Today’s The Saturday Paper and coffee, and today’s new review, bought and read (13.4.2024

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 influences as ‘European’ or ‘colo
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Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

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In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that never is actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publish
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Wenche Ommundsen: Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet

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Wenche Ommundsen: Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet [PAGE 595] In the title poem of Ouyang Yu's first collection,  Moon Over Melbourne , a homesick Chinese poet compares the Australian moon with the moon celebrated by countless poets in his homeland. The moon is the same, but at the same time it is different. Like the ancient Chinese moon, it inspires poetry—and madness. But in Australia, that poetry is born of frustration and loss, and of everything this foreign moon fails to be. The ‘bastard’ moon over suburban Melbourne even looks Australian. ‘Mooching’ along in an ‘air-conditioned’, ‘I-wouldn't-care-less’ kind of mood, it mimics the country's indifference towards the newcomer and towards everything else: ‘you hang on you all right you no worries mate’. 1  Australia and China are both colonizers, but they colonize differently. While Australia is content to plant ‘the rag of a flag/among your rocks’, and then retreat into lazy indifference,
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