Attention, let poetry light up life
"Into the mountains... There is something to leave a message", this is the circle of friends distributed by the post-95 poet Star Bud at 05:32 on February 20, 2022.
Yesterday (February 21), Xia Kejun, a teacher at Xingya and a professor at the School of Liberal Arts of Chinese Min University, received a call from a friend asking for the contact information of Xingya's parents, "Someone asked the relevant departments to confirm that (Xingya) had been killed. ”
The news of the death of the star bud first appeared on the Internet, and at noon on the 21st, some netizens posted, saying that "the evening update, basically confirmed, the victim is a talented actress bud." Netizens said that the place of the accident was in the "Aotai Bonsai Garden", "killed in the tent, I don't know whether it is temperature loss or high reaction or disease." (Source: Red Star News)
Xingya, whose real name is Rao Jia, was born in 1995 in Tunxi, Anhui Province, and in 2013, he studied poetry in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, and is now studying in Beijing. Her works have been published in magazines such as Poetry Journal and Mangzhong, and she has won the 25th Rougang Poetry Award and the 5th Guanghua Poetry Award. In 2018, he published the poetry collection "Animal Alien Chronicles", and in 2020, he published the poetry collection "Branch Book of Mistletoe".
Selected Poems of Star Buds
cogs
Over the years, I've been following the little gears in my body
They turn west, and my steps don't go east
They fell asleep, and I looked down at the pages
Eat grass and learn to drill wood for fire, fish for needles on the seabed
Repair insomnia in the right eye
Give the rhino in the body to the wild leopard
Make a filling for them
Waterproof mask and rubber shoes
The gears that wake up are a chain
Sonorous colons, they turn westwards
Probably the voice of the father
The voices of brothers and sisters
The professor's voice
The voice of the boss
Sleeping in the loess the voice of grandpa and uncle
The living led me into the flock
Feed me gold and nuts to the dead
Still in my dreams, I'm talking to me
And the grass in my stomach is still growing in vain
What an intimate cog that burns through day and night
Wild leopards and rhinos running
We're talking about animal legs
A four-legged animal can be a jungle walker
Two-legged birds are generally birds and swimming fish are legless
When my cousin and I talked about animals
The number of legs is calculated in advance
As for the coat color character, the grain in their necks
It's not a topic we care about
We only prefer to talk about their legs
For example, I mentioned eight legs
The sister would immediately say bees crickets scarab beetles
And a series of words like these insects
It popped out of her mouth
I mentioned two-legged sisters but never thought of people
Compared to the brother who drank heavily at home
Grandfather who walked from two legs to three legs
The crippled uncle walking on one leg next door
She prefers to talk about the birds parked outside the walls
For example, and crows
Red-billed parrot
Poet Star Bud
Flower magpies
The flower magpie magnified its guts to kick the branches
Teasing it that the branches should also have feathers
If only the branches had grown feathers
Will it fly more vigorously than a flower magpie?
It decreed that all branches forced to silence should fly away from the trunk of the tree
Several magpies also shot straight away with one foot on the ground
Spin
Still standing up straight like an adult
This can only explain the legs and feet of the magpie in the orange-red sunset light
It has been strangely stretched
It no longer needs to be reflected with the help of images of branches
Real body
The magpie patted his chest
"Snap" and burst open
Deadly flower spots on the feathers were scattered on the ground
Sun Monkey
Three hundred years ago, the helicopter was not invented
Balloons are used to put on the butts of monkeys who take sugar to dilute loneliness
Paint the zoo and urine blue
If you want to fly an airplane, you can drive the monkey leg behind people's necks
Someone rode a horse and monkeys were screaming with excitement all year round
Depression is mostly gone
But I forgot the way back to the zoo
The monkey's wild face seemed to indicate something
But I never dared to be suspicious
You also have to be silent about strange things
For example, I often see tall people walking
In fact, it is a simple combination of monkey and human body
The monkey is pregnant, the navel falls under its navel, and the balloon on its ass is punctured by a steel needle
We suddenly jumped to a hundred and eighteen thousand miles away due to inertia
Named the monkey who worked in the shadows "Goku"
Succession
All summer I hid in the shadow of the legs of the table
Most of the youth on the face falls off
The sound of his father's cough fell into the depths of the smoke and alcohol
The throat tightened even more sharply The camphor branches outside the window
But it was higher than his sideburns
In deeper sleep
I put a cold piece of soap under my head
The hair almost ran out of foam and I thought there was a dull yellow iron plate in my head
I heard my father sitting under the tiles where the starlight could not be seen, boiling porridge
He turned again towards the black pond surrounded by red diamond leaves
Throw a cigarette butt as if a thick rope suddenly appeared under the eyes
He was now getting closer and closer to the black pond but the cigarette butts were frequently thrown out of the border
With the old legs and feet and arms are more and more disobedient
And what I inherited
It was his long-lost youth that was now back in my body
He is experiencing a devastating collapse
Tigers and cats
The tiger does not lose its identity because of this tree
Instead, he became the cat's apprentice
Since I was a child, my grandmother has retold the story of the tiger and the cat to me
Now it seems that their respective majesty is only a little difference in physical posture
Cats draped in tiger fur often move on moonlit tiles
Their expanding shadows resemble tigers
So my grandmother frequently sat up suddenly in the dead of night
The back is stiff
It was as if the soul of a cat had suddenly burrowed into her old spine
No one can predict whether the tiger will break through the door
So many years have passed, and every time my grandmother suddenly sat up in the middle of the night
Not a single tiger has ever been found
She didn't even know what the tiger looked like
After all, the cat used to be its teacher
Cat barking and tiger roaring
In the ears of the elderly whose hearing is weakening
It's getting harder and harder to tell
giraffe
I turned my head to examine these long-necked animals
Have you ever been injured unexpectedly？
I also rotate my head like this when I repair my bike
And the next difference is
For giraffes, my eyes have to be all the way down my neck
Climb in the direction of the white clouds
They're just too long
Against this rainy day of the season
No matter which patch my vision stays on, they will continue to grow
Until adulthood
The ego departs from the family
Constantly climb the floors of the city with shackled hands
The traffic below made the giraffe whistling again and again
I miss these huge animals that once fed their eyes
A well-lit society is more likely to allow itself to generate all kinds of uneasiness from the body
And when I was young, I didn't suspect the giraffes that accompanied me
Even if their horns pierce the sky
There was not a single drop of raindrops of real pain sprinkled
Star Bud Manuscript
Talk about death
I've heard that death is vertical and curved
Plates and scales like I've painted die without a pound
When they actually saw it, they all lay down in the loess
After falling asleep, there were a few ghosts pressing down on the body
Smaller diseases or poisons in the body
For example, a cold, a fire, occasional joint pain
I went out and sleepwalked around and they disappeared
My long insomnia at night and night finally kept parallel with my body
The moonlight was just right friends would talk to me again about death
It's not about the death of man, it's about the death of the wind, it's about the death of the grass
The death of dolomites is yes once their organs are depleted
By the hollow vertebrae in my back I would think of more loved ones
They have all been whipped
Those dead white roof wheat fields
When they come from a fulcrum of the earth
Sleep ghosts will be more repressive things
Bring it into our bodies
It's just me
That one I cracked the trolley case code
This is a metaphor for calculating how much the red of a persimmon is from the skirt of a woman
The one I had blown out of the moon lay down with the stiffness in the middle of his eyebrows
With this sensuality of me she collapsed under a thin lip of the daughter country
And these are the heavy hoes and iron tools that I have on hand
These ones I love to hunt are the most protruding parts of the muscle
These I formed a tribe
And those of me stopped by the shores of the tribe's lake, they said
I am the most exquisite part of my facial features
Those I used the broken paper utensils to filter out a hundred yellow oriole throats
They fled to the belly of the yellow oriole
They are wrapped in wailing quilts to kill dreams
A full moon illuminated my single-figured bones
Grey Magpie
During the day I was with a flock of grey magpies
Their six toes
Stuck to a few rows of branches, I had dreamed of it
They're all colorful birds with gray-black faces
Constant flashes remind me
Relatives who move under the igloo
For example, my father
A few gray magpies will be pinned to the chest
Through their hissing
To judge the disease hidden in the lungs
The eldest brother often mentioned a gray magpie
Walk into the casino so you can hear it night and night in the chess and card room
The panicked sound of birds fighting
Grandmother used the gray magpie to boil the soup for a lifetime
And finally they come back
A flock of birds with intact bodies
Fly in the long night under the eaves
It has become the specialty of all loved ones in their dreams
And the grey magpie during the day
Their huge toes remain silent
The branches that stick to the universe are like one
A totem that is enough to crush time
Missing snails
The snail under the rubble was missing under my eyes
It's detached from a region or even a visual institution
It's no longer the one I saw last night that was omitted from my eyes
It's not the one who fights with me for food in my dreams
It's only climbed from the rubble to the dirt slope, an irreparable process
It seems to explain the mystery of the crawling marks
The disappearance of the snail is also similar to the disappearance of the human being
And the disappearance of reason
I couldn't see its cartilage and the more intimate things under its shell
Even the form is overwhelmed by the vast expanse, even years later
When I return to this place where my intellect has been
In the ruins that are bigger than the sky
Can I dig out a petite shell with layers of webs wrapped in it?
And I believe it's no longer the snail that has been abandoned by time
It will regain eternity in the same lost crowd
Let out a tight throat moan
"There are leopards sniffing the boiling cherry blossom trees"
——Commentary on the poetry collection of Xingya", "Branch Book of Mistletoe Parasitism"
Huo Junming
I am no stranger to Xingya's poems, and I read some of her works almost during her studies at Ningbo University. I remember once I was on a train with her from Beijing to Nanjing, and she received a poetry prize, and I was the judge of that award. We only met when we got out of the car to gather, and only said a few words. What impressed her was that she was wearing a wide black dress. At that time, she lived in Beijing to study abroad and audited at some colleges and universities.
Xingya began to write poetry in 2014 in her first year of college, and it should be said that her poetry starting point is relatively high, and even reveals signs of "poetry precociousness" compared with her peers. If we follow a person's writing profile, we focus on February 21, 2014— or even earlier, in a library in Ningbo's Yinzhou district, where a person began their first poetry reading and writing. In 2014 and 2015, a writer's explosion period was formed around the Yinzhou Library, ZhengkengDian and Huangshan City Library. In the small southern town and library mixed with warm and humid air, a young man is receiving the ball lightning of language again and again, "the world in the library has just begun to open" ("Two Bullets") ...
As a starting point for writing, Star Bud's poems are almost always done in the library, which projects the indispensable influence of the reading experience in the initial stages of writing, such as "just hear the branches in the arm growing / It must be some fuse / They will also grow green leaves and even blossom" ("Trees") Reminds me of Dylan Thomas's "power to open flowers through the green fuse". Thus, youth, reading, and writing constitute the spiritual face of typical adolescent writing, "they teach me to write 'mysticism' / until the end of my pen grows a black hole in the form of grapes / They talk about Rumi Shegland / and Saint-Joan Pesnavai / By the quiet fire / My ears listen to the burned poems / Snow on the gloves with psychicism / Take out their five senses Heartbeat" (Kickball). To a large extent, poets need soul mates and destiny partners more.
Some of the poems that are in the initial stage are also closer to fragments, and have not yet constituted "poetry" in the sense of "whole" and "effective", and their greater effect is that they correspond to some of the basic abilities or talents of the writer. Xingya's poems also basically follow the format of "diary", and each poem indicates the place and time of writing, which provides a lot of convenience for others to read.
Like many people, Star Bud tries to find the "depth" of poetry in the initial stages of writing, so we will find some so-called "big words" in her texts, such as the high-density "system", "human nature", "rationality", "intellect", "crowd", "ruin", "eternity" and so on in the poem "The Missing Snail". These "big words" actually constitute "explanation" or "truth", and they also show some of the basic principles of Star Bud's poetry writing, that is, her poems are not completely limited to the personal experience of the growth period, but add a large number of intellectual, mental, hallucinatory and transcendent elements, and thus also valuablely discover those invisible or anti-everyday parts, "I can not see its cartilage and the more hidden things under its shell" ("The Missing Snail").
If we look at it from the level of experience and memory, in xingya's poems we can see the spatial experience, that is, the poverty in the villages of Anhui - "remembering that I was also in the south of Anhui / A mountain ridge that can overlook the total eclipse of the moon / Play with building blocks and push to the blocks / and raise a yellow oriole on it" ("Building Blocks"), witnessing the daily life and fate of generations in the countryside - such as the grandmother and mother in the kitchen, which constituted an almost damp and cold black spiritual scale and a strong sense of foreignity, "I did not have the courage to light any candle / And less courage to ignite the silent air and make the will of the soap / emit a deadly glare in the night" (Soap at Night). Childhood and memory often begin with the stomach and taste. The vegetables depicted in depth in poems such as "Bitter Vegetable Seedlings in the City" and "Hollow Cabbage" allow us to see the folds of the everyday rural world and the deep waves of still water, which are daily nourishment and daily suffering, "In the kitchen, relatives hold pots and spoons to them / Bow side by side The tiny cartilage of the taste buds in the tongue signals to them / When they are fried in a pot and parade through the front of the church / The simple light clings to it / A few steaming plates // I am tired of eating this kind of food" ("Hollow Cabbage").
It is worth noting that almost from the very beginning of the star bud's poetry shows the balance or suppression of sensibility and sensuality by "reason" and "intellect", so that her poetry is almost from the beginning not "abusive and susceptible", but poetic qualities with moderation and intellectualism— which are both formal and linguistic. A writing technique and detail is evident here in Star Bud, where she almost never uses punctuation but spaces when dividing, pausing, or lengthening within a line.
Perhaps because of the study of painting, the visual and texture of Star Bud poetry is more prominent, and it can even be called "object poetry". It is worth noting that Star Bud has many poems that gaze deeply at the animal landscapes, such as snails, cows, magpies, crows, peacocks, hedgehogs, lizards, frogs, parrots, yellow orioles, red-billed gulls, giraffes... These "object poems" are undoubtedly the result of the poet's deep gaze, transforming the objects from everyday situations into spiritual phenomena, thus possessing symbolic functions and the qualities of individual spiritual allegories, "I was born at the right time when a hedgehog passed by / They were wet but did not arouse the minds of others / In the next few years they will borrow my young body to cover the front" (The Hedgehog's Birthday).
My birthday date
1995
June 10
There are leopards sniffing the boiling cherry blossom wood
- "Cherry Blossom Wood"
When these pictures, scenes, and details merge with the spiritual symbols of life, we see images that are both real and illusory, located between the boundary between the everyday and the imaginary, and the poetry thus acquires additional spiritual and psychological potential. The masterpiece in this regard is "Inheritance" -
He turned around and threw cigarette butts at the black pond surrounded by red diamond leaves
It was as if a thick rope suddenly appeared under the eyes
Indeed, the poems of Star Bud always have the impulse to escape the boundaries of everyday experience. Thus, "words and things" often appear in her as "abnormal" states, and transcendental and scattered illusions always participate to varying degrees in everyday objects and empirical situations. It also involves a person's mental vision and imagination, "I can't believe in the natural softness of dogtails / In small towns they are often used as dangerous instruments / Used to extract teeth, hang coffins, open security doors / A dogtail grass can tighten the surface of the water / Knock properly" (Dogtail Grass).
In 2015, at the age of 20, Star Bud has begun to flash black fragments of "insomnia", "sleepwalking" and "death" in her poems, and the weightlessness of deformation, and they somehow allude to the poet's almost innate dark spiritual face.
The golden toad on the flower stand when I have insomnia
Insomnia with flea in boots with me Insomnia is insomnia is insomnia
You just can't lie down
Watch out for the moon cutting off the waking heads of disobedient children
Made into lotus flowers, golden toads jumped on the sheets
Masquerade as me
The green neck fatally put on the pillow towel
Wait for the judgment of heaven to come
- Satanic Song
Poetry necessarily has "autobiographical" and spiritual anatomy. This is both an understanding of the self and an examination of the other, and the two often start at the same time, "In 1995 the four animal faces I saw were / Goat' Tiger's Pangolin's Peacock / I didn't stop in front of an animal" (Adulthood). Star Bud's poems are not short of dramatic banter and irony, more often than not, a person making various expressions on the stage of the night but not getting out of control, "making dramatic cries and laughter" ("The Aperture of the Snail") ... There is a special sense of role and identity in Xingya's poems, which makes our reading also have a special feeling, such as "Rental Time", "Liang Zhu Apocalypse" and other poems, "My girlfriend was once a tenant on the ninth floor here" ("Rental Time"). Correspondingly, we see a person's "confessions" and more intimate verses...
It also needs to be mentioned or reminded that if a person's poetry starting point is too high, it will also form a lot of shackles to the poetry of the latter, and if it is not corrected and self-identified in time, the inertia or "self-stylization" of poetry will become stronger and stronger. Reading recent poems by Star Bud, I always have some unsatisfactory points - such as the increasingly heavy elements of "reasoning" and "self-justification", and maybe this is exactly what I expect from a young writer...
November 23, 2021 at Tuanjie Lake, Beijing
Editor: Wang Aofei, Second Instance: Man Man, Final Trial: Jin Shikai