Cuiliu Street | Ding Dongya: Buried in love and introspection

Bury your head in love and introspection

□ Ding Dongya

If poetry is as false as some of the "reality" we see online today, then poetry has no meaning or value. As a poet, you should sincerely face yourself and the real world, shout with even a weak voice, or record it generously, and never lose your own thinking and opinion. Undoubtedly, it is precisely because of the existence of "meaning" that even the most insignificant things have an endless aspect in poetry. After all, poetry can save ordinary life from destruction in some bad situation only by hoping to give meaning to the events and things of ordinary life. At the same time, the pleasure and power of this writing with "meaning" will, under the influence of language, add a fascinating side and may even give more mystery (poetic polysemy), because "poetry frees words from the task of meaning, and returns them to those who see the forget-me-not-me at the edge of the abyss, to help this idea of the place, the idea of determining the existence of the place" (Yves Bonafuva).

Poets re-experience the joys, sorrows, hopes and despairs of life when they create, conveying in the form of poetry the true appearance of the world seen by the eyes of personal emotion, with their own colors, voices, and their own light that may transform into storms. In this respect, a good poet is similar to a good director. Such as Yasujiro Ozu. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about his films is that when he depicts the beautiful things and things he perceives, he does not doubt their beauty and can fully understand them as empathizers. This is also the commonality of Zhang Ergun as a poet. His poetry is sometimes like a movie picture or several pictures, and personal experience and imagination (here referring to the freedom of thought) when presented in poetic form have an indescribable sadness outside the warmth, or an indescribable warmth beyond the sadness, "Grace Light", "Through the Wall", "Weeping Mourner Says", "Shout", etc., are good examples. Let's take a look at the poem of the same name in his recently published poetry collection", "Moving Mountains". The poem clearly has his disappointment at the writing of reality from time to time, or some kind of spiritual sustenance, "I do not give up day and night, studying the method of moving mountains / Just to get rid of this after-the-fact and troubled uselessness / This bereaved dog-like uselessness", "I do not want to witness, my life of suffering / I am carrying my own hardships in vain", and his so sober consciousness has undoubtedly become part of his "bitter life" as a poet. But I believe that as long as he continues to write poetry, he will continue to carry the "hardships" and sufferings in the world of his personal life, as persistent as a fool, but this "futility", no longer just for himself, but for more people to suffer in the world:" - They are all kinds of people, born from me / Let me be in the panic of writing / Spend them, unspeakable day by day..." ("The Old Oath"), "He runs on the road every day, gently carrying them / Like a person who sends relatives, but also like a person who sends the end" ("The Old Oath") Flea Market"), this kind of ideological "spending" on others or other things, is not Zhang Ergun's self-transit as a poet.

Poetry, as a way for the poet to speak and think about himself, undoubtedly needs a kind of "sound" transmission, which can be externalized into the aesthetics or rhythm of the poet's poetry, or it can be a metaphorical bass mode, even if sometimes the poem cannot fully reach the poet's own action, and even make the thousands of perceived words in the poem seem suspicious, but it has to be admitted that this kind of speech is sometimes full of everyday truths. When I read Zhang Ergun's poetry collection "Moving Mountains and Sending" and the group poem "SuddenLy Remembered" published in this journal, I think of the English poet Philip Larkin from time to time. Their poetry is almost no barrier from the public, and ordinary voices and ordinary lives in poetry are always shining with the brilliance of human nature. If some of Philip Larkin's poems "always have the breath of the morning or the flickering of the morning light" in some of his poems, in the same sense, some of Zhang Ergun's poems carry the warmth of "light". Those writings that are close to everyday scenes and things, under the guidance of "light", often emit philosophical understanding. "Grace Light": "When we don't know yet, / When the mother is sick / Light, / Has been lying on the low windowsill early / Take care of her for us, / Take care of her / Light, / Was also the mother of the mother / Now it has become, / A child who is more filial than us"; "Spring Light": "As if overnight, / Peach blossoms are raging / But I know, / The earth has accumulated for too long, / Silently swallowed / Many spring rays, / Can flow out those flowers that are too beautiful"; "Suddenly there is a memory": "The gold in the shipwreck is still in the merciless mud / Secret flickering. Who in a past life, the baby who was left at the ferry / was already a child and grandchild around the knee. In a past life, the river that devoured me/ is now rushing, roaring / Like a great, calling again to this life". This kind of affection for a certain field or something and things is in fact also taken by the external world, and they simply retreat to the background of the poet's writing, becoming the key to the poet's presence, and when the impression and emotion merge, they become a constantly modified sketch in the poet's mind until it falls on the paper. Zhang Ergun, on the other hand, writes through these visual images, fleeting emotions, or unquenchable uneasiness, obsessively showing them and examining them, even if they are constantly lost in between.

Nowadays, the pursuit of writing in the present has become a fact that needs no rebuttal, but how to face one's own heart and liberate oneself at the moment of writing, rather than deliberately creating meaning, allowing oneself to talk with natural things or irrelevant things, when the intellect and sensibility are freely connected, is a problem that the poet must face. The hollow lyricism and seemingly philosophical lines of account are not poetry, nor can they be, and the experience that poetry brings to the reader is not only auditory, visual, but also physical, and in Emily Dickinson's case, she is only certain that it is poetry if she "physically feels as if her head has been removed". The fine quality of Zhang Ergun's poetry lies in the combination of meaning and emotion, abandoning flowery rhetoric and metaphysical high-minded poetic language that is faithful to everyday experience. From the perception of the present world to the inner feelings caused by natural things, Zhang Ergun's "Sudden Memories" may provide a new possibility. It no longer just records its thin flesh and its thin thinking, but faces itself and completes the spiritual struggle and self-salvation in a frank way.

Oh, I'm long past the age of death

You cannot give a pure virgin body for you

I was suspicious, worried, and added a lot of malice

with hostility. Big river, I don't deserve it anymore

With you, forget about it. ......

As a poet, Zhang Ergun cannot always be rational (human rationality is limited, and poetry must be irrational), and at certain moments, he needs to find a sustenance for his loneliness, grief, doubt and meditation (poetry is the victory of meditation) or the object of conversation. When the great river appeared before his eyes, he suddenly became a child who did not need to continue to be silent, and the bitterness buried in his heart seemed to be only shouted out loudly, and he became simple and clean again, and he could live frankly again, and he could flow with the river without mercy. In this way, poetry has real meaning as an effective way of identifying itself. At this time, the "I" in the poem is no longer just an individual being, but has become the majority of "we". Even this emotion is like a torch, illuminating the ego will also warm the "we" of empathy. On another level, the seemingly self-lamenting and ignorant loss in this poem also confirms that Zhang Ergun has a life here and now or at that moment in love, patience and self-examination.

As a sincere poet, Zhang Ergun has always continued to deconstruct and construct himself. He dared to face himself and the times, still "with unknown expectations" to continue to write boldly and keenly, and believed that in poetry, as long as he was still "the one he wanted" and the "ideal" himself, he was willing to bury his head in the world and wait for the arrival of a poem of good character.

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Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 4, 2022

▲ Ding Dongya