Welcome to Chinese poetry - September 2005

18 januari 2006 Born in a small town in Sichuan province, Shang had a topsy-turvy life in the army in a very turbulent period of China’s recent history. In contrast, the career he has made for himself as a poet since the 1960s has been described by Michelle Yeh as ‘self-effacing’ (in her article ‘Variant Keys and Omni-Vision’ she writes that it “is amazing that in the past four decades he has never been involved in any literary controversy”). This unassuming quality carries across into what the man writes.

Much of Shang Qin’s work is written in the form of prose poetry. Its essential feature is imagery: a single, central image that draws together diverse threads of thought, emotion and sensation. In ‘Electric Lock’, the central image is that of a man who, with the help of the headlights of a taxi he has just stepped out of, glimpses himself inserting his key into the heart of his own shadow. Although the scene is embedded in the everyday, Shang Qin’s poetic instincts are attuned to its metaphorical potentials. And so the ‘key’ enables his alter ego to escape the glare of artificial light and allows him to step inside an obscure interior world, the darkness of which he soon gets use to. The precision of the image and the directness with which it is presented seem prosaic, but the metaphorical associations which the poet quietly adds to it provide our imaginations with endless nourishment. Images such as these become vital emblems of the battles most of us wage against the creeping dehumanization of our contemporary world.

We would like to thank Michelle Yeh for allowing Poetry International Web to use her translations of Shang Qin’s poetry on the China domain.