First, the image of the poet
The first inspiration I got from reading ancient poems actually came from the ancient poets themselves, which ran counter to our modernist educational tradition: in the past, we always calmly reminded ourselves that to separate poets from poems, poetry itself was a self-sufficient discipline, and poets were almost insignificant. Why do ancient poems bring me close to the poet himself? First of all, I think it is because there is a strong poet image in ancient poetry, which participated in the poem itself and became an important force for the establishment of this poem.
It needs to be clarified that the image of the poet is not a symbolic bohemian or pedantic life image, but is created for the public's attention to poetry or for self-indulgence. It has nothing to do with the expression of human nature, but the expression of personality built around poetry itself. Image is a position, not a gesture. Between the lines of those excellent ancient poems, I can always feel a poet-perhaps it can be said that a soul stood up and spoke to me and showed me his whole person-his personality, temperament and character. These are what I call images.
And this image is ahead of the poem, combined with the poem, to prepare for the next poem, just like the so-called "looking forward, how to come back suddenly" as free and complete. I understand the true meaning of "to write a good poem, be a good person first". This is not a simple moral admonition, but a person who is full of self-knowledge and self-confidence in his life and art. The "good" here refers more to the "intact" good than the "bad" good, because bad people can write good poems, although good poems do not follow bad people. On the basis of "good people", a good poem naturally has strong personality strength to run through and support.
There are too many people who show the image of an independent poet in ancient poetry. Many poems can tell who the poet is at a glance, and his figure clearly stands in the poem-it is not the skill that presents his figure, but the true spirit. Rather, his skills are already a part of his image. In modern poetry, it can be said that Lu Xun and Mu Dan are the first to have strong images, and there are many others, such as Haizi, Xichuan and Xiao. In contemporary times, the most complete thing is of course Haizi who unconsciously established his own image as a poet. On the contrary, other people who should have a strong image of poets, such as Guo Moruo, Feng Zhi, He Qifang, Li Jinfa and later Beidao, blurred their image because of vacillation.
Starting from the image of the poet, I think of the poet's attitude towards the world. Among those excellent ancient poems, no matter how difficult the poet was at that time, he was always calm about the world written in his poems. There is no relationship between the writer and the written. They are not beyond and belonging to each other, but control and exchange with each other. Just as Li Bai said, "I can never get tired of watching each other", if the poet quotes it a little and opens it up a little, the world will naturally flow into his poems ── the most leisurely ones are of course Tao Yuanming and Li Bai, who are all over the mountains, but the majestic and tenacious Du Fu is also a kind of hearty calmness. Calm comes from courage. The poet fearlessly faces the world he writes and the poems he will produce, studies them comprehensively, and then goes straight to the core. As Bai Hua said, "A poet should be brave and have an image". Courage and image are mutually successful.
Aside from the original meaning, I want to understand the sentence "controlling feelings with anger": this "anger" can be said to be brave Only by being brave can you express yourself-only in this way can you express yourself directly, calmly and profoundly. It's like a person who has trekked through the world, but bravely expressed his feelings ── he sang while walking, faced with the sudden changes in the world, materials and art itself, he stopped to examine and accept, and then he spoke proudly, and a real world stood out.
In fact, this has something to do with the accuracy of what Pound said. Accuracy is an important criterion of poetic art, which has a new meaning in ancient poetry. As Bai Hua pointed out in an article about ancient poems, a good poem should be like many ancient poems. You naturally want to quote to express your feelings in a certain situation. This accuracy is not only a refined sentence, but also driven by the poet's own atmosphere. He can bravely capture accurate words, and then speak incisively and vividly instead of all the power.
Du Li's poems, especially long poems, give people a sense of balance in structure and emotion, just like a person walking in a big forest and stopping. Every stop is a new landscape in front of you-just like riding a horse and seeing Chang 'an flowers all night. This is also the ideal state of long poems in my mind, which is free, open and tenacious. The difference between it and western traditional long poems is just like the difference between pizza poems and The Waste Land. If Pound's early imagist poetry is an understanding of the skills and fragments of China's poems (mainly quatrains), then Selected Poems of Pisa is a study of China's ancient long poems (including prose) from structure to spirit.
Returning to the emphasis on the image of poets, I find it interesting that there are two places in contemporary poetry geography that are almost naturally concerned about the possibility of establishing images in poetry, that is, poets in Sichuan and Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, perhaps because of their exquisite landscapes and exquisite cultivation. However, on the one hand, the form of their image erection tends to be weak, probably like the construction of ten talented people, literature and beauty in Dali, but they lack the directing ability like that, especially Du Fu's ability to deal with stubborn and impossible subjects. Du Fu not only dealt with it, but also undertook it ── more importantly, he not only undertook it, but also embodied: "He embodies the scenery of an era" (Huang Canran's words).
So think about it, in front of those great poets, when we think of their poems, what appears in our hearts is a whole "so-and-so poem" instead of a poem. This is also the difference between great poets and excellent poets: when it comes to Li Bai, we say "Li Bai", and when it comes to Jia Dao, we can completely replace it with "Monks push the moon to lower the door". Every poem of Li Bai can only appear in Li Bai's hands, while "The Monk Pushes the Moon to Descend the Door" can completely appear in the hands of another poet. A great poet is poetry itself, that is, his time.
Second, born of love, naturally becomes a poem.
Then I can talk about poetry-of course, it is still closely related to poets. The way of ancient poetry's birth and progression gave me a lot of inspiration, or just echoed some problems I was thinking about. For me, the birth and development of poetry is the whole and whole structure of poetry, because good poetry in my mind has no purpose and result.
Once a friend asked me after listening to a poetry writing class, "Is poetry so complicated?" I heard that her question refers not only to the finished product of the poem, but also to the motive of the poem. I replied almost immediately, "It doesn't matter if it's simple or complicated. If it is caused by emotion, it will naturally become a poem. " "Emotion leads to poetry." I don't know if the ancients said that. It can be seen that for a mature poet, poetry is already a part of life, and there is no need to create it deliberately before and at the time of birth. Robert Duncan, a Montenegrin poet, got three tastes and said calmly, "Poetry is a natural thing." Poetry is running water, salmon and elk change horns.
Why emphasize "a mature poet"? Because I'm talking about motivation, not process. Pure motivation, of course, must have mature technical support to naturally become a poem. "Three hundred poems, no evil thoughts". This "thinking" refers to motivation, not the thoughts and feelings in the poem that has been said all the time. "Thinking innocently" means that there should be no impure motives in the process of poetry germination-not only can't use poetry, can't guess poetry from other angles, but also can't write poetry in the name of writing good poetry and compete with poetry. You can't cheat a real poem, just like real love.
"Emotional induction" can also be called "inspiration". "Inspiration" refers not only to an image, a sentence or even the whole idea that jumps out of the mind, but also to the strong impulse aroused by a poem in the poet's mind. This impulse has been brewing, has been integrated with the poet's life, and will be successfully highlighted at the right moment. There is a strange example in ancient poetry: there are a lot of poems written for singing and scenes, which seems extremely untenable today when the necessity of poetry is emphasized-how can we write poems for so many accidental scenes that only belong to social communication, behavior and discipline? However, this is what I call strangeness: there are many great works in these poems (just look at Li Bai), and each poem looks very expressive-in a certain scene, but it is inevitable-when you put it in the presentation space of the poet's whole creation. As long as there is a little touch-even almost no specific requirements, the poet naturally overflows his poems because of the fullness of the poet image he has accumulated and cultivated.
I think of two poems by foreigners, which just illustrates the difference between the western poems we are familiar with and the ancient poems in China I mentioned here. Auden's famous "Mourning for Ye Zhi" has a cloud: "The Irish pierced your poem"; I think gary snyder, the contemporary poet who was most impressed by China's ancient poems, made a more calm sentence: "When the stream rises/poetry flows/when the stream falls/piles of stones." This is the free state of poetry like spring water, and piling stones is the process of casually cultivating oneself.
"Man", a word that often appears leisurely in ancient poetry, properly illustrates the spontaneous power of poetry and the poet's calm attitude towards it. Just as Du Fu said: "Poetry is old and vague, and flowers and birds are not deeply worried when spring comes." Jiang Kui's words echoed from a distance: "The new poems are diffuse, and the scenery is long and dark." What a peaceful state! Poetry, from openness to openness, has gained the natural power brought by poets.
In the process of opening up, poetry even has the ability of self-growth. The way of poetry is involved here-perhaps it is a technical problem, but there has been too much discussion about how to learn details from ancient poetry. What I want to say here is just a discovery of my structure, and then the way to grow. As far away as the way in which the overlapping sentences of folk songs in The Book of Songs are constantly changing into articles, to the way in which all the possibilities of developing the theme are exhausted (I regard it as a long poem), until Li Bai's songs are full of eight barren verses and long melodies of Song Ci, the poetic situation we see is like an impromptu movement of jazz, and poetry is constructed, dissolved, modified and changed in the process, which is the whole of a poem. Finally, it is just like Genesis: this way of proceeding is absolutely opposed to the writing style of arranging and making a poem in order to rush to an inspired sentence and meaning. It is the freedom of "everything moves in the east wind" (Li Bai), not the conservatism of "having answers".
Thinking about contemporary poetry, from Pound to Montenegro, the emphasis on freedom and improvisation, and the wonderful digression of the magical bishop can all be combined with the above, from which we can see that the study of ancient poetry we have always said is somewhat constrained by the blind touching the image, and the study in structure may lead to the spiritual inheritance more directly than the thinking of words and images.
Of course, the biggest fault caused by this freedom is that it is easy to lead to the prose of poetry. Let's start with Fei Ming's point of view. He said that the biggest difference between ancient poetry and new poetry should be that the content of ancient poetry is accompanied by the form of poetry, while new poetry is accompanied by the content of poetry. Is this statement right or wrong? Indeed, judging from most of the ancient poems we have seen, they make use of the poetic form (more words) to make them self-sufficient in form. However, in those excellent ancient poems, although their contents, including material structure and emotional structure, are very similar to prose, the effect they achieve is absolutely poetic-and because of their absorption of prose structure, they have gained more ups and downs in content and form, making their expressive ability richer. This is in line with the changes in contemporary poetry: since 1989, relatively thin lyric poetry has gradually added more narrative and dramatic factors, giving it commensurate strength to cope with the increasingly complex world. And this is just in line with Fei Ming's prediction ── so far, it must be like this.
Third, emotional writing.
Going deep into the emotional core of ancient poetry, my findings are quite different from the general view that ancient poetry is "carefree": excellent ancient poetry is as obvious as Song poetry and as obscure as Tang poetry in Jin, Tang and early Tang dynasties, and it is a very sentimental text. What is sentimental writing? Take a peculiar category of China's poetry as an example: erotic poetry, which is different from the "erotic poetry" of metaphysical school john donne and Indian erotic poetry, and is deeper and heavier than the erotic poetry studied by modern people such as Kang Zhengguo.
Erotic poems are not only beautiful in words or romantic in content, but more importantly, the poet's infatuation-in short, it is to pay attention to and cherish the fleeting things in this world and the relationship between the poet and these fleeting things (called "fate" by the ancients). It is precisely because of the conflict and pull between this "effort" and the actual "impossibility" that the poet tries to leave things that will disappear with his pen.
In fact, this obsession and persistence also belong to the origin of poetry: why write poetry. Poetry exists largely to resist forgetting (a metaphor: Muse is the daughter of the goddess of memory). I once said: At least, we write poems because we think there are some memorable things in this world. Reluctance to things and time, as Faust said: How wonderful, please let time stay at this moment. Poetry combines the characteristics of music and architecture: it not only allows time to flow to show emotional changes, but also allows time to freeze and search again.
As Jiang Kuicong said, "A tree with feelings will not be so green." I feel sorry for it, from the bitterness of "Where is Wei Niang, Song Yu is back ... I can't hate it tonight" to "Wan Li has been in Kunming for a hundred years". Despair, and finally laugh at my old age. "Fairy Yun Biao, it's foolish to laugh at you." Bitter, as straight as Jia Baoyu: the only stupid word is right! However, this is the poet's obsession with the world (even just the world). He can't be detached, and he doesn't want to be detached-what is it to want to be detached from writing poetry? Contemporary poetry turned from nothingness and metaphysics before 1989, and followed modern British and American poetry back to pay attention to real life, which is an understanding of "not wanting to be detached" because there is no other place to speak of.
This is what Liu Xiaofeng called the spirit of eastern and western poets: salvation and freedom. But in fact, there is no freedom. Salvation and freedom are actually one, both of which are painful contests brought about by the incompleteness of life-in this contest of intimate hugs and violent throwing, poets can deeply taste the pain. The poet chews this bitter core, but knows that it is the honey of life.
However, the greatness of ancient poetry does not stop there. In many poems, we often feel that there is a huge and unreasonable power of mutation: in the low return on earth, it suddenly turns into an unrestrained situation and an irrelevant time period. For example, in Jiang Kui's famous Poem "Poems on the Fairy Yin and Sorrow in Yu Lang, Qi Tianle", most of the first part is listening to crickets, from scenery to people and back to scenery, but at the end of the last two sentences, the poet suddenly pulls away: "Look at the fence with a smile, and look down on human joys and sorrows from the perspective of" heaven ",in which the sigh is far greater than sadness and sorrow.
And his other poem "Han Gong Chun". The same is true of Looking at Wu, which naturally expands from the sigh of the world to a wide angle: "When the doctor dies, the laughter lasts forever." From this distance, it fell on a person: "There are tired passengers on board at night, and hesitant waterfowl are calling each other." And this person is obviously the poet himself. He not only pulled away from the world, but also pulled away from himself. But he didn't turn away and get away with it, but turned around and cherished it. In the second half of the year, he laid out a world as if no one was at home: "Qinshan is greener on the ground" and "the moon falls on thousands of stones", which made me face the world more calmly and fully.
Mr. Xia called Jiang Kui "writing tenderness with a hard pen and high profile", which is true. As a result, tenderness becomes deep and cold, making poetry mysterious, detached and shocking-a name called "Macro" can never grasp its touch of "close to my heart". Just like the effect of Joyce's The Dead, at the moment when poetry reaches this extreme, only the world is quietly dying and circulating.
Sticking to rheology, leaving that stubborn persistence to rheology itself to solve the problem between rheology, is the real detachment, which is detachment without abandonment.
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