Chen Cang
1. In what year did you start writing poetry? What inspired you to write poetry in the first place?
To be honest, I don't know when I started writing poetry, because I still don't understand what poetry is. I think poetry is like a butterfly, I don't know where it comes from and where it goes, I don't know if it is Liang Shanbo Zhu Yingtai changed, but when I see it flying with wings, I feel particularly beautiful. Before I graduated from junior high school, except for Li Bai Dufu and others in the textbook, I had not been exposed to a single extracurricular poem. However, in the summer of the year after graduating from junior high school, when I returned to the village to continue herding cattle, I didn't know why there was always an inexplicable confusion and sadness, so I often sat on the mountain and watched the white clouds in a daze, and there were always words in my mouth, to the effect that, Mom, if you become a god, then quickly take me away. My mother died early, thirty-nine years old, buried at the foot of the mountain at the east end of the village, every time I go out or go home I have to pass by her grave, I often look at a tree on her grave and ask myself, Mom, I miss you, will you be reincarnated into a tree? If that's the case you shake it. I don't know from what day I wrote down these thoughts in my mind on unused homework, and it was written down every day, and I quickly wrote down several books. Whether it is poetry or not, it is a natural outpouring, just like a sparrow wants to crow a chicken.
2. Please choose 2-3 ancient and modern Chinese and foreign poets or artists who have the most influence on your poetry creation.
As I have just said, although I write and paint out of a life instinct, I have the ideal of being a poet and a writer, which should be influenced by Jia Pingwa. I was already admitted to school, and one day a classmate told me that there is a person named Jia Pingwo in Danfeng, do you know? I asked, is he the village chief or the county chief? Classmates said that he was a great writer. At that time, Jia Pingwo had just published a novel" "Impetuous", and I borrowed it from my classmates and hid in a paulownia forest at the school. I still remember it. Jia Pingwa is a native of Danfeng County, and I am from the same village, so I feel very kind to him, it seems that he is my distant uncle, such a figure has credibility, so he quickly became my example.
One day, I met a poet in society, and he gave me a pamphlet, and I learned that it was a collection of poems. The cover of this collection of poems is black and is called "The Four-Colored Cat on the Deserted Street." After a few months, I thought I should also put together what I had written down, and I consulted how the poetry collection came out, and they told me it was printed by the printing house. When I rushed to the printing plant, the printing house told me that I must first go to the cultural center to get the verification; when I rushed to the cultural center, I met The Children's Literature Writer Ning Youzhi, who also had a pen name called Tranquility, who set up a stall at the station during the day to sell melon seeds, and went home at night to write, and had published thousands of fairy tales and fables. Teacher Ning received me very warmly, applied for an internal ISBN for me, and took the initiative to write an article for me called "Preface".
At that time, I was formally exposed to literature in the true sense of the word, and I had already copied several poems written by Murong Xi, Wang Guozhen, Nietzsche, and Baudelaire. I picked out eighty of them, took them and gave them to the printing house. But the printing house told me that printing was for a fee, about two hundred and eighty pieces. I didn't understand very much, and after a few hours of debate with the workers in the printing house, I felt that I had a book number, why did I not print for free? Helplessly, the director of the printing plant ran up to me and asked me, who made you write poetry? I patted my head and thought about it for half a day, and I didn't know who made me write poetry. Is it a teacher who teaches languages? Is it the role model Jia Pingwo? Is it a country? Definitely not! What does whether I write poetry or not have anything to do with them? The director said, so, ah, you have to write your own poetry, you have to pay for it yourself.
At that time, a steamed bun was about five cents and two grain stamps, and my monthly living expenses were twenty yuan and thirty-two and a half pounds of food stamps issued by the state, and two hundred and eighty yuan was equivalent to forty or fifty thousand today, which was exactly the same as the price of books published at my own expense. Oh my God, what to do? I hurried back to the village to ask my father for help, and at first I didn't have the good sense to speak, because I didn't know how to explain to my illiterate father what poetry was and what a collection of poems was. At three o'clock in the middle of the night, I gritted my teeth and told my father that if I printed this book, I could use it to bring back a daughter-in-law who ate commodity grain. When the father heard the commodity grain and the daughter-in-law, his eyes lit up when he got up. But his eyes soon dimmed, and he couldn't understand the connection between the guy named Poetry and his daughter-in-law.
I moved out of Jia Pingwo, at that time Jia Pingwo was the most famous person in our place, for example, my father did not know Li Bai Dufu, but he knew Jia Pingwo. It was really useful for me to move Jia Pingwo out. The next day my father went up the mountain, cut down a dozen trees, and raised the huge sum of money for me. So, the first pamphlet I printed at my own expense came out, called "Eternity and a Moment", the cover is pink, the price is two pieces, what exactly is written, most of them have forgotten, only remember a poem, to the effect that I hope to be sick, only if I am sick, I will get the care of others. The reason why I remember this poem is because it resonated with a single woman.
I put pamphlets for sale downstairs in my dorm room, and on book stalls everywhere, and it was a wonderful time, and the book stalls were everywhere, and the most popular one was poetry.
3. Please provide the title of your 10 masterpiece poems since writing.
I don't seem to have written a decent masterpiece, so I'll list a few of the more widely disseminated ones - "Walking the Dog", "Weight Talking", "Heavenly Question", "Construction Site Nap", "Big Truck", "Talking", "Two Monuments", "A Few Pieces of Wood", "Chen Cang Herding Sheep", "Preservatives", "Fathers In the City".
4. Do you write poems with a wave of time or revise them repeatedly, are there any other ways to write?
As long as my poems fall on paper, they are rarely revised, because like mountain springs or volcanic eruptions, once they erupt, they are irreversible. However, poetry is my child, I am a poet who can conceive, every time I come into contact with something beautiful, I will have a pregnancy reaction, and then this thing called poetry will curl up in the depths of my soul and be warmed by me, and then after a long period of growth and development, until one day, the melon ripens and falls, falls to the ground, and becomes an independent life.
5) How do you see life, career and your poetry writing?
I once said that novels are not written, but lived. In fact, writing poetry is the same, we can't imagine how a person who has no beauty in his eyes, lacks imagination in his heart, and has no poetry in life can become a poet. So, for me, the three are completely integrated, and I can't strictly distinguish the three at all. It's like a cup of coffee I'm drinking, life is water, occupation is coffee, poetry is sugar cube, and I stir them together to call it a drink in the true sense of the word.
6. Do you pay attention to poetry review articles? Do you write poetry reviews, reviews, and research articles?
I honestly confess that I can't read a lot of poetry theory, let alone write such articles, which should be the reason for my low level of poetry theory. But then again, it doesn't affect my appreciation and writing of good poetry at all. Let me make another analogy, for example, there is a pot of flowers on my balcony, which was given by a friend who is in the flower business, I don't know what its name is, nor do I know its habits, but it does not affect my appreciation at all, and even has a little more mystery.
7. Please write down the three elements of poetry writing that you think are most important.
Forget that you are human. Forget that you are alive in the world. Forget the text itself. To do this, you need to turn yourself into the invisible of all things, even if you are a stone, there are ways to dissolve, that is, high temperature, fire! Don't forget, cement, steel, tombstones, dust, ashes, all come from stone.
(Source: Poetry Quest)
Chen Cang, a post-70s poet and novelist, a member of the China Writers Association, the vice chairman of the Shaanxi Youth Literature Association, and the editor-in-chief of Life Weekly. He participated in the 28th Youth Poetry Society. He has mainly published poems such as "Poetry Shanghai", "Ai's Gate", "Awakening God", eight novels in the series "Chen Cang Into the City", "Houtu Temple" and "Painkiller", "The Prophet" and "Animal Sorrow", novella collection "Three Feet Underground", "Shanghai Beilu", "Goodbye Bai Suzhen" and so on. He has won the 3rd China Stars New Poetry Award, the 3rd Red Sorghum Poetry Award, the 2nd Guangzhou Literary and Art Urban Novel Biennial Award, the Novel Selection (2014-2015) Biennial Award, the first Shaanxi Youth Literature Award, and many others. His works have been reprinted by "Novel Selection", "Novel Monthly", "Xinhua Digest", "Prose Selection", etc., and have been selected into various annual anthologies and university textbooks.