Welcome to Chinese Poetry - March 2004

January 18, 2006 However, an alternative Chinese poetry has flourished in splendid and frequently difficult isolation on the island of Taiwan since 1949. After the defeat of the Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army by Mao Zedong’s communists, many Chinese relocated to Taiwan, and the poets among them continued to write, albeit in a very different world to that of the Mainland. To an outsider, Taiwanese poetry is characterized by several obvious features. Firstly, it is written in the traditional form of the Chinese script, not the simplified characters that have been in use on the Mainland since the 1950s. Secondly, Taiwanese poetry has not suffered nearly so much from the kind of heavy-handed ideological interference that is found in Mainland poetry in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Of course, political conditions on the island have not always been conducive to real freedom of thought, but generally, there has been less of an effort to transform literature into a mouthpiece for government policies. Thirdly, Taiwanese poetry seems to retain stronger links with traditional Chinese poetry and Chinese language norms, a fact that suggests an intriguing continuity with tradition rather than abrupt and wholesale rejection. Finally, and most significantly, Taiwanese poets, while maintaining powerful ties with the past, have been freer to engage with the poetical experimentations of foreign modernisms since the 1950s, and leading exponents such as Luo Fu, Shang Qin, Ya Xian, Yang Mu and Luo Qing have achieved international success.

Chen Kehua (b. 1961), our new poet of the quarter, is part of this rich tradition, and in his work you will find a fascinating interplay of experimental energies and traditional concerns (particularly the poet’s engagement with China’s long Buddhist tradition). An eye doctor by profession, Chen Kehua is, to play weakly with words for a moment, an “I doctor” in his more recent poetry, much of which seeks to undo in us our fixation with this elusive, possible illusory, entity that seems to live with a force of its own in nearly all of us. Well-known in Taiwan as an activist for gay rights, Chen Kehua also uses poetry to challenge sexual stereotypes and to upset easy moral positions. Reading him is therefore an unsettling experience in many ways, but his challenge is a therapeutic one in the sense that it suggests a wider, wilder life beyond the comfortable (if confining) shapes we so often assume, almost despite ourselves, within what is called 'social existence'.

As a social critic, the poet is empowered both by the Buddhist tradition, which provides him with concepts and language with which to attack the ego, and by his vision of alternative sexualities. Beside this, however, the poet frequently displays a powerful, if wistful, lyric sensibility and the sort of qualities that the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski describes in his poem ‘Self-portrait’:

I read poets, living and dead, who teach metenacity, faith, pride . . .