The incessant bustling of the poet among the birds and stones

27 juni 2014 It’s really very weird that a Chinese poet comes here to share his experience of poetry writing with Dutch audience, speaking in neither Chinese nor Dutch. Poetry is like a tropical jungle with the richest linguistic bio-diversities in the geography of its own language, but in the territory of another language, it might turn to be a desert. I don’t think I can say something essential about poetry writing in my poor English, those tiny miracles hidden beneath the words, those unexpected storms among the tones are unwilling to dwell in a language used only for fundamental communications.
 
However, I’m not the kind of poet who deeply believes that poetry is something lost in translation. Sometimes I find that poetry might gain more in translation, and misreading or misunderstanding might be unintentionally creative. That’s why I decided to be here with you, talking about poetry. Furthermore, there are other things as important as our maternal language in poetry writing, for example, the notions of what is poetry, life experience and the necessity of internal life, our feeling / emotion / perception / cognition under a certain social-historical context. These factors nowadays become more and more commensurable between us, since the monster of globalization devours us from different corners of the world into the same stomach of modernity or contemporaneity.
 
Before sharing the experience of how to write poems, I’d like to ask you, why do you want to write poetry? I guess the answers could be so diversified like images in a kaleidoscope. Personally I always consider two lines from Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s poem ‘Possibilities’ one of the best answers for this question.  
Yes, writing poems seems to be quite absurd compared with signing a commercial contract or attending a chic party with celebrities. But if you once experienced the great pleasure and the highest liberation of your inner world in writing poems, you will understand why the rational life is much more absurd than this suspicious behavior called poetry writing.
 
I would like to talk about some aspects of poetry writing by means of reading some excellent poems. First, I’m going to share a poem of Brazilian modernist poet João Cabral de Melo Neto with you. The title of this poem is, by chance, ‘Poem’. We’ll read the English version of this poem which is translated by an American Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin:  
The reason I choose this poem to explain how to write poetry lies in the first stanza, especially the metaphor “telescope”. Telescope is an instrument for observing something from a long distance, but in this poem João Cabral integrates telescopes into his own physical eyes and uses those inner telescopes to spy on something should be very close to him (street) or even inside him (soul). In his literary view he invents a long distance (a mile away) between himself and those proximate or inside stuffs. It means, he wants to keep distance from every acquainted thing and wants to be a sober and neutral observer of his daily life, even of his mental world. This is exactly the first suggestion I’d like to give for the beginners of poetry writing. To write poems you should observe everything clearly, but your sight of observation may not be the reflection in the mirror with the same shape and same size in the reality. Try to watch all the things you are familiar to in a new way, from a discreet distance, like an investigator, a spy sent by sort of intentional curiosity.
 
You may ask me, “How can I keep a distance from myself?” A good option is to use your inner telescope to observe something in your memory. They might be some scenes in your childhood; naturally they have a time distance from your actual life. You can write those scenes with abundant details as if you are investigating your past from your present. Details, specific names of specific things, precise description of the location, environment, physical action and psychological activity are of great importance of poetry writing. Poems are not abstract clouds that always float on the high sky; they need to glide down to earth to get enough concreteness as their energy. Here we have a good example of this principle, ‘Death of a Naturalist’, one of the very early works of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who had performed at Rotterdam festival several times before he died last year:  
In this poem, Seamus Heaney dealt with a very interesting experience in his childhood which might arouse lots of similar memories in the mind of every reader. The speaker narrated in the first stanza how he collected frogspawn and how he learnt some scientific knowledge with frogspawn in the primary school, it’s very common all over the world. Then in the second stanza, the speaker gives us a horrible scene about how a little child was frightened by the real, noisy, vivid, dynamic, aggressive frogs far out of the classroom. You can take this poem as a chronicle of a psychological transition, occurring in the growing process of every child when he confronts the unpleasant and unknown reality which cannot be explained by what teachers taught to him. The word “death” in the title refers to this transition; it’s the metaphysical death of the innocence of the “pure” childhood. After this metaphysical death we start to know “the dark side of the moon”. Exploring writing materials in your memory of childhood is an efficient way for starters, because our childhood memory is always full of details. These details can provide a firm base of a poem. You might find that, in ‘Death of a Naturalist’, Seamus Heaney described everything with accuracy, the name of plant, the characteristic of swampy area, the sense of smell, the auditory / tactile sense, the behaviors of frogs, and even the name of the teacher. Rich details in a poem will not drive us mad; on the contrary, they will recall more sympathy from our own memory.
  
Sometimes you may be tired of writing the full-length process of a specific event, scene or other kinds of experience; you want to write something more subtle, something more related to your little emotion, your inexplicable mood. To this case, my advice is that, of course, emotion and mood can be direct materials for poetry, but even they might be very obscure. When you write them, try to make them as clear as possible, try to find some concrete substance in order to give the invisible mentality an appreciable container, a controllable form. Otherwise you are not able to prevent the intemperate dark flood of emotional expression; it will destroy your original writing intention and drag your words into a wasted land of all kinds of clichés. Remember that: don’t write those emotional elements directly until you are ready to avoid superficial sentimentalism. Here is an excellent example of how to express pure emotional stuffs in a substantial way, a short poem ‘One Art’ written by American poet Elizabeth Bishop:  
Elizabeth Bishop is very famous for putting a distinct visibility and legibility into lyric voice. We have all experienced the nightmare of losing personal belongings. It absolutely leads to a very bad mood, mingled with such gloomy emotions as frustration, self-accusation, sorrow, depression, and nostalgia. If you directly write down this vague mental situation (“Oh, How stupid I am! Oh, Why God is so unfair to me!”), your poem will not be more valuable than a post on Twitter. Elizabeth Bishop employed an ironically lyric tone to drive the complex of losing into a significant paradox. She didn’t vent anger or express sorrow in an excessive way. Instead of that, she calmly set a series of specific things to hold on this strong but ambiguous emotion, from door keys, mother’s watch, houses to river and continent, at last to “you”. It’s a progressive sequence, and gives a wonderful rhythm to reveal the complicated mentality.
 
Many beginners of poetry writing may take it for granted that poetry needs a special language higher than their daily language. When they write, they prefer to use lots of flowers of speech, lots of decorative words to make the poem more “poetic”. That’s totally not a good idea. I do think when you become a skillful poet; you can develop a personal lexicon with many unusual vocabularies, but most great poets only use daily language during their entire writing career. Actually modern or contemporary poetry is a way of saying, its poetic effect depends less on the traditional “beauty” of literary language than the particular state of consciousness beneath the simple language. Sometimes the language can be as simple as a cup of water. Let’s read a poem of Constantine Cavafy, a Greek poet lived in Alexandria, Egypt:  
Did you find any difficult word, any flower of speech in this poem? Its linguistic simplicity guarantees the clarity of Cavafy’s profound skepticism. The whole poem is just like an ordinary person talking to himself in a quiet tone, with a very plain expression. However, the last two lines are so powerful that you will never forget such a serene depression after reading.
  
Now I’d like to ask you to move back to the metaphor “telescope” at the beginning of my lecture. I’ve suggested you to observe your life from a certain distance. Let’s go further. Did you ever imagine what might happen if you put the telescope upside-down, and turn yourself to be the object of observation? Can you imagine that some higher existence, some mysterious thing is observing you through the same telescope at the same time you are observing your writing materials? Here is short poem of a great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz:  
When the speaker in this poem (the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy) was looking up at the night sky, trying to explore some mystery, he suddenly realized that the stars were writers who wrote a vast, unknown text, including him, as a tiny code, and an anonymous reader from the sky was reading him. This poem may help you to practice the poetic imagination. Everybody knows imagination is the essence of the poetry. They may think it’s very abstruse. However, imagination is not hard to master; you just need to think about a common scene reversely.
  
I’m going to conclude my lecture with the poem ‘A Tale’, by another Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert. The title of my lecture comes from this poem. It’s sort of meta-poetry, which means it is a poem about poetry or the poet itself. I will not analyze it, since this poem is very easy to understand, as are the other poems I shared with you today. I only want to say that, after reading it, I hope you will better comprehend the diversity of poetry and the pride of being a poet: