Neighbors: This Poet Who Knows the "Naked Plains" Deeply - Reading Ah Xin's Newly Compiled Poetry Collection "Naked Plains"

This poet who knows the "naked plains" very well

——Reading Ah Xin's newly compiled poetry collection "Naked Plains"

Wen | neighbor

Ashin's newly published book of poems includes almost all of his important poems since 1988.

How did I gain insight and record all this in a secret file and bury it deep in the ground?

These are two verses from his "Abandoned Baby". Reading his poems for many years, of course, this is a verse, but it can be said that this is the way Ah Xin used poetry to ask him how he could "understand" the secrets of the world, and to ask whether his poems could qualify as personal "secret files". This "underground" "secret file", Ah Xin is also questionable, his "why" shows his desire for the world to know, but also a deeper doubt - do I really "understand"? How did I receive God's secret gift?

Reading these poems deeply, I feel that the poet's writing, on the one hand, is a continuous deepening of the poetry itself, and on the other hand, it almost gives us a feeling of "exoticism". For many years, the poet who was in Gannan Tibet, which was very different from the mainland, wandered in a strange place, and had to reconcile with such an "exotic land" in the form of poetry, coexisting, and became a long comfort to his soul. At the same time, this "exotic" scenery and personnel also continue to enter the poet's flesh at the same time, so that Ashin's poetry gradually grows into a "exotic" style.

Look at a section from his Winter Ranch —

In the coldest seasons. yak

Tear each other apart with lips and tongues that are used to rolling hay.

The fur with the blood particles was with ice ballast

Torn off of a companion

- This blood food!

And the end of the poem —

people

Drink bitter wine, boil, restrain...

In the coldest seasons,

The Earth rotates. It doesn't regulate the speed, but I think

It rotates slowly and almost stands still.

I sometimes regret that many poets who have lived in Tibetan areas for a long time, how can you not discover this?! But the foreigner Ah Xin was able to go deeper, deeper, and even enter and merge into one like a "sacrifice", and the poet Ah Xin keenly sensed the slow rotation of the cold season.

Tibet, after all, is harsh, although there are also spring flowers and autumn moons, but the flowers are unusual flowers, and the moon is unusual. People who are willing to die and infinitely strong, resolute and helpless to obey the earth and the will of God, have their own inner laws, and have awe-inspiring seemingly submissive unyielding. Fate is mysterious and not mysterious. They treat this life as if they were in a previous life, and they treat the next life in this life.

The man and the horse were silent, against the wind, marching in the stiff naked plains.

Who is waiting for us in the future, boiling black tea?

Whoever brings the message of the dead drags us into fate,

Retrograde with the Great River?

"Who is waiting for us in the future", who is not the exact person, but time, is the unknown of life. As a poet who has lived in Tibet for a long time, his view of life and death and his gradually mature understanding will undoubtedly be influenced by almost everything in Tibet. For Ashin, religion is sometimes not entirely religious, but time guides people on earthly journeys, the subtle opening of the door of life and death, and the generous mercy of the mysterious and unknown god for the humble life of this world. The person who has faith, who is so directed to "fate", and the "retrograde" of the great river, is only another kind of final soul arrival of destiny.

Life is the world, and in "A Plateau Is Snowing" we see—

...... Green face

Guru, flapping a pair of barefoot, chanted that song

The song called "Les Misérables": Holding a cane,

Walk out of the cave and come down the hill

A livestock village.

The guru of the poet's writing, the wise man's "flapping a pair of bare feet", is actually another kind of human pleasure. After the snow, "a village where people and animals live together", people and cattle and sheep coexist in a world of reincarnation. The wordless wise man points us to see that the world does not exist in appearances, there is no sorrow or joy, there is no matter the length of time, everything is a process.

The place where Ashin lives has its providence. The poet, as a wise man of another life, his "view", his emotional immersion in the world, is the shadow of the poet's self-

The sky was forming, and the distance was crossed by a flock of gray pigeons

It's just a matter of time;

There's something new being made on the horizon,

Stones are shaped in the morning mist.

The water was really cold. She broke the ice by the stream and scooped the water,

Eyelashes with cream – I want to walk over and lean over

Comfort her

And help her carry a bucket full of ice water back to the hut by the forest.

- "Morning Mist"

The poem seems to have been written in the same way as "Genesis", and the first four lines are the pen of creation, breaking through the air and taking shape. The last few lines are to create man and create oneself. Reading these poems reassured me of Ah Xin's language abilities that he seemed to have "transformed" the Chinese language. He is accumulating strength for the regeneration of the Chinese language, poetry as mysterious as a long-lost incantation. Perhaps, his poems, with another kind of Chinese beauty, are mixed with some of the ancient and distant that we seem to be familiar with, but also some slightly unfamiliar "impurities", and it is these "impurities" that make his poetry appear unique in style.

After Chang Yao, we were pleasantly surprised to see the power of Ashin's unique creation.

Drafted on February 22, 2022, revised on 23 February

——— This article was reprinted on April 20, 2022