How should poetry be written? This is an obvious but yet unsolved problem. Because there has never been a poet in the world who learned to write poetry through academic studies, and there is probably no country on earth that has opened a school specifically to train poets. Did I specifically learn how to write poetry? No. When I was in college, I majored in missile automatic control, and most of the courses I took had nothing to do with poetry. Later, I passed the self-study examination and obtained a junior college and undergraduate diploma in secretarial major. Although the secretarial major was a liberal arts major, there was very little content about poetry in the more than 20 courses. So, does it mean that there are no rules, no consistency, and no skills in the creation of poetry? Apparently not. No matter what kind of thinking personality, work style and writing skills each poetry author has, there are always some unique things, and there is always an inherent stipulation. In order to find the rules of poetry creation, we must first understand what the definition of poetry is. 1. The definition of poetry. Poetry is a genre of literature and one of the important styles of literature. It is the earliest literary genre produced in human society. It uses rhythmic and rhythmic language to express social life and people's spiritual world in a highly concentrated manner. This is a relatively popular statement. In my article "A Little View of Poetry", I also defined poetry, calling it "Poetry is a report of the emotional world." This group of "A Little View of Poetry" was first published in Taiwan's "Asian Chinese Writers Magazine" It was published and later included in my second collection of poems, "Trickle Collection". Although it is not complete, it expresses the essence of the poem. Simple and easy to remember, I like it better. Of course, when students take exams and answer questions, it is best to follow what the textbook says. 2. Poetry must have a purpose. Establishing the theme of the poem is called establishing the intention. Although poetry is not hard-written like other literary works, and poetry often comes out by itself, the author should also determine and express the thoughts, feelings or sensations conveyed to the reader. I once advocated: "Poetry can be read, or it can be difficult to read, or it can even be incomprehensible, but it must make people feel it." There are only two sentences in my masterpiece "Waiting at the Ming Tombs Reservoir": "History is also flowing. / No Dam”, its intention is that no one can stop the long river of history. Another song, "Candlelight," only has three lines: "How beautiful/you/the knife wound in the night." Through the praise of the "knife wound", it expresses my hatred of darkness and yearning for light. If there is no intention, the poem will lose its theme, and you will not be able to communicate with readers, you will not be able to make people feel what you want to express, and you will not be able to move or infect others. Of course, the purpose of some poems is not so clear. This is the case with poems about landscapes. It is impossible to say whether they are in favor or against anything, but they express the author's feelings and feelings. This can be said to have a purpose. For example, in "The Wind of Qingdao" written by Kong Fu, he wrote: "The wind on the street is / like glass / people are swimming / like fish." It is difficult to say what the theme of this poem is, but after reading it, I feel it is very beautiful. . The wind is so clean and clear, and people are so free and leisurely, giving people a sense of pleasure. There are also some poems that do have intentions, but they are not clear. Different people have different feelings or feelings. For example, in my book "Confessions of Mount Everest", "I am just/a//a/stone on top of a stone", is it writing about the humility of Mount Everest? Or is it a self-deprecation about Mount Everest? Or write something else? I think the students will also have their own opinions. I call the conception of this kind of poetry "analytical conception", just like analytic geometry, it is not plane, but three-dimensional and multi-dimensional. This kind of idea is also allowed to exist. In recent years, some people who "create without themes" have appeared in the literary world. I thought that their works will only be fresh for a while and will soon become rotten. We must adhere to the view that "poetry must have a purpose." 3. Poetry should let the image speak. The thoughts and emotions expressed in poetry are abstract. How to express these abstract things and pass them on to others, you can't just say it directly, you must let the specific images speak for themselves, so that people can feel or understand something from the images that can be grasped. For example, Shu Ting's "To the Oak" compares her lover to the oak tree and herself to the kapok, allowing the oak tree and the kapok to establish a connection and communicate, using specific things to sing about love and illustrate the poet's views on love. Another example is my work "Thought Tree", which regards the abstract and elusive "thought" as a tree, and the secular environment as a cell where the "tree" is imprisoned. It avoids directly saying that thoughts are restrained and suppressed, leaving readers with a sense of wonder. Zi established concrete "thoughts", and through these concrete images, he felt the harsh living environment and difficult growth state in which "thoughts" lived. Let images speak richer, more vivid and natural than abstract expressions. If you encounter something that makes you happy, you just shout: "I'm so happy! I'm so happy!" Others only know that you are happy, but they don't know the degree of your happiness or your mental state. Infection to others is not enough. But if you let the sunshine, flowers or something else speak for you and express your "happiness", it may be different. Because sunshine and flowers are visible and tangible, vivid and real, but "happiness" is invisible and intangible, too abstract. 4. Poetry should be subtle. Implicitness is an important factor in the charm of poetry. Implicitness means that it contains deep meaning, hides it but does not reveal it, does not make a positive explanation, but uses euphemistic and vague words to express the meaning. For example, in my poem "I am Beautiful", there is not a single sentence criticizing those who blindly worship foreign countries, which makes people really feel the existence of this kind of criticism.
“From the morning sun to the sunset/I don’t cover myself/The fields on the roadside/The flowers in the fields/As beautiful as me//Black hair does not need to be dyed yellow/Yellow skin does not need to be whitened/The sun does not dislike/Any kind of color/ What's more, I'm very beautiful//The sun comes every day/Just to admire me?" I used my beauty and my confidence to euphemistically express my dissatisfaction and resentment towards those who blindly worship foreign countries. If you directly say that it is wrong for you to blindly worship foreign countries, how pitiful it is for you to have no self-confidence, etc., then it cannot be called poetry. I also have a similar poem called "Some People's Show Off", "I / went abroad yesterday / / looked here / bitten by an American mosquito." Being bitten by an American mosquito has become something to show off. In the sarcasm, the disdain for such people is implicitly expressed. Of course, there should be a certain degree of implicitness, and it should not be too deep, leaving people confused and unable to feel anything after reading it. I remember Zang Kejia vividly said: "Some poems can make people chew their teeth and not taste them at all." Ai Qing also published articles in poetry magazines criticizing the difficult poetry style. In my opinion, poetry can be unreadable, but it is not worth promoting. A good poem should be subtle but not difficult, and should not pretend to be profound. I once wrote in a poem: "Being naked is not necessarily beautiful; hiding and being a masked thief is not necessarily profound. Dark, light, complex, and simple are appropriate for the poem." I also talked about the implicitness of poetry. Students can experience this issue. 5. Poetry must be condensed. High degree of condensation is one of the important characteristics of poetry. People once used the term "enriched uranium" to describe poetry because of its condensation. After my work "The Cow with Horns" was published in the People's Daily, many fellow poets mentioned this poem when they met me. What's the reason? The key point is that this poem is relatively concise, using more than a dozen lines to express the spirit of thousands of working cows. "The curved bow/is held above the head/the life that is taut and burdened/shoots the iron plow into the wilderness//the bow is held above the head/has been this posture for thousands of years/when life reaches its end step by step/the top of the head The horns were sawed off/but still bent/without slackening//and then made into a trumpet/to make the final cry.” In terms of time span, it has been integrated for thousands of years; in terms of space span, it encompasses the entire earth. In addition to shortening time and space and condensing the whole poem, each sentence should also be as concise as possible. As the saying goes, "One more word will make it longer, and one word less will make it shorter." Try to use the fewest words to express as much meaning as possible. Another poem I wrote, "Mom Loves Me Again," was written after watching a Taiwanese movie of the same name. "The seats and aisles of the cinema/are covered with crying trees//the tears of mother and child that cannot be wiped away/wet Taiwan and the mainland." In just four sentences, they cross the strait between Taiwan and the mainland in space and in time. Spanning nearly half a century, it not only describes the mother and child in the movie, but also hints at the mother-child relationship between mainland China and Taiwan. It is both implicit and condensed. Of course, condensation does not mean short, nor can it be said that a long poem is not concise. The key depends on the information content and degree of concentration of the poem. People who are new to writing poetry are often afraid that others will not understand them, so they have to speak clearly. In the end, others understood it clearly, but it was no longer condensed and the poetic flavor was gone. Achieving condensation is not something that can be accomplished in a day. It must be continuously explored and gradually achieved in the process of diligent creation. 6. Poems should jump. The strong jumping ability is the biggest feature that distinguishes poetry from other literary styles. This kind of jumping, in addition to the span of time and space, is also reflected in the fact that in the process of language expression, poetry can remove the plot, do not need to explain, do not need to consider the literal succession, and can even jump from one thing to another all at once. That thing goes up. For example, in my work "Flying a Kite", "The kite/is held by me/a dream//the earth/is held by the kite/a star", jumping back and forth from "kite" to "earth", leaving behind a The large space invites people to imagine, and it looks very unique, remote, and beautiful. The poem does not add any explanation to this kind of jumping back and forth, it just lays it out for you to feel. However, the jumping nature of poetry is not just random jumping without principles. This kind of jumping must serve and obey the theme of the poem. In other words, the poem should start from top to bottom, and there must be a main line hidden in it. Every sentence cannot lose connection or be irrelevant to the main idea. Like the poem "Flying a Kite", if the kite is not flying or flying, but is hung on the wall or placed on the table, the above associations cannot be made. Precisely because it is a flying kite, those sentences are reasonable and useful to the main idea. To realize the leaping nature of poetry, we must boldly make associations. For example, in my work "Crying Erhu", I wrote: "I often miss/a crying erhu/the sharp sound/in the season without sunshine/shining//I saw the old man playing the piano/putting his pair of The eyes/are given to ten fingers/on the trembling strings/singing and crying day and night/exploring the way in the wind and rain//walking out of those/gloomy years/into the lush sunshine/laughter and singing/more valuable than gold "Heavy", from A Bing to me, from no sunshine to dense sunshine, the jump is very strong. But through the communication and combination of associations, the transition is natural, reasonable, and believable. The leaping nature of poetry is also reflected in many other aspects, which students can often experience and grasp, so I won’t go into details. 7. The language of poetry should be new, strange, and beautiful. I once wrote a poem called "To the New Year" and it was published in many places. Among them, when it was published in the People's Daily, not a single word in the poem was changed, and it was published as I wrote it. But when it was published in Gaomi City News, the editor changed two words, changing "clear" to "fiery", which made me very unhappy.
There is a sentence in the poem: "Clear fireworks/bloom your beautiful yearning." On the night of New Year's Eve, clear and bright fireworks bloomed in the sky. Writing it "clear" is not only realistic, but also implies people's love for the future. The hopes and prayers for the coming year are clear and clear. The fireworks are indeed hot, but they are far from the purpose of the poem, and they appear rustic, old-fashioned, and have no poetic flavor. The word "clear" seems inappropriate, but looking at the entire work, it seems very reasonable, novel, strange, and beautiful. Such language is often not prepared before writing a poem, but appears suddenly during the writing process. This means that in the process of conception and creation, we must always look at things with a different perspective, and sometimes we can even deliberately violate certain established grammatical requirements. Like the "crying erhu" I wrote before, generally speaking, the erhu can play tunes and sound, so how can it cry? Just because it is poetry, Abing's erhu must be crying. If it is not crying, it would be wrong, and it would not be the language of poetry. I have a view on poetry, which is called "childlike innocence and conscience, which is called poetic heart." I believe that in order to make the language of poetry new, strange and beautiful, we must have a childlike innocence. The eyes and mind are always curious, seeing everything fresh, without frames, without looking forward or backward, observing with your own eyes, thinking with your own brain, and saying whatever you want. Only in this way will your poems be different from others and be novel and beautiful. Of course, in order to make poems novel, strange and beautiful, you must also have rich imagination. Only in this way can we be surprised and win by surprise. As the saying goes, "Be unexpected and be within reason." The "horned cattle" I wrote about regarded the curved horns as a bow, but what was shot was not an arrow, but a plow. The cow died, the horns were sawed off, and the bow became a trumpet again. These imaginations are all unexpected and difficult to believe, but after reading the whole poem, I feel that they are indeed reasonable and reasonable. Imagination needs to be cultivated and exercised. I hope that students can often let the wings of imagination fly around the world and breed more new, strange and beautiful poems. 8. Poetry must tell the truth. "Poetry must tell the truth" was probably put forward by Ai Qing in his "On Poetry". Poetry is used to promote truth, goodness, and beauty, and to criticize falsehood, ugliness, and evil. If you don’t tell the truth, don’t truly reflect social life, and don’t truly express your thoughts and feelings, it will be useless no matter how fancy your poems are. , and it won't cause people to scream. The German poet Goethe's autobiography is named after "Poetry and Truth". He also regarded the truth of poetry and the truth of emotion as the life of poetry. I once wrote a book review for a poetry friend's collection of poems "Out of Loneliness". One of the sentences was, "Why do you insist on saying that your heart is full of joy when your heart is crying and bleeding?" Although my poet friend wrote about some small emotions, but Even if it is a small emotion, it cannot be false and unjust. Just think, if you are not moved yourself, how can you move others? Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, our poets have produced many so-called poems that are slogan-like, straightforward, hymn-singing, and hypocritical. Who still remembers a poem like this? Therefore, I have always adhered to the principle of "dare to love what you love, and dare not to love what you don't love." It is other people's business to cheat and deceive others. Anyway, I want to pursue the true feelings and not do anything to deceive the world and steal reputation. Fortunately, China will definitely become more open and democratic in the future, and telling the truth will not be a problem.