Welcome to Chinese poetry - December 2004

January 18, 2006 Zhai Yongming, our final poet for the China domain in 2004, was not associated with the Today! magazine in practice, but her personal experiences and her poetic temperament give her a strong affinity with that trail-blazing publication nonetheless. Like many of the most accomplished Today! poets, she too spent an extended period of her youth out in the countryside receiving “re-education” from peasants and, after her return to the city in 1976, she was also attracted to Western poets (Sylvia Plath being a formative influence, in her case) in her efforts to cast off the one-dimensionally ideological nature of Maoist poetry for a mode of writing more richly introspective.

In comparison to {id="972" title="Shuijing Zhulian"} and {id="974" title="Wang Xiaoni"}, the two other women poets whose work has been published on Poetry International Web, Zhai Yongming’s writing is more self-consciously feminist. In the manifesto-like statement entitled Night Consciousness [Heiye de yishi], she refers to a particular mode of thought she dubs “women’s thinking” [nüxing sixiang]. To Zhai, this appears to mean something more than “feminine sensibility” or an explicit feminist agenda. From a reading of her poetry, it emerges that “women’s thinking” is a disturbing synthesis of stream-of-consciousness, surrealism and confession.

In a brief note on her poetry published in the 1990s, Zhai underlines the role the miraculous plays in the writing process:

Writing poetry is a process that involves waiting for a miracle to happen. That instant which we strive so hard to get close to is the instant we comply with the will of Heaven.

From statements of this nature, it is clear that poetry for Zhai requires magic and mystery. It is only by tuning in to those “clouded forms” that lie beyond the confines of mundane thoughts and feelings that the poet can discover sparks for her work. In a sense, this amounts to confronting the possibility of madness that exists at the borders of the reasonable, and perhaps it is this that lends Zhai’s poems a hazardous, threatening air.

Further clues to her approach to her art are given in the short essay “For a Vast Minority”, also translated for Poetry International Web. In it, she explains her work in terms of intuition:

A minority, then, and yet a vast, unlimited one, by Jimenez’s logic. This is because this minority structures an exchange between myself and quiet and language, and constitutes the axis of my poems, spurring on the circulation of poetry’s blood, causing language to become like living red blood cells that breed, multiply and increase the various elements in poetry that seem like the ravings of a mad woman but which are, all the same, the gains of intuition.

As in the case of Frida Kahlo, an artist with whom Zhai feels a strong creative link, the starkly auto-biographical provides the poet with a material and a means with which to explore that intangible world beyond the lights of personality and self-awareness, a space that is impersonal and yet often beguiling in its nocturnal otherness.