In comparison, it seems that Amang’s poetry is very idiomatic and tends toward a spoken mode of expression.

Amang: My poetry does tend to be rather idiomatic in its mode of expression, doesn’t it? I think in part it’s because the spoken language suits me. I always say I’m an “uncultured” person, that I’m a little “countrified.” The spoken language goes with my country tastes. Also, the things I write about choose this mode of expression for me. If the point is to deal with all the positive and negative aspects that the Internet, cell phones, and Facebook have brought into our lives, all these inevitable “changes,” and various facts of life, then spoken language is much more immediate and effective. It is newer, more alive, sneakier, and funnier; it packs a fist-fighter’s punch. Sometimes a poem comes easily; it is just a simple flow of words from the heart, an impromptu daydream. Sometimes you really push the envelope and cross a boundary and find yourself in your own private wilderness of the soul. When you return from wandering in the wilderness, you come back with a new map drawn to a new scale that lets you recalibrate the ratio of your life to your writing.

Amang
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I think that what is going on in poetry right now is getting more and more interesting. At the recent 2011 poetry festival in Taiwan, we had an event called “Singing the Poetry in Women’s Hearts.” The singer Lo Sirong (羅思容) was invited to put to music a few poems written by Taiwanese women poets. Among the poems she chose was my “One Too Many,” which is not easy to be set to music. Lo Sirong said she had to read it many times. She is undauntable! And she figured it out! Listening to her up there on the stage singing, I was lured into a secret fantasy. I imagined that one day I would sing my own poems. I wouldn’t chant them; I’d use the beautiful recitative mode they have in opera.

Among the mainland poets who started to write in the 1980s, I was one of the few who did not belong to any particular school of poetry. As far I know, neither of you belongs to any school or community of poets. What do you think of the phenomenon of poets organizing into “groups”?

Chen: There are forms of creativity that require groups of people to work together, film for example, and theater, even music. But writing is basically a solitary activity, you have to depend only on yourself. To make a sports analogy, it is like the difference between soccer and golf.

Amang, you seem to be publishing in the literary magazine Off the Roll: Poetry+ (« 衛生紙詩刊 ») a lot lately. Do the writers who publish there constitute a school?

Amang: Yes, I do publish a lot in Off the Roll: Poetry+. For me, Off the Roll: Poetry+ is the best poetry magazine in Taiwan today. The editor, Hung Hung (鴻鴻), in a piece entitled “The Kind of Poetry Off the Roll: Poetry+ Wants,” wrote that they wanted work that is singularly apropos and singularly incisive. “Apropos” means the poems should grasp the essence of the times; “incisive” means the poems should present a deep experiential understanding of reality. Quite clearly, this demands from the poems a particular world view. And the requirement that the poems be “singular” in these two qualities implies that they cannot just repeat the conventional wisdom.

Ideally, every poem should grow organically into its own individual form, but a lone poet can’t do everything.

The editorial approach of Off the Roll: Poetry+ happens to align with the direction my own recent efforts. Some poets are getting together to start an “Off the Roll: Poetry+ Poets” (衛生紙詩人) group on Facebook, but being in a school of poetry doesn’t mean anything to me, and I don’t care about anything in the work of other poets that has to do with the sense of belonging to a school of poetry. What we can be very clear about, however, is that all the authors who publish in Off the Roll: Poetry+ are very strong personalities. They know how to fight; they know how to go after it. It is an extremely interesting magazine; it energizes you. Plus it doesn’t just publish poetry, it also publishes plays.

I am not interested in schools of poetry. What poet can write within the limits of one school of poetry for an entire career? Ideally, every poem should grow organically into its own individual form, but a lone poet can’t do everything. This is why there are so many poets. What I really want to say is that there is so much an individual poet might do that it just isn’t right to spend a whole career writing one particular kind of poetry. There is a reason for factions, and it doesn’t seem a very important reason. I don’t attend a lot of poetry events, either. Instead, I walk a lot. I camp. I hike. I go to the theater.