space. Doesn’t the significance of the image increase given that Youzhou Tower is fictional? The poet climbs onto a tower of language and allows the “self-I” to blend with the “other-Is” and the “universal I,” establishing a trinity amid boundless space – is this not the archetype of all poets, ancient and modern?

Similar themes and sentiments are expressed in Cricket’s ‘This Borrowed Time.’  Just as we can hear crickets chirp when we are standing in an open place, yet can’t locate the source of the sound, Cricket has hidden himself online. When he posted to the Artsbj.com Poetry Prize forum, he wrote with surprising thoroughness. In an age where a significant proportion of internet forum postings are irresponsibly written or simply offensive, Cricket’s comments were always well thought-out, careful, and insightful. Any single one could be taken as a piece of formal commentary. I read the collection he submitted several times, at one point strongly doubting if this weren’t some famous poet submitting anonymously as a test of both his poetry and the judges’ competence. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who are as curious about this mysterious Cricket as I am: this year’s PoetrySync festival will satisfy our curiosity, and he will no longer be able to enjoy the thrill of anonymity.

In today’s China, where power and interest rule the day and poetry is ever more marginalized, every one of these poets is a ‘Youzhou Tower.’ Each relies on his or her own methods to seek out new and traditional ways of building poems, working alone amidst chaos, guarding the ancient poetic spirit. In fact, in this era of globalized capitalism, what poet writing in any language isn’t a Youzhou Tower?  When we are gazing out toward each other, and cross barriers of space and language to sing in unison, this is poetry’s festival.