Category Archives: Contemporary poetry

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Mo Mo 默默 on Yan Li 严力 article from Coquette 撒娇

Below is my translation of an article, from the year 2000, written by Shanghai poet, abstract photographer (about whom I’ve written on this blog), and arts organizer Mo Mo. It is Mo’s take on fellow poet-artist Yan Li’s return to China after years in the US, among other locales. The original is a fine piece of prose in Chinese, and regrettably somewhat less than that in English. Nonetheless, it perhaps deserves the light of day. I’ve added a collection of Yan Li paintings, both from the series to which Mo refers, and from more recent work, to fill out the picture.
 

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One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, a new machine came shrieking through, tearing open the once complete world of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Goya, Delacroix, and Rubens; the once complete world of agriculture. The steam engine came ripping through, leaving in its wake: A new black hole.

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The light emanating through this hole then illuminated the canvases of Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Miro, Renoir, and Seurat, painters using vibrant colors to deftly depict the new world of the hole with peaceful dawns, quiet vases on table tops, beautiful women amidst afternoon bouquets, and the beach of La Grand Jatte. Before their very eyes a new capitalist world is drawn in by the steam engine, and the miracles of material objects are spawned by capitalism. The Impressionists are like children frolicking in the sun, a light in which even the occasional twinge of despair is spectacular: sunflowers of van Gough. Only one painter among them is truly aware: Paul Gauguin.  Gauguin feels the irresistible pull of the steam engine. Instead of giving in, however, he opts to escape — in 1865 the painter flees to the emerald blue waters of the island of Tahiti.

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Without a station or a terminal point, the flight of the steam engine is much like human desire itself. In a mere one hundred years this black hole swallows up two thousand years of material culture, and in its rampage Kandinsky, Munch, Magritte, and Duchamps gradually begin to open bewildered and consternated eyes. The Kandinskian lines and patterns form a kind of restrictive force endeavoring to obstruct the unbridled drive of the steam engine; Duchamps creates installation art in an effort to toss tangible objects across the path of this unstoppable progress; and the lonely Munch stands all alone beside the tracks hopelessly calling out: “Stop! insatiable inhumanity!”

A black hole.

World War I ….

World War II ….

A mushroom cloud in the sky above Guam ….

The pain of the wound in 1949 finally overflows the heart of Picasso, so that even he can no longer twist out his enraged forms. The crushed people of “Guernica” are the people smashed in the path of the steam engine, the very bodies rent asunder by the dog eat dog desires of humanity.

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Spilling into this space is no longer oil, but now heroin, as the slowing steam engine celebrates its wild ride like the coming of the end of the world. The pain of the wound finally numbs Dali, whose hallucinatory canvases more than any other manifest the fragments of a world torn to bits under the wheels of the steam engine.

Goodness is in pain.

Truth is in pain.

Beauty extends pain.

And now, all around we see a wounded world. In the year 2000, after having been baptized in the experience of cruel American capitalism, Yan Li is one truly aware. He moves, however, in a direction opposite of Paul Gauguin; Yan Li returns to his country of origin, a place in which the steam engine’s destruction has only just begun. On an afternoon of a thousand sighs, a determined Yan Li raises his brush, and starts patching our world full of scars, healing our wounds one by one.

And you, do you still feel the pain?

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originally published Coquette

June 1, 2004

text by Mo Mo

translation by Paul Manfredi

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Word Image by Yu Huaiyu

Going back through some word-image materials in preparation for revising a chapter on the subject, and returning to the work of Yu Huaiyu 于怀玉, one of the leaders of Shanghai’s poetry circles and, more importantly, originator and principal editor of Shigebao 诗歌报, China’s largest online poetry venue. He is also a visual artist, working in ink paintings.

Yu Huaiyu goes by the name “Xiaoyuer” 小鱼儿 ，or “Little Fish.” Somehow the nickname meets the man and the art 1/2 way, even if there’s nothing in fact in his name save homophony that suggests water bound creatures. His poetry and his visual work share a kind of cleverness, breezy, fresh, and often amusing. “Today I entered a Chat Room” is a case in point. My translation follows below, but preceded by two Yu’s ink paintings.

 

YHY image 1 YHY image 2 YHY image 2 1

This morning I entered a chat room

Where I found two people

Me, Little Fish

And another guy called Everybody Else

I greeted Everybody Else

But he didn’t respond

So   I left

Come afternoon, I went back to the chat room

And that Everybody Else was still there

I didn’t say a thing to him

and  just left

Before getting off work

I went back to the chat room

and said to Everybody Else

Hey, old friend

Isn’t it about time you left?

今天进了聊天室

今天我进了聊天室

上午我进了聊天室

里面有两个人

一个是我小鱼儿

一个叫所有人

我向所有人打了个招呼

他没有理我

我 就走了

下午 我又进了聊天室

那个叫所有人的家伙

还在 那里

我没有跟他打招呼

就 走了

下班前

我又来了聊天室

对那个叫所有人的家伙说

喂 老兄

你也该走了

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Poets with Cameras, again

A few months ago I wrote about Mo Mo’s abstract photography. I neglected to mention that Yang Xiaobin has been using a similar strategy in a micro-photo series, which is to say taking pictures of physical objects (walls, street pavement, and the like) at ultra-close range, blowing up the results to impossible-to-decipher vistas and them exhibiting them as abstract work. This he calls his “post-photography” or “Traces as Palimpsest,” as his first show of such work was subtitled. A palimpsest is a work of layers, with older text effaced, erased, destroyed or otherwise just faded from view, and a newer text inscribed upon it. When applied conceptually to the built environment, which Yang’s work seems to suggest (near I can make out)–the waves of development in Taiwan in this case but in fact anywhere the built environment is constrained enough to require constant re-development–we can see older structures exerting their presence in shadowy forms through the new, ghosts which haunt any optimistic attempt to assume that our physical surrounds are “here to stay” (and of course all ideological implications with-standing).

By the time the work reached the Jiaodu Abstract Art Gallery (角度抽象画廊) the series had taken on the more inscrutable name: Post-woundism (后伤口主义), leading with the following image:

Yang Xiaobin photography image

The “scar tissue” of contemporary life makes a certain amount of sense to me, but I’m not sure I exactly see it in this image (or at least its reproduction, which may indeed have lost something in translation).

Regardless, and now it looks as though Bei Dao has joined this particular fray (or just gang), with an exhibition in Hong Kong Museum’s Beijing branch in October last year of related work. The Poetry Foundation carried a report (from Global Times), with little more than announcing the fact that the exhibition took place.

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The title,  ”Nil Mirror” is reminiscent of the title of Bei Dao’s Landscape Over Zero, something which would suggest word-image convergence on some level. I can imagine a terrific group show of poet-photographers, particularly if combined with readings.

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WHITE SNOW BLACK CROWS

Reblogged from 中国大好き:

Yi Sha

White Snow Black Crows

Beijing morning. Iron Lion's Grave.

It has snowed all night.

Stepping on a field of white

walking deep into the campus,

suddenly -

sounds of attack.

A commando of crows

at my feet filling the deck

of this aircraft carrier.

Oh, white snow black crows

like God's own picture,

make me rub my hands,

Read more… 171 more words

and let's not forget the poets: this is a fine addendum to my previous post, for whatever we say about China's aircraft carrier, it is quite a symbol, drifting in uncertain waters.
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Mo Mo the Abstract Photographer

Mo Mo 默默, Shanghai poet, arts organizer and editor of the highly influential journal Coquette 撒娇 has, like many other poets in recent years, taken to visual art. Mo’s chosen medium is photography, or “Abstract Photography,” one example of which:

The abstract can broadly be drawn into two (at least) categories, fundamentally distinguished by the absence or presence of a title. The title, it seems to me, brings the abstract work one or more steps closer to the figurative, to the articulable.

In Mo Mo’s case there are titles to his images, the above, for instance  有时候感觉自己有很多自己 (“sometimes I feel there are many selves of the self”). The question I wish to pose is: in the domain of visual-verbal intersection, does the poet have a kind of edge, a special knack or gift for negotiating the territorial overlap between the language, such as it is, of the mind’s eye and eye itself?  In that case, perhaps, we speak (?) more of synesthesiac harmonizing and less of communication, bridges, or other ferrying of some “thing.”  So what do the “many selves of the self” say visually? Truth is, not much to me at least.

But there is a visceral quality image itself, something almost delicious, or even luscious about this imagery. The harmony, in other words, is less with the words, than with an eye for elemental and material experience.

what we miss every day

In this instance we have  ”每天，你错过了什么”  (What do we miss, day after day?). Here, by contrast to the image above, the hints of an urban scene, akin to Mo Mo’s Shanghai, enveloping built environment, figures subjected to warmth and light. What they “miss”? Again, unclear, though in this case apparitions amidst urban scape certainly not unfamiliar theme.

世界大同后的第一个早晨

In the above image (世界大同后的第一个早晨), though, I find a more compelling vision. The “first morning after great harmony” is both soothing and unsettling, dynamic in idea and image. Technology is convened to a purpose here, a fact of production and a thematic element, the thing that “brings us all together,” for better or worse.

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A New Category of New

The particular instance of verbal visuality apparent in contemporary calligraphic performances of contemporary Chinese poetry is fascinating to me. Calligraphy, though indeed rather variegated after roughly 2000 years of theory and practice, experiment, return, renewal and the rest, has among its underlying concept balance. The balance in calligraphy, something ancient and fundamental, drawn from the world of nature in ways few arts can (in my humble opinion) stands in rather stark contrast to the awkwardness of modern poetry, the awkwardness of the everyday, the voice of the now.  The drawing together, so to speak, of these two media is an exciting prospect, exciting because of the inherent conversation at work, an extra-linguistic (graphic) comment on the ideas conveyed combined with a musicality or rhythm all its own. The following calligraphy by Ouyang Jianghe, a performance of the first three stanzas of Bei Dao’s  ”Rose of Time,” is a good case in point:

时间的玫瑰

当守门人沉睡
你和风暴一起转身
拥抱中老去的是
时间的玫瑰

当鸟路界定天空
你回望那落日
消失中呈现的是
时间的玫瑰

calligraphy by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 书法

当刀在水中折弯
你踏笛声过桥
密谋中哭喊的是
时间的玫瑰

当笔画出地平线
你被东方之锣惊醒
回声中开放的是
时间的玫瑰

镜中永远是此刻
此刻通向重生之门
那门开向大海
时间的玫瑰

The Rose of Time 

when the watchman falls asleep
you turn back with the storm
to grow old embracing is
the rose of time

when bird roads define the sky
you look behind at the sunset
to emerge in disappearance is
the rose of time

when the knife is bent in water
you cross the bridge stepping on flute-songs
to cry in the conspiracy is
the rose of time

when a pen draws the horizon
you’re awakened by a gong from the East
to bloom in echoes is
the rose of time

in the mirror there is always this moment
this moment leads to the door of rebirth
the door opens to the sea
the rose of time

translation from The Drunken Boat

Ouyang, a veteran poet himself, has taken Bei Dao’s actually rather regulated metrical form, with repetition of “rose of time” phrase and relatively strict free-verse structure, and strewn it about the page like, to quote old E.P., cabbages tossed on pale satin. This cacophony of strokes,  seeming attempts at indentation, awkward drifting and bending of the lines, allows us to actually see the opening up (Heideggerian clearing) of poetic spaces, visible resonance among the words, like the breath of the poet, like, in fact, so many knives bending in water. It is this combination of visuality in imagery and visuality in the presentation of the imagery that I find extraordinary. Such a tradition is ancient in China, but also new and renewed each time a calligrapher sets her hand to the task of the performance. This is, to my mind, an excellent instance of an intimately ancient art that is also fully contemporary.

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Luo Qing’s Rewrite

Visual artist poet and scholar Lo Ching (Luo Qing) has been now and again inclined to rework famous pieces of the Chinese tradition. In most cases, the “rework” has to do with visual interpretations of the literary tradition, itself much overlapping with visual. In some cases, though, Lo also rewrites the poems, taking one jueju 絕句 line at a time as the basis for his own new poetic line. In the following poem, the very well known “Deer Hermitage” 鹿 柴  by Wang Wei, Lo takes the final image of sunlight penetrating a deep forest and illuminating moss, and militarizes it. Wang Wei’s poem is in bold, and Lo’s lines follow beneath.

空山不見人
　　　　 (Empty mountain, no one seen)

因為我是原始太初
　　　 Because I am the very first

第一個
　　　　                  Primeval animal

自覺為人的
　　　　         To become suddenly aware of my

獸

                                            Humanity

但聞人語響
　　　　 (But human voices are heard)

因為我是大千世界
　　　　 Because I am the last person

最後一個
　　　　                  In the whole wide world still able

還能獸語的
　　　　              To speak

人

                                                Animal talk

返景入深林
　　　　 (Reflected light enters deep forest)

因為世上最後一線
　　　　 Because the very last thread of the world

爆炸光閃
　　　　                  Explodes in a flash

射穿我空洞肋骨的
　　　　 Penetrating deeply

深處                                            My bones and flesh

復照青苔上
　　　　 (Again shinning on green moss)

因為整個黑暗的地球上
　    Because what remains of the dark world

只剩下一小塊彈片
　　　　 Is but a bit of shrapnel, shimmering

在一層薄薄的青苔中
　　　Upon the thinnest layer

明滅                                            Of moss

Among the many versions of visual performance of the opening lines of this poem (empty mountain, no one seen), the one below is my favorites:

I like this image in particular for the way that the word for person (人) appears in the word for mountain (山) –where, in terms of the characters themselves it does strictly “belong”– is a bit lost even so, drifting about the bottom of the word, slightly off kilter. The two characters at the right, in fact, have come apart from themselves more or less entirely, with the center of emptiness falling down on to the mountain, leaving two watery dots above.

In terms of self-referentiality, a feature notably most out of sync with the Chinese literary-art tradition, there is the obvious presence of Lo’s ink stamp, again not where it “should be,” appearing in the center of the painting. This bold demonstration of self is deftly mitigated, however, by the even more central location of the word NO () that separates the two characters of Luo Qing’s name, becoming something like “Lo NO Qing,” or “Qing NO Lo,” or simple graphic (non-sequential) demonstration of negation.

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Short poems for contemporary world

Reading new short poems by Yan Li, now, and thinking that they are indeed an excellent (won’t say “best”) literary medium for a visually-oriented, multi-media barraged contemporary mind-space.

And with that thought, the recollection that short poems are anything but contemporary. There are of course the “short poems” 短歌 ， a genre of Japanese poetry even more condensed than the globally well known haiku. And even in the modern period, the last century, during the ebbs and flows of modernism. Yagi Juichi’s 八木重吉 (1898-1927) poem from early in the twentieth century:

If you lay a plain koto
in this brightness
it will begin playing quietly,
unable to endure autumn’s beauty.
(from ‘A Plain Koto’)
 

Regardless of when or where, the condensation increases the pressure of attention, so that every syllable (even material of the words themselves) come into focus. The experimental of these have been frequent occurrence as well. Taiwan poet Xia Yu’s 夏宇 “Reading” 閱讀, for example:

舌頭上
一隻蟹
On the tongue’s tip
A crab

Yan Li has been composing what he calls ‘poetry gum’ since the early 1990s, and has by this time amassed literally thousands of such short poems. They serve multiple purposes, but for the most part I would say they are occasions to change perspective. As the poetry gum series is alternatively titled: ‘polyhedral mirror’ (otherwise known as a ‘disco ball’) refracting images in ways that we don’t expect, can’t see coming, but are lucid in certain light. Here I offer a few with one of my favorite Yan Li paintings, “Mother and Child”

 
 
无论你是什么样的炸药
语言都能够充当导火线
No matter what kind of explosive you are
Language can serve as the fuse
 
 
理想所搭建的积木之城
在人与人的互动中倒塌出来的形状
就是我们如今生活在其中的城市
A city of wooden blocks is erected by our ideals\
Through give and take they tumble into a certain shape
And this is the metropolis we live in
 
 
人类有打动自己的能力
人类不可能做得比人类更坏
人类是制造科学的一种工具而已
人类必须发出些声音地
从人类的身旁走过去
Humanity is capable of touching itself deeply
Humanity cannot do any worse than humanity
Humanity is just a tool for manufacturing science
Humanity can’t help making sounds
As it walks on past humanity
 
 
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Abstract art/poetry in contemporary China

The question of abstraction hinges on the question legibility or intelligibility, with communication of visual idea divided semiotically between the semic and asemic forms of expression. Works can be plotted along a spectrum, and I am particularly interested in relationship between word art and visual art in this context. But before this, perhaps a reference to the very eloquent defense of the illegible or ‘asemic’ side of the spectrum, provided in this case by T.J. Clark who was writing in this case with regard to the innovation of Jackson Pollock:

What Pollok invented from 1947 to 1950 was a repertoire of forms in which previously marginalized aspects of self-representation –the wordless, the somatic, the wild, the self-risking, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled, the “existential” the beyond or before our conscious activities of mind—could achieve a bit of clarity, and get themselves a relatively stable set of signifiers

(T.J. Clark, Farwell to an Idea, 308)

Such a stable set of signifiers the like of which Clark describes has long been in existence in ink painting and calligraphy in China. I am reminded of  Zhang Xu 張旭 and Huai Su 懷素, two great Tang calligraphers whose works exhibit asemic qualities (in Zhang’s case often because he was just drunk enough to “stop making sense”).

Huai Su

Zhang Xu

In the contemporary era, the tradition continues, reinvigorated by by a century or so of modernist practice in the West, but fundamentally no departure from the eigth century. This brings me back to my (ever!) ongoing (contemporary) visible (Chinese) poetry project.  I am trying to work out a nexus of visuality, Chinese poetry, modernism, and contemporary Chinese aesthetics. A thorny mix, perhaps, but conveniently summed up in the following image by Li Zhan’gang 李占剛 .  Here Li is echoing the Chinese literary tradition in calligraphically performing a well-known poetic text in this case namely, “A Generation” 一代人 by Gu Cheng 顧城

First, the poem,

黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛，我確用它尋找光明

The dark night has given me darkened eyes And I use

   them to look for light

Next, the calligraphic execution of the poem by Li Zhan’gang:

 

the tradition of re-inscribing a well-known poem can now be introduced into the realm of contemporary poetry. It is now possible to “return” to that work, to borrow from yet another medium, and “harmonize” 2009 sentiment (when Li inscribed it) with the 1979 “original.”  This in effect gives legs to a now considerably more mobile visual-verbal tradition, one which evolves anew into the future precisely for its solid anchor in the past.