I met the poet Mai Cheng 麦城 (pen name of Wang Qiang 王强, left, pictured here with Yan Li 严力) a number of years back in Seattle, which is to say totally out of his element.  I met him again two weeks ago, this time in Dalian, his very own city.  By ‘his very own’ I mean that the man seems to own the city, and not only because he is a wealthy real estate developer,  wealthy enough in fact that he doesn’t bother to develop much anymore.  I say “owns” because his command of his environment, via the highly understimated medium of the language of poetry, is near complete.  Wang Qiang is, in other words, a successful contemporary Chinese business man who also happens also to be Mai Cheng, one of the best poets of his generation.

Take, for instance, “After a Dream Passes Over”

A dream paved my way to the city

A glimpse provided by a surge

From an out-of-date battery

Showed a different view of my native ground

The silence on the left side of the road

Persuaded the silence on the right

By order of the street light

A Glass elevator

Slowly lifted my social standing

And the marriage that fell in line behind it

Was bottled by pop songs from Taiwan

With their imported melodies

As Theresa Teng’s singing style

Moved from outer to inner regions

There I was, sitting at the most reflective part

Of a transparent screen

Watching mannerisms of wealth enter and leave

My gaze was hijacked

By lurid signs winking through glass

But behind that gaze

Was yet another gaze

A teenager’s red mini-skirt

Scorched by toughness under her skin

Opens a split at the seam

The bartender measures precisely

Two densities of liquor in a glass

A woman pours liquor for a man

His spinning head leaps toward her recesses

In places where nightfall lies in heaps

New darkness embraces old darkness

Spurred by the dream, I try on a new status

Leather shoes, neckties, trench coat

Like a turned-off lamp

Turned on once again

I hurry after another lamp’s light

At a crossing the signal light

Brings my dream to a halt

Along with the self that rambled in dreams

Now night-blue air stretches before me

I try to use it, to elevate the night to higher quality

Then, over the canyon of discarded experience

To make the leap

To go or not to go?

After the dream passes over

(translation is by Denis Mair and appears in Selected Poems: Mai Cheng [London: Shearsman Books, 2008], pp 57-59)

Sight is the operative sense in the work, appropriately for the city, particularly at night.  Mai Cheng is seeing–mini skirts and skin, liquor glasses, glass elevators, and street lamps. But he is also seen, in new clothes, in an orderly marriage, in reflections.  While occupying a rather difficult space of both agent and object of gaze, he can also be found listening carefully, to pop songs, and to the commanding sound of silence that both frames his native ground, again street level, and opens it up as a “night-blue air” that remarkably “stretches” before him.  This unbroken transition from the concrete to the abstract, a rising to higher quality over “discarded experience” seems so familiar, so apt, even for the reader who is none of the things Mai Cheng is.

There is no question that the “value” of Mai Cheng’s voice can be in part attributed to his financial success, a fact which pervades a contemporary Chinese society reduced too often to crass calculations and cost-benefit analysis.  In such a context, if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter.  And poetry doesn’t sell.  On the other and I believe equally important hand, the successful business wo/man in contemporary China is increasingly in need of poetry, and all that poetry symbolizes.  The question, I suppose, is when that need for poetry becomes more acute (such that poetry might in fact jus sell), will there be anyone there to write it?  At the moment, fortunately, Wang Qiang is on the scene.   Let’s hope he lasts.