Solving the poet Du Lulu's "Mystery of the City-State": How to Shape a Self-Contained Poetic World?

On March 12, "How Should I Shape All This - Du Lulu's New Book Sharing Meeting" was held at Fangsuo Guangzhou Store, and Du Lulu, together with the poets Huang Libao, Ling Yue and Li Heng, discussed how to break through and reconstruct the poetic laws of modernism and how to shape a self-contained poetic world with rich imagination.

At the sharing meeting, the poets Huang Libao, Ling Yue and Li Heng spoke freely and were full of dry goods.

The latest collection of poems, The Mystery of the City-State, is Du Lulu's fifth collection of poems, containing more than 60 of her new works since 2015, and she uses language to examine people's inner flow. This kind of investigation points to the side of the self, from the mirror of sincerity and reading ability reflected in everyone's heart. She deliberately gets rid of the natural mystery, reshapes the solid heart, and on this basis creates a mysterious garden on the basis of a complete reality, providing the greatest reverie and challenge for every reader who enters the world she has created. In this regard, she once said, "I want to build a world in the poem, which is independent and closely connected to us." Everything, people, animals, plants, and order of words here is conceived and added by me, and everything is shaped by me. ”

Some critics say that Du Lulu's poems are difficult to interpret, on the grounds that Du Lulu's poems are different from what readers read, whether in terms of language, sense of language, technique, or the subject matter of writing, and are more bizarre and rich in personal perceptual cognition. In this regard, the poets Huang Libao, Ling Yue and Li Heng interpreted it separately.

Du Lulu's latest poetry collection, The Mystery of the City-State, includes more than 60 of her new works since 2015.

Abstract narrative poetry, grasping the sense of proportion between the concrete and the abstract

The famous poet Ling Yue pointed out that many of the poems included in "The Mystery of the City-State" can be said to be an abstract narrative poem. "I think the focus of Du Lulu's poetry is on the inner experience of the characters and a small number of plots, and the narrative things become objects of reflection and contemplation at any time in her poems. Many of her poems are the process of objectivity merging into subjectivity. "He believes that Du Lulu's poems are generally very self-centered and subjective, but the narrative framework in his poems is indispensable." Without a narrative framework—for example, only when a grape trellis is built can those imaginative vines grow along the grapevine trellises, and without the trellises, the imagination will not be supported and will collapse. Therefore, Du Lulu has done a better job in the construction of the narrative framework, as well as the blank space, as well as the sense of proportion between the concrete and the abstract. ”

He also mentioned that the personal names in Du Lulu's poetry are more complex, and the personal names are a particularly important factor in interpreting poetry, because the complexity of the personal names represents the increase of characters, and the drama will also be generated with the increase of characters. At the same time, he also noticed that Du Lulu forcibly combined two languages of different natures, narrative and poetry, thus forming her language tension.

The famous poet Huang Lixiao said that in addition to Du Lulu's poetry, there is an external world and an inner world, as well as a world of reader empathy, and such multiple aspects constitute different spaces for green and green poetry. In today's poetry, readers sometimes ignore its structure, in fact, poetry writing also needs structure, just like movies, dance dramas, dramas, there must be a reasonable structure, so that the work will not spread out. Du Lulu's poems, whether long or short, have a good design in structure, and the grasp of skills is in place. "When others say that Du Lululu's poetry is a labyrinth, or has a mysterious nature, or is in a trance and wandering, I feel the vitality of Du Lulu's poetic language, and the vitality is expressed in the avant-garde consciousness of the poet. Some obscure poets have some overly vulgar writing methods, which are not found in Du Lulu, and she presents a fresh side of the language of Chinese poetry. ”

He stressed that among the current Chinese poets, Du Lulu is very characteristic, and this feature is related to personal temperament, that is, Du Lulu's feelings about things are due to inner life, but he has won personalized expression.

The famous poet Du Lulu listened carefully to the sharing of poets.

Fairy tales versus anti-fairy tales, poetry is therefore dramatic and tense

The famous poet Li Heng said that his understanding of Du Lulu's poetry was "fairy tales and anti-fairy tales", and he used a poem in the poetry collection "Hunting" to explain his views. He believes that Many of Du Lulu's "fairy tales" are expressed in non-historical contexts, and many of its rhetoric are not directly related to our reality, to the region in which we live, or to some very concrete things of a certain era. For example, the "city-state" in "The Mystery of the City-State", which comes from the Homeric Epic, is the main concept of the connotation of ancient Greek politics. "But when Du Lulu deals with it, instead of really putting it in a logical context, she puts the 'city-state', as well as the various rivers in her poems, the changes in various personal names, and the use of various quotation marks, all of which are recording her daydreams, that is, in this daydream, she has a lot of her own instantaneous feelings, just like a chopstick in a water cup, the light shines down, and the chopsticks feel that it is not straight, but broken." It can be said that there is a refracted relationship between Du Lulu's poetry and the experience of reality. ”

However, Du Lulu's works are very naïve on the surface, and even have some very overhead imaginary pictures similar to Calvino's, but she will always lead one of her writing consciousnesses into reflection on herself. In Li Heng's view, this is the "anti-fairy tale" feature in Du Lulu's poetry.

For this point, Huang Libao also agreed: "Poetry is like this, there is contradiction and tension. I think that Du Lulu's poetry has a dramatic component in it, that is something that is suspended or has not fallen, and it is that part that does not land on the ground, which constitutes the spatial art relationship that is immediately separated, so that the composition of the poem seems to be an impenetrable thing that continues to progress, which is also one of the fascinating places of her poetry. ”

Du Lulu himself said that for poetry, the author is certainly the creator, but the reader should also be the creator. Because after the poem is written, the poem itself is independent, and everyone reads it and has a new understanding, which is a particularly rich thing for a poem - because our participation together opens up more space for it.

Written by: Nandu reporter Zhou Peiwen

Images courtesy of respondents