Poets have a special relationship with silence because of their poems. They always return to the silence at the beginning or end of poems in some doomed way.
We can take some works in China's new poems as examples to illustrate how to do this in close reading.
For example, in the famous Eight Chapters of Poetry, Mu Dan put the silent place in the metaphysical space of love:
We hugged each other quietly.
In a world where words can illuminate,
The unformed darkness is terrible,
This may or may not fascinate us.
-Mu Dan's Eight Chapters of Poetry
"In love, silence is more than words." So love makes the world quiet. When the silence of love surrounds us, the flame of words "jumps to purple" (Turner's language). So there is a dialogue: this is the embrace and entanglement of the fire of words, which is more enthusiastic than the embrace of the body.
Conversation is like a flame of mutual embrace, which illuminates the world of body embrace; In the in-depth conversation, the light of words makes lovers see each other's faces clearly.
But this kind of dialogue also makes silence further increase, which actually enhances the mystery and darkness in love. Lovers talk in order to listen to silence and indulge in this "unformed darkness". Zhao Jiayin, a contemporary poet, said: "Addiction itself is intoxicating, just like everyone's own mission." This is also extremely important.
Zhao Jiayin is a poet obsessed with silence.
The old soul rises alone.
Diffuse the night sky
Fable grows double arc.
Enhance each other's aesthetic feeling
Its strange head
Full of fantasy
Like looking forward to fruit
Will be incredibly mature in autumn.
Some journeys are destined to be lonely.
No mountain
No water
No shadow
I don't even know myself.
Meaning itself.
-"mission"
Excerpt from Zhao Jiayin's Iris series, Mission.
Lonely mission, natural silence. In Zhao Jiayin's mission, silence is directly transformed into a kind of power, and this power of "breaking out in silence or dying in silence" is directly converged into a mission. The eternal theme of poetry (even the mission of poetry) has been interpreted. In Zhao Jiayin's view, silence is the power of mission and poetry.
Han Dong is another poet who is fascinated by "silence".
For example, his "Silence:
I don't talk in a plain life.
I have a heavy upper jaw and a huge lower jaw.
Like a primitive crack in a barren highland.
Even in the season of going home, between lips and teeth
If you can't grow green leaves
I have a stubborn stone lock in my mouth, and the huge stone glows green.
Maybe it's a killing between two stone mills.
Like a ruminant brought back from my mother.
I miss horses. The stone statue chewed silence.
The shadow of the white wall is cannon fodder for my loneliness.
A woman who cries with a mask is the old mother of a silent man-
She gave birth to him by nagging-she felt hurt.
Well, fill the room with my whistle soup.
-Han Dong's silence.
This poem is concise and clear. Has been precisely controlled. The image presentation of Silence is also very skillful and attractive, and the fragmented scene makes Silence present another possibility.
A good close reading of poetry begins with reading or staring at the work in silence: after a long time of staring, it seems that enough language has been absorbed from silence before the interpretation of the work can begin. The essence of interpretation is to ask questions to the works and listen to the answers to the questions, which is the wind blowing in the works.
We need to listen patiently and carefully to this "wind". Once we understand, we will stop, quit speaking and explaining, and go back to reading the works. This is the end of intensive reading: returning to the work, returning to the long-term gaze on the work in silence.
Close reading begins with silence and ends with silence. And now we can start reading carefully-in silence, looking forward to the moment of "watching".