Psalms: Western Han Water
◎ Pei Zhenxiang
Son of the West River
Follow the steep undulating hills
I will walk all over the banks of the West River
I want to touch every tree, every grass I come across
I want to get to know every animal, every bird I see
Look out over the unattainable rocks
I can only quietly write down their colors and shapes
They were in daylight and moonlight
The dazzling or cool glow that is emitted
The West River feeds me and feeds them
I live in the world so chaotically and helplessly
Trapped in your own flesh
I must come from the ancient, dark, deep soul of the West River
Find your own genes and bloodlines
I must live both in the present and in the past and in the future
I must come from the descendants of those flourishing and wanton West Rivers
Those mountains and land carved out of the West River
Find my own ethnic group
Write yourself into the family tree
They are the sons of the West River. Me, too
West River
She shed blood, she drank wine
It is a poison that makes people intoxicated and sinking
In her body, countless fish, turtles and crabs are bred
It also carries dirt, gravel, tree roots and gold
She was chaotic, majestic, reckless, like a drunken man
Walk backwards and downwards through the mountains
Sometimes running, sometimes strolling, sometimes jumping and tumbling
Sprinkle a song all the way
On both sides of her river, there are yellow trees and green trees
Honeysuckle and wild chrysanthemums grow
Flocks of wild boars, bears and wolves grow
Tigers and leopards who like to act alone, as well as bears with infinite power
Growing with them are also drinking sorghum wine and eating cornmeal buns
A group of people hunting and fishing in a deep mountain gorge
Their ancestors established dynasties and nations
It is called Zhou, Qin, Wuxing, and Qiuchi
Following the history and legends, I keep seeing
Those born kings
Renxia, paranoid, heroic, shuttles back and forth between mountains and rivers
Fight with blazing fire and fearless sacrifice
Complete a life where light and darkness intertwine
Like this river of blood and love
The mud and sand are underneath, the vastness is unrestrained, there is no beginning and no end...
Head towards the West River
In the early morning or dusk, we walk towards the yellow river like sorghum wine
Drink horses, drink cows, drink donkeys
If it's summer, we strip naked
Soak your knife-scarred body into the raging river
Let the stirring decoction wash away our bruises and soothe our wounds
Let our skin become smooth and delicate again
This is a river with the same skin color as us
Rather, because of her nourishment, we have this complexion
This is also a skin tone consistent with the sun
Skin tone consistent with moonlight, with the northwest earth
Same skin tone as corn
When we drag a tired, weak or injured body
Head towards the West River, we know
We are walking towards our ancestral lineage, towards the flowing temple
Towards their own genetic code and unpredictable destiny
Preachers to the earth
In the early morning or dusk, we walk towards the spirit-like Xihan Water
We drink horses, we drink cows, we drink donkeys
Also open the capillaries of the whole body and drink yourself
We will dye a new body with the waters of heaven from the tomb
Recast a brave and gorgeous race!
There is a kind of love
There is a kind of love that is about the West River, to be precise
It's about the boiling hot water of the West River, about the sunset light that stops on the West River
It's about spring, and canola flowers bloom all over the river and the slopes
The birds, with their soft hearts, spread their songs all over the earth
It's about autumn coming, and the west river is covered with reeds
The snow it opens up brings winter to an early stage
And we are obsessed with this whiteness that drifts with the wind, with this whiteness
It brings us back to the solitary beauty of the poetic age
There is a kind of love that is about this land where the West River flows
To be precise, it was about those mountains, and he let those flowers blossom and fall
He made the trees tall and tall
Let them stick to the laws of the seasons and let those leaves
Green when it's green, and red when it's red, red, thoroughly
Whenever the autumn wind blows across the West River, the sun penetrates the fog, these ravines and mountains
Hand over so many starfruit, chestnuts and August melons
Let us feel different lives and between lives
That mysterious connection and selfless giving
There is a kind of love, which is about the village with thousands of gestures by the West River
To be precise, it's about wisps of cooking smoke
The houses that are raised are about those houses underneath
Placed on the god cabinet in the middle of the hall, the ancient family tree
It is the door head, carved with a plaque that reads "Cultivating the Heirloom"
It was the hand of a woman stirring the spoon handle, sitting on the large bluestone in the doorway
An old man who eats dry smoke, with a child with a yellow dog behind him
It was a seventeen-year-old female doll, smiling at the nineteen-year-old male Ding Zhao of the neighboring village
It's a pear wood box, it's a flowing water mat, it's a late-night moon hiding behind clouds
Deep in the soil, a seed was planted
There is a kind of love, which is about the cemetery by the West River
To be precise, it is about some woods full of pines and shrubs
It is a tombstone with blurred notches
It is the unified surnames on the tombstones that gradually come to us
Those lines of words, those faces in memory, those that are out of reach
Come to the stars and grains of salt in our flesh
This is the simplest, most enduring and most moving love I know
It is frozen, not burned, not burned, not beaten, not cut continuously
We are born ten thousand times in this love, and we die ten thousand times
But we didn't love enough, and we didn't feel all of it
This is the love I know, related to the West Han Water
Like the Western Han River, it is vast, cyclical, and has no beginning and no end
Love......
Memories of the West River
It's in winter. Twenty years ago
The West River forms a thick layer of ice. After the flood
Water stranded in a depression at the foot of the mountain
Those beaded lakes turned into huge crystals overnight
We drove the cattle, passed by them, and carried the shelves
Buckle upside down on the ice and cut the tip of the knife into the ice
Pull it backwards and you have it once
Speedy gliding
Those young, hard years
I walked with my father and sister along the snow-white, hard river
Walk to Shui Wan, gourd head, and chop firewood for a year
Slip them down the crack between mountains and mountains
Stacked in a rocky mess by the West River
Then, wait for the arrival of hot days and the arrival of the rainy season
Tie the firewood into a raft and sit on top of it
Downstream
Drag them to the banks of the river and the village
I once witnessed a child
Play in the sand by the West River and roll in the mud
Growing up to be a handsome teenager
I walked hand in hand with him into the waves of the West River
Let the turbulent currents of water strike our young bodies
Then, on a hot afternoon
West River, choking the child's breath
The people buried him in the high ground on the shore
Let him look at Xihe day by day
On the jumping waves, we looked for it
A treasure trove of freedom and dreams. On the banks of the river with cliffs thousands of feet
We face the mountains
Practiced shouting and singing
And the gardenia-like girl who herded cattle together
It has long been submerged in a southern city, and the crowds are rolling
I used to put the strength and passion of a newborn calf
Splurge around the West River
Now, I'm back in the autumn wind
In vain, looking for the possibility of new life
It's so fast! The teenager's gliding on the ice
I haven't had time yet
Again, hydropower stations, sand fields and this planet
Continuous warming
It has drowned everything
The West River curves and winds between mountains
We also bend and bend, moving between worlds
When we finally lie down in the stones by the West River one day
To be part of the shore, we will be thousands of years old
Listen to his waves, no longer separated...
My river
This is the river that I have decided to entangle with all my life
From Mt. Shimazuka to the mouth of the Two Rivers, from Qinzhou, Lixian, xihe
Go to Kang County, Cheng County, Luoyang, and bury the bronze ware deep in the mountains
Has evolved into the skeleton of this land
Stored for thousands of years, it emits a rich aroma of wine
In the spring, she is still a river full of flowers
West Qinling, West Han water, every inch of rock and soil, every stream of water
They all contain the distant past and nurture an endless future
All about distant imaginations
On this river, you can find a correspondence and a destination
So I decided to be the prodigal son who wandered between the mountains and the waves
Plant crops, trees and offspring by the West River
What am I seeking? What do I want to cherish?
Only in this western land is an obscure, muddy river
As a dynasty, he was the Zhou Qin Han Tang
As an article, he is the Zhong Ding inscription and the Chaotang SongZhang
As a musician, he is both a yellow bell and a primitive wild folk chant
As a character, he was the Qin Emperor Han Wu and the Qiang King
The wind swept through the clouds, the current flowed straight down, and the intestines were swept away...
After thirty-eight years of life, I finally cut open my liver and gallbladder
I saw my own texture and color. I understand since I was born into the world
I'm constantly looking for a way back
I was looking for a middle-aged river, looking for one that would take me out of my belly
And the river that keeps calling me back. People call it creation
I will call it destiny. People call it destiny
I will call it love. People call it love, and I will call it the way of heaven.
It will take me to find another self, thousands of selves.
Walk along this river and walk towards the one that has been shining for thousands of years
The starry sky of the race, towards the distant place of time and space that I am constantly pursuing
Towards the intersection of the moment and the eternal.
Then, I own my river, and my river owns me
We each became each other, and I, will be part of the West River
Have the ease, steadfastness and glory of being a child.
Exploring Between Time and Survival (Creative Talk)
Wen 丨 Pei Zhenxiang
Every serious writer will constantly explore the meaning and possibility of writing between his own time and the reality of survival. In the whole process of the prosperity and decline of the Tang Dynasty, Li Bai and Du Fu not only wrote poetry treasures that were open, free, unrestrained, and had the atmosphere of the Tang Dynasty, but also wrote such works of compassion that faced reality directly as "three officials" and "three distinctions". Therefore, the aesthetics of an era are both rich and diverse, and inextricably linked to the overall style of the times. In the early 1980s, in response to the problem of "obscure poetry", Xie Mian and other predecessors understood great pressure to publish the "Three Rises" article, which laid a solid theoretical foundation for the personalization, life and legalization of new poetry writing. I really like the phrase "new aesthetic principles are on the rise". I think that the state of literary development indicated by this formulation should become a norm, and our creation will be more vibrant.
In recent years, with the deepening and expansion of reading, I feel more and more that our poetry creation is moving towards a new stage of rational and benign development. Many submerged and down-to-earth poets continue to come up with refreshing and good works, but at the same time, the entire poetry creation pattern and aesthetic vision are too smooth and single. I hope that the poetry world can contribute to poets with unique aesthetic temperaments like changyao in the 1980s, and at the same time try to take a different path myself. I know that my ability level is limited, but I want to touch some unfamiliar subjects and fields and try to build my own writing system. Because, including myself, too many young people have written a large number of egoistic, slender, sensitive, and crisp works, and have formed an almost completely unified and difficult to identify aesthetic style. However, our era of mud and sand has a complex poetic pattern intertwined with tradition and modernity, and people's survival is so cruel and gorgeous, stubborn and fragile, all in an endless emptiness, seeking the meaning and eternity of life. Therefore, I want to start from the field of my own existence, go to the depths of history and the earth, and explore the possibility of the soul's destination. At the same time, I also want to forge an open, chaotic, atmospheric, and free poetic style to match such a sacrificial creative behavior.
This is the reason for the emergence of the group of poems "Psalms: Western Han Water". The place where I was born and raised, in the western part of the southern foothills of the Qinling Mountains, the Western Han River, as a fabulous river, together with the land around her, gave birth to the prosperity of Zhou Qin and the Qiang civilization, and became the treasure land of feng shui for our ancestors to flourish, I grew up running around this big river, and personally felt her majesty and breadth. Now, when I am almost confused, I feel a fatalistic writing responsibility even more, urging me to understand her and present her. She is destined to be an extraordinary river, the source and destination of those of us who live on both sides of her, body and soul. We also need to inherit her wild, heroic, wanton, and magnificent genes precipitated in our bodies in this era of selfishness and weakness, and complete the shaping of this land and the human soul in this land. I think that at the same time, we will also find the destination and permanence of the souls of our group. As soon as this road is embarked, I will continue to explore.
Exploring Roots and Individual Destiny (Review)
Wen 丨 Jin Yong
A change in the style of poetry is an adventure of language, and this group of poems happens to be another adventure of the poet. A large number of overlapping nouns, verbs, verbs and objects are closely interlinked. Primitive animals such as bears, wild boars, wolves, snakes and birds have been resurrected in his pen, aiming to open the way for us to explore the code and root nature of life. Using the matrilineal river as an incision, he slowly opens the lines of life and allows the body and soul to return home again.
This set of poems has always run through a vein of life, that is, the water that feeds our souls. To trace back to the source, the reproduction and inheritance of human beings, giving a river poetry and history temperament, human life and the life of things skillfully coincide, people and water have a passionate breath of life, poetry text is also full of ancient meaning, with an epic grand and powerful aura. Here, the fate of the river, that is, the fate of man. It is this huge and silent disappearance that makes the poet have to gaze at the river in his hometown again, and let the endless sound of the water open his mouth for the poet. To put it more broadly, he is from the perspective of history and makes an epic narrative. From an early age, this is the poet emphasizing the presence of individual life, but also feeling the helplessness of life will disappear, and then between the permanence of nature and the ephemerity of the individual, he seeks the confusion and unity of will and soul. So here, there is chaos, there is sobriety, there is entanglement, there is also enlightenment. The poet could not say all this, so he let the river speak for him.
"I am so chaotic and helpless living in the world / Trapped in my own flesh / I must find my genes and bloodlines from the ancient, dark, and deep soul of the West River / I must live both in the present and in the past and in the future / I must live from the descendants of those lush and wanton West Rivers / From the mountains and land carved out of the West River / Find my own ethnic group / Write myself into the family tree ..." The poet gradually tends to pay attention to the fate of the greater self, that is, the fate of the race. At the same time, the poetic style has also taken on a new atmosphere in the transformation. Obviously, the poet has stepped onto a new level on the road of creation, and the text has gradually matured, with a great atmosphere and a deep sense of heaviness.
As the source of life, water gives birth to everything: humble, great, vulgar, civilized, in fact, all of which are related to the lifeblood of water. Water is silent, and so is life, like a temple, a spiritual thing that needs someone to open and listen to her flowing voice. The water comes out of the Qinzhou Mountain, and the poem "Poetry Classics Qin Feng", which is the common source of water and poetry. Water is the root, and the inheritance of culture is also the continuation of the root. "What am I seeking?" What do I want to cherish? / Only on this western land, a river that is not clear and muddy and sandy / As a dynasty, he is the Zhou Qin, Han and Tang Dynasties / As an article, he is the Zhong Ding inscription and the court song / As music, he is both the Yellow Bell Da Lu and the primitive wild folk chant / As a character, he is the Qin Emperor Han Wu, but also the King of qiang / The wind rolls down the clouds, flying straight down, swinging qi back to the intestines..." The poet gradually opens the source of the root nature through the backtracking of a river. It is precisely the questioning and torture of life in this world that there is a retrospective and pursuit. Because of this, the poet invisibly opens the picture of the poem for us, extending the thickness and width of the poem infinitely. Because of the existence of this great weather, this group of poems enters from a narrow place, gradually opens up a broad field of vision, makes the realm of poetry rise again, and gives it the vicissitudes and solemnity of epic poetry.
Let's look at the sentence in "There is a Kind of Love" again: "This is the simplest, most permanent and most moving love that I know / It is a love that is not frozen and burned, not burned, not beaten and cut through / We are born ten thousand times in this love, ten thousand times dead / But we have not loved enough, and we have not all felt its breadth and depth / This is the love I know, related to the Western Han Water / As vast as the Western Han Water, the cycle is endless, the beginningless / Love ..." This makes me naturally think of the ancient river water, the ancient love: "The so-called Iraqis are on the water side." But the love here is not as beautiful as expressed in the poem, but it is implemented in practice, figuratively. Returning to everyday reality, give love another kind of annotation. Even if life is humble and perishable, as a person who has survived on this side of the water, he has closely connected himself to this water and soil, and because he is with the landscape, he also has his own greatness and glory.
In short, compared with the traditional poetry writing in the past, this group of poems has made a qualitative leap, and the structure is beaded and grouped, presenting the Western Han Water To us and filling in the new writing experience. This kind of on-the-spot narrative writing is more like a kind of continuous "crossing" back and forth between ancient and modern, which seems to pull us back to that ancient, simple, and original era, but it is closely related to the current reality. But the poems are not directly lyrical, but more narrative and modern, presenting a sense of picture in a cold white stroke. Its context, rhyme, are slow, layer by layer, but this is by no means an obstacle set by the poet himself, but changes with the passage of context and meaning, presenting us not only with the individual life's perception of fate, difficulty, confusion, contradiction, doubt, warning, but also its inherent tenacious vitality. In terms of structural framework, it is expressed in the form of long poems and large poems. In the end, it presents a realm of forgetting both things and me, and it is also a three-dimensional shadow of walking. I was present, but without me, and the leap between the small self and the big self gradually moved towards the pace of great poetry and epic poems, and in turn reached the life cultivation of a hundred rivers into the sea and tolerance is great.
(Excerpted from the second half of Yanhe Magazine, Issue 11, 2021)
Pei Zhenxiang was born in 1982, a native of Luoyang, Shaanxi Province, and a member of the Shaanxi Writers Association. His works have been published in Poetry Journal, Yanhe Poetry Journal, Yangtze River Poetry Journal, Feitian, etc., and have been selected into anthologies such as "Selected Poems of Chinese New Year' Eve" and key literary and artistic creation support projects in Hanzhong City, and he has authored poems such as "Dance on fingertips" and "Fruit Street". Participated in the 20th National Prose poetry pen meeting and was shortlisted for the 8th China Red Sorghum Poetry Award.
Jin Yong, formerly known as Li Jinyong, is a member of the Gansu Writers Association. His works have been published in newspapers and periodicals such as "Feitian", "Caotang", "Selected Poems", "Writers' Digest" and other newspapers and periodicals, and have been selected into "Selected Short Poems of Contemporary Youth" and "Selected Poems of Chinese Rural Poetry".