In your most recent sequenced poems — such as “The Book of Tibet,” “Gift” and “Notes from the Late Qing” — that hybridize prose with verse, as well as different voices, musicalities and narratives, you employ various linguistic registers. How do you relate to such a multi-layered poetic structure, its emotional responses and interpretation?

When I was young, I had already come up with this poetic ideal of “weaving prose with poetry,” that is, “all mingled in one,” mingling all linguistic genres into one melting pot. When I began to write “An Immortal Companion to Watercolor” and “Historical Annals,” I started to find ways to hybridize the novel, prose, theatre, and even journalism with poetry, and to achieve this intertextuality with skill and ease.

Poets Bai Hua, Zhao Ye (center)
and Zhong Ming (right) in Chengdu, February 1993
BY Xiao Quan

Of course, such techniques are not original. Experiments with sound, voice and presence define much of contemporary and avant-garde poetics. As to how I would blend all of these voices into a melting pot, I, too, don’t quite know. I just do so with a little common sense, and let the technique function as it best can.

Do you see a poem as an experience or as an act?

One can’t be separated from the other. “Poetry is experience” — this is a universally-known dictum from the German poet, Rilke. Even Nabokov who detested Rilke, also said, “Poetry is a distant past.” But poetry must also be an act — in a modern sense, and even more so in a post-modern context. If I must choose between the two of them, an old poet like me would go for the former.

Ezra Pound says, “Make it new.” You have a skillful way of making the language both “new” and “fresh” when it comes to developing a unique signature in Chinese in terms of the language as a tradition, but without the antecedents of a so-called “modern” poetry or the preconceived “traditional.” In “A Year of Chronicles in Suzhou” and “In Qing Dynasty,” for instance, the ancient idioms ( 成语 ), proverbs ( 俗语 ) and sayings ( 惯用语 ) are able to express intention: they speak and show without telling.

My understanding and approach toward tradition draws its influence from the celebrated essay of T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Personally, I don’t have any new perspective or unusual rhetoric to offer regarding “tradition.” To put it more plainly, reading Chinese classical poetry, for a contemporary reader, is to foster one’s qi. It is a way of literary self-cultivation through reading choices and learning of oneself.

So how do/should we read them? Obviously I am thinking of Eliot’s famous saying, “Immature poets imitate, great poets steal.” Or as Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Only true geniuses will take things from others to use as their own.” Work that can be stolen or “taken to be used” is never first-rate work. However, these less than first-rate writings are able to survive (survival being their best fate) because they are waiting to be read by a certain great poet, to be taken away again.

To take a step further, many writings by second-rate poets or soon-to-be-first-rate poets are often destined to be “stolen” by another strong poet. The former exists only for the latter. After which, the former “dies,” for its mission is over. Does that mean that a great poet would steal everywhere? No. Certainly there are limits. As I have previously mentioned, great poets will only steal from second-rate or soon-to-be-first-rate poets. If they meet another true poet, no matter how they would like to steal, they cannot. Even if they can, it is useless. They will end up as mere imitators. Let me also quote another thought-provoking saying, “Learn from the living Eileen Chang, and the dead Hu Lancheng.” (“学张爱玲生，学胡兰成死”)