TBPP000084 / songs(p11

By Ouyang Yu

 11

to this day after some seven years of unsuccess

i still do not understand why they gave me the money at all

to support a project of uncovering

what is never there anywhere in australia

like excavating a virgin mind that knows no human history

i'm more interested for example in getting deeper knowledge

of a building site

as to whether there is any big pipeline or sewerage

running underneath a house that i want to buy

or how to turn the space of a back garden

into another house in the future

recently it has just come to my notice

that i am more an archaeologist

of identities than of anything else

i mean that identity is something resembling the part of history

you are keen on unearthing

when you get to the bottom of it you find

what is originally supposed to be this becomes that

my english is bad and i'm afraid that i do not explain myself

let me put it another way

identity is a piece of tang

that serves only to show the existence of non-tang

if you get it out of the earth

forget about identities

i'm really not interested in archaeology and stuff like that

you can't get a mayan an egyptian a greek a roman an indian a chinese

civilization from the middle of australia nor anywhere on the coast

no matter how long and hard you try

probably counting two million years from this second on

one might find a possible co-existence of a possible multi-

cultural civilization buried with all its distinguished cities like

malbane seednay breezebone addlaird darnwin whorebutt cuntbora

and me a possibly fossilized being if fortunate enough

would they the future archaeologists be able to find out with their

intricate

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

002, from Poetry Remarks

By Ouyang Yu
Image
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.
Read more

LOWER DOWNS, RUBBISH AND LOW POETRY by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
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...
Read more

Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
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...
Read more