A few days ago, the poet Yu Yan's new collection of poems, "I Once Stayed Up All Night for the World", has been published by the Writers Publishing House. Many people in the poetry circle began to wonder what kind of surprises this big move would bring since returning to poetry in 2014.
"Most of my poems are concerned with the real world, and I rarely write about the wind and snow. I think that the wind and snow moon belong to the agricultural era, which has been written by predecessors. Today (April 12) Red Star News reporter exclusive interview to Yu Yan, for the title of the poem "I once stayed up all night for the world", he has his own answer, he believes that we are in the post-industrial era, we must have a matching text. The poet's attention to the world has its own unique perspective, "My poetry themes have both history and reality, and the gap between ideals and reality produces anxiety." ”
It is understood that all the poems in this collection are selected from the works created by Yu Yan in the second half of 2015 to the first half of 2021 - five years.
The first series of poems, "I Operate on the Sky", mainly expresses the author's philosophical reflections on the world;
The poems selected in the second series, "How Many People Stand on the Balcony in the Dark and Smoke", are mostly reflections on their own lives;
The poems selected in the third series of "All Rivers are Running for Life" are all presented by sentient beings, or depicted as worldly phases, implying the author's reflection and criticism of national nature and human nature;
The fourth series, "A Group of Serious-Looking People Walking Downstairs from Me", is an alternative interpretation of the world, and the author always believes that poetry and science are two ways to approach truth, and poetry is a shortcut;
The fifth series, "An Ant Is Crossing the River Thames", is a work written by him when he lived in England, with exploration and criticism of the reality and history of this strange country, as well as a perception of the world from a completely open vision;
The sixth series of "Robot Age" selects two groups of poems, which happen to be published in Flower City magazine, "Robot Age" is a poet, worried about the alienation of human nature in the future development of the intelligent era, and "A Fish and Its World View" is to observe the absurdity of human society from the perspective of a fish.
Metaphor
As for the audience of the collection, Yu Yan believes that it is suitable for people at different stages of life and different classes. "My poetry writing is based entirely on everyday spoken language, or Mandarin Chinese based on the Sichuan-Chongqing spoken language. There are no esoteric, profound words in my lines of poetry, they are simple and easy to understand. Yu Yan said that his writing has a conscious universal pursuit, because he believes that everyone's life needs poetry, earlier, Yu Yan put forward a view that "poetry is a kind of just need", he believes that only different life experiences and different cognitive levels get their own different perceptions in his poetry. At the same time, he also deliberately writes poetry interestingly, so that readers can get the pleasure of reading from critical words.
In addition to talking about the new poetry collection, Yu Yan also talked to red star news reporters about his various views on poetry.
I am a stone monkey of poetry
Red Star News: Did you start writing poetry in that year? What inspires you to create like this.
Yu Yan: My earliest poetry writing was when I was in college, in the mid-1980s. Expression is human nature and the basic right of man, and poetry is the most economical and efficient way of writing that I can find. Expressing it in poetry is a way for me to participate in the world.
Red Star News: Why do you say that you mentioned in the Afterword that "I am a wild writer who jumped out of a rock"?
Yu Yan: I am a person who is not strong in learning and imitating, and I read the poems of my predecessors, whether Chinese or foreign, and rarely gain anything. My writing has no inherited literary genealogy. I can read some of the shadows of my predecessors in the works of many poets, who have a literary heritage of both light and dark, which makes me very envious, and often makes me feel inferior, and I once doubted whether the branch words I wrote could be regarded as the poetry they recognized. I am a stone monkey of poetry, jumping out of the cracks in the stone at once, and my writing itself is constantly expanding the edges of poetry, constantly breaking through rules or unspoken rules, and constantly tearing apart the inherent aesthetics, which is an instinct of my resistance to the world and a kind of self-consciousness of mine.
Red Star News: Is the way you write your poems constantly revised or just a wave? What do you think are the three elements you must have to create poetry?
Metaphor: My writing is all in one go, poetry writing needs a breath, this can not be interrupted, interrupted writing is difficult to return to the original rhyme, the text presented will have a deliberate craftsmanship. I wrote the long poem "Madhouse" two years ago, and I wrote two thousand lines in one breath, but only half of it, and something was put aside, and for more than two years, I still haven't found the pulse to continue writing. Of course, I'll revise it too, but it's basically limited to a few words.
I don't think poetry writing has three or five elements. I think the most core element of poetry is originality, and the originality of poetry is "no one has said anything before", and the poet who has never come before and is more bullish can do it without continuity. The daily use of Chinese is only a few thousand words, how to achieve "words that have not been spoken before"? In fact, it is to cut into the unique perspective of things, a unique understanding of the world. This requires the poet to accumulate and cultivate his own life.
For example, the rhythm and musicality of language are also the characteristics of poetry that distinguish it from other genres, but this is only the basic skill of the poet.
I don't advocate poetry containing so-called "golden sentences"
Red Star News: The style of poetry changes with personal experience. You have gone through several stages along the way, tell us about it. Is today's poetic style stable for you for a long time?
Metaphor: Any writer has different emphases at different stages of life, or different stages of life have different focuses. I clearly have two phases of writing, the first in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, and the second after I returned to poetry in 2014. I evaluate myself: the poetry writing in the first stage is more sharp and sharp, black and white love and hatred leave no room, direct and rough; the second stage of writing, perhaps the growth of life experience, sharp and at the same time more tolerant and generous. I understand that "poetry is like its person" is a kind of change, and the poetry of the moment matches the person at this moment.
The language style of my poetry has always insisted on simple, direct, clear and accurate expression, a directness that is close to everyday spoken language. I'm not good at or don't like to deliberately set the difficulty of reading text. I think the real difficulty of poetry lies in expressing the most complex feelings in the simplest language, the most economical words that store the richest information, and the expression in one arrow is the real difficulty, rather than deliberately writing sentences with complicated imagery. The use of literary harm is a common problem in current poetry writing. I do not advocate that poetry contains the so-called "golden sentence", a poem is a system, each sentence is only a part of the system, each sentence only adapts to the system, and the sentences that live independently from this system are all harmful to the text.
The threshold of poetry is not low, it is the highest form of literature
Red Star News: Nowadays, many people say that at the bottom of the threshold of poetry, children who are a few years old can also write poetry, as if writing poetry is not a difficult task. How do you see this?
Metaphor: Many people say that the threshold of poetry is low because they do not know what poetry is, and they often divide some clichéd chicken soup words as poetry. Poetry is the highest form of literature, and this recognition has systematically studied the history of literature, and the students of the Chinese Department of Science and Technology know it.
The reason for this understanding is that after the rise of new media since the rise of new media in recent years, the threshold for the publication of so-called "poetry" has been low. Many people who do self-media have a very low ability to appreciate poetry, have no basic literary literacy, and are self-appointed as "editors-in-chief", and the so-called "poetry" launched by their platforms is mostly some clichés, or chicken soup or saliva words, which to some extent misleads the public's cognition of poetry.
Other paper media, because of the love draft, relationship draft or some publicity needs, indiscriminately sent some branch texts that look like poetry, which also seriously misled the public's perception of poetry.
Of course, some famous poets who have written good works have also published some words that have no new ideas because they have written on the occasion, which has also caused many people to have the cognition that "I write better than famous poets".
There are also some "famous poets" who have been professional writers for decades and have written branch texts for decades, but have never written a real poem. Their "fame" is often obtained by holding meetings, attending events, and staying up for seniority. In fact, this phenomenon is not unique in the poetry world, but there are also a large number of such unworthy "brick makers" in other fields. It is these people, their present words, that make the public misunderstand the threshold of poetry writing.
In the Great Leap Forward of folk songs in the 1950s, there were many famous peasant poets, who created or copied the slogan style, also known as "poetry", but is it poetry? Therefore, it is not that the threshold for poetry writing is low, but that most writers of branch writing do not have the threshold to enter poetry at all.
Poetry without readers, similar to karaoke
Red Star News: Do poets need their own "fans"? If the poems created have no readers, how should such poems be defined?
Metaphor: Poetry reading is a minority, especially in the modern society where pragmatism prevails, and the vast majority of people never pay attention to useless poetry. This stems not only from the fact that the source of modern poetry was not born of a maternal culture, but a derivative of a foreign culture. Modern poetry is only a hundred years old, and it is not the result of the inheritance of classical Chinese poetry. The basis of Classical Chinese poetry is the agricultural civilization, is the poetry book heirloom, China's modern and classical there is a rupture, modern society has no classical Gelug poetry survival soil.
Classical Grammatical poetry, like classical opera, has a value limited to providing a cultural sample. Modern poetry is based on industrial civilization, and modern Chinese poetry is more inherited from the Western literary tradition, and the integration with maternal culture is in a long-term and gradual process. In terms of cultural identity, it is not really universal. In our basic education stage, the education of modern Chinese poetry is also lagging behind or even distorted, and most of the selected poetry samples are works from the embryonic stage of Chinese vernacular literature, and it is difficult to carry out real aesthetic education in modern poetry. As modern poetry writers, we have the responsibility and mission to enhance and expand the aesthetics of modern poetry reading.
Good poetry is never without readers, and literature itself is empathetic. Poetry without readers can only be a kind of self-amusement of a literati, similar to karaoke.
In fact, with the rise of new media, many excellent or above-passing poems have been widely disseminated, such as Haizi in the past and Yu Xiuhua now. Of course, relatively speaking, the readers of poetry are still niche. For example, those who come from science and engineering majors, the proportion of people who read poetry is very small, and the reason I have analyzed earlier is that cultural integration and education are lacking.
I have run a poetry public account myself, with a fixed readership, and the poetry readership on Weibo is even larger, often with tens of thousands of readers. My public account and Weibo itself have not been promoted, and the readership has been completely formed naturally. If there is an opportunity for some effective promotion, it should have a lot of room to expand.
Of course, writing is the mission of the writer, and if history develops according to normal processes, the readership of poetry must increase geometrically with the development of social hierarchies.
Red Star News reporter | Zeng Qi
Edited | Duan Xueying
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