"The Starry Sky of Yannan Garden: Selected Poems of Women Poets of Peking University" is selected into the names of female poets who have appeared in Peking University in the thirty years from the nineties of the last century to the present, which can be regarded as a more comprehensive anthology in this regard. By weaving these dozens of names together, readers also have an intuitive understanding of a branch line of Peking University poetry. There are a few names that surprised me if I only read the history of poetry, such as Yin Lichuan, who was once one of the most important representatives of "lower body writing" in Chinese poetry, but I did not expect, or our poetry reviews rarely emphasize this, that is, she also studied at Peking University. I think this example represents an overall impression of my reading this anthology, which is the compatibility of heterogeneous styles.
"The Starry Sky of Yannan Garden", editor-in-chief: Li Shaojun, edition: International Culture Publishing Company, January 2023
Compatible with different "timescales"
Peking University is often associated with academia, but if we carefully read the works of each poet, we will find that the path explored by each person is "very different". It can be said that the works of this group of female poets of Peking University are compatible with different "time scales" of new poetic history, and also dialogue with different poetic historical imaginations.
Qin Liyan's style was influenced by Wordsworth lyric poetry, as well as 19th-century poets such as Emily Dickinson. Both of these English poets were allegorists in lyric poetry, and their scenes of nature, often containing moral and philosophical expressions, were written mainly in the context of pan-Romanticism and symbolism. Qin Liyan's "Bee", like Wordsworth's "Daffodils" and Dickinson's "Stormy Night", moves from a hyperrealistic depiction of the details of everyday life to a metaphysical contemplation of the human subject. The same is true of "Antarctic Stone" and "Old Email", as well as other poems that are not about nature but about people, such as "Once Upon a Child", which is typical of life as some kind of dramatic scene.
What is remarkable is that in the several volumes of the poet's works I have seen, including the ones selected here, there is a unified, stable, and sincere lyrical protagonist's voice, which is never wrong in tone and quality. Or we can say that the poet Qin Liyan built an image of the creator "I" who allows readers to constantly trust around his many and still increasing sequences of works, and this creator is strictly equal to the observer and speaker in the poem, which is rare in contemporary poetry. If we compare the complex, pluralistic, often playful and ironic voices that prevailed among post-seventies poets, we will confirm this rare quality. The "anxiety of influence" of modernism is hardly seen in her work, and the poet maintains a deliberate "desensitization" of vernacular new poetry, but her translation and her reading of English poetry significantly affect her sense of language, her poems are grammatically "natural", or rather, a naturalized Europeanized language, relying on conventional prose structures to define language, rarely using academic black words, popular culture vocabulary or non-literary terms, and rarely adjusting the natural order of language itself. At this point, we can see her similar style to Mu Dan, Feng Zhi and other writers who experimented with new poetry in the thirties and forties of the last century. But there is no doubt that this is not an influencing relationship, but rather due to the nature of the work and the closeness of the reading method.
图/IC Photo
Comparison of "strong force field" and "weak force field"
There are seven or eight poets who have been active in recent years in the anthology, and they are obviously more involved in the scene of contemporary new poetry, so their works are closer to the style of their male poets, and through their works, we can also clearly find their awareness of dialogue with some key issues of contemporary poetry, such as the rhythm of poetry, the intensity of rhetoric, metalinguistic views, narrative, feminism, identity politics, etc. But at least half of the poets in the collection actually work in other ways, either continuing to deviate from the narratives and conventions of mainstream poetic history, exploring literary styles that cannot be classified, or just entering the apprenticeship of poetry, as post-nineties or post-zeros, still struggling to find their own "tone" and themes, or lacking discussion in mainstream poetry history because of other "critical" states of creation. But the effectiveness of the anthology lies in the fact that it is through this comparison of mature and young, strong-field and weak-force-field poets that we may be better able to discover possible problems in the writing of the former, or "possibilities" of its future direction.
The works of Zhou Zhan, Ma Yan, Fan Xue, Li Wan, and Kang Yuchen show the more intellectual side of these poets, and their works show outstanding comprehensive ability in the breadth of subject matter, the complexity of language, and the reflection on metalanguage. Kang Yuchen's work shows her familiarity and love for the campus of Peking University, where she has lived for ten years, and her work is related to Peking University, at least in terms of visibility, and can be said to be the best among poets born in the entire 90s. She made microscopic and patient observations of a series of buildings, plants, and personnel at Peking University, and devoted much more attention than her peers. At the same time, her writing is influenced by her long-term research on modern Chinese literature, which is not only an academic influence, but also a literary style and literary imagination. In her works, we can feel the unique "student tone" of Zheng Min and other Jiuye poets in the 40s of the 20th century, as well as the speculative and inclusive expression that combines reason and emotion. I think the most obvious thing in her is the continuation of the tradition of the university New Poetry School and the Nine-Leaf Poetry School. In recent years, I have observed that her work has shifted from a control of rhetoric to a comfortable belief in what she expresses. Of course, her writing at the beginning is not the type of goddess who appeals to imaginative games, but tempers the impulses of sensual games with rational contemplation. Therefore, her works also provide a very diverse way for us to understand post-90s poetry. Her poems are not only a literal reference to the forties of the last century, but also a familiarity with the emotional structure of the war years, a familiar knowledge of the life dictionaries of the characters in them, so that she can easily use the letters, diaries, and archival materials of the time, and her poems can also be said to be a "by-product" of her research, and we can read the poet's love and confidence in the professional field in which he is engaged. In a sense, writing poetry seems to be an integral part of her academic research, a seemingly boring system that can form a vibrant and constructive closed loop through writing poetry.
Writing poetry was also a way to appreciate the taste of the literati at that time, so I especially liked "Shen Congwen Writes Love Letters", in which I can read about the poet's "impersonal" ability, and she tries to transform into a writer. But Kang Yuchen's poems are also in dialogue with the most popular contemporary phenomena, with the anxiety in the process of his own study, and with the process of identity transformation from student to "social person". Her poems sometimes become a kind of mediator device from the campus to the big stage of life, bringing together things from different discursive fields, thereby creating linguistic misalignment between them, which also effectively deconstructs the concept of "lyricism" or "poetry" as understood by traditional and even modern literature. It transforms "poetry" into "literature", assembling prose, philosophy, diaries, etc. into a self-consistent continuum, thus subtly adapting to the cultural stereotype of "talented female poet".
Cross-references between different poets
The works of poets Yuan Shaoshan and Huang Qian have a style of "direct writing" that breaks with the rhetorical tradition and is characterized by unrestrained imagery and lyrical tension, and has the decisive and confident tone of romantic poets. Zhang Huijun and Su Han have another original lyric and introspective feeling.
Zhang Huijun's poetry is a simple, simple, noble lyric poem, she is also clearly influenced by translated poetry, and internalizes the important poetic imagery since modernism into the structure of the Chinese language itself, and we can read a little Akhmatova's style in her work (in terms of the characteristics revealed by the title "Moon of Russian Poetry"), a little confessional way of dealing with her own emotions (not so extreme). In her work in recent years, she has significantly moved away from the usual metaphorical relationship between women's poetry and the "mad woman", and she has distanced herself from the decisive voice of Sylvia Plath, and found for herself a voice that is golden, full of subtle female perception, and at the same time self-healing and full of twists and turns. Several of her poems to her daughter, along with those of another contemporary poet, Yuan Yongping, constitute a group of noteworthy voices in contemporary poetry, perhaps continuing from Zhai Yongming not far away. Although Zhang Huijun is a medical doctor, it is rare that her work has almost no medical impact, and unlike poets such as Lu Xun, Williams Carlos Williams, and Gottfried Bain, she did not turn the scalpel of medicine to the anatomical table of poetry, but her poems were written more like those of a liberal arts student who had never changed careers, which I think may come from the poet's comprehensive reading of literary works during his long apprenticeship.
Zhao Hanqing and Yang Biwei are impressed by their openness of language and kaleidoscopic adaptability. Yang Biwei's works are obsessed with the development of China's geogeography, in her works, not only writing about the ethnic minority customs of the five western provinces of China, especially Xinjiang, but also about her own travels in the Mekong River Valley in Southeast Asia, and intertextualizing with her reading classics, such as Duras's "Lover", forming a tapestry of regional feelings.
Of course, when doing such categorical readings, many impressions are not derived from only selected poems, and my previous reading of these poets inevitably affects my judgment of their selected works for inclusion in this collection. Some of them are not their masterpieces, but can only be called "recent works", but most of the poems I have not read before.
Another novelty is that through the anthology, readers can more consciously use the cross-references of different poets as the basis for their stylistic grasp. It is through the inherent inclusiveness of poetry selections that we can try to deconstruct the inextricable but artificially constructed connection between Peking University and the academic school.
Written by/Wang Nianjun
Editor/Zhang Jin
Proofreader/Xue Jingning