Cover of the book "Selected Geographical Poems of Gan Jianhua".
From Hengyue Xiangshui to the west of the west
——Written on the occasion of the publication of "Selected Geographical Poems of Gan Jianhua"
Text/Yin Zhaohui
One
As a poet, Gan Jianhua, as early as the 1980s when he studied in the Great Northwest, he threw himself into the vigorous Chinese college student poetry movement. As the flag bearer of Huangshuihe, the first college student poetry society on the Qinghai Plateau, since then, modern new poetry has been embedded in his life genes, carrying the blood temperature of a Xiang people, and finally deriving the literary map of "The West of China's West".
In recent years, I have also wandered around the periphery of the poetry circle to play soy sauce, and have seen some of the depths of the poetry world. I slowly learned about the name of Brother Jianhua's poem. In particular, after his strong recommendation and meticulous operation, Taiwan's "Genesis", "Taiwanese Poetry Journal" and "Chinese Modern Poetry" have successively launched the works of our Hengyang poets and Hunan poets, deepening and expanding his "Hengyue Xiangshui", which is really indispensable. And I have the privilege of being among them three times, and I am also deeply and proud.
So, that day he and I weChat voice, talked about his geographical poetry selection is about to be published, asked me to write a few words, from the perspective of seniority and self-knowledge, I am very afraid; from the inner feelings of himself and poetry, I am happy and happy.
In the current cultural and literary circles of Hunan, Gan Jianhua can be regarded as a well-known and respectable figure. His influence is even as far away as home and abroad, as evidenced by the fact that many newspapers and periodicals have published his poems, as well as many overseas Chinese poets and critics who have written his poems.
In the early years, as a journalist, Jianhua Brother wrote many in-depth reports that made people bloody, collected two books, "The Good Man under heaven" and "The Sword of Iron Blood", which became the research object of the journalism departments of various universities in China, and twenty or thirty top-level experts and scholars published commentaries and articles, which were collected as "The Third Layer of Expression"; as one of the few members of the Chinese Writers Association in Hengyang, he focused on the research and writing of Huxiang culture, especially the local culture of Hengyang, and at the same time loved the prose creation and literary and historical excavation of the Qaidam Basin in Qinghai, his second hometown. He has done a lot of cultural popularization and promotion work for the two places, and has won various awards such as the National Bingxin Prose Award, the Silk Road Prose Award, the Sichuan Prose Award, the Wu Boxiu Prose Award, and the China Iron Man Literature Award.
The first time I met Brother Jianhua was more than 20 years ago, when I was just recruited to the Propaganda Department of the Nanyue District Party Committee. The time he came to Nanyue for an interview, I accompanied him to breakfast, and he stood on the steps downstairs of the Phoenix Hotel, looking down at me in the lobby through the lens light, suppressing me all the way. Later, because of the relationship between work and literature, I had more contact and attention with him, and slowly became acquainted. In particular, as a party newspaper reporter, he has always maintained the conscience that he had developed when he was a student, spreading justice in the form of news, and returning justice and innocence to the people of the world.
From these two levels, the influence of Brother Jianhua in Hengyang, Hunan and even the national press and literature circles is quite admirable to me.
Two
More and more people know that Jianhua Brother is a geographer, derived from the two geographical terms "West of the West" and "Hengyue Xiangshui". The former is his fiction and originality, and the latter is his further deepening and expansion, so he was recruited as a member of the Chinese Geographical Society, and it is said that he is the only member of the Chinese Geographical Society among the members of the Chinese Writers Association. On November 1, 2018, his alma mater, Qinghai Normal University, appointed him as a visiting professor of geography, and it is said that in more than 60 years since the establishment of his parent department, he is still the only graduate to receive this honor.
"West of the West" is the name of a novel of his own name, but it has clear geographical boundaries. Between the Arjin Mountains, the Qilian Mountains and the Kunlun Mountains, starting from Dachaidan on the northern edge of the central part of the basin, along the G315 (Xining-Kashgar) Chaka-Mangya section, from Yuka and Nanbaxian to the north to Lenghu Lake, and then to the west, pointing directly to Laomeng Cliff, Oil Sand Mountain, Huatugou and Aral Grassland, and finally reach Yitun Prague, which borders Xinjiang. Then return from Lake Gaskule, Mangya Dasaka, along S303 (Golmud - Huatugou) eastbound, through Gansen, Nalengrad River, Utu Meiren, to Gobi New Town Golmud, from G3011 (formerly G215, Gansu Liuyuan - Golmud) through the heart of the basin Dabsun Lake, back to the original point of Dachaidan Town, a whole circle down, about 1500 kilometers. It is roughly consistent with the "Distribution Map of Oil and Gas Fields in qinghai Province's Qaidam Basin", where Brother Jianhua and his father once "I contribute oil to the motherland".
"Hengyue Xiangshui" is actually the Nanyue Hengshan and Xiangjiang River basins, specifically, it is the 15,310 square kilometers of land mountains and rivers in Hengyang. "Hengxiang" was first seen in the Eastern Jin Dynasty Luo Han's "Records of Xiangzhong" (also known as "Xiangzhong Landscape Records"), which is the earliest literary work in Hengyang. Famous artists of the past, including The Tang Dynasty Lang Shiyuan and Han Yu, the Southern Song Dynasty Yang Wanli, the Yuan Dynasty Ouyang Xuan, Zhang Yu, Zheng Ze, the Ming Dynasty Li Yan, Xu Xiake, Gao Heng, the Late Qing Dynasty Luo Dian, Wang Wanshu, Zeng Xi, Peng Weixin, the modern Qi Baishi, Luo Yong, Wu Mi, Feng Youlan, etc., all have poetry praise, landscapes are enhanced by famous poems, and poems are circulated because of famous landscapes. Brother Jianhua once asked the great poet Mr. Love to write the four words "Hengyue Xiangshui" and planned to edit and produce a set of "Hengyue Xiangshui Series".
For Brother Jianhua, both places have extraordinary significance. Because, his jacket jar was buried in the Xiangshui of Hengyue, and his youthful blood was sprinkled in the west of the west. They linked the motherly land where he grew his umbilical cord and nurtured his youthful recklessness, youthful passion and middle-aged jianxun.
For thousands of years, the ancestors have left a vast sea of poetry, containing a wealth of geographical knowledge and geographical phenomena common in life. For example, "Why should the Qiang flute complain about the willows, and the spring wind does not pass the Jade Gate Pass" (Wang Zhizhuo); "The king does not see the water of the Yellow River rising from the sky, rushing to the sea and never returning" (Li Bai); "The sky is cang, the wild is vast, the wind blows the grass to see the cattle and sheep" ("The Song of Shule"), and so on, these famous sentences that have been passed down through the ages describe the weather and phenology, terrain and rivers, natural landscapes and other related knowledge in the discipline of geography.
Brother Jianhua's wisdom and open-mindedness are to combine the wisdom of a geographer with the bloodiness of a poet, from "the south of Hengshan Mountain" to "the eight wildernesses of the world", from Quanhu Lake, Jiepai, Fuyan Temple, Maodong Bridge, to Leng Lake, Chaka, Delingha, Utu Meiren, traveling thousands of miles, seeing thousands of people, truly realizing the deep integration of poetry and distant places, and expanding the poetic propositions of a cultural scholar. For example, the first of the "Nine Chapters of Buckwheat" is: "The row of trees at the mouth of the village / Like the screen of the door of the big house / It is not easy to see through the hearts of the clansmen / Step by step approaching / The heart is throbbing / The tears are confused / It seems to touch the surging blood veins." Another example is "The Dream of Huatugou": "Loneliness after the prosperity has faded / With me getting old day by day / I believe that there are still a pair of big eyes / Looking at the west to the west / The loneliest road in the world." It is obvious that while Expanding his own cultural territory, Brother Jianhua is also constantly enlarging himself and the pattern of poetry.
It can be seen that his heart is full and lonely.
Three
The famous Hunan writer Han Shaogong said in the article "The "Roots" of Literature": "Literature has roots, and the roots of literature should be deeply rooted in the soil of national traditional culture. This sentence later became a big windward display of root-seeking literature, and it also profoundly influenced the Jianhua brothers who were studying hard in the cold window of the Huangshui River at that time.
Trees have roots, people also have roots, and the roots of Brother Jianhua are the roots of the Maodong Bridge in his hometown. "The trees have been growing there peacefully / One is camphor / The other two are also camphor / A few palms, one tree of peach blossoms / Three or five Privets / Oranges and grapefruit / Still golden in the depths of spring / After the thorns of the oak tree are removed / It is a straight scale / It is also the legendary life of my grandfather" ("Muraguchi"). He wrote 20 poems for his hometown in one go, not only the old mansion "the sweet fragrance of orange blossoms in front of the door" and "filled the whole mountain chong", but also cypress, calamus, shallots, oil tongs, peppers, etc., all of which became his love and nostalgia. In a large number of pages of "Hengyue Xiangshui", "South of Hengshan Mountain" and "Maodong Bridge", he stands in the two dimensions of the countryside and the city, examines a series of problems that have emerged in the process of modern civilization, and deeply thinks about whether industrial civilization and agricultural civilization can coexist harmoniously.
For the remote and remote Qaidam Basin, a land that has been poured into the blood and sweat of three generations of oil people, Brother Jianhua has spent a lot of energy and space to love, describe, praise and remember. "Summer morning twenty-two years later / Facing Mount Saishten again / A huge Chinese ink freehand painting / Blurred eyes with tears / In the world's longest sunshine time / Exposing an emotional negative" ("Back to cold lake"). I think that whether it is poetry or other literary styles, what human beings care about, how our literature intervenes and intervenes, is the common topic of human destiny.
In particular, some of the poems in the series of "Strange People and Different Aspirations", "Journey to Central Zhejiang" and "Hengyue Xiangshui", Brother Jianhua has a high-mountain respect for the birthplace of traditional Chinese culture and the collection of traditional culture, and the humility of "running dogs under the Qingteng Gate". In front of the sculptures of Xu Xiake and Gong Zizhen and the tomb of Su Dongpo, he has prostrated himself three times in a down-to-earth manner. In "Qingteng Bookstore", "He Cong begged for pulp food" and "wandered alone under the moon with hunger", although he very restrainedly stated that the sage "Xu Wei was not there", he vividly wrote the piety and heartache of a Huxiang junior more than four hundred years later, thus further establishing the image of their independent literati.
Brother Jianhua answered three ultimate philosophical propositions in poetry: Who am I? Where did it come from? Where are you going? At the same time, the accurate and vivid reproduction of natural landscapes, and the interaction with the worldly sentiments in the poetic style, answers the three core questions of geography: Where is it? What does it look like? What does it mean?
Four
"How many things, never urgent; the heavens and the earth turn, time is pressing. Ten thousand years is too long, only to fight for the day. (Mao Zedong, "Man Jiang Hong and Comrade Guo Moruo")
The news events and news figures that happen every day around the world, as the poet Jianhua Brother, who was once a journalist, still maintains a keen ability to react and express intervention. For the situation in the Taiwan Strait, the present and past of Hong Kong, the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, the 48-hour ceasefire in Syria, the thirteen village essays and other events, at the first time of the news, Brother Jianhua had a steaming poem to respond. Reading poems such as "Taiwan Qingshui Cliff", "A Glimpse of Hong Kong's Tsim Sha Tsui", "Notre Dame de Paris", "Chinese Men's Football" and other poems make it easy for me to associate with the jokes in his usual WeChat: "I am not in the jianghu, but the jianghu still has my legend." ”
For the departure of Mr. Love, who is famous in the world of Chinese poetry, the poet Whose father died unjustly in the Qilian Mountains, Shen Congwen, a literary scholar who was despised by Wu Han, vice mayor of Beijing, Han Meilin, a great painter who refused to eat rare wild game from the mountains and denounced the way, Fang Fang, a female writer who was controversial for making memories of history, Yu Xiuhua, a shaky female poet with cerebral palsy, and Brother Jianhua, all expressed the scale of his conscience with poetry with extreme admiration and compassion, and used poetry to "tell you the spring of a weedy tree", and used poetry to abandon and ironize the traditional literati.
As a poet, Jianhua brother has never indulged in personal small emotions, as the famous poet Huang Yaya said, his "rich experience and broad vision are the necessary cultivation of poets.". He used to use the news to spread justice and conscience, and he now broadcasts fraternity and warmth in poetry.
At this point, "instant tears". Some pain is the external generation of physical collisions; some pain is the natural emanating of emotion. The same is true of Jianhua Brother's geographical poems.
There is no difference between all laws, and the integration is the same return. Every poet, his intellectual structure and life experience are different, and the poems written must be very different. A good poem must be a poem with sensibility, a poem with intellect, and a poem that stands out should be a poem that gives brilliance to divinity.
Here, I would like to quote a passage from Mencius's Dedication: "What is desired is good, what is desirable is faith, what is full is beauty, what is full and glorious is great, what is great and great is holy, and what is holy and unknowable is God." ”
If I am a mortal and a common man, if I follow the god of the muse all my life, I can exhaust my life to attain one of the two good faiths and beauty, which can be said to be enough. The radiance of the divine nature always illuminates us from above, bathes us, and is blessed to have it; no, I am destined.
From the Maodong Bridge to huatugou, and then from the west to Hengyue Xiangshui, and even the wilderness of the world, it is not only a journey of geography, but also a journey of poetry, but also a journey of spirit.
Encourage brother Jianhua and bow your head.
Yin Zhaohui, pen name Bai Ding, Shaoyang people, Ju Nanyue. He is a member of Hunan Writers Association and vice president of Hengyang Poetry Society. He has published poems in Genesis, Selected Poems, Hunan Literature, Anhui Poets, Taike Poetry Journal, Chinese Modern Poetry and other journals. Published poetry collections such as "Twilight Quadrilateral" and "Five Elements".