Hai Nan, a famous writer in contemporary China, is one of the representatives of Chinese female pioneer writers. She has won the 1996 Liu Li'an Poetry Award; the Top Ten Female Poets of the New Era of China; the Poetry Newspaper Poet of the Year Award in 2005; the Poetry Monthly Poet Award in 2008; the Third China Women's Literature Award in 2009; the 6th Lu Xun Literature Award (Poetry Award) in 2014; the 2nd "Monkey King Cup" Chinese Poetry Grand Prix Grand Prix in 2021 with "Golden Monkey National Park"; and the 6th "Chinese Long Poem" Award for "The Beauty of Arrival". HaiNan cross-text writing "Man Biography", "Woman Biography", "Body Biography", "Love Biography", etc.; masterpieces of long novels such as "Pattern", "Nightlife", "Mabang City", "Private Life", etc.; essay collections "Hanging Garden", "Voices in the Screen", "My Magical Journey", "Please Men Toast", etc.; poetry collections "Lip Color", "Fictional Roses", "What is Behind the Back", etc. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Yunnan Normal University.
Ya Lijuan is the director of the Editing and Research Office of the Shanghai Municipal Research Museum of Literature and History and the deputy editor-in-chief of Century Magazine. He is a member of the Chinese Poetry Society and the Shanghai Writers Association. He has published poetry and poetry reviews in Literature and Art Daily, Literature Newspaper, Shanghai Literature, Works, Hundred Reviews, Southern Literature, Guangxi Literature, Shandong Literature, Anhui Literature, Dianchi, etc. Published poetry collections "Unfinished Journey", "Endless River", "Thinking Fish", and won poetry awards. He currently lives in Shanghai.
Poet Hai Nan
Ya Lijuan: You are known as one of the representatives of China's female pioneer writers, and won the Top Ten Female Poets award in The New Era of China, and the Third China Women's Literature Award. Do you pay special attention to your sense of female identity in your creation? What are the advantages of female poets in writing?
HaiNan: There is no need to divide in the sense of writing. However, gender exists again, like the relationship between the sun and the moon, and their different colors of day and darkness reveal another mysterious existence between the universe. Gender is the conflict and contradiction of the world, and it is also the story that they must experience with different feelings of their bodies. I forget my gender in my writing, but in the process of using language, I unconsciously produce a feminist position and aesthetic.
Ya Lijuan: Poetry resonates, thinks and recognizes with emotional ideas and accompanied by psychological tendencies or self-awareness, and the expression of language defamiliarization is easier to make poets unique. You have been writing across genres: poetry, novels, essays... To you, what is the interconnection between these multiple texts? How do you establish poetic coordinates in many scatters to enhance the recognition of your poems?
HaiNan: Writing encompasses a wide range of linguistic structures, and if it is divided according to convention, there are novels, poems, and essays. I started writing on paper when I was 17 years old, and my first work I published was short stories, and then I started writing poetry and prose. In my later readings, I found that many of the writers who influenced my use of language were poets and novelists, for example: Proust's long volume "Remembrance of the Lost Water" is a poetic novel from beginning to end, and if each paragraph is arranged in separate rows, it is poetry. There is also Borges, whose poems have the details of the novel, the novellas have the lyrical allegory of the poems, and the prose has the poetic charm. And Milan. Kundera, all of his works embody the erratic structure of poetics. He was a very rich writer. Secondly, there is Nabokov, who, in addition to being a poet, is also permeated with the rhythm of poetry in his works. All the emotions in the context of the writer's time arise in different contexts.
There are three genres in my writing, but they are intermingled, like the relationship between the moon and the sun.
Ya Lijuan: You have won many poetry awards: you won the 1996 Liu Lian Poetry Award; the 2005 Poetry Newspaper Poet of the Year Award; the 2008 Poetry Monthly Powerful Poet Award; in 2014, you won the 6th Lu Xun Literature Award (Poetry Award); in 2021, you won the 2nd "Monkey King Cup" Chinese Poetry Grand Prix Grand Prix for "Golden Monkey National Park"; and the 6th "Chinese Long Poem" Award for "The Beauty of Arrival". Your poetry seems to be known for its long poems, but I know that there are folk poetry clubs that advocate "short, shallow, and beautiful" as the aesthetic standard, how to evaluate long poems and short poems? What do you think is the standard for a good poem?
HaiNan: Writing a long poem is like writing a long novel, it takes time, it also needs to be an extension of the context. What is a long poem, of course, is a long poem that requires a number of lines, and my favorite long poem volume is Dante's Divine Comedy, but in Eliot's "Wasteland" and "Four Quartets", I also read the structure of long poems. Long poems are like novelists writing long novels, first, it takes time and physical health. Second, there is a need for a lasting ability to perpetuate a story, to perpetuate a poetic problem. Third, the vast discourse that stirs your inner linguistic semiotics needs to be stirred. These three are my experiences in writing novels and poems. The short poem is like a mountain stream on the land of Yunnan, gushing out from countless roots and whiskers, looking for rivers and then merging into the ocean.
The unfamiliar and open context makes people want to read the first sentence and can't help but want to read it down. Good poetry is like a white cloud carrying your body and mind on a vain journey, or it can fall on the ground and inhabit the earth.
Ya Lijuan: A good poem should have its own spiritual dimension, depth of thought, and historical thickness, and a good poem allows readers to enjoy the pleasure of intertwining feelings and wisdom, and at the same time experience the meaning of thinking and discovering. Modern poetry uses metaphors and images to express thoughts and emotions, which will inevitably cause obscurity, too straightforward and easy to affect poetry, how to let readers feel the power of poetry through language media?
Hainan: Poetry is the trapezoidal symbol in language, and it can only be read by groups that need poetry to be read. Some poems are reserved for the future, and every writer with ideals writes a book of the future. If you think too much about the readership when writing, you will first deviate from your own heart. Those who meditate on symbols, structured on the earth, plants, trees, rivers, mountains, need to find the key, whether it is patina or metal, it is a time of wandering around the writer. A person who has not experienced the vicissitudes of his heart cannot be lost in time. When we tell the story of mankind, we become a grain of dust in the yellow sand under the sky. If my readers can like my works, they also need a process of finding the soul, if a book allows readers to find their own stories and lives unconsciously, then this book is a dream space.
Ya Lijuan: Poetry in the new era should not only show her personal style, but also show the storms of the times. Writing is a conversation between the author and the world, how do you deal with the relationship between poetry and reality? How to express your thoughts and emotions in the style of new poetry?
HaiNan: Melancholy and passion are my norm, the music stand for my writing and life, on which I play the unpredictable things that arise from the weather seasons and society. The stronger the sense of uncertainty or drift in language, the mystery of time in the fireworks can be unveiled. The true tense is divine and impenetrable. Rather than confessing or presenting, I am more psychedelic in the mysterious sense of language in the hidden, a story and a person's language, in the endless universe, just a metaphor that you dream of. I have said: I disappear where I should disappear, I appear where I should appear. There is no one in this world who can take responsibility and fantasize in your place, these are two different worlds. Burn it slowly, like in my southern highlands, my skirt hung with thorns and wild flowers.
Ya Lijuan: With the change of social and cultural context and the rise of self-media, in your opinion, what impact has it had on contemporary poetry due to the change in the way poetry is disseminated? Do you usually only read print newspapers and books? What are your criteria for choosing to read poetry?
Hainan: The Internet has brought more people to abandon paper books, which has always been resisted in my life. Reading paper books from a young age, this habit has been maintained to this day. And I don't stop collecting different versions of paper books. Reading every day, divided into several periods, is not used to reading e-books at all. Paper books not only in the bookstore, on the bed, in the living room, but also with me on my travels. There was a book in the box, as well as paper traditional notes, so that it was easy to draw pen drawings and write miscellaneous notes by hand. And the paper book seems to be the soul, accompanying my body everywhere. Another reason is that a writer who writes and publishes books loves paper books even more.
All books, novels, prose poems mean that you have to meet with language, reading is like an encounter, why meet? There are too many books in the world, and it is impossible to read all the books in the world in a short lifetime, and the things and people that people encounter in their lives are arranged by God. Reading poetry is also a mysterious encounter, first of all, poetry must lose my senses and touch, and then lose my mind, thoughts and actions lose my time, only such poetry will seduce me to read down, like love, is love at first sight, without this foundation, anything is just a foil.
Ya Lijuan: What influence did reading have on your creations? You graduated from Lu Xun College of Literature and Art and Beijing Normal University. We find that many good poets are also good critics, and conversely, many good critics write their poems very well.
Hainan: Yunnan is the most diverse territory, and I grew up and read in different latitudes and longitudes of natural ecology since I was a child. I started reading at the age of 10 and my writing evolved entirely from natural history, and no one taught me how to write. What had the greatest influence on me was reading classical Chinese poetry in my youth, which nurtured my early poetic situation. Later, almost in a frenzy of reading foreign literature, the eighties were an era of idealists living and reading, also known as the post-idealist era. We are in the best of times, and at the same time we have the best of times. Technology hasn't accelerated yet, and the Internet hasn't emerged yet. People advocate reading and labor, and dreamers are not afraid of hardships. Reading changed my destiny, it was paper books that allowed me to have bookshelves, pillow books, every leisure moment, are hungry reading, so my personal reading history appeared Proust's "Remembrance of the Lost Water Years", this seven-volume book was written by the writer to the future, and some books are eternal because when the writer creates, from the body to the soul, the vast cosmic light is stirred. It was the brilliance of these great writers that made me fall in love with reading and indulge in the languages they created for a long time. In addition to poetry and novels, I occasionally write some reviews or commentaries, and the literary theories of Roland Barthes and Benjamin have a great influence on me, and I prefer the genres of Roland Barthes's "Lover's Whispers" and Benjamin's "Lyric Poets in the Age of Advanced Capitalism". As Benjamin puts it: "Getting lost is an art, and it's not a simple art, and in life, I learned this art very late, and it fulfilled my dreams." ”
Ya Lijuan: As a special comprehensive art, poetry creates an artistic conception and a sense of picture through language, you are both a poet and a painter, how do you achieve "poetry in painting" and "poetry in painting" when dealing with the relationship between "poetry" and "painting"? Yunnan has produced many outstanding poets, what kind of poetic tradition and atmosphere? Kunming, Yunnan Province, has four seasons like spring, your costumes are colorful, your painting style is colorful, and what is the influence of Yunnan's unique geographical environment on your creation?
Hainan: I painted very late, I only started painting in 2014, but despite this, I grew up living on the Yunnan Plateau on the palette, and the landscapes and rivers of Yunnan led me into the color field journey. Poetry and painting have no boundaries, and the two meet here, forming another small world on my canvas.
Yunnan has a rich and mysterious natural landscape and cultural landscape, and on the migration path of various ethnic cultures for thousands of years, ancient ancestors invented songs that can be sung to celebrate the cycle of birth and death, while worshipping all things on the earth as the inner gods. They fled the war in search of a new place to live. Therefore, every ethnic group in Yunnan has their own unique rhymes and farming songs, and until now, whenever you enter a village, the villagers will sing toasts to welcome you. Yunnan is full of true magic realism, where people use song and dance sacrifices to talk about love. I grew up in a land like this, and the sounds of various language families influenced my writing.
Ya Lijuan: You are a distinguished professor of Yunnan Normal University, and I heard that your Hainan studio is open to college students at specific times, and often communicates with students to read and write, please tell me more about the situation.
Hainan: The poetry of the post-90s generation has the younger experiences and explorations of this generation, and the era in which they grow up and live will allow them to experience another kind of confusion and meaning of life under the high-tech Internet.
Before the pandemic, my studio was generally open every Friday. The studio has books, tea, and I love the good times with young college students, we talk not only about literature, but also about life, and students will talk about their hometowns, the places where they grew up reading and living, and even about their love. Every time we are with college students, we will have very fresh topics, go to the student canteen to eat together at noon, and occasionally call takeaways to the studio to share the trends of this era. With them, we share life, explore the crises and contradictions of this world, and also feel the delicious relationship between life and reading.
Ya Lijuan: Faulkner said in an interview with the Paris Review: "There are three conditions for being a writer: experience, observation, and imagination. Having two of them, or sometimes just one of them, can make up for the other two. "In poetry, inspiration, passion, experience, imagination... Which one do you think is more important? Have you ever had a creative low? How to maintain continuous motivation and strong creative desire in long-term writing? You have written a lot, what successful experiences can you share with your readers?
Hainan: The day consumes our melancholy, just like the futon clothes as long as they are exposed to the sun always have a taste of the sun, which sometimes looks like berry durian, and it is like dry grass, sun-dried firewood. The sun in Yunnan is blazing hot, even in winter. This is a magical territory, as long as there is sunshine, no matter how much nothingness, you can always find reality and return to your perch. If a writer wants to write for a long time, there are three elements for me: First, never lose the pursuit and practice of illusory power, a dreamer, will only let a cloud disappear from under the eyelids, only by following the cloud to change will find the vast cloud, mysterious traces. Second, never lose the ability to enjoy solitude and live in language with it. A writer who is lost in the depths of the language will be integrated into your time and the time and space of the history and future behind you. Third, never lose the time course of pursuing a person's inner world and smelting magic, all works need the writer to go through the tribulations of life to reach your long night and light.
In poetry, inspiration, passion, experience, imagination... These are important, but all of them are attached to the imagination of the individualist, and an imaginative person will be passionate. The so-called inspiration is the reality that arrives from the flying imagination. I've never had a creative trough, I've been writing since I was just 17 years old, and it's done in the trough because language is bread and potatoes and air, and it's also my day and my long nights.