The blue distant mountains and the golden rice bunches, Mr. Zheng Min in the eyes of the poet Lin Mang

Zheng Min, a famous Chinese poet, poetry critic and scholar and professor at the School of Foreign Chinese Literature of Beijing Normal University, died in Beijing at 7:00 a.m. on January 3, 2022 due to illness.

Zheng Min was the last poet of the Nine Leaf Poetry School, at the age of 102.

The following is an article written by the famous poet Lin Mang around 2005, introducing mr. Zheng Min in his mind.

Zheng Min in his youth (Picture according to poetry magazine)

Blue distant mountains with golden rice bunches

——Mr. Zheng Min, whom I know

◎ Lin Mang

I met Mr. Zheng Min in the early 1980s, and time passed so fast that a quarter of a century had passed in the blink of an eye. It was shortly after the publication of the Nine Leaves Collection, and it was also the day when obscure poetry first entered the poetry world. In the past three decades, Chinese poetry has experienced another climax and decline since the birth of new poetry. In the past thirty years, I have had a lot of contacts with Mr. Zheng Min, and as a junior in the poetry world, I have learned a lot from Mr. Zheng Min's poetry and poetry. Mr. Zheng Min has always maintained a strong creative and innovative spirit, and while writing poetry, she is also an accomplished poetry theorist. Anyone who pays attention to the development of new poetry in China will not ignore what Mr. Zheng Min has done, and she is undoubtedly a poet and critic who should pay special attention to in the history of the development of our new poetry.

Mr. Zheng's new house and old residence

Mr. Zheng Min lived for many years in a unit on the first floor of 17 apartments in the west gate of Tsinghua University. It was a (last century) fifties apartment building, dark red buildings hidden in the shade of trees, a small garden surrounded by untidy fences, planted with shrubs, roses and some other flowers. Mr. Zheng sealed the balcony as a place where she usually read books, this small world that belongs to her, in the small garden, you can see the flowers and plants she planted and the shade of trees. Over the years, Mr. Zheng has not known how many poems have been created and conceived there.

What I remember most is the early spring February orchid in Mr. Zheng's small garden, the small tender green leaves, the plain pale blue flowers covering the surface, some quietly overflowing the fence and spreading to the sidewalk, they are constantly swaying in the early spring wind. It was the spring of the early 1980s, in the land of China, where knowledge and culture were just beginning to take on a new lease of life, and on the university campus, the little February orchid seemed to be a symbol, a symbol of joy, and they filled Mr. Zheng's garden, in front of and behind the building.

I remember that time, Beidao, Munk, Jianghe, Duoduo, Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, Yiping, Yan Li, Xiaoqing, etc., a group of more than a dozen of us rode bicycles to Mr. Zheng's house, it was spring, February Lan was in full bloom, they were like our mood, eager for spring wind, eager for knowledge and cultural influence.

Mr. Zheng Min's first impression on me was that he was a knowledgeable, sharp-minded and sharp-tongued man. She received us warmly and thoughtfully, not at all as a teacher but as a poet friend, and I still remember it vividly.

At Mr. Zheng's home, we talked about the poets of Southwest United University, about the surge of poetry and new poetry in the past, and about the changes and development of poetry. At that time, Mr. Zheng's daughter, the poet Tong Wei, was still in high school, and she recited her favorite poems for us, and the poems at that time were quietly overflowing every young person's heart in a new form.

Later, I visited Mr. Zheng Min's home in Tsinghua many times, and in her home, we held a special poetry reading meeting on "The Poet and Death" that she created in honor of her poet tang Xiang; we also had a dialogue about the state of poetry, which was after the "Post-New Poetry Seminar" held by Poetry Exploration, at which Mr. Zheng expressed some of his views on current poetry, and we had a long conversation after that meeting. Later, Mr. Zheng asked her doctoral students to sort out the recordings, which were published twice in Hebei's poetry journal Poetry God. Of course, there were many visits. I remember that when my daughter was a freshman at Tsinghua University, I also took her to see Mr. Zheng Min, hoping that she could get some spiritual energy from Mr. Zheng.

Mr. Zheng's small living room and balcony transformed study are in harmony with her temperament, and there is a calm bookish atmosphere in simplicity. Sunlight shines through the tall trees, and the garden in front of the door changes face with the four seasons. And Mr. Zheng Min has always worked hard for the rise and fall of poetry.

In 2002, Mr. Zheng's family moved to the Heqingyuan Community of Qinghuayuan on the east side of the Yuanmingyuan, leaving the familiar old house, the home became larger, the sun shone straight into the house, and the view of the second floor became more open because there was no shade from trees. We went to visit her and said that the house was good, but Mr. Zheng said that he was not adapted to the environment here, the trees were new, and the bald ones were not green. In her enlarged living room, there were the furniture, books, and paintings with which we were familiar, and like her master, they had not yet become one with the new house. In my understanding, Mr. Zheng prefers to be closer to nature, and a poet's heart cannot be without green.

Two different returns of a poet

Mr. Zheng Min should be said to be mostly Beijingers, because she has spent most of her life in Beijing. Her ancestral home is Minhou, Fujian, her father studied in France, and after returning to China, she worked as an engineer in a coal mine in Henan. Her childhood nanny was a Beijinger, and the poor mining area in the 1920s and the nanny who was nearly half a hundred years old told her about life in Beijing left an indelible and profound impact on her.

When she was ten years old, she returned to Beijing with her mother to attend primary school, and she only remembered that her home was in the area of The Qihe Tower on the south side of the Red Building in Peking University, and there was a large old locust tree in front of her house. That year, in order to translate Mr. Zheng's poetry collection, the Japanese scholar Akiyoshi Hisashi specially invited Liu Fuchun, an expert in poetry history of the Academy of Social Sciences, to the old place to search, and they did find a large locust tree, but they did not know whether it was the tree in Mr. Zheng Min's memory.

After the 1931 September 18 Incident. Her father left the coal mine in Henan, the family moved to Nanjing, and she was admitted to the Jiangsu Provincial Women's First Middle School to attend junior high school. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Mr. Zheng Min went to Chongqing and studied at Shapingba Nanpu Middle School.

In 1939, he was admitted to the Department of Foreign Literature of Southwest United University, and later transferred to the Department of Philosophy to study Western classical philosophy. Here, she met Mr. Feng Zhi, a poet who taught her German lessons, and Mr. Feng gave her a lot of guidance and encouragement for her poetry writing. Her work began to be published in a number of newspapers.

In 1947, Mr. Barkin asked her to organize her poems, which were later included in the tenth series of a literary series edited by Barkin under the title of Collected Poems 1942-1947. In 1949, Tang Xiang said of Zheng Min's poems and their style in the article "Zheng Min's Prayers in quiet nights": "Zheng Min's poems seem to be a flower of time that opens up in the historic calm of the moment before the storm, always smiling and listening to the music of the thoughts that flow through her heart, and allowing her life to be dissolved into a picture, a statue, or an image. Let the flow of thought gush out one pattern after another, a symbol of silent thought, a dialectic of ideas, rich and jumping, but also show a mysterious stillness. She was a poet who "wrote poetry with the sanity of a lucid mathematician ... In her poems, the veins of thought and the muscles of feelings often correspond naturally and harmoniously to each other... Although she often unconsciously immerses herself in a deep affection, her attitude of viewing outside the object, the feeling of the philosopher, often jumps out, singing the supreme rationality. ”

In 1948, Mr. Zheng Min crossed the ocean to study in the United States. She studied foreign literature at Brown University as a part-time student. In 1950, he transferred to Illinois State University for graduate school, and in 1953 he completed his Master of Arts thesis in English literature and received a Master of Arts degree from Brown University.

In 1955, she returned to her homeland with her husband, Mr. Tong Shibai, who studied automatic principles in the United States. First of all, he worked in the Department of Foreign Literature of the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In 1960, he was transferred to Beijing Normal University to teach.

In 1979, Xin Di, Cao Xinzhi, Tang Qi, Tang Xiang, Chen Jingrong, etc. found her for the editor of the "Nine Leaves Collection", and as early as the 1940s, the influential literary and art journals in Shanghai, Beiping and Tianjin at that time, "Poetry Creation", "Chinese New Poetry", "Literary Magazine", "Ta Kung Pao Zhou Literature and Art", "Yishi Bao, Literature Weekly" and "Wen Wei Po Pen Club" published poetry works at the same time. After this gathering, with the publication of the most important poetry collection in the Chinese poetry scene in the past two decades, the Nine Leaves Collection, it injected a great impetus into the upsurge of new poetry in the 1980s (last century).

After stopping writing for twenty years, Mr. Zheng Min returned to the poetry scene for a long time with a poem "Poetry, I Found You Again", and he could not receive it.

Mr. Zheng Min rarely talks about these past events, whether on the phone or at occasional gatherings, she always talks about the poetry she cares about most. Speaking about the group of poets of the Nine Leaves, she was very serious about correcting people to call their nine poets a genre. I understand her intentions very well, and now many young poets are anxious to name themselves, forgetting that genres should be composed of common organization, a common poetic program, representative works, and representative poets. Many of the poets of the Nine Leaves Collection are from the Southwest United University, and they are undoubtedly the best young poets of the (last century) forties, each of them has their own contribution to poetry, they are just a collection of excellent poets, but it is not a poetic genre.

A poet who has both research and creation at the same time

In a poem entitled "To the Teachers of the 'Nine-Leaf Collection'", I wrote: "There is a bouquet of thought / Through history / A long time is not time / But our expectations / / The flock of birds travel far and wide / From a kind of writing to today's flower fragrance drifting / Then I see / You push open a window / Gaze is quiet / Reminiscent of the autumn harvest day Of the field / Thoughts also meander through / Plough the tundra of the frozen soil / Present the green ..." This is a very immature imitation that I wrote when I had just finished reading the Nine Leaves Collection Many of these sentences are from Mr. Zheng Min's "Golden Rice Bunch".

The Nine Leaves Collection is a collection of poems that have had a great influence on me, and I remember buying a few copies to give to the poets and poetry lovers around me. Among them, Mr. Zheng Min's poems have taught me a lot.

In 1983, I read Mr. Zheng's article on the internal structure of poetry in the magazine, and I went to her house to ask for advice, and she gave her a copy of "Studies on British and American Poetry and Drama" published by Beijing Normal University Press, which has been with me for many years, because I often read it, and its blue-green cover has been somewhat damaged.

I have read many of Mr. Zheng Min's articles and poems, and at the age of eighty, I still have a lot of writing, and every year there are valuable theories and poems presented to the poetry world. Up to now, Mr. Zheng has published a variety of poetry collections and many articles on poetry theory. She has always been concerned about the development of new Chinese poetry, because of her age, she has rarely gone out, and we often discuss the problems and current situation of poetry on the phone. Sometimes she hears some people talking about her opinion, and she discusses it with me very seriously, and I often advise her not to care what people say, and suggest that she write what she thinks according to her own ideas. But she was very concerned about any conference or the wind and grass in the poetry world, sometimes because of the sharpness of her criticism, which caused some people to be unhappy, and she was also very serious about the work of young poets, because she was concerned about the development of new Chinese poetry.

This reminds me of a debate a few years ago about whether new poetry has a tradition. It stemmed from a conversation between Mr. Zheng and Professor Wu Sijing, who talked about their views on New Chinese Poetry from different perspectives, and Mr. Zheng believed that the history of New Chinese Poetry is very short, there are still many problems that need to be studied, and our new poetry has not yet formed a good tradition. But Mr. Zheng's painstaking efforts have been criticized by some as a denial of decades of achievements in new Chinese poetry. Many people who only care about themselves, many people who do not have a big artistic vision, cannot understand Mr. Zheng Min's mind and ambition.

In China's new poetry world, we do need more poets and critics like Mr. Zheng Min. She always made me feel that she was a bouquet of golden rice in the new Chinese poetry scene, bowing her head in contemplation/silence in the autumn field." Silence. History is nothing more than a small river flowing at the foot of the /foot". In her heart there is always the clear glow of the full moon and the distant blue mountains.

Red Star News reporter Zeng Qi

Edited by Li Jie

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