Article
Jonas van de Poel on Shuijing Zhulian & the cityscape's new nature
Poetry up close: ‘In memory of some trees’
April 07, 2015
The short poem deals with the perennial issue of the ‘I’/eye, subject/object dichotomy, the idea of the observer as creator, the observed as creation, and the poem itself at their crossroads. How does this divided protagonist, as an abstracted urban phenomenon, manage her survival in the intimidating habitat of a Chinese megacity, a place in which ‘there’s no comparable distance’, and alienation seems a logical end point?
‘In memory of some trees’ posits an idea of inner-city nature as precisely that, an idea. Much too often when constructing urban environments, city planners implement neat rows of trees and shrubs, demarcate green zones that are cordoned off and meticulously kept, and acquire dominion over the natural world through allocation, destroying all hints of actual wilderness.
The poem’s speaker subscribes to the pleasing, flattering aspects of this constructed nature and its ‘calm and serenest . . . passionate greening’ that brings ‘good-natured laughter’, but is nevertheless aware of its distal constructedness and its limitations. The poem’s ‘faraway’ trees mock their observers and impose on them an awareness of their own limitations: ‘according to them’ all of the city-dweller’s thoughts, including its conception of the essence of nature, ‘cannot be let go off’ and are ‘merely another now wind-blown small grove of trees / growing far off in the distance’. These inner-city trees beg their observers to ‘let go the beasts’ stowed in their ‘point of view’, a point of view limited by the surroundings of the overwhelming, contemporary, Chinese megacity.
Read ‘In memory of some trees’ here in both Shuijing Zhulian’s original verse and in English translation by Simon Patton. And to read more poems in our archive dealing with cityscapes and urban environments:
Maria Barnas (Netherlands), ‘A city rises’
Fernando Charry Lara (Colombia), ‘City’
Tua Forsström (Finland), ‘The city was sparkling’
Michèle Métail (France), ‘The city, from the city’
ko ko thett (Burma), ‘a few ways to eat a city raw’
Jane Yeh (UK), ‘Happy Hour, New York City’
Jonas van de Poel is the current web/editorial intern of Poetry International. In addition to studying at the University of Amsterdam, he is a poet and co-founder of the Amsterdam Writers Guild.
Chinese poet Shuijing Zhulian (born as Chen Huan in Handan, 1981) received recognition and acclaim for her online fiction pieces at the remarkable age of 16. This prodigal literary figure’s penname, Shuijing Zhulian, meaning ‘crystal chain’, was taken from a popular song’s lyrics. I have selected her poem ‘In memory of some trees’ because, as a fellow city-dweller, this poem speaks to me and does so transnationally. It provides its readers with a potential answer to the hypothetical question: ‘How does the youth of China deal with urbanity, with living in prefecture-level cities?’
‘In memory of some trees’
several trees
faraway
enough to make me feel quite flattered
in big cities there’s no comparable distance
in big cities my viewpoint’s sealed off between
insteps and the eyeballs’ inspections
right now
I must go all out to spy further trees
their calm and serenest greening
passionate greening
brings me—teasingly—good-natured laughter: Look here, you
confident city slicker
Please let go the beasts stowed in your point of view
everything you yourself think cannot be let go off
according to them
is merely another now wind-blown small grove of trees
growing far off in the distance
several trees
faraway
enough to make me feel quite flattered
in big cities there’s no comparable distance
in big cities my viewpoint’s sealed off between
insteps and the eyeballs’ inspections
right now
I must go all out to spy further trees
their calm and serenest greening
passionate greening
brings me—teasingly—good-natured laughter: Look here, you
confident city slicker
Please let go the beasts stowed in your point of view
everything you yourself think cannot be let go off
according to them
is merely another now wind-blown small grove of trees
growing far off in the distance
The short poem deals with the perennial issue of the ‘I’/eye, subject/object dichotomy, the idea of the observer as creator, the observed as creation, and the poem itself at their crossroads. How does this divided protagonist, as an abstracted urban phenomenon, manage her survival in the intimidating habitat of a Chinese megacity, a place in which ‘there’s no comparable distance’, and alienation seems a logical end point?
‘In memory of some trees’ posits an idea of inner-city nature as precisely that, an idea. Much too often when constructing urban environments, city planners implement neat rows of trees and shrubs, demarcate green zones that are cordoned off and meticulously kept, and acquire dominion over the natural world through allocation, destroying all hints of actual wilderness.
The poem’s speaker subscribes to the pleasing, flattering aspects of this constructed nature and its ‘calm and serenest . . . passionate greening’ that brings ‘good-natured laughter’, but is nevertheless aware of its distal constructedness and its limitations. The poem’s ‘faraway’ trees mock their observers and impose on them an awareness of their own limitations: ‘according to them’ all of the city-dweller’s thoughts, including its conception of the essence of nature, ‘cannot be let go off’ and are ‘merely another now wind-blown small grove of trees / growing far off in the distance’. These inner-city trees beg their observers to ‘let go the beasts’ stowed in their ‘point of view’, a point of view limited by the surroundings of the overwhelming, contemporary, Chinese megacity.
Read ‘In memory of some trees’ here in both Shuijing Zhulian’s original verse and in English translation by Simon Patton. And to read more poems in our archive dealing with cityscapes and urban environments:
Maria Barnas (Netherlands), ‘A city rises’
Fernando Charry Lara (Colombia), ‘City’
Tua Forsström (Finland), ‘The city was sparkling’
Michèle Métail (France), ‘The city, from the city’
ko ko thett (Burma), ‘a few ways to eat a city raw’
Jane Yeh (UK), ‘Happy Hour, New York City’
Jonas van de Poel is the current web/editorial intern of Poetry International. In addition to studying at the University of Amsterdam, he is a poet and co-founder of the Amsterdam Writers Guild.
© Jonas van de Poel
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