Ye Yanbin: The spiritual totem of the lamplighter

□ Ye Yanbin

Lu Weiping is a recognized and powerful poet in contemporary poetry. He was an intellectual who had reformed and opened up to the southern coast, and his life and poetry, which had begun as a migrant worker, made his writing always loyal to his own experience and heart. His name in the poetry world is almost a symbol of quality poetry, and since the 1990s he has won several poetry awards. The poetry collection "Flame on Porcelain" once again presents the poet's extraordinary talent and creativity.

"Flame on Porcelain", by Lu Weiping, Huacheng Publishing House, December 2021 edition, 58.80 yuan.

Lu Weiping's most vivid impression on readers is that of an excellent civilian intellectual writer who walked with the times. For decades he shared the fate of the great wave of immigrants who created this era, and he was highly recognized by readers for speaking out for this huge social group. He sang in a low place and adhered to the consciousness of the common people, making his works a distinct texture left by the changes of this era, and also becoming an aesthetic presentation of a new form of Chinese social genes. "I Regret Letting This Stone Blossom" writes:

I knocked the stone open

I will be a big stone

Turn into many small stones

It is called stone blossoming

A stone blossom is a stone that speaks

But when I saw one by one

Small stones running in the footsteps of the strong wind

There was also silence after the wind stopped

I regret letting this stone blossom

I can stand a big rock

Long silence

But the silence of the weak

It always makes me feel uneasy

This is the voice of the poet, and it is also the cry of the poet to society, although low, but it is shocking and gripping. Because of his adherence to the common people's consciousness, his poems focus on the small people and small details that have been neglected in the big times, allowing readers to get closer to those who have been ignored and forgotten:

Glass cleaner

Smaller than a spider

Bigger than a mosquito

I can only think of them as flies

Adsorbed on skyscrapers

The brightness of the glass

Reflecting their darkness

More accurately, yes

Their darkness makes the glass bright

I wouldn't worry about them falling

The ropes that tie them

They will not be easily allowed to escape

On the way to and from work

I saw that they had only one question over and over again

The lowest level of life

How to get to such a high place

To earn it back?

In this poem, the big times are big and the small people are small, the skyscrapers are bright and the window workers are dark, the workers' status is high and their lives are low, and they are impeccablely completed in this poem. These poems are undoubtedly the most distinctive texture of this era, and they are also the latest testimonies left by the poet. Taking the people as the center is not a slogan in Lu Weiping's poetry, but the lifeblood of writing.

Guangdong is the forefront of reform and opening up, and I once said that the wave of immigrants in Guangdong has created a new generation of new people, who have experienced the pain of broken arms and the pain of grafting. The success of Lu Weiping's poetry lies in the fact that after experiencing this painful transformation, he looked at the once familiar world with a new vision, and the things that had been regulated by old textbooks, old customs and even old ways of discourse were renamed by the poet. It is discovery, but also creation, and the good poet will always be the name of the world. Please read The Book Burning:

There are always some books

It is used for incineration

The fire it emits

Follow me

In the dark of night

Read other books.

Is this refactoring or awakening? You go to enlightenment, and when you understand it, you have light! Read The Nail:

Who is when you start to rust

Paint the walls again and again

The white of the walls hurts you black

You were once the only bright spot on the wall

Colorful hats hang around your neck

You can't remember exactly what day it started

You stand out because you have become

A spot that you think of on a rotten tooth

The cruelest punishment

Even if you have ever bitten a stone

Bite open the iron cap of the wine bottle

Just let it rot slowly

Don't pull it off, is this a nail?

The inevitable end, your pain

Forgotten by the walls again and again.

Is this talking about nails? I thought I was talking about me, I was used to making a screw that never rusted, but after we rusted, who was whitewashing the wall of our pain? Pain doesn't have to scream, it really hurts to grit your teeth. And enlightenment may have another joy, please read The Castle:

I only do it at low tide

Build my castle on the beach

I know that the sea will come at high tide

Take away my castle

But I enjoy it

I love the sea

I am willing to wave in every moment of joy

There was the futility of my life.

I believe that without experiencing a kind of enlightenment of life, I can't write such a clear sentence as "In the joy of every moment of the waves, there is the futility of my life"! In fact, this is the duty of the poet, Lu Weiping said, "The poet is the prisoner of the word, but also the guard of the word, only the poetry can reconcile the two identities of the poet." In the process, the world is constantly renamed, creating new images and moods, while at the same time allowing the poet to gain new tension and connotations to the old language.

Lu Weiping adheres to the position of civilian writing, adheres to the innovation and development of poetry, and more consciously completes the cultivation and grasp of poetry language by contemporary literati. He said that "experience should seep in, emotions should seep out", and in this infiltration, the purity and refinement of language were completed. Lu Weiping's poetry has a distinct degree of recognizability, peace and warmth, and generosity and openness. The penetration of emotion makes Lu Weiping's way of speaking reveal the poet's compassion and friendliness in peace and warmth. In many poems about migrant workers, they habitually show the misery and darkness of those low-level lives, so as to complete the conquest of the reader with sharp and rough language. One of Lu Weiping's masterpieces, "Encountering a Group of Apples in Fruit Street", is written about apples, but its symbolic significance is to care, friendliness and blessings for the girls who have left their hometowns:

They are certainly not on a tree

But they're all Apples

That is enough to unite them

Body to body

Warm each other, fragrant each other

They are not like durians

It stinks of its own

He also grew a body of vicious thorns

Guard against others

I saw them smiling from afar

When I got closer, their faces were red

It is the red of the country girl who bows her head

It's not like peaches are frivolous red

Unlike strawberries, it's so red that it's fishy

They are the cleanest and healthiest fruits

They are the fruits of kindness

The best of them always stand in the most conspicuous place

Accept the city's pick

They are the lucky proud of apples

How many apples have never entered the city in their lifetime

It's almost New Year's, and I'm going to pick a couple of the most homesick people from them and take them back home

Let them see

White-haired daddy in the snow.

This poem is the inspiration that can only be obtained by a person with a clean and good heart, and this poem is also a poet who cherishes the cleanliness and purity of language, and can only be written by a poet with a cultivated word. Those rough and fierce "hot and popular" poets, in the face of such language, reveal the unbroken fire of the poetic language and the inner anger of the poet. Poets are those who accomplish their mission with words, as in the poem "Before the Tomb of Bai Juyi":

An Inner Mongolian said that it was far from the original grass

A Tibetan says one year old and one year old

A Hainanese person said that he was also a fallen man at the end of the world

A Gansu man said that when they met, why did they ever know each other...

They are all speaking in tongues

But I can hear every sentence.

Similarly, Lu Weiping's poetry grows low, but the height of his inner dimension and language is that many different aesthetic pursuits and poets and readers with different aesthetic cultivations are likely to become his confidants, because reading these works makes us believe Lu Weiping's words: "Poetry obeys the needs of the heart, and in the middle of the night, I face things that cannot be illuminated, and still do not forget to light the lamp until the dawn comes." Because of this, Lu Weiping's creation and research on Lu Weiping's creation are bound to attract the attention of contemporary poetry.