How do you consider the “I” and the “we” as objective nouns and pronouns during your writing process?

Yu Xiang
BY Lai Er

When I use “I”, I speak with “I”, who is sometimes myself (including the fictional “me,” the exaggerated and transformed “me,” the “me” who exists in different periods of time, and so forth). Sometimes it is the “I” whom I can identify with, and the one who is not “me,” but whom I can understand and feel… in the latter, the “I” signifies on some level “we”; it is the “we” I can understand, the “we” related to an individual’s basic rights and integrity.

“We” also exists when narrating and describing a common or collective behavior.

Do you have any non-institutional spiritual inclination?

I do. I often read scriptures, and books related to religion. I take an interest in videos and thoughts related to religion. These materials influence my understanding of this world, and help me find the courage to face the absurdity of our human world.

Indeed, as you’ve suggested, I do not partake in institutions and organizations.

Do you agree that literature is quintessentially a mode of memory? Do you think it is possible for poetry to create or present an alternate future through individual histories and collective memories?

Since the writing of poetry, like any truly creative endeavor, can consist of many different angles, motives or points of view, it may contain many different futures. In my opinion, its future veers toward “eternity.” The real problems that writing faces are of an ultimate nature, the rest are a question of the fundamentals. For a writer and writing in itself, writing as an endeavor is a witness to time. This is why I feel that writing is a hope to reveal or capture our human spirit. Writing is a transient form of eternity, or perhaps a search for this transient eternity.

Yu Xiang
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

How do you feel about romanticism in poetry?

This question isn’t very romantic!

From a wordless world of painting to an articulate place of poetry, how do you relate to these two seemingly disparate forms of expression? How different are these two worlds of imagery?

I don’t have the time or energy to create a large number of paintings. There isn’t a conflict between painting and my poetry. In fact, until now there hasn’t been a real intersection between both of them. I paint on a sporadic basis, mainly to calm my mind, to meditate, to adjust my spiritual well-being. This is why most of the paintings I’ve done are natural landscapes.