More than 600,000 people on Kuaishou write poetry.
The "B Station Poetry Conference" initiated by UP master "Mr. Ariyama" has received 10+ submissions in six issues.
Xiaohongshu held online activities such as the "Little Red Book Fighting Poetry Conference", attracting tens of thousands of poems to submit.
Conservative estimates put the number of people writing poetry on these three platforms alone in the more than a million. This is an interesting tendency, if not a cultural phenomenon worth exploring.
This tendency was initially mostly the spontaneous behavior of netizens, and after gradually forming a climate, the platform also deliberately encouraged and supported it, and continued to increase its voice. Recently, station B will publish poetry collation in the comment area, barrage and video, and published a poetry collection "No longer strive to be another person: I write poems on station B"; Xiaohongshu cooperated with the professional poetry journal "Poetry Harvest" and published several issues of "Xiaohongshu Poetry Selection"; Kuaishou also announced that its human rearview mirror studio will jointly read a single reading and launch a poetry collection "A Person, You Must Live a Spring".
Station B netizens author "No longer trying to be another person: I write poems on station B", CITIC Dafang, January 2023
Kuaishou poetry collection "A Person, Also Live a Spring", Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, × single reading, February 2023
Successively launched the mainstream poetry publication "Poetry Harvest" of "Little Red Book Poetry Selection"
According to the standards of "serious literature" writing, most of these poems are very immature and clumsy, and some works are even far from poetry.
But the definition and standards of modern poetry are not so stable, and there has never been any hard threshold for modern poetry writing. If we go back to the source, poetry is originally a reproduction of human beings' own life and thinking activities, everyone can write, everyone can be a poet.
"Wild poets" and "critic poets" do not necessarily mean to achieve some kind of literary achievement or become "poets" in the narrow sense. They just hope to find a small gap and a small breath in a life full of stress or even powerlessness, so that their emotions can be relieved and their spirits can be comforted.
For these writers, writing poetry is more a new possibility in lifestyle, a small accident under the solidification of life scenes, and a small resistance to prescriptive life.
Therefore, using the standard of "serious literature" to understand these poems may have been from the beginning. But this is not to say that these writers, these poems, do not have the possibility of entering the field of contemporary poetry writing.
In fact, no matter what the scale, today, there are still so many people who read poetry, write poetry, and love poetry, which is a good thing, at least not a bad thing.
"There are 360 days a year with machines, but there are mountains, rivers, lakes and seas in poetry"
The 48-year-old "cold winter year" makes a living from a street stall. But on Kuaishou, he is a poet with 16,000 followers.
At the beginning, he posted content on Kuaishou such as "12 zodiac IQ rankings" and "real people and real things: this guy should not be sentenced to death". Two years ago, he switched to publishing his own original poems, with fewer likes and comments, but he continues to do so. The latest video shows him reading poetry on his mobile phone in front of a stall. The stall in the video is long, filled with power strips, gilded Buddha statues and groceries, and behind the stall, a middle-aged uncle with a somewhat worried hairline, his head bowed the whole time, his voice is low, and he can hardly hear the noise of the surrounding environment.
His poems contain the seasons, maple leaves, snowflakes, villages, and wheat fields, but the details of his daily life are barely visible.
"Cold Winter Year" reads poetry in front of his stall
Like "Cold Winter Year", the poems of "Zhw Yegongzi's Poetry Garden" on Kuaishou are also full of life insights and romantic expressions. This Shaanxi uncle, 51 years old this year, now works as a senior engineer at a power plant in Baotou. His account is only poetry, and from the beginning of 2022 to now, a total of 111 works have been released.
"There are 360 days a year with machines, but there are mountains, rivers, lakes and seas in the poem." This is a one-sentence sketch of "The Poetry Garden of the Night Boy" by Kuaishou Gong.
The writers of the works included in Kuaishou's poetry book cover more than 40 industries: delivery workers, farmers, blind masseurs, shepherds, vegetable farmers, radio anchors, air conditioner welders, self-employed stalls, painters, high school history teachers, supermarket employees, pump house workers, full-time housewives, junior high school language teachers, side cooks, retired workers...
For them, life is already full of exhaustion and bitterness, full of hard matter, so it is natural to pursue those soft and beautiful things in poetry, and express the feelings of the heart that cannot be said to others.
Han Shimei is a typical example of the poetry writers who emerged from Kuaishou. Almost drowned by her mother at birth, married at the age of 22 to a man who could not say "a whole word", and for the entire first half of her life, she lived for others, she was the daughter of her parents, a wife, and a mother of a pair of children. It would have been the same for the rest of my life, just like the hundreds of millions of working people in this land.
But from April 2020, she found another way to live, she began to write and post poems on Kuaishou, she had social interaction outside the family for the first time, she had recognition and affirmation, and she had the posture of existence as "Han Shimei". In the past two years, writing poetry has become almost all of Han Shimei's work outside of housework and work.
Every night at half past ten, the luggage factory where she worked stopped running, and the housework was done, Han Shimei lay on her side with her back to her husband, took out her mobile phone and began to write poetry, and was hungry until one or two o'clock in the morning. In the dark rural night, the glimmer of her mobile phone illuminates her weather-beaten face, the glimmer of poetry shining into fate.
"Poet on the field" Han Shimei became popular in Kuaishou, and her poetry full of life resilience touched countless netizens.
"Poets in the comment area", they are playing with something very new
The difference in platform type and positioning makes the poetry writers on station B and Xiaohongshu relatively different from those on Kuaishou.
Station B users are mainly Generation Z young people. They are rebellious, but not as fierce as when previous generations were younger; In big narrative and small lyricism, they will firmly side with the latter; They play memes and self-blackening, are the recipients and creators of pioneers and trends, but also have a great passion for tradition and mainstream culture; They shout "lie flat", but their bodies are still living seriously and hard; They have mental anxiety, but they may not pose a crisis yet, and they also have a strong ability to dissolve themselves—ghosts, talk shows, and now writing poetry.
The poems written by young people in Station B are quite rich in themes, including student life, workplace pressure, the bitterness of love, the warmth of family affection, the small lyricism of daily life moments, and the big pursuit of life direction. Penetrating these all-encompassing themes, each with different expressions, is the greatest common divisor in the spiritual context of contemporary young people: what kind of person should I become.
"Going to Work" realistically reproduces the mentality of young people who do not want to cater to the workplace environment. The conference room erupted into laughter again, and the "I" in the poem knew that someone had picked up the boss's stubble again, and Ta didn't say a word, just "watched a few more dancing videos of young ladies with a blank face." But "glanced at the phone screensaver" and realized that his salary was about to be paid, so he could only choose to join, "politely perfunctory". This kind of mentality that does not want to pander to, but can only helplessly join, wrote the voice of every workplace worker.
If you can't reveal your inner voice when you go to work, turn yourself into a creature of your imagination when you leave work. "The sound of the subway swaying / the wind and waves close to the night beach", however, behind the romance is the bitterness of "996 Blessing", we have not felt the beauty of the night beach for a long time, and young people can only "shine on their own".
Young people don't really want much, they just want more moments to face themselves. "I want to sing / Some people say you are inaccurate / / I want to learn to draw / some people say you are not talented / / I want to work out / some people say you can't hold on at all // I want to be quiet / someone stops talking / It turns out that there is no one else on the other side" ("Voice of the Heart")
Yet others are always there, and voices always come from all directions. They owe "a wedding to their parents, a pair of children to everyone" ("owed"), they may have "a wall full of books, lonely echoes and a life of hitting walls everywhere", they eat a late-night snack, "a stream of heat splits the body in two / half is naïve, the other half is sentimental", they want to buy a train ticket to Tarzan to see the sunrise, and finally "buy a subway ticket / go to life with a wry smile" ("The Journey of Social Animals")...
These situations and encounters are more or less likely to be experienced by every generation of young people, and because of this, these works can resonate on a fairly broad level.
The propositions have commonalities, but the way to deal with them, this generation of young people has their own distinct attitudes:
At the end of the above "Go to Work", the "I" in the poem did not find the right time to join, continued to look down and read the news, and then made up an extremely vicious joke: "I suddenly laughed / They are all looking at me / I said / I just reacted." This ending probably comes from a classic joke, which the author deformed and inserted at the end of the poem, the last resistance of contemporary young people to the workplace atmosphere.
The same is true in the "Guide to Cycling and Wrestling", when you get off work, you have to look at the clouds in the sky, look at the tower crane in the distance, "see the bare snow-white thighs of girls and the strong chest looming under boys' T-shirts", and young people say "I just don't look at the road".
They try to pry open the gaps in life in light confrontation such as ridicule, banter, memes, self-deprecation, etc., they still believe in the light, believe that the bald head can find the possibility of "being yourself" through the gap. In this sense, poetry became their light, the antidote to their lives.
The first phase of the "Station B Poetry Conference" initiated by "Mr. Ariyama" received 3,000 submissions.
Although Xiaohongshu's user age group is also dominated by young people, its main characteristics are not age, but gender and consumption. In Xiaohongshu, female users account for seventy percent, and users in first- and second-tier cities account for half, and these users are concentrated in seven major areas: beauty, food, mother and baby, home, clothing and accessories, pets, weight loss and fitness. Reflected in poetry, the works on Xiaohongshu are full of design, exquisite typography, and content with strong emotional expression and life aesthetic characteristics, which can be summarized as "literary and artistic tone" and "literary green taste". This is in line with the overall temperament and character of Little Red Book, and poetry presents almost the same function as retouching photos.
The self-proclaimed "stall poet" began publishing poems on Xiaohongshu in early 2022, and in one year, the number of fans rose from 100 to 170,000. Almost all of her poetry works are short poems and ultra-short poems, with light text and shallow content. For example, this "Autumn Letter":
In autumn, sitting under a tree reading a book / I like to read a certain sentence / I shyly recite it in my heart / But the leaves take my place / Kissed it
The word "very" can very illustrate the author's understanding of aesthetics, and to a considerable extent, its underlying logic is the same as youth literature and costume idol dramas.
The "Flower Keeper" experiments in "improvising poetry" on the street
Although she did not publish her works on Xiaohongshu at the beginning, under the recommendation of Xiaohongshu blogger "Tan Yimo", her poetry collection "Whales Comfort the Sea" quickly became the platform's "traffic book", and more than 100 bloggers joined the recommendation. Subsequently, the blessing of star Li Xian made this poetry collection printed 5 times in just two months.
"The Whale Comforts the Sea"
Not all tracks
All lead to the direction of spring blossoms
Not all flowers will bloom
Not all agreed ones will come
I know that it is the meteor that praises the night
Whales comfort the sea
After reading this poem, you should be able to understand the reason why Yan Qi can be popular on the Little Red Book.
The observation of the main features of poetry on the three platforms is not that they are very different. The poems on Kuaishou have nature singing and low-level narratives, the army of classical poetry on Station B is also spectacular, and the nature on Little Red Book also has dirt and wit. When it comes to the commonality between this type of poetry and the writer, although bias cannot be avoided in any way, there are still some tendencies to consider.
In general, these poetry writers, who have no ambitions for poetry and do not want to make it a career, rarely train themselves, often writing out of instinct or based on existing reserves and experience. Their writing purpose is very pure, that is, I write my thoughts by hand, I write my thoughts by hand, so that poetry becomes a small breath for modern life full of instrumental rationality and established patterns, so the content of their poetry is mainly manifested as the interception of fragments of daily life, the expression of personal emotions, and the form is mainly short and lightweight, adapting to the current reading habits.
Li Shaojun, editor-in-chief of Poetry Journal, commented that "light poetry" allows people to escape from the heavy chaos of daily life and gives people emotional comfort. The writing and reading of this kind of poetry is relatively pure, amplifying the healing effect of poetry.
New media to help "poetry renaissance"?
In the preface to the poetry collection of Station B, anthropologist Xiang Biao judged the phenomenon of poetry writing that is currently emerging on the new media platform of the Internet as a resurgence.
In fact, long before this, there was no lack of media to break the circle of public accounts such as "read poetry for you" and "read a poem and then sleep", and reading poetry audio was sought after, regarded as a kind of poetry "revival" on the Internet.
Whether it is the statement of resurgence or the judgment of revival, it is a relatively vague media language, which confuses multi-dimensional issues such as poetry in communication and writing.
The low tide or decline is mainly to benchmark the "poetry boom" of the 1980s, the state of national poetry. Indeed, since the 1990s, poetry has gradually separated from the general population at large, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is "marginalized". But there are no "waves" like today, such as "Wang Guo is really hot", in the era of online poetry forums in the first decade of the 21st century, when there were not necessarily fewer people writing poetry than now.
From the perspective of writing, contemporary poetry may not have a low tide or decline. The general judgment in the poetry industry is that Chinese new poetry has been developing and rising since the 1980s, and the most "marginal" nineties may be the period when Chinese new poetry has the highest artistic achievements, with various genres and concepts blooming, and important poets and works have come one after another, such as "third-generation poets", "middle-generation poets", "coquettish", "reckless man", "non-non-non-fei", "maritime poetry group", "folk and intellectual", "spoken word poetry", "narrative", "personal writing" and so on.
Every generation of young people is writing poetry, and poetry has never disappeared among young people. Although campus poetry declined in the first decade of the new century, due to the development of the Internet, the main position of young poetry writers shifted to Internet forums, BBS, and blogs. Post-80s poets who have witnessed the era of forum poetry will certainly not agree with the statement of "ebb tide" and "return tide". In 2010, Xin You, Hu Sang and other post-80s poets edited the "Complete Collection of Chinese Post-80s Poems", which collected more than 1,600 poems by 178 post-80s poets. Another book, The Wandering Generation: Post-80s Poetry in China, published in 2012, includes works by more than 300 post-80s poets. With the recovery of the campus poetry club, the post-90s poetry writing group is even more spectacular. The "Selected Poems of the Post-90s Generation in China" published in 2022 is composed of the heads of 11 poetry journals such as "Poetry Journal", "Xingxing", "Yangtze River Poetry Journal", "Poetry Tide" and "Poetry Monthly", as well as poets and critics, and 200 post-90s poets are selected. The poets selected for these collections have a certain writing record, and most of them have written poetry as their career. With this perspective, how much is out there?
Therefore, for the "revival" and "revival" of poetry, if not a dubious assertion, then at least do not rush too much, especially for the elevation of poetry development itself. We can treat it as an ongoing phenomenon, and as for the results, we might as well wait and see. But it is necessary to fully affirm its significance in the sense of mass culture.
The act of writing poetry itself has meaning
We have harshly evaluated the artistic value of this batch of poems at the beginning, probably for the poet community, so as not to be scolded for lacking basic judgment in this article. But we also affirmed at the outset that it is not the intention of this article to examine the quality of these works by the standards of poetry in the narrow sense.
So since there is no objectivity in terms of artistic value, is this kind of writing as a way of life worthless and meaningless?
In fact, lifestyle writing and career-based writing, there is no absolute barrier, many poets also started from lifestyle writing at the beginning, but wrote and wrote, found that they may be quite good at this, began to ponder seriously, read, think, practice, and constantly polish their skills, and then recognized by the mainstream poetry industry, they became "poets". The migrant poets and peasant poets who emerged before, such as Zheng Xiaoqiong, Yu Xiuhua, Chen Nianxi, Xu Lizhi, Xu Tianlun, Li Songshan, etc., all followed this path and harvested both in the public and poetry circles.
Yu Xiuhua Visual China infographic
Chen Nianxi Visual China infographic
It doesn't matter if you don't become a so-called "poet". "Poet" is only an identity, no more noble than any other. You can still write poetry without the aim of being a "poet".
When a person picks up a pen and starts writing poetry, the butterfly begins to flap its wings and begin to influence its survival posture. Write happy things, and we can relive that happiness again. When I write poetry when I am depressed, the blockade in my heart is slightly relieved. If it is well written, it will be very satisfying and proud; If you don't write well, you can also experience the difficulty of creation and understand the boundaries of yourself. What's more, we can expect to be read, then resonate with others, and comfort others.
It doesn't matter if you don't write it in the future, even if you write it and can't pass it on. Writing poetry when we are young is enough to make our lives different, to distinguish us from other beings. So Nishikawa said that young people who have played poetry will not be bored in this life. Liu Qing said that writing poetry proves that "I am still active as a spiritual being."
The Polish poet Szymboska, a Nobel Prize-winning writer, wrote in the poem "All Possibilities", "I prefer the absurdity of writing poetry over the absurdity of not writing poetry", which is probably the best commentary on the meaning of young people writing poetry at Station B.
The absurdity of life is that people spend their entire lives looking for meaning, but they may eventually find that individual life is so small that there is no such thing as "ultimate meaning" in life. All meaning is about giving stories. What everyone can grasp is nothing more than this process, nothing more than what kind of life we choose.
Writing poetry may not change anything, let alone combat this absurdity. But this group of poetry writers, the choice is to let poetry into their lives, and let writing poetry become a small accident in their own lives.
Because for them, the process of writing poetry is the whole meaning.
Of course, they may also not care about the meaning at all. Then it is good to write meaningless poetry.