Artikel
Welcome to Chinese poetry - September 2004
18 januari 2006
Born in 1966, Yi Sha graduated from the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University in 1989, a year that will always be remembered for its inspiring student demonstrations and the tragic massacre by the Chinese government of innocent people in Tian’anmen Square. Before 1989, Chinese poetry was extraordinarily vibrant, with all kinds of groups and isms emerging across the country, together with the appearance of a plethora of unofficial poetry publications. In the wake of the Tian’anmen Massacre and the round-up of individuals involved, the situation altered drastically. Groups dissolved and poets tended to work in a more isolated, individual way.
Since the publication of his first collection Poets starved to death in 1994, Yi Sha has become an influential figure in the Chinese poetic landscape both for his uncompromising commitment to kouyu shi and for his love of literary polemic. His poetry is frequently confronting, and occasionally seems to be more intent on upsetting than providing delight to readers, but he has already assembled a core of work that tries to get poetry to acknowledge the realities of day to day existence. In the statement entitled “Say What You Have to Say” he writes:
When reading a poet’s work, I have, on the one hand, and expectation with regard to the poetry, and on the other, I want to see something of the life behind the text. This latter desire has been getting stronger and stronger of late—this serves as a reminder to me about my own poetry.
As Yu Jian once noted in his 1988 article "The Rebuilding of the Poetic Spirit" [Shige jingshen de chongjian], there was a tendency among many writers of poetry in the 1980s to “abandon their own lives, to abandon the existence in which they find themselves for the sake of day-dreams". Poetry was always too pure to be found in the mundane: it existed in rainbows and dreams and worlds of intense private feeling. Yi Sha seeks to counteract that tendency: signs of his life loom large in his work, starkly at times, and without the warm glow of self-glorification.
Contemporary mainland Chinese poetry was born on 23 December 1978, the day on which members of the Today! [Jintian] editorial team pasted up copies of their unofficial literature magazine on various walls in Beijing. After ten bloody and chaotic years of "Cultural Revolution", the poetry that emerged in the pages of Today! sought to fuse elements of Chinese tradition with the experiments of Western modernism . . .
Yi Sha, this month’s Chinese Poet of the Quarter, has a reputation for being something of an iconoclast in contemporary Chinese poetry circles, but there is no mistaking his dedication to poetry. His work can be linked with that of three other poets already published on Poetry International Web —{id="971" title="Sheng Xing"}, {id="977" title="Yu Jian"} and {id="972" title="Shuijing Zhulian"}—poets who make a conscious effort to free themselves of some of the Romantic and/or lyrical trappings frequently found in the work of those Today! pioneers and who are trying to write what is called kouyu shi, that is, poetry written in spoken language as opposed to some form of literary dialect.Born in 1966, Yi Sha graduated from the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University in 1989, a year that will always be remembered for its inspiring student demonstrations and the tragic massacre by the Chinese government of innocent people in Tian’anmen Square. Before 1989, Chinese poetry was extraordinarily vibrant, with all kinds of groups and isms emerging across the country, together with the appearance of a plethora of unofficial poetry publications. In the wake of the Tian’anmen Massacre and the round-up of individuals involved, the situation altered drastically. Groups dissolved and poets tended to work in a more isolated, individual way.
Since the publication of his first collection Poets starved to death in 1994, Yi Sha has become an influential figure in the Chinese poetic landscape both for his uncompromising commitment to kouyu shi and for his love of literary polemic. His poetry is frequently confronting, and occasionally seems to be more intent on upsetting than providing delight to readers, but he has already assembled a core of work that tries to get poetry to acknowledge the realities of day to day existence. In the statement entitled “Say What You Have to Say” he writes:
When reading a poet’s work, I have, on the one hand, and expectation with regard to the poetry, and on the other, I want to see something of the life behind the text. This latter desire has been getting stronger and stronger of late—this serves as a reminder to me about my own poetry.
As Yu Jian once noted in his 1988 article "The Rebuilding of the Poetic Spirit" [Shige jingshen de chongjian], there was a tendency among many writers of poetry in the 1980s to “abandon their own lives, to abandon the existence in which they find themselves for the sake of day-dreams". Poetry was always too pure to be found in the mundane: it existed in rainbows and dreams and worlds of intense private feeling. Yi Sha seeks to counteract that tendency: signs of his life loom large in his work, starkly at times, and without the warm glow of self-glorification.
© Simon Patton and Yu Jian
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