I often read interviews with some poets. Q: "Which poem (or poems) of China in recent years impressed you the most?" A: "I don't seem to remember anything." Or "not impressed." Some people assert that China's new poems are not good, or at least have problems, big problems. The depth of impression seems to have become a standard to measure poetry. But poetry is never used to impress or remember.
When writing a poem, all I can think about is how to write it well. I'm afraid no one is writing poems while thinking about how to impress readers. As the Irish poet seamus heaney said, "When I write a poem, my eyes are not on the reader, but here (myself)."
Of course, it is not a bad thing for people to remember their works, and it can even be said to be a good thing. But the crux of the problem is that the quality of a work is not always directly proportional to the reader's memory. For example, some Chinese teachers, middle school students and beginners still use Wang Shi, Xi Shi and Xu Shi.
In the era of fast food culture, it is definitely not poetry that is easier to remember, but some songs, advertising words and pornographic jokes that are easy to understand. Because poetry has never been and will never be a fast food culture.
I heard that when Brodsky came to the United States in the early 1970s, he asked Harvard undergraduates to read and recite poems, which left a good tradition for American literature education and undoubtedly affected the spread and development of American poetry. Heaney said that what broschi "did was to insist on the importance of memory."
According to the unintentional and intentional classification of memory, we should adopt intentional memory for modern poetry, that is, strengthen memory, that is, recite as Brodsky asked Harvard students to do. Therefore, if you like a poem or a work of a person, you might as well read it several times and it will naturally impress you. Whether you have the patience and calmness to read poetry is also a test of a poet's attitude towards poetry and his true and false identity.
There are two internal factors that distinguish contemporary poetry from classical poetry and poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. One is the lack of external rhythm of poetry, and the other is the influx of narrative poetry strategies.
In my opinion, the greater driving force that affects poetry reading and memory is not poetry itself (except for the serious shortage or lack of poetry education), but the material and spiritual double noise that this era does not read (not to mention poetry) and this era brings to people. Reading (poetry) has become a kind of internal strength, a kind of cultivation, and an attractive melody, rejecting and rejecting the secular with great silence inside the body.
However, modern poetry is hard to remember (as time goes by, it will naturally leave a deep impression), which does not mean that there are no good poems in modern times. On the contrary, almost every day, we can find some excellent poems in the print media and online.
Love by Wang Xiaoni, Sadness of Submarine by Ann, Father and I by Sun, A&B by Sun, etc. It can't be as easy to remember as "an old friend said goodbye to the Yellow Crane Tower/fireworks went down to Yangzhou in March/sailed across the sky blue alone/watched the Yangtze River flow", but who can say that they are not excellent?
I still appreciate Yu Jian's sentence: "I pay attention to letting readers enter and be present, not memorizing."