Chen Yuhong PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR Amang PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR Yang Xiaobin PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

In a new interview by Chinese poet and critic Yang Xiaobin (楊小濱), two of Taiwan’s contemporary women poets — Chen Yuhong (陳育虹) and Amang (阿芒) — discuss personal experiences in poetry, Western and Chinese literary influences, and the “feminine characteristics” in writing, among other topics. Born in Kaohsiung, the national award-winning Taiwanese poet Chen Yuhong graduated from the Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages in Taiwan. She spent many years in Vancouver before returning to Taipei. Her work includes several volumes of poetry such as Concerning Poetry (1996), Rivers Flowing Deep into Your Veins (2002), and Annotations (2004). She also translates writings by British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and French Tibetan monk, Matthieu Ricard. Born and raised in Hualien on the east coast of Taiwan, Amang is the author of two books of poetry, On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003) and No Daddy (2008), which was published by the mainland Chinese women’s poetry journal, Wings. Her poems have been published in several important Taiwanese literary journals, including Poetry Now and Off the Roll: Poetry+. An active blogger, she hosts an online poetry forum on Wings. Currently, she works as an English teacher in Taipei. She also produces video documentaries. Yang Xiaobin was born and raised in Shanghai in 1963. He earned his PhD from Yale University and taught at several American and Chinese universities. Currently, he resides in Taipei and works as a research professor at Academia Sinica. A prolific scholar, his poetry collections include Across the Sunlight Zone (1994, winner of the First Book of Collected Poetry Award in Taiwan), and Landscapes and Plots (2008). In an email, Yang writes: This interview took place on the afternoon of February 16, 2012, at the Landis’ La Brasserie and Le Rendez-vous in Taipei. Chen Yuhong had organized many gatherings of poetry readings at this European-style cafe, while it was Amang’s first visit. We had a pleasant conversation. I used my iPhone to record the nearly three-hour session, after which each of us worked on revising the transcribed version.

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Could you perhaps begin with the relationship between personal experience and poetry? While the text or culture is at times relatively clear in Chen Yuhong’s work, the personal experience is quite obscure. I find it easier to perceive the function of personal experience in Amang’s poems.

Chen: My parents moved to Taiwan from Shanghai in May 1949. My father’s ancestral home is Nanhai in Guangdong province, and my mother’s is Suzhou, but they settled in Shanghai since they were young. My mother tongue is Shanghainese (上海話), and I only learned Mandarin when I entered elementary school. Because of my father’s job, I was quite accustomed to the situation of “the coexistence of Chinese and foreign people” (華洋共處). But the reason I studied in the foreign language department at university was that I was really bad at mathematics and physics. Living in Vancouver for over a decade allowed me to read British and American poems, and truly, I am very much influenced by Western poets.

…any incident could only serve as the starting point (or the source of inspiration) for creation. It does not need to replace the entire creation.

For me, writing poetry is absolutely from experience. If my creations contain the so-called feminine characteristics, it must be natural, because all my sensibility is experienced and gained through my feminine body/ identity. Luckily, growing up, my environment was very peaceful and pleasant. I have never been discriminated against or suppressed because of my feminine identity. Rather, I have sometimes been favored because of it. Perhaps this has been due to the fact that I have had few negative experiences, it is difficult for my creation to be sharp.

Amang: Ever since I was young, I knew that boys and girls are treated differently. I was brought up by my grandparents. My parents planted trees on the mountain, and my grandmother, who was over sixty, lived near the base with the four of us kids. Life was hard, and my grandmother had to earn money and make a living. My older brother had his own study room and desk, and was seldom scolded. But we three girls were often scolded. My grandmother was good at using dirty words, which seemed easy for her. Those words were full of images like genitals. Once she chased me to a line of trees near the river, and I ran back and forth between the green and red leaves to avoid her poisonous arrows. I hated my grandmother at that time. Her scolding us with dirty words was our first sex education. We girls knew nothing, and naturally tried to escape and resist. I don’t know if this is a fitting metaphor for relating personal experience to poetry. Later, when I began to write poems, one of the inspirations was the discomfort, doubt, or resistance I felt in my heart.

For instance, if I heard a car hit a little girl, that was a sound I had never heard. I did not dare to watch, but the sound would remain in my mind for months and months, until I made it disappear by writing poems. One summer, a car ran over a snake, and the snake burst into pieces. The sound stayed in my mind like unmelted snow, because I never finished writing “That Poem” (那一首). Also, a movie made me hurt from my throat to my esophagus to stomach. The pain would not go away until I wrote it out. When I was ten years old, I moved from Hualian to Taipei. The sky became narrower, the sea tamer, and people were more cultured… The discomfort because of these changes could sometimes be resolved by climbing mountains, but the deeper discomfort always needed to be resolved through writing. Creation is like deep breath, bringing me oxygen and freedom.

This is why your poems are quite vivacious. Is it an inheritance from your grandmother?

Amang: Ha! I never thought of it that way before. Who knows, maybe poetry is another kind of dirty word? I run and escape to trees, while keeping in mind the dirty words?

In a photo you once gave me, you were on a tree. I think what you say is quite true. The relationship between the era and the individual is an interesting topic. Personally, I don’t mean to speak for our era, and don’t have any clear sense of social responsibilities, but once in a while, I unconsciously write poems that are closely related with our era — even though most of the time they are not directly connected. What do both of you think of this? Do you have a conscious response to the era or society? Is individuality — or privacy — the most fundamental?

Chen: Personal experience first comes from one’s family background, followed by the society/era in which one lives. Everyone has their own characteristics, but personalization is absolutely comprised of family, society, and the era. Composers create with their personal background/experience, thus each of them has his/her own characteristics. This is the reason why there are differences not only in subjects and imagery, but also in vocabulary / grammar / rhythm. Take for instance, the differences between the Taiwanese poets, Ya Xian (瘂弦) and Yang Mu (楊牧) or Guan Guan (管管) and Wu Sheng (吳晟).

Each era has its own creation, expression, and concentrated issues. I can only write about my own experience, and it only happens here and now. Once, I wrote “Selling a Small Kidney” after reading that a young man sold his kidney to buy luxury goods. I also wrote the poem, “The Homeless Dog Blooming like Christmas Flowers,” after witnessing a dog killed by a traffic accident. But any incident could only serve as the starting point (or the source of inspiration) for creation. It does not need to replace the entire creation. In the impermanency of a given time and place, I think I’d prefer to seize the more common, more basic — and possibly the deeper and more emotional side of human nature.

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Annotations BY Chen Yuhong (Baoping Wenhua, 2004) on/off BY Amang (Tangshan, 2002) The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction BY Yang Xiaobin (University of Michigan Press, 2002)

Amang: In the face of dramatic social changes, I always think that poets have the best to offer. Because they have the smallest burden to carry and are freest. I think a true poet can start from zero, and there is no time limit. They can invigorate language in response to social changes, and can also create their own language: vocabulary, syntax, structure, tone… In the face of dramatic social changes, I always think that poets have the best to offer…. They can invigorate language in response… I like to discover nature. On the one hand, I enjoy relaxing and refreshing myself in the mountains and near the sea, connecting with higher or unknown mysteries. On the other hand, I am very curious about life: plants, animals, and their interaction with nature. Of course it includes human beings, our biological nature, the relation and interaction among ourselves, and between ourselves and nature. Because of this, my observation and reflection of the current era and society are reflected in my writing. I do respond to realities. My responses can be masculine as well as feminine, public as well as private. In other words, I do not consciously speak for the era, or with a sense of social responsibility. Instead, I speak from a sense of personal concern. It is a very distinct perspective. It originates from the “genetic code” of my personal evolution. There is a marked difference between my writing and yours, which contains the so-called female consciousness. Recently, I’ve been writing a series of poems all entitled “…the female…”, and I realize that my male consciousness is very strong. Do you think your writing contains a female consciousness? I notice that most poets translated by Chen Yuhong are women. Chen: Sappho (630-570 BC) is the first female poet with whom I identify in the Western literary history. Her work and life story offer a great example of infinite imagination. I do read a lot of Western female poets, such as Hilda Doolittle, Marina Tsvetaeva, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Patricia Kathleen Page, Wisława Szymborska, Denise Levertov, Phyllis Webb, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Glück, among others. Facing different social realities, each of them had/has her own personality and fortune, though no matter what their surroundings were/are, they never gave/give up writing or insisting on their aesthetics of creation. The distinct feminine characteristics in their writings resonate for me. It is as if I can see a deeper self through those poets. However, writings by male poets attract me too. For instance, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin, to name just a few. Good poems appeal to heart and soul, and the author’s gender doesn’t matter.

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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: 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.”

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.

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.

Besides writing, Chen Yuhong also draws and paints. What influence does art have on your writing?

Chen: Studying painting and drawing taught me to rely on my eyes, and not on preconceived notions of what I think things look like. Any one thing takes on different appearances depending on where and when you see it. And so what you should draw are the details of the difference, not the fixed image (or notion) of the thing that you carry around in your head.

All arts are related at the root. Studying painting taught me that abstraction, in fact, comes from concreteness; an abstraction doesn’t come from nothing.

Once, in Vancouver, an oil painting teacher of mine explained this principle to me using a flower vase in front of a piece of red silk as an example. The teacher said, “You don’t have to paint the vase to paint the vase.” The point was that if I painted what I saw in the red (the red silk), then the vase would appear all on its own. I think this is an example of “negative capability” — the ability to look at the negative aspect of things — that Keats said all poets needed to have. All arts are related at the root. Studying painting taught me that abstraction, in fact, comes from concreteness; an abstraction doesn’t come from nothing. What we look for in a painting is color, composition, and brushwork. It is the same with poetry; we look in the language for highly individualized brushwork, color, and compositional sense.

Have you tried other art forms, Amang?

Amang: I like to go to the theater, and reading plays is for me about the most enjoyable reading experience there is. I have always wanted to mess around with playwriting, but I haven’t yet. I also really like film, and in early 2010 I finally took the plunge, so to speak. I went in deep, to the bottom of the ocean, and I encountered the angels and the devils of filmmaking. It was thrilling and stimulating. My camera went everywhere with me; it went on every job. Our first impossible job was chasing down a recurring dream of mine and some hazy memories.

The first “child” that my camera and I had together was the documentary Express Mail, Address Unknown, which was on the program at the 2011 Women Make Waves Film Festival (2011台灣國際女性影展). The rising tide of my dreams broke over the levees of my life and overwhelmed me.

The strong hands of this tide reached into my eyes, ears, and pores and wouldn’t let me alone until I gave in and let myself be pulled out to the sea on waves. There were many aftershocks, and they left me even more drenched and dizzy. At the film festival, the audience asked me what my plans for my next film were, and I said I might make a sequel. But a sequel would be even harder, and I need to wait. I need to wait for the right weather, the right wind, and a different “me.” Recently, I have been taking my camera into the mountains, where I live and study with the indigenous Atayal hunters. I have no preconceived idea of what this new film is about, and that is because documentaries can’t be created according to a plan. They resist any plan.