Zhang Ergun: In my opinion, there should be no standard for good poetry

Zhang Ergun's poems

Partition wall with ears (excerpt from group poems)

Zhang Er Stick

Remembering a night in the mountains

It's been years since the cold night, but it was

Several frostbites on the body, firmly remembered

And the cluster of flames that warmed me

Still with the heartbeat, shaking, flickering

Dimming. Destined, a lifetime hovering

In the boundless snow and wind, it continued that night

The fate of hunger and cold. Like a desperate prisoner

Ancient shackles are followed. Like the ancestral weeping mourners

It follows a poignant voice. Can't get by

That night of despair, the extra night of a lifetime

It faced a bunch of campfires, carrying a vast expanse of darkness

Overnight. For the rest of my life, I am thankful

That campfire, that warmth, that ashes

More and more, more and more grace

seaside

By the sea, someone peddled jewelry and musical instruments to me

and ornaments. They use fish bones, shells

And coral refining... These come from the sea

Objects in the depths, good looking and cheap

Deep in the ocean floor, will there be none

A bustling bazaar with many things going through it

Schools of fish and shellfish, they will not also

Shipwrecks, canvases, and jewelry left behind by pirates are peddled

Even after the tsunami, those who died

A body that is carefully processed by schools of fish

Being a guest

I know that my human world is full of loopholes

Dreams are like a mirage, waking up is an endless sea market

Knowing that I was inexplicably panicked, I wouldn't

Greater than, headless flies, will not be greater

Hen on a hot griddle. What's the matter

The world is just a fragment

Days, you make up a thousand, I make up a hundred, pieced together

This faint sigh, this sigh

------------

You fix your eyes on it, and it's me who survives with a broken tail

It is me who wags my tail and begs for mercy

You see, the stone is me, the one who lifted the stone

It's me too. Scarred, it's still me

top

The old people gathered again in the winter square

Like a team of elderly executioners

They rose and fell, arms up

Whipping the gyroscope. In the emptiness

And on the hard earth, one heart after another

The throbbing gyroscope is spinning. whip

A sound fell, and the gyroes of joy

In the whiplash of generations

Not a single dodge, not a single one stopped

It was as if only by spinning all the time could you survive

As if there were only silence, accepting this endless

whip. The life of a gyroscope

Only deserves to be consummated

Chu Han

The snow of the Chu kingdom has melted. Han Chinese

Not yet. Soldiers in heavy armor

The two kings who were equipped with keys and repaired bicycles

Abandoned in a winter snow, shivering

Outside the chessboard, the red horse stomped on the opponent's black cannon

I don't know Wei Jin. And those scattered pawns

Useless taxis, unwilling cars... I must miss it too

The pleasure of just being picked up and put down

They must not know that they are dead

They are born and die countless times a day

Sometimes, live under the hands of the key

Sometimes, he died at the hands of a bicycle repairer

holly

Holly on the side of the road, watching us day after day

When an old man, when crossing the street

Their branches will brush together

In the middle of the road, stick out a little bit

It's like, I want to hold on

There were two passers-by, when quarreling

They will turn their heads around, like dissuasion

In the Wax moon, there are no greener plants than them

Even in the cold of the night, they are under the street lamp

Green and lush, waiting for every night returner

Every holly must be hidden

A heart for good

Pitchers have ears

Always suspicious, the partition wall has ears

I always felt that I had fangs and claws around me

And beyond the four walls, there is one

Miasma-filled forests are everywhere

Bottomless traps. Ambushed, countless bloody

Bows and arrows and dangling torches

No one knows that I have been suffering from suspicion for a long time

Like a fur-mottled twilight

Tiger, draped in one

The old clothes of the world are empty on these four walls

In the room, there was a nightmare of gain and loss

Blowing sugar man

Years ago, the air was sweet and the streets were fragrant

A child, sucked his fingers

Follow the Candy Blower. Surprised

He only needed a piece of sugar and blew it out

In the world, rare flowers, birds and animals

He also blew out the Eight Precepts of Sun Monkey and Pig

Blow out Guan LaoYe with Red Rabbit, Wu Song and Tiger

He blew myths and he also blew operas

So many grudges, sorrows and joys

From his mouth, a little

Spray out. As if, in his parched belly

Hidden deep, a universe from ancient times to the present

It was as if he were a disheveled face

But the Creator of boundless mana

Interview

Writing poetry is both accidental and inevitable

Zhang Er Stick

1. Why write poetry?

Zhang Ergun: Writing, at first, is only due to an impulse to express and confide, in order to fill the increasingly pale and empty ordinary daily life with a line of unknowable and unpredictable sentences. In order to let yourself not indulge too much in one of the unbearable dilemmas, in order to make the one who is forced and urgent to be more calm and calm, in order to be under the grinding of aging, not to be indifferent and not to worry about gains and losses. Writing and writing, discovering the writing of poetry, brought me a lot of comfort and encouragement. This consolation and encouragement is enough to make an ordinary person slowly get rid of limitations and narrowness, gradually forget his worries and timidity, and urge a person with unlimited shortcomings to begin self-reflection and give birth to love and regret...

2. What is your poetic concept?

Zhang Ergun: More often, I am in a passive environment, recording what I think and see. I have worked in the wilderness for many years, often in the wilderness, in the dark and narrow tents, in the rainy night in the wind, when I take a nap in the grass, when I shade under the trees... So, I feel like I'm a poet who walks out of my study, and almost all of my poetry is put into my own heart by the feelings of my own body, transformed into the words I want, and then presented. In writing, I also became a person who crossed the river by feeling the stones. Moreover, every poet has his own rivers and whirlpools, his own banks, his own territory that he wants to flow through, the crowds that want to nourish, the oceans that he wants to flow into... When we define all of this, we automatically generate our own poetic genealogy, poetic aesthetics, and ways of speaking. My life and flesh and blood, my weakness and short-sightedness, my dazedness and sloppiness, my clumsiness and cunning, all block me in my language, and I am doomed to become a transparent and hard diamond, a shining gold, an indomitable steel under this heavy obstacle... Maybe, I'm just a bunch of loose sand, I admit it. I guarded this loose sand of myself, slowly picking out the parts that I thought were useful, and I treasured the useful parts and then waved them out to become those poems. I longed for words to resist my short and ineffective life a little. Perhaps this resistance is ridiculous, but between ridiculous resistance and silent obedience, I only want me and all the life I have witnessed to leave a little scratch on this earthly world. Therefore, my poetic view is to solve one's own doubts in writing, to liberate one's own nature, to deconstruct one's own destiny, to explain one's own soul.

3. What does hometown and childhood mean to you?

Zhang Ergun: Probably like all rural children, my childhood was ignorant and stubborn, and I desperately longed for the world outside the village. When I grew up, I found that childhood was like a shadow and lingered. Childhood experiences and memories will also accompany us throughout our lives. Childhood forms and determines our personality, aesthetics, hobbies and even life values, etc... Throughout our lives, we have been revising the details of our childhood day by day. Perhaps, throughout our lives, we will only live under the protection of childhood, living in nightmares. Speaking of hometown, it is not as depressed as we imagined, nor is it as harmonious as in memory. It has many bad habits, many ignorances, and of course many things that warm people's hearts. Homeland is a paradoxical existence in our lives. I once described my hometown as follows: "I know that there is a group of people there who have lived a dumb and wordless life all their lives, and it is impossible to have their own words remembered and recited for the rest of their lives." Their honor and disgrace are honors and disgraces that can be ignored in an instant, and their gains and losses are gains and losses that fall into the dust. I need to write down everything I have witnessed and heard in the form that I like and am good at, and I am afraid that I, a forgetful and ordinary person, will meet people or things that are easy to be ignored and forgotten, like white clouds meet green smoke, like an ephemera meeting another group of ephemerals..." Therefore, the writing of each of us must also be deeply blessed and interfered with by childhood and hometown. It can be said that I, now, am the legacy of my childhood and hometown.

4. What is the internal relationship and correspondence between poetry and the times?

Zhang Ergun: Each of us must be deeply imprinted with the information of the times and regions. Our knowledge structure, way of thinking, values and so on are all closely related to the times in which we live. A good work of poetry should have enough strength and courage to walk through the jungle of time and space to reach a distant and strange place.

5. What is your confusion about the creation of poetry at the moment?

Zhang Ergun: My writing, and my writing ideals, is a natural barrier. I sometimes think sadly that my lifelong efforts are nothing more than the futility of a guard. My writing is often discouraged, disturbing, and even awkward. I hope that the poems I write, like a stone thrown out, will make a little ripple in the hearts of some people who read them. But I can't do it, and many works are like snowflakes on the river after all, and there is no news. Even, I myself will forget and dislike an old song. I don't know how to deal with the dilemma of "what to write, how to write". I think that since I don't have the ability to solve these confusions of my own at the moment, I might as well slow down and calm down a little, and wait for time to solve all this.

6. Experience and imagination, which one is more important?

Zhang Ergun: Experience is important, but the trade-off between experience is even more important. Imagination is important, but so is the ability to control imagination. Perhaps, experience and imagination, like the relationship between the weighing pan and the weighing pan, are indispensable. Without experience, there can be no imagination. It's like a baby who has just fallen to the ground, his experience is zero, so what is his imagination?

7. How light can poetry bear, or how much poetry cannot bear?

Zhang Ergun: It varies from person to person, and it varies from poetry to poetry. Poetry can bear everything, and when it is heavy, it can even destroy the country and rejuvenate the country in an instant, and when it is light, it is like clouds and mist.

8. What is the standard of good poetry in your heart?

Zhang Ergun: In my opinion, there should be no standard for good poetry. Every classic is a standard. Good, is good, a look at it feels good, as soon as you think of it, it is called good, a variety of good. Well, no need to attach anything else. Whether it makes you feel touched, shocked, joyful, fresh... As long as it was in that moment, it made me feel so much. Years later, that feeling is still like a spring breeze, lingering, and that's enough, it's good poetry.

9. Where can I find the new Chinese language?

Zhang Ergun: The newness I long for is a new one that has been inherited in an orderly manner, not a fragmented one, not a turn-off, not a pot or a pot to sell iron... Therefore, the new Chinese language must be hidden in the daily life visible to the naked eye, in the living and fragrant city well. We are with the ever-changing life, and we must be with the new.

10. What is the efficacy of poetry?

Zhang Ergun: What poetry can become, what is its effect. There are always people who write "heart-saving pills", there are always people who write "water forgetting love", there are always people who write "historical records", and some people write "big choruses".

11. What kind of poetry do you think needs to be wary of or opposed at the moment?

Zhang Ergun: I am worried about giving new words! It's always been.

(Image from the Internet)

【Personal Profile】:

Zhang Ergun, whose real name is Zhang Changchun, was born in 1982 in Dai County, Shanxi Province, and works for the Geological Survey Bureau of Shanxi Province. He is the author of the poetry collections "The Wilderness" and "Into the Forest", and has won various literary awards. He is now a contracted writer at Wuhan University of Literature.