Woeser
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

In truth, during my college years, I had started writing poetry seriously, and organized a poetry club with classmates (from all majors, and of different ethnic groups) who were passionate about poetry. We used typewriters and letterprint machines to print poetry journals and publications. I remember Southwestern Colorful Rain and Mountain Eagle Soul as two of the more influential journals. I can say I was the most active campus poet in Sichuan during the mid-late eighties. During my graduation in 1988, I organized a poetry exhibition with two poet classmates.

Yes, at that time we had already defined ourselves as poets. I even had my first poetry collection. It contains poems I wrote during my university years, hand-typeset by my father. In reality I’d already become, or rather was very willing to become a poet who lives and writes by her dreams.

Which poets have influenced you the most? Are they Chinese or Tibetan poets or others?

I should say that during the early years of my poetry writing, the Chinese poetry scene was experiencing revolutionary changes. In my short story, “My Twin Sister [Budan],” I described the impact of this huge influence on me:

Considering external unrest, a huge flag soars in that stormy era, while tides surge under the flag, and the experiences and wanderings all over the world, writings or debates day and night, a strangely nervous rebel, a frightening feeling, and passion, passion, the silently vanishing, like 40 degree feverish passion, how promising! Almost overnight, Budan’s sentiments that were unconsciously gathered through years, that bag of explosives in her little chest, is suddenly lit up by poetry’s fatal matchstick, it explodes, exploding her into pieces, shattered, and can no longer be pieced back together.

To clarify, what most influenced the Chinese young, rebellious poets at that time were European, American and South American contemporary poets, as well as the Russian modern poets. This was also the case for me. Rebellious, unorthodox poets were my idols. I accepted mainly a few non-Chinese contemporary poets as influence, for example Yeats from Ireland, Ginsberg and the Beat poets from the States, as well as Plath and the Confessional poets, Mandelstram, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva from Russia, etc. The list was endless. After my university graduation, I basically read mostly their work.

Also around the same time, I read poems by the 6th Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso and Milarepa. But I read their Chinese translations, the earliest Chinese version, which are classically very elegant in terms of text.

Themes such as travel, Lhasa, memory and loss recur in your poems. Would you say that these subjects inspire you? Where or how do you seek inspiration?

The Whiteness of the Snowland
BY Woeser
(Tangshan Publishing House, 2009)

In fact, writing poetry is to me like in search of memory of a past life. In the epilogue for my collection of poetry, The Whiteness of the Snowland (Tangshan Publishing House, 2009), I wrote:

I have always wanted to be a poet. This is the karmic force from a previous life, as well as a continuation of cause and effect. That spring, I finally returned to the Lhasa I left twenty years ago. I told myself, it was not for any reason other than to listen to that voice. For a while, I was very superstitious, thinking that some verses might contain words that are secret codes, like Ali Baba’s “Open Sesame,” and if I’d keep on writing, a hidden door would suddenly open, and another truly kind world would belong to us.

I returned to Lhasa when I was twenty-four. The biggest problem I faced was discovering the “Sinicized” me being a stranger in her own hometown. This led me into a profound identity crisis. At one point, I thought I had resolved this problem; a poet friend of mine said, “Actually we are of no nationality. Our identity is poet.” His words relieved me, to the extent that during the first few years of my stay in Lhasa, I shut myself up in the “ivory tower” of poetry. The poems I wrote became more individualized, with a highly individualized feel, imagination and language. And I thought that poets or artists tower above all, or surpass all, and that the attribute of nationality could be overlooked. But writing such poetry couldn’t alleviate inner turmoil. I can’t say that I was suffering terribly. To be more precise, it was probably a feeling of emptiness. Thus, I couldn’t even go on writing this kind of poetry.