Two years ago, a friend recommended Yu Jian's long essay to me.
For people of the Chinese Department, Yu Jian is a poet who cannot be bypassed, in terms of teaching materials, he is a representative figure of the "third generation of poetry", and his famous work "No. 6 Shangyi Street" is also a must-read chapter.
In class, whenever Yu Jian is mentioned, there are always a few key words--secularization, popularization, oral writing, daily experience, and his famous poetic propositions, rejecting metaphors. When it comes to his "No. 6 Shangyi Street", it is always necessary to discuss its "avant-garde" and "vulgarity", and to pull out "obscure poems" to establish a clear boundary with it.
It was the first in the classroom, in the exams.
Before contacting Yu Jian, I was told by my friend not to call casually, "he doesn't hear very well."
Online sources say that Yu Jian was infected with acute pneumonia when he was two years old, and an overdose of streptomycin injections caused weak hearing. Although his hearing aids have recovered most of his hearing, he still cannot hear subtle sounds.
"No matter how noisy the world is, it's the same for me," he said. ”
This is the second Yu Jian I have known through the Internet. When he was young, he was assigned to a coal machine factory as a worker, and the factory assigned him a very noisy job, he found the leader and said that he had a bad hearing and hoped to change the type of work, and the leader told him: "I can't hear just doing this." ”
That factory workshop, like in Dickens's novel, is constantly lurking in danger. Later, Yu Jian wrote about a worker in the poem, Luo Jiasheng.
The electric stove put his head
Exploded a large opening
It's horrible
"Wearing flip-up shoes, squatting on steel plates and welding steel plates, sparks splashing under my ass." It was also in this dangerous workshop that Yu Jian and "Dero" became lifelong friends.
In Somewhere in the Mississippi River, Yu Jian writes:
He entered the factory a year before me, and he was already an old worker. Crouching on a cast iron platform, "You have to do this," he expertly clipped a welding rod to the welding tongs, and I obediently followed. There are many crafts that my master thinks is self-taught and does not need to be taught, and I can't pass them, and Dero will teach me.
Yu Jian's "Somewhere in the Mississippi River" is actually taken
One day Drew showed me a crumpled red-bar letterhead with a poem scribbled in blue ink and handwriting. Years later I learned that it was a few lines in the index finger's "Believe in the Future", when the poem was circulating underground and was all hand-copied. He sneaked a look at me, immediately folded it up, and stuffed it back into the inner pocket of his jacket. He was proud that he could get all kinds of "secret documents" and gossip.
Dero knew that Yu Jian wrote poetry, so he always lent him all kinds of "forbidden books" to read, "You look at it for three days!" "You see Friday!"
Dero and Yu Jian in the suburbs of New Jersey
In that factory, Yu Jian worked as a rivet for ten years, and his poems gradually became known to more people.
In 1979, Yu Jian recited his poems in front of everyone for the first time. After the recitation, there was a storm of applause at the scene, and someone excitedly said to him: "You are our Lermontov of Yunnan!" ”
In the 1980s, the earliest batch of hippies in China was produced, and Yu Jian's name was always associated with the word "pioneer", and he was called "the standard-bearer of the college student poetry school" by the "College Student Poetry Newspaper", and without the "college student poetry school", there would be no later third generation of poets.
In 1985, in "They", which he co-founded with Han Dong and others, Yu Jian's introduction was: "Yu Jian's lifelong struggle in Kunming is to pretend to be like a person." ”
The following year, the headline of the Poetry Journal was published in Jian's No. 6 Shangyi Street, a work that is considered to be the first to open up the atmosphere and "vividly shows the poetry of daily life".
Douban's exclusive giveaway "No. 6 Shangyi Street" manuscript and private photos
Stripped of the evaluation given to it by literary history, "No. 6 Shangyi Street" is a true portrayal of Yu Jian at that time:
Yu Jian has not yet become famous
Every time I was taught a lesson
In an old newspaper
He wrote many meaningful pseudonyms
It was also in the 1980s that one of China's earliest hippies came into contact with photography, and although Yu Jian has held many photography exhibitions at home and abroad today, he still does not have a collection of his own photographs.
Two years ago, talking about his vision for a new book, he said that he wanted photography to be independent of the text and become a complete space. "This photography book is a world that Chinese poets see."
Of the more than one hundred and sixty photos he originally sent, I was impressed by one that was named "Museum of Modern Art."
He photographed neither the museum exhibits nor the crowds of people watching the exhibition, but a pair of feet that had taken off their shoes and were resting. Who would go to a museum to photograph someone else's feet?
He will.
Museum of Modern Art, New York 2004
Somewhere in the Mississippi River has never been a travelogue to me, not a mere record of a trip to a foreign country. It is a way of life that is the poet's ears and eyes, teeth and bones.
There are poets he encounters, street scenes to watch, childhood things, feet, tramps and hat shops he sees.
We make two books of words and images, put them in a box, and you can swim in his words or walk in the images, which are two different ways of feeling, two ways to see the world.
Yu Jian's "Somewhere in the Mississippi River" is a real picture, the left is a photographic collection, and the right is a long essay
Yu Jian's writing is extremely beautiful, a simple beauty, a beauty after abandoning complicated embellishments and gorgeous words, and his words have the soul of poetry, clear and profound.
In yunnan in my childhood, there was no one on the ground, only the leaves were shaking, and the leaves of the sun were on the trees. I couldn't wake up for a long time.
The banks of the river are second to the next, and the day gradually dims like a long sunset. I've never seen nature appear in such brilliant colors, it's thrilling.
We ate the lunch she had made, light and simple, like a snow falling on a ruin in the countryside.
Unlike the flag bearer who rushed to the forefront in the 1980s, Yu Jian, who entered the new century, seems to be on the opposite side of the "vanguard", and in "Somewhere in the Mississippi River", traditional Chinese culture and classical poetry are constantly mentioned by him.
I began to write in a superficial and sharp Chinese environment, read Frost, and the experience of memorizing classical poetry in my youth was revived, as if I had met a Tao Qian who spoke modern Chinese. As the shouts wane, translators will see such low-key and simple poets. These poets came to meet Li Bai's Jingting Mountain, Wang Wei's Yuanchuan, and Bai Juyi's "Towards the Jade Peak, Looking for the Blue Water's Edge" at dusk.
I asked how to write poetry. Anne said that it was impossible to teach. Students read poetry, discuss, meditate, listen to music, dance, sing, roam at her school... Poetry is a life. Teaching poetry is not teaching poetry, but life. Confucius has been doing it for a long time.
Has he changed? No longer pioneering, no longer sharp?
I think not, the poet in different eras, has different thinking and writing, has his current emotions and cognition, blind pioneer is inertia, back to tradition, is Yu Jian's fresh blood.
Therefore, in these two books, we can see what China's first-class poet now sees, thinks, thinks, and writes down—his views on the world.
He saw Duchamp's works in the museum and lamented that the aesthetic atmosphere of the world had changed after Duchamp, and modern art had left a huge space for geniuses and liars to play.
Reflections of Duchamp's Works at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
Seeing the homeless man's backpack in Brooklyn, he wrote: "Living a dirty and chaotic wandering life is a bohemian fashion. Articulate everyday life, everything is beautiful. ”
Brooklyn 2019
The New York he saw was not heaven or hell, but a worldliness, and people lived like this.
He stopped in ambitious New York, but preferred the unenterprising Vermont.
In the United States, which is full of desire and generally advocating positivity, Vermont is an alternative, lazy, contented, and inhabited by the immortal Wang Wei.
He read poetry with the poets of Vermont and attended evening country concerts with the people there.
Vermont Country Concert 2010
At 6 o'clock on this day, a country concert is held, and at about 5 p.m., the residents walk in pairs and threes, and the people outside are also driving out of the forest one by one. Singing are homeless singers from outland, rookies, outdated pop masters, as well as local family bands. Blues, violin, guitar, black pipe... Anyone who wants to sing can.
The moon rose, big and bright, like the kind of moon I had seen in my youth.
Vermont 2010 Film
After the first draft of the photo album was scheduled, the last photograph was of the poet Ron Paget's home in the forest, the blue sky of early autumn, the white wooden buildings, the golden flowers, and I intercepted Yu Jian's poem at the end:
I met the poet Ron to write poems on Mansfield Hill
On the same piece of paper
He writes his English and I write my Chinese
I've read the tourist brochure which states that the mountain is like a camel
Ron said it seemed to him more like the folds of a whale
I am not Bai Juyi, he is not Du Fu
Writing poetry makes us extraordinary and makes us perfect
It's like two horses chewing grass
The first time the proof came out, I instinctively sensed something was wrong.
It wasn't until I saw the third Yu Jian in the documentary "China Is So Beautiful" that I made up for this last piece of the puzzle.
Yu Jian and Mo xizi poems
The third Yu Jian, Zhong Lifeng and Mo Xizishi in the courtyard of Jianshui, he was concerned about whether the on-site staff had eaten breakfast, and turned to look down at the bridge rice noodles in front of him, "I have never eaten breakfast in front of so many people, too contrived." ”
Because of the need for filming, the director opened the wheat on the side: "Let Li Feng hum a song that suits this scene, what do you think?" ”
Yu Jian: "This fat man with glasses, don't worry, naturally, everything will happen." ”
The third Yu Jian and the director's "Liangzi" can be regarded as a knot.
He took Zhong Lifeng and Moxizi poems to meet his old friends, dancing and singing all the way along the way, triumphantly introducing his friends to them.
Yu Jian: "Here, the land of hidden dragons and crouching tigers!" ”
The director choked him back: "Teacher Yu, your friends don't seem to have any successful people." ”
Yu Jian: "I am 'moss marks on the upper step of green, grass color into the curtain green.' There is a great deal of laughter, and there is no white ding'. ”
Director: "Why are you pointing at me when you say Bai Ding?!" ”
In this documentary, I touched his basal body temperature.
If the first two Yu Jian give the impression of a very strong folk poet, with a bald head, like a folk tyrant, like a tribal chieftain, then the third Yu Jian is a hot, warm, funny happy old man.
Yu Jian, Zhong Lifeng and Mo Xizishi sang and danced on the railroad tracks
The last piece of the puzzle is the third Yu Jian.
"Somewhere in the Mississippi River" is not only the poet's words, the poet's photography, but also the poet himself.
Next to Harlem's graffiti, on the banks of the East River in New York, on the top of the Empire State Building, on the banks of the Mississippi River, with Ron Padgett, Jim Jarmusch, Maidan Li, Xu Zhenmin, and Xiaoni Wang, he happily sent me private photographs that he had treasured for many years and asked me to complete the final part of "Somewhere in the Mississippi River."
In this set of books, I want you to see a more real and more grounded Yu Jian, see a sparkling Chinese poet proudly go to the world, see a lovely soul full of poetry and poetry, and see a poetic dwelling.
Putting aside the various titles that academia had given him, and abandoning Gao Tao's poetic ideas, he and Lu De'an were like two farmers who had been reunited for a long time, losing their hoes and walking into the subway in Manhattan.
Twenty years ago, the poet Ludean was on the New York Subway.
Yu Jian's new book
Somewhere in the Mississippi River
Exclusive giveaway from Douban Bookstore
*The quotations in the text are from Jianxin's book "Somewhere in the Mississippi River", and the illustrations in the text (except screenshots of the documentary and the actual pictures of the new book) are included in the "Somewhere in the Mississippi River • Yujian Photography Collection".
*Some of the information refers to Jian's past interviews and dialogues, and hereby acknowledges them.
*This article is reproduced from Douban Reading.