Poetry: Can writing poetry be taught?

Can writing poetry be taught?

Huang Fan

The insoluble dilemma is precisely the starting point of modern poetry

In my early years, like the vast majority of literary enthusiasts, the first big obstacle I encountered was the conceptual barrier. The mind determines how you think, how you feel, how you observe. If you are completely enveloped by an ancient idea, you will not even be able to see your own era. Just like a person who only has Tang poems in his eyes, you let him write poems, he must write very similar to Tang poems, but these poems have nothing to do with his own time.

I wanted to write modern poetry, but the ideas I had in my head belonged to Western romanticism, and the two did not match at all. This romanticism makes me lose sight of the customs and customs that modern poetry cares about. For example, I like Goethe during the period of wild rush, and later Heine, Byron, Shelley, and even Guo Moruo, who learned to be particularly like the crazy rush in the Republic of China, his "Goddess" and other works. The spirit of Dionysus in their works shook me at the time. For example, in Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, there is a saying that the Atlantic Ocean split itself on both sides in order to make way for the west wind. This statement is too bold, especially able to capture me, who was still a science and engineering man at that time.

This subjective tendency to exaggerate is in line with the quieter agricultural era. Because people at that time still trusted utopia, trusted in individual heroism, trusted in emotional supremacy, trusted in idealism, even if you expressed your chest directly and exaggerated subjectively, the reader would not feel any sense of violation. But in our time, things have changed dramatically. Social changes are very intense, and the relationship between people, people and society, and people and themselves has become complex and delicate, so that the contradictions and dark sides of human nature are greatly stimulated. At this time, it is too difficult for you to make people believe in the innocence of romanticism. For example, you can still have the idea of emotional supremacy, you can even write like this, the problem is that people will think you are arrogant; you can still talk about utopia, heroism, but people will feel that what you are talking about is chicken soup.

There is no way, our times have let a large number of impurities, poured into the original very pure love, affection, morality. We begin to re-examine our inside and out with a rational, sophisticated eye. In this way, we have developed the habit of weighing, there are a lot of left-right swings, and there are a lot of unsolvable dilemmas. These questions are precisely the starting point of modern poetry. The romantic ideas I held at that time were completely out of touch with our time. In this case, I went to write modern poetry, almost Zhang Guan Li Dai.

But this kind of romanticism, it gave me a good inspiration in advance. Because romanticism will make you discover that everything can change the way you look at them through subjective imagination. This way of generating a new vision is precisely what Romanticism and Modernism have in common, so modernism is sometimes called Neo-Romanticism. It is just that in the concept of modern poetry, there is a rational restraint that suppresses this excessive exaggeration and lyricism. The trade-off of intelligence adds the so-called heliotheistic tendencies. The tendency of the sun god is the tendency to pursue order, harmony, tranquility, and restraint to balance people's dionysian tendencies in lyrical times, because people are particularly prone to passion when they are lyrical.

Oriental poetry is a quiet infighting, the pursuit of endless meaning

It was almost impossible for me to cross this conceptual barrier on my own in the early days, and I really needed a time to cross. The timing was opportune — in 1983, I fell ill and fell out of love in time, and then returned to my hometown of Huangzhou to take a year off school. This setback became a textbook for me, from which I learned the ancient Chinese wisdom of "no dispute is contention". Since then, I have not aged before I have begun to have an aging soul. The more I looked at the things that at first glance were not wrong, the more I became a skeptic and began to doubt everything that I had not doubted before. For example, could an ideal be a self-promise that pushes you forward? It's time for you not to believe you can still commit.

When you think like this over and over in your head, you actually come to this juncture of writing modern poetry, and inadvertently escape a territory circled by romantic ideas. Frustration becomes a falsification of your old ideas. The ideal is gone, where is the new way out? In order to get out of such a spiritual dilemma, I went to the town library to borrow books. That library had only 5,000 books in total, but most of them were liberal arts books. I actually borrowed a collection of poems by Shu Ting and Gu Cheng, which was published around 1981. Gu Cheng's poems hit me at once, because there were too many unsolved mysteries in Gu Cheng's poems, there was concern for small things, and there were doubts about people, which made me suddenly surpass humanitarianism. Gu Cheng's poems are immersed in Whitman's vision, and under Whitman's democratic vision, everything can sit on an equal footing, and this understanding has become the starting point of my poetry later.

Once the gap in writing modern poetry was opened, it soon groped into obscure poetry, and then groped into the entire domestic and foreign genealogy of modern poetry. Later, when I could write modern poetry, it became logical. In addition to writing poetry, I also had to study modern poetry for teaching reasons. In this way, in the study of stripping away the cocoon, I had an epistemic experience- rediscovering the power of imagery. There is something special about imagery, which can bypass reason in the first place. Because imagery has an image, the image triggers a sensory response at the beginning, and when your senses have a response, you will think of examining it with reason.

Therefore, imagery is equivalent to the story in the novel, it has the most powerful allusive power, and it can even be said that it is the root of all understanding and not understanding. Because imagery mainly relies on the contrasting hints of several things, let you speak for it, let you say its meaning with reason. That is to say, the poet creates a new thing, and when the reader sees this new thing, he will naturally compare it with the old thing in front of him, so that he will first touch the reader's senses, and then touch the reader's reason.

Imagery is very similar to music, whether you understand music or not, music will first arouse your sensory responses, such as cheerful, melancholy, exciting or soothing, and so on. It will throw the problem of understanding to reason to solve. Just like after you read a story, you will be moved, there will be a lot of indescribable feelings, and then you will explore the meaning of the story, and only then will reason work. Realizing this, I suddenly became enlightened, as if I understood why after every poetic revolution, imagery became the first object of pursuit. It is not until, like the Tang Dynasty, that all its possibilities are exhausted, and at this time, the discussion of the Song Dynasty will join the ranks of writing poetry and become a magic weapon for another way.

I realized that the clarity of oriental imagery actually implied the oriental wisdom of "no dispute is dispute", which is an extension of the oriental cultural character. The oriental imagery is bland on the outside, seemingly inclined to have the tendency of the sun god, very restrained, but the inside is magnificent. Oriental poetry is a quiet infighting, the pursuit of endless meaning. In recent years, I have begun to pursue the accuracy of imagery. The so-called accurate imagery, which has the taste of receiving aesthetics, pays attention to the reader's sensitivity to the image, which is actually a respect for the reader's humanity. For behind all poetic meanings, poetic forms, and techniques, there is a rational basis for human nature.

Poetry comes from the poet's gaze, depending on how you see things

The problem that popular writing is easy to face, I personally feel that the least difficult thing for people to grasp is poetry.

What exactly is poetry? We generally feel that romantic things, distant things, things in the sky, and things that cannot be reached are all poetic. This understanding is actually very superficial, and it uses a very everyday vision. Once you adopt the daily vision, everyone will feel that the blue sky and white clouds have poetry, and the miserable wind and rain are not poetic. The reason is that we judge whether there is poetry or not by the pleasure of our own body. The blue sky and white clouds make your mood very comfortable, and you will feel poetic; the miserable wind and rain make your body and mood in a more difficult state, and it has no poetry.

All this is chicken soup in the eyes of the poet. Because the true essence of poetry is to make familiar things strange, to find a way out of reality. As a person who writes poetry, you must have the ability to defamiliarize and give poetry to the things in the vicinity that you consider to be scrupulous.

In the book, I specifically talk about how to defamiliarize familiar things and introduce four methods. If, in essence, the old things are compared together, they produce new things, and the reader will get a new eye for the old things. For example, if you look at butterflies and fallen leaves, they are old things, and if I say this - "Butterflies are fallen leaves that refuse to land.". Put butterflies and fallen leaves together in this way, and you will find that something new is created that gives the reader a revolution in vision.

I have a point where I think poetry comes from the poet's gaze, depending on how you look at things. Even if everyone thinks that something is not poetic, if you can look at it with strange eyes, it has poetry. Poetry depends a lot on the way you look at things, the perspective, and that's what makes a poet the most remarkable. I think that when writing poetry, you should first forget the grand history, use a microscope to look at your own life, don't be afraid to see the big in the small, see the small, and don't forget that your life is the source of your writing. Don't be afraid that your life is too humble, in fact, your humble life is connected with the grand life of human beings. They all have the same existential and moral logic, and you write about yourself as you write about humanity.

Ordinary people need to hide, because ordinary people have too much invisibility. When I was young, I once played with Liu Lizhan, a poet from Nanjing. In the evening we walked outside the house, and suddenly Liu Lizhan said, "Do you hear anything, there is a night sound, and there is a night sound in the whole sky." "Later, I often got up in the middle of the night to listen to the night sound, and I couldn't hear it in the past, and I felt that at night it was silent. When you transform a perspective or idea, you have a whole new pair of eyes that can see the poetry contained in familiar things.

I think it is particularly easy for ordinary people to ignore the training of basic skills in writing. Ordinary people regard poetry as a genius's career, and naturally feel that such trivial things as practicing writing single sentences cannot be put on the table. I also admit that there are geniuses, but this is not to say that ordinary people do not need to write poetry for life. Many people don't have to be poets, they need to write poetry to enrich their spiritual life. Besides, if you don't go deep into the depths of modern poetry, how do you know you have genius? In fact, I believe that diligence and willpower are geniuses, and we can't say that humans only need Gauss and don't need a professor of mathematics. Besides, if you didn't live to a hundred years ago, it's really hard to determine whether you have a genius, after all, there are too many literary masters and artistic masters, who have achieved success in their later years.

For example, Goethe's Faust was written in his late years, Duras's Lover was written in his sixties, and Cervantes's Don Quixote was written in his sixties. Huang Gongwang began to really paint in his fifties, and it was not until he was in his seventies that his works showed the appearance of a master. For another example, Taiwan's Wang Dingjun was in his fifties and chose to write prose with all his might, and became a master of prose in his later years. The list goes on and on. In short, we must give up some prejudices.

(Image from the Internet)

【Personal Profile】:

Huang Fan, 1963-, formerly known as Huang Fan, a native of Huanggang, Hubei Province, is a modern Chinese poet and novelist. Huang Fan began writing poetry in 1983 and has since embarked on the path of modern poetry and fiction. Since 1985, he has published and published works such as "Nanjing Lamentations", "The Eleventh Commandment", "Southern Gifts", and "Mr. Girls' School".