How about Amang? A distinct feminine angle also seems to exist in many of your poems.

Amang: When I first began looking into poetry, I mostly read male poets. After writing poems for a while, I became curious about how other women poets view the world. Do they have common experiences? Do they feel at ease? Do they resolve the challenges of being a woman in their poems?

I began to look for female poets to read. I made an important discovery: physically, women have multiple orgasms, and when the sensitivity in their poems becomes strong and full, it is also like multiple orgasms. My awareness of my own female consciousness started very early. To put it this way, I have had feminine consciousness since I’ve had sexual consciousness. It is nature, and the first nature, instead of the second. The root of feminine consciousness in my poems is physical and natural, and culture stimuli are added at a later stage. Based on my own reading and research, I find that it is good fortune to be a woman in this day and age. Also, when I consider that so many frightening stories are happening to women around the world, I feel very lucky to be a woman where I am. We have more opportunities, more skills, more power, and wider vision than many women had years ago. These opportunities are not pennies from heaven or gene mutation. Most of them are credited to those courageous moms who fought for women to have a better life and a more self-determined sense of identity. I express gratitude in some of my poems, I stand together with them, and at the same time I carry on the cause. It is a big challenge to “inherit the property and deal with the debt.” While reading, I get to know many “sisters” who take on the challenge, and I am deeply inspired and encouraged by them.

As a group, you seem to have been influenced more by Western literature than by Chinese. At least, you don’t seem to be interested in stressing any relationship between your poetry and the Chinese literary tradition. Is this a fair assessment? I read a lot of classical Chinese poetry when I was young and even majored in Chinese literature in college. This was because I wanted to study Tang and Song dynasty poetry. I have to admit, though, that Western modernist literature and art have been more of a direct influence on my writing than the Chinese tradition.

Chen Yuhong
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Chen: I was a Foreign Literatures major. I write poetry in the modern style, and have mostly read modern Western poetry, but there is no doubt that I started to write because of Chinese classical poetry. The reason why I “don’t seem to be interested in stressing any relationship” between my poetry and the Chinese literary tradition” is that, unlike poets such as Chen I-chih (陳義芝) who studied Chinese literature, I don’t have a head full of imagery from classical literature that I can draw on from memory. It is not that I am unwilling. I can’t, and don’t dare to.

So I definitely started to write because of the inspiration from Chinese classical poetry. My Chinese teacher in middle school was Ms. Guan Rong (關容). Every time she finished teaching a lesson on a work of prose literature, she would write on the blackboard a verse that was connected to the topic of the prose piece we had just studied. She’d read the poetry out loud in her husky Beijing accent and explain it to us. She said the language of poetry is concise but the meaning is expansive; one word of poetry is worth ten of prose, and that’s because in a poem there is not only language but also imagery and music. As an example, Ms. Guan cited the line from Yuan Zhen’s “Elegy” (元稹 / « 遣悲懷 »), “O youngest, best-loved daughter of Xie, / Who unluckily married this penniless scholar” (translated by Witter Bynner). Each line paints a picture, like a story book.

Another of her examples — the verse, “Withered vines, old trees, and crows at dusk” from Ma Zhiyuan’s “Autumn Thoughts: To the Tune of Tianjingsha” (馬致遠 / « 秋思 • 天淨沙 »). It is painting, pure and simple. Years later I wrote a short poem of twenty-eight Chinese characters (“Impressions: Confined to Bed, Master Zhou Mengdie (周夢蝶) Begins to Recover”) in which I try to convey my ideas in simple language and ordinary imagery. In the poem I’m just trying to work my way to the core of Ma Zhiyuan’s poem, which is also twenty-eight characters long.

I would not have known how to even begin to write poetry if the rich imagery, beautiful music and breadth of vision of Chinese classical poetry hadn’t been taking root in my heart for so long.

I majored in English at Wenzao Ursaline College of Languages, but half my credits were from classes in Chinese literature (including classes in classical poetry, Zhuangzi, and so on). With Professor Bao Bin (鮑霦) of the Chinese Department, I studied everything from “Guan guan cry the ospreys over the sandbanks of the river” (the first line of the three-thousand-year- old Book of Poetry) to “The moon sets, the crows call, and frost fills the sky” by eighth century poet Zhang Ji (張繼). Professor Bao analyzed the poems, and also had us write poems modeled on them. I indeed wrote some poems in classical four- and eight-line regulated verse patterns, as well Song-dynasty style lyrics to the tunes of Remengling (如夢令) and Pusaman (菩薩蠻). Professor Bao specialized in the poetry of Tao Yuanming (陶淵明) and Wang Wei (王維). Listening to her read the verse “Sound deafens in chaos over the rocks, light deepens in silence in the pines” from “Clear Stream” (« 青谿 »), I was convinced that Wordsworth and Yeats must have read Wang Wei. Didn’t the American modernist poet Ezra Pound say that classical Chinese poetry inspired his Imagism because it embodied his principle that in poetry one was to “use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” and “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome?”

Professor Bao Bin insisted that poems must be memorized. I remember one year when we had a competition to see who could write the most poems from memory; you received one point for each poem you could reproduce; length didn’t matter. I started with “I slept through dawn on a spring morning” from Meng Haoran’s (孟浩然) “Spring Morning” (« 春曉 »), and in three hours I wrote ninety-six poems. It is a shame I didn’t keep that notebook, and of course, I can’t recite those poems one by one anymore. I didn’t take a single class in modern poetry in college, unless you take into account the National Youth Corps Literary Arts Camp I attended one summer (the director was poet Ya Xian). I would not have known how to even begin to write poetry if the rich imagery, beautiful music and breadth of vision of Chinese classical poetry hadn’t been taking root in my heart for so long.

My intent is always to make my poems more like spoken language, though it is usually difficult for me to escape the influence of a more literary, written language. I think the language in Chen Yuhong’s poetry is mainly literary.

Chen: I’d maintain that poetry is the “art of language” and its language should be pure; no matter how idiomatic the language, it should still be appropriately polished. Is this why my language seems to be rather “literary”? I’ve noticed that almost all the poets I like are very well-versed in Chinese classics, and all of them strive for lapidary language; even in lines that are very idiomatic they still find a way to slip in rhyme and rhythm. If upholding a traditional creative aesthetic makes one “old school,” then I guess I’m hopelessly “old school.”