Meanjin, No. 79, Issue 3

By Ouyang Yu








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LOWER DOWNS, RUBBISH AND LOW POETRY by Ouyang Yu

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Beauty is so far from being the dominant principle of modern poetry that many of the most splendid modern works are clearly portrayals of ugliness - Friedrich Schlegel ( On the Study of Greek Poetry , 1797) Contemporary Chinese poetry has unashamedly turned from the sublime and sacred to the vulgar and profane. In April 1999 at the Panfeng Conference in Pinggu County, Beijing, poets split into two camps, the  zhishi fenzi  (intellectual) and the  minjian . 1  The poets in the intellectual camp (Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xi Chuan, Zang Di and others) were mostly well-published, anthologised, critically acclaimed, well-travelled and internationally well-connected. As university professor and poetry critic Cheng Guangwei noted, much of their poetry reflects the influences of Western literary masters such as Yeats, Rilke, Lowell, Pound, Baudelaire, Milosz, Pasternak and Brodsky. 2  The  minjian camp (Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang and others) critiqued these infl...
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002, from Poetry Remarks

By Ouyang Yu
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Mel C. Thompson Publishing, San Francisco, 2013, p. 23. [I said 'no page number' because my lower ear mark concealed it, my apologies. Then I thought: What a fantastic idea if there's no page numbers! I have a book that has no Contents although it timidly carries page numbers. See Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes . Wild Peony, 2002. In future, I'd make a poetry book with no Contents and no page numbers. Why make things so easy for people that they won't even bother reading?] This book is long out of print, so don't start thinking that I'm trying to promote something. I've only got one copy in the world and I'm not selling it.
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Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

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