Where there is poetry, there is hope
The poems of female poets are the crystallization of long-term dormancy of desire. Through it, it reflects the incredible gradient of everything in the hazy night. The latest short film in NOWNESS's original series "Poetic Portrayals", "Portrait of a Poetess", attempts to find the long-buried grass snake gray line in their poems. The light and shadow change, and the words between the lines connect the original identity and second nature of the poets.
On the banks of the Lancang River, the water gushes and the mountains overlap.
Xishuangbanna wakes up with the sound of insects. Halfway up the mountain, the women, the men, the nameless travelers, and their cats, their eyes dominated by the flow of the river, looked aimlessly farther away, indulging in a reasonable loss of focus. Emerald green banana leaves spread over the mountains, and the veins of the leaves are like lines of broken poems waiting to be filled, and the continuer of this moment is a fly passing by.
To tell the story of emotion, human beings are born with language. In order to push language further, people use poetry to express life experiences. Stripped of the illusion of flowers in the fog, we approached four female poets who grew up in different but equally active women. They think honestly, record, romantically imagine, write, and more courageously ask questions and introspect themselves. The meaning of gender here is not to tighten the shackles of stereotypes, but to let us see more clearly the poetic nature that descends on different individuals, how to approach, gather, and emit the light that lights up ordinary life.
Coincidentally, the shore lit torches like fluorescent lights, projected on the lancang river before nightfall. And what were they thinking before the torch was lit?
The river is calm
Turbulent again
The poet Wu Ang wore a long red dress and melted into the oil green of the mid-mountain. The wild and interesting background is very compatible with her, extremely intense, and has its own measure. To this day, the female poet, who has been friends with poetry for more than twenty years, still has a way of life full of free and diffuse nature — like a poem.
As a professional poet, Wu Ang sketched this portrait of identity with a rather light and simple way of life. At the end of the 1990s, when she had just begun to write poetry, poetry was a literary carrier with avant-garde attributes, and its dissemination was wrapped up in the atmosphere of the Romantic era, and the speed and opportunity of the poet's soaring speed and opportunity were dramatic. Growing up in a family of intellectuals, he was systematically enlightened by literature and prepared in the world of words for more than ten years. Wu Ang believes that the "surrender" to poetry at that time was the luck and opportunity given to her by heaven, which she described as an "explosive ascent". Writing poetry seemed to find an outlet, guiding the youthful impulses of her youth.
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Wu Ang's living ratio is half in Beijing and half in Simao, Yunnan. Writing poetry for her is something that requires all her attention and emotion to do well, and has nothing to do directly with scenes or time. Because of his obsession with novels (especially the direction of suspense) in his youth, the steady rate of writing a poetry collection in a few years has replaced the fast and abundant production in his twenties. But this is by no means a deliberate concession brought about by changing the style and expression. The worldview and methodology shaped by poetry have become her linguistic instincts. This instinct is based on innate hints, but it grows under the strong pull of the day after tomorrow, and penetrates into the creation of both poetry and fiction.
But how far can the desires of adolescence support the occasional poetry to walk? Wu Ang's poetic world has no physical boundaries. It is uncontrollable, unruly, less certain, not tamed, and filled with indomitable and romantic banter that belongs to a woman's sense of fatalism. On the one hand, she is a representative poet of the "Lower Body Poetry Movement" in the Early 21st Century Chinese poetry circle. Boldly and nakedly rebelling against reality with "the presence of the flesh" and "real physicality", writing and presenting the authentic enthusiasm; on the other hand, when she turned to a more de-gendered attempt, the broadening of her vision also exercised her self-discipline and self-sustaining mentality as a poet.
Written for more than twenty years, Wu Ang's name and the development of contemporary poetry have been deeply imprinted. From the strong self-destruction and self-disclosure consciousness of the early "confessionalism", to writing about their own interests and emotions, to the complete abandonment of the "confessional school" in the later stage, in recent years, they have begun to try to graft the skills of the novel into poetry and create a story in the poem. To some extent, the change in her vision and creative nature represents the change in the interests of the intellectual women of her time. With the popularization of education, the horizon is more open, the heart is more mature and liberated, and the pursuit of purity outside the shackles of gender, they regard themselves as teachers, and only teach their own lives. It was a retrograde but equally plump journey of growth.
Wu Ang's poems have always been known for their beautiful sentences. In "The Song of the Young Widow," she relentlessly rebels against repressed bodily consciousness; likewise, in "All I Love," she praises the eyes of a light but affectionate lover. But Wu Ang gradually realized that this was too easy to be "recognized". The poet's vigilance and sharp thorns build up defensive mechanisms like conditioned reflexes. She wants to continue the rebellion: "I don't want them (the so-called critics) to recite my sentences. There is no way to recite, there is no way to capture, this is my own artistic pursuit. My poems are not 'flattering' things – because reading my poems subconsciously grabs a few beautiful sentences and catches something they can remember forever. "She doesn't.
"The poet has to keep identifying himself as 'I am a poet.'" Writing poetry is always an open system and structure. This constant confirmation can actually ensure our vitality and the sense of continuity in our own creation. Wu Ang said. The poet has always believed in the value and benefit of "concreteness". Be a concrete person, write specific words, do specific things. While dissecting herself, she offended herself, and deconstructed herself, and this woman carried half a lifetime of directness and bravery, as if it were a natural achievement.
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Dressed in a red dress, Wu Ang stood barefoot in the water of the Lancang River, the river was calm and turbulent, and when the undercurrent was deep, the water surface was still cloudy and breezy. This seems to allude to the temperament of Wu Ang himself. She leaned back, as if to bend her efforts into an exaggerated gesture of pregnancy. As a poet, is the moment of encounter with the "female" self of the gender connected with other people?
"In fact, gender is a particularly hidden thing, such as the long hair I have now, which does not mean that I always realize that I am a woman." Wu Ang said:
"And my chromosome, which is hidden in my body. By the time I'm menopausal, I may not even remember what the menstrual holiday is—unless you're giving birth. Your gender consciousness is actually when you have sex. But there wasn't much time in our lives at that time, so I felt that emphasizing this gender consciousness was actually better than forgetting it. ”
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A woman's maternal consciousness (or inclusive nature) is higher than any professional label. She cherishes those professional or amateur poets who are calm and quiet in their creative hearts, and provide opportunities for children and young poetry lovers to communicate and shine all year round. Some of them are school students, some are working mothers, and some are cleaning aunts from friends' homes. Wu Ang is a generally preoccupied role of leader in their group. Poetry is a text, but it is also a synthesis of images and sensory imagery. From this, she cherishes the almost fuel-like writing nature of poetry creators, which is where the vitality of poetry lies: "Even if we don't write normally, we must raise the soil well, so that it is at least continuously stable and warm, and it is an eternally luminous vessel." ”
All people who can write for a lifetime, regardless of gender, must be very powerful. The poet Wu Ang believed and did so.
Bright red
Plantain flowers
The afternoon in Xishuangbanna, with a kind of rampage magic, seems to burn everything fiercely. A handful of bright pink plantain flowers was lying on the ground at the moment, like a stubborn girl whose desire was about to be dried.
The poet Yuan Wei briefly interpreted the girl here. But what was different was that her desires were abundant, abundant, and rising more and more. Her desires are directed directed at poetry, and her desire is an ambitious attachment to poetry, and her desire is close to "animal nature"—if in her own words.
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Gorgeous, resolute, crisp. Once you contact it, you will know that these are Yuan Wei. A few years ago, she set up a concept for too many aspects of her inner self, called "a large group of Yuan Wei":
"Because you don't have to focus on who I am, you don't have to think about it anymore. I'm writing a set of poems this year. In the process, it seems that I have stopped pursuing what is 'good poetry', or what I have written better than before. You can't keep up with your own changes, but you will see your changes, the point is that you can see it walking, that a large group of Yuan Wei is migrating, and you can't do it, you can't interfere through self-awareness and cognition, but you can influence them. To understand, feel, and adapt to them, then a strong system of personal will does not exist. ”
A large group of Yuan Wei was assigned everywhere by the master's abundant perception to shape their life experience, thus feeding back to Yuan Wei himself. In Yuan Wei's view, the quality of a poet is to want to write poetry, which stems from the natural nature and can never be domesticated. And even if you bite yourself to death, you can't be domesticated with the almost animalistic creative desire." Because only desire is strong enough to sustain your lifelong writing. Yuan Wei's eyes were warm and vocal when he expressed his absolutely firm point of view, just like when he said this sentence.
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Yuan Wei was born in Beijing, then moved to the mountains and forests of Hangzhou, and lived a simple and secluded creative life in a corner of the tea garden. In addition to writing poetry, she raises cats and rabbits, and raises a few jade-banded butterflies every summer. She also engraved a print, and when she went down, she gave birth to a sharp mark. It was even like her poems, involuntary, barbaric, clear, destructive, but also elegant. She and Wu Ang met early, and in Wu Ang's eyes, Yuan Wei was a natural poet - because she was sensitive, upright, righteous and courageous enough, as long as she wanted to write, no one could stop her.
Since writing her poems, she has published her own collection of poems, "Tuna", "Lovers Exhibition", and "Astrological Notes - Mercury Retrograde in 2015". The logic and philosophy of astrology, and the unpredictability hidden in the collective human subconscious, fascinated her. Whenever she opened the conversation, she started with the ancient Greek and poetic traditions. The poet is a prophet, and the soul has its own eyes that look forward. Using logic to overlook the trajectory of life, this is probably one of the "big group of Yuan Wei" who loves to do the most.
Or back to poetry. As a feminist, Yuan Wei recently combed through the evolution of the modern poetry history of Chinese women. The development of this has clarified her thinking to a certain extent, as well as the role of female poets in the development of poetry. In the era of emphasizing sexual liberation, because of the reform and opening up, the social atmosphere was enlightened, and women's writing began to enter the field of vision, but at that time, the "female poets" only served as the poet's family members - "I am only a man's spiritual partner and a caretaker in life. ”
Later, it evolved into the creative era of the "post-70s", and began the independent state of feminism in women's writing and turned it into a common sense. Today, the development of the feminist movement has gradually evolved from "de-gendering" to emphasizing the characteristics of women that are different from men. To emphasize women's rights is to emphasize women's perspectives. This made Yuan Wei deeply aware of the awakening wind of female (or feminist) consciousness, which was rushing towards her. She wasn't just one of the people who were wrapped up in it, she was the one who took the initiative to pick up a pen and write about change.
"In the era of Zheng Min (one of the representative poets of the 'Nine Leaves' school), female poets were still emphasizing that I was a male lion—that is, male, I had the same strength as men, and when describing women's independence, I wanted to be like a man; in Shu Ting's time, it was I who dared to say that I had a female pursuit. Then to the generation of Yi Lei (a contemporary Chinese female poet who wrote a group of poems such as "The Bedroom of a Single Woman"), it became that I no longer needed love, I was myself. Later, after the era of reform and opening up of sexual liberation, like Xiao An (the representative poet of the "non-Africanism" in the third generation of Chinese poetry writing), he generously wrote 'I enjoy my sexual life happily'; 'post-70s' became 'I am like everyone, what is my physical feeling'. ”
Yuan Wei's narration condenses the trajectory of female poets. The face of female poets and female poetry is gradually stretched, which is a history of women's struggle, struggle and self-evidence.
Born in the 1980s, Yuan Wei is a typical new intellectual. She has her own strong sense of social responsibility and value output ideas. In her view, social responsibility is important because it is genderless: "It's just that when it comes to enforcing social responsibility, women are doing it from a female perspective and in a female way of executing." For her, writing poetry is her innate sense of social responsibility.
In her twenties, the spirited Yuan Wei worked as the editor-in-chief of a well-known independent electronic publication, OUT. The life of constant contact with people makes her ask herself: Who do I want to be in this life, and I am satisfied? She thought about it for a long time and had no answer. The media experience (of the golden age) pampered her creative talents, but being a journalist or a magazine person, perhaps bringing her only a few days of pleasure, was far from answering the ultimate question of who she wanted to be. She decided to stop.
So she went to Yunnan and lived for three months in one breath. With that personal proposition that was not yet clear, the rules of secular life that could not be rationalized made her unable to wait to solve it quickly, and she knew that the only person who gave the answer was herself. She blurted out the answer without much repetition. If there is one option that she will never regret, it should be a mystery in the subconscious.
Yuan Wei's answer is to write poetry. "Even if I don't have enough to eat, even if I am belittled by my family, or gain the image of a loser, I can fully accept that I can only be a poet." 」 I don't have a second option. When I figured it out, I felt very relaxed. I immediately found 'who I am'. Although I did not engage in a 'job' in a serious way after that, I did not have a hard life because of poetry. ”
Who didn't write a few poems during adolescence? Yuan Wei not only has a lonely love for poetry. She actually knows that spontaneous creation is like hormones, and it can't actually be counted as "writing work." But when she transformed into work, she learned a lot of self-consciousness as a poet. Even if Yuan Wei knew in his consciousness that "self-consciousness" was a serious consumption of a poet. But she was still careful to maintain some of its precious chaos. She always believed that what was between chaos and clarity was the starting point of poetry.
red
Land
In the poet Yu's hometown of Sichuan, the land there is also such an endless reddish-brown color. The strong laterite is not mixed with a trace of impurities, with a straight and cheerful look.
The red soil of Xishuangbanna has a natural and magnificent momentum, like a flame that has temporarily stopped. At this moment, the earth under Yu Youyou's feet is vividly restoring her original path, and at the same time becoming an image that reflects her personal personality characteristics. In the here and now, imagine the moment. Poetry, she says, is this strangeness.
At the age of 14, she began writing poetry. The first poem is related to a crack in the door: "There is a slit in the door \ I often peek through it \ Peep outside \ A deformed miniature \ The world \ Pointed, long \ embedded in my line of sight \ Countless rays of light pass through \ into my room ..." She is a sensitive but extremely alert girl who is extremely obedient, and at the age of 22 published her first book of poems, "7 Years", which covers the process and fragments of a girl who picked up the process and fragments of her incomplete female consciousness from the age of 14 to 21. Such years of tempering are the prelude to the conscious speculation of a female poet.
Yu Recalls that when she first came into contact with poetry, it was the instinctive experience of "knowing nothing". At that time, the creation relied more on her intuition. There may be a matter of the proportion and blessing of talent. But when she enters the process of systematic poetry writing, intuition becomes self-consciousness, and the poet should have this self-awareness. Once the cultivation of self-consciousness is ended, poetry will not be a sustainable product.
To write sustainably, this is what Yu Youyou asks of herself. Many people's creative life span only shines in the first one or two years, is seen, praised, and then ruthlessly disappears. The trajectory of creation has been affected from the very beginning: "I want to be myself, to seek myself." But when self-consciousness disappears, the ego must also lose its own charm and weight.
Yu Has a baby's face that does not perfectly match her personality and tone of voice. This makes her identity somewhat confusing. The self is difficult to rivet, and it is always changing, and she always warns herself as a poet that restraint and infinite closeness to reality are the most important lessons that a poet should cultivate.
"For the first two years, I've been telling myself that I must be 'self-centered' when creating. The existence of the "I" should be hidden, the narcissism of the creator of the word should be eliminated, and the poetry should be allowed to make its own voice. I don't think it's right to think of yourself as the Creator of words, like the Creator who exists in your words. 'Self-centeredness' is the emphasis on personal style, but in poetry writing style is not the most important, and it is most important to build a system that will not be 'taken away'. ”
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Yu Youyou said. In a situation where most people are pursuing and reinforcing a style, she chooses to give up and avoid the formation of stylization: "Once I found that poetry for a certain period of time was twisting into a common discursive tendency, I was anxious and eager to open up other paths. ”
After the publication of the representative poem "7 Years", Yu Youyou has successively published poetry collections such as "I Am Bait", "The Wind That Can't Be", and "Half a Person". Her poems have been translated into English, Russian, French, Japanese, Swedish, Arabic and many other Chinese. In July 2019, the first English poetry collection, My Tenantless body, was published in London. Based on poetry, Yu yu extends the medium of his creation as far as possible.
She does installation art, opening art exhibitions of poetry and installation concertos; she holds poetry workshops to build understanding and empathy for poetry creation among the general public in the form of collage poetry creation; she works with French cellists to "translate" her poetic imagery into musical scores, opening up the high wall of transformation between text and music. In Yu Youyou, you can see a "post-90s" female poet carrying forward her keen nature to the greatest degree of flexibility and ingenuity - this is a kind of "WTO entry" creation that is not speculative. The spontaneous spirituality of poetry poured out her understanding of poetry—poetry itself is diverse, and it should be diverse.
Yin Li, a poet and also a painter, once said that since he began to paint, he found that excess poetic material could be included in painting, and excess visual material could write poetry. Poetry and painting both have their own audiovisual languages, and once they are juxtaposed, a magical causal order is born.
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The poet Yu Youyou is also a wild painter. She uses oil sticks, because she seems to be the most liberating painting tool. Most of the paintings are based on floral still life themes, which are quiet, elegant and beautiful. A painting is a state of mind, a state is a poem. Since 2015, she has painted a self-portrait of herself every year. The dark eyes of the person in the painting are the most recognizable signs of the painting's owner, Yu Youyou. In this way, she has achieved "sustainability", that is, constantly engaging with poetry in new ways.
However, the young girl Yu Yu still tries to achieve rebellion in the completed works. After one stage, she wants to ruin everything: "When you stand on the ruins of the words you destroyed, and you have to rebuild, there is an anxiety, but also a pleasure. It's like you've done a negative and negative formatting. "If the writing life wants to continue forever, this work step can be painful but crucial.
"I think the poems I've written have nothing to do with me." Yu Youyou said: "My function is to create the next poem, I can't even memorize any of the previous poems, I just want to go to the next one immediately." ”
In the water
reed
Snow leopards living in highland areas are extremely hardy, alert and agile. They live day and night and live alone.
The poet Ye Wei said that if she had second nature, she might be a snow leopard with the habits of life as above. She is particularly fascinated by snow leopards, arguably in line with her expectations of an ideal character or spiritual temperament. The reeds are fierce and fierce, extremely assertive, a little bit of saying one thing and not saying another, and even showing domineering. The snow leopard's bark is like a cat's, and the reeds are whispering in the day, they don't look aggressive, but they are not humble and stubborn, and people will always notice the mesmerizing silence on them in the noise and boiling.
Perhaps, as a poet, she needs this contrast to create a place and an umbrella for herself to observe quietly. During her graduate studies, she focused on the study of poetry translation. He then founded the poetry brand "The Tenonists Tanei", one of the five founders. They are all poets and poetry translators, so they spontaneously gathered into groups quite tacitly, translated contemporary Chinese new poems into English, and published them to overseas poetry websites for mobile promotion, and in the past year, there have been more than 200,000 hits.
China's new poetry achievements are rich, and new generations are born, but there are very few opportunities for spontaneous exchanges that can face overseas: "Because the group that can do Chinese poetry and English translation is very small first, and most of the sinologists who have been doing it are sinologists who master both Chinese and English, or who are native English speakers who have a strong interest in China, and the number of this group is also very small." "Our efforts to promote poetry through translation have gradually gained some attention, and for poetry, as long as we can pay more attention, it is a good thing." ”
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Even the snow leopard in the alpine region embraces its own strong desire for life, not to mention a reed that flutters in the soft waves but is firm. Ye Wei also unabashedly emphasizes that the original intention of writing poetry was out of his own desires. The poet's writing is the expression of desire. Surprisingly, the group of female poets has always held a strong demand for the expression of desire, which makes us see from the other side that women's expression has been obscured and covered up in the long history of writing.
Whether it is the so-called colloquial poetry, or the academic school, or spontaneous writing from the folk, no matter how they express their desires, if they delve into the connotations, they are nakedly exposed to desires. As long as the poet dares to expose her desires, then her writing will not stagnate.
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Writing poetry throughout his study abroad is the unique experience of this young poet born in the 1990s. After returning home, What Ye Wei observed was an embarrassing situation. In the academy, the number of male poets is much higher than that of women, and therefore directly determines that the object of poetry discourse in the campus environment is male poets. She admires the female poets she can see, out of life consciousness or active self-consciousness, unremittingly using a very simple and seamless perspective to record the fragments of life. This made her feel nostalgic for the natural understanding of life carried by female poetry creators.
It is not so much the understanding of life as it is more specific, the understanding of conception and birth that is naturally introduced in the process of maternal identity transformation. Ye Wei has read many female poets from the impulsive writing of adolescent hormones to the maternal consciousness of writing without any worldly or utilitarian purposes. And more male creators, because they enter the relationship between marriage and family, write forever under the confinement of a certain ideology.
The existence and inspiration of women's poetic expression that she saw from this made her feel very precious: "In poetry writing, if a female poet is intentionally or unintentionally caught up in the oppressive poetic trend of the male poets of the same era, she loses the original unique flavor of female poetry, which is the advantage that God has given us in creativity." ”
Writing poetry can reveal the nature of the mind, and The Reed rejects the purposeful behavior of using poetry as a tool. Writing, especially poetry, is taboo to blindly pursue showmanship. The language created is actually a rhetorical essence, but the performative rhetoric is the most harmful blinding tool to the text, and the things under the tool are the core of the poem.
"It's hard to see a person's heart, but I think it's okay through poetry. I'm against the overuse of performative rhetoric, because that would obscure the real mood in a jumble of rhetoric. Once this is done, it is not a necessary poem. If it is really urgent to write it, your thinking must be connected for all people, and others must be able to read their own life experience in your poem, otherwise the poet is too selfish. ”
Reeds, i.e. reeds. This name, which is full of natural imagery, is the origin and beginning of her personal growth experience. Growing up in the Guanzhong Plain, nature generously connects the Loess Plateau with the Gobi Oasis, and the simple beauty of abundant water and grass is imprinted in the heart of the reeds. Under the influence of the subconscious, her affection and attachment to nature like her family have also been transplanted into every fragment of life that deserves to be remembered.
Ye Wei learned guqin and painting since childhood. But she has never been able to find the satisfaction and enjoyment of exporting desires like poetry in other channels. She remembers one winter in New York, the snow outside the window was blowing, and she tried to play a song "Plum Blossom Three Alleys" on the guqin. But she suddenly felt that the expression of the existing piano song was still very limited to the ideal state she wanted to present in its entirety: "But if I write a poem, or even five, six, or ten different poems, the mood or emotion I can express can have many dimensions, but the piano song can't." ”
I put down the piano and picked up the pen. The snow didn't stop, and she kept writing. It is not clear whether the poem chose her, or whether she identified the poem.
Poets / Wu Ang, Yuan Wei, Yu Youyou, Ye Wei
Director / Fan Qing Graphic Photography / Luo Yang
Producer / Xiao Yaohui Producer / Liao He Planning, Writing / Wang Chuyu
Director of Photography / Lao Dong Editing / Shinko
Image / Liao He, Sun Xin Hairstyle / Li Shuang Makeup / Anna
Composer / CHILLGOGOG, Xi Chenchen, Miint Potatoe, Liu Ge
Graphic Design / Bay Bay, Big Tree Poster Design / Lee Yi-jeong
Producer Coordinator / Ren Yanrong Executive Producer / Viva Typesetting / Left
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As a paper version of NOWNESS's multicultural content, the spring 2022 issue of NOWNESS PAPER, with the title of Second Nature's "Poetry and Nature", launched a dialogue with creators in different fields such as Song Jia, Jia Zhangke, and Renke. This new issue of NOWNESS PAPER is published in tandem with Weekend Pictorial, so stay tuned.
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