TBPP000086 songs(p13

By Ouyang Yu

 13

while the feeling returns season after season

that you are married to the earth in a shit-it-eat-it way

that the best fruit comes from the worst emissions

and by eating the thing we grow

we are eating ourselves new and raw

with the passage of time


10


don't blame me for having stopped writing altogether

ever since i went west

what am i supposed to write about

and where am i supposed to publish

the chinese newspapers and magazines overseas being so money-minded

and sex-centred

taiwan and hong kong too far away

and the mainland too politically exclusive

my chinese daily growing stale

like an opened beer can

never drunk

or a too old body

that can't sell itself

even when fully exposed to the public view

day and night

how strange it is that you had thought anything was possible

once you went west

which was supposed to be the solution

to all the chinese communist problems:

overcrowding lack of sex weekly political sessions

centralized collectivism

worshipping of a deified personality repressive nationalism

instead

you find parallels:

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