Flowers on the Grassland
Ye Mei
When I used to read Narenqiqig's poems, what I associated more with them was her ethnicity. This Mongolian woman from the Northeast is soft and poetic, and it is clear that the bloodline of her wandering ancestors' long songs murmurs through her body and her poetic lines.
Mongolians, as a nomadic people with a glorious history of thousands of years, live in a vast territory and have a rich humanistic history, and their poems and folk songs occupy an important place in the history of Chinese culture. Its poetry and folk songs occupy an important place in the history of Chinese culture. The heroic epic poem "Jangal" represents a vast sea of folk songs, forming a magnificent and majestic grassland cultural belt. In the long history of Mongolian poetry, it has developed from a simple proverb-like syntax into an art with neat lines, varied rhymes and rich expressive power, and a number of outstanding poets have emerged since the modern times who have had an impact on Chinese culture. Narenqiqiqi has been nourished by multiple cultures since she was a child, and she is full of deep feelings: "The Mongolian long tune/horse-head fiddle/a Mongolian's good singing voice/Tengri/you have given me all this and at the same time/also given me/a poet's aura and intellect/I am trying to write and sing with Mongolian blood/the big Chinese character.... ..."
She is clearly a poet with a national temperament, but her vision is all the way out of the box, insisting on a posture of seeking openness. Many years ago, Naren Qiqige came to Beijing, to literature as a profession, while working as a publication editor, for others to do the trousseau, while writing poems, has participated in the Poetry Magazine Society's twenty-second "Youth Poetry Club", has in the "People's Literature" "Poetry Magazine", "Stars", "Ethnic Literature", "October" and other publications to table the work, the work has been selected for the "Contemporary Ethnic Minority Women Poetry", "China Her works have been selected for the "Chinese Contemporary Minority Poetry", "Chinese Poetry Annual", "Selected Works of World Chinese Literature" and other annual anthologies, and she has won the Bingxin Children's Literature Prize and other awards.
She has traveled through the storms of life, laboring along the way, with poetry as her close home, and I almost believe that it is poetry that gives her the strength to move forward, journey after journey. 2010, Naren Qigiqi's poems were selected by a rigorous selection process and were included in the Stars of Literature of the 21st Century Series, which is the result of her many years of perseverance. Before that, she had not published a book of poems, although she had traveled long and far on this path. As early as three years ago, "Ethnic Literature" had recommended her to declare this series, and the poets involved that year were all very strong, and after some hard-to-pick-and-choose voting by the jury members, Naren Qiqiqi had a brush with it. But she still waited with her flexibility, just like sowing a seed in the soil, watching it with anticipation, wondering if it would germinate and break out of the soil. I hope to give an account of all her years of writing.
This time, the flowers opened toward her. It is interesting that there are so many flowers in this collection of her poems. Writing poetry is supposed to be like enjoying flowers, and reading a poem that strikes a chord in one's heart is like a flower that suddenly flashes into one's eyes, brightening them up. Naren's poems are flowers everywhere: "a bitter cauliflower is singing life" "plum blossom printed on her shoulders" "early winter petunias" "before the spring of a particular year, the blossom of the tung tree" "the earth has been renamed magnolia" "deep peach blossoms, stored my flock" "hibiscus under the sun in the autumn"...... The flowers under her pen take on different shapes and sizes, some delicate, some simple, some simple, and some simple, and some simple. Some are simple, some are brilliant. She seemed to be a woman who planted flowers into her lines of poetry, so fond of describing life and conveying her thoughts with their colors and expressions.
So her poems contain the kindness and love of flowers. There are so many unspeakable things in this world, and she just looks forward to the bright flight with a woman's eyes, and just wants to say blossoms with her voice. She uses "We Speak of Blossoms" as her title, speaking of the beauty of nature and the human world without speaking of the falling flowers, but watching the red wings flickering in the green grass, petal after petal, the poet lovingly picks them up and returns them to the grass, "they are flickering in the grass Clean and quiet Joyful and penetrating / How like people who love each other / Discovering and illuminating each other". She pulls the nobility of poetry to the concern for the lower class, writing about the ash greens in the capital, the ash greens that are exactly the same as those in her hometown, like neighboring sisters, wearing simple clothes; writing about the sunflowers in the city, the orange helmets on the heads of those migrant workers' brothers are the blossoming sunflowers, which, in her eyes, carry warmth that can dispel the cold and the lonesome; writing about the shoemaking woman in the hutong, "a pair of chapped hands / put a pair of shoes on the ground". A pair of chapped hands / sticking a shoe to the palm, nailing it firmly", the hot summer is over, and the harvest of fall is coming soon. She glues poetry and reality together, allowing people to appreciate the poetic meaning of those commonplace everyday situations, and thus further appreciate the peace and exuberance that poetry with universal humanistic care can bring, just like a gentle breeze and rain, giving people a continuous and meticulous nourishment.
In this post-industrialized era, faced with what seems to be a chaotic and noisy world, what should a poet say? Naren Kiger says in her poem, "Forgive me I still write poems/Still busy and loving in this earthly world/...... like spring flowers From nature's wind and rain/Like/such brightness and splendor" ("I Have My 90,000 Miles of Mountains and Rivers"). She believes that to plant a poem is to plant a life, to plant a flower. She hoped to find an intersection where she could wash away the dust and the pain, and through which people could go to Dongting Lake to blow their pipes, attract the phoenix, and sing and dance in the smoky waters. Hai Zi once with "from tomorrow onwards, be a happy man, feeding horses, chopping wood, traveling around the world ...... I just want to face the sea, the flowers bloom in the spring", touched countless young hearts, and Naren Qiqiqi has a similar longing, to". find Wuling Mountain/enter the Peach Blossom Garden/pull up your long hair/be a person who can sow seeds/plant rice seedlings/beat your wrists/use a hoe and sickle". Rather than learning from Haizi, she proved him with her own discovery. Yes, a first grader in elementary school, after seeing pictures of the polluted Gulf of Mexico, sadly asks, it's summer and the gray whales are in the Arctic, but after the summer they'll have to go back to the Gulf of Mexico to reproduce their offspring, and will they ever be able to go back home? The flower-loving Narenki Kiger makes the sound, "Returning the green hills to the green hills / Returning the green grass to the green grass / Returning the birdsong to the birdsong / Returning the wind to the wind / Returning the simplicity to the simplicity" ("Returning"). While being intimate with reality, the poet transcends reality and scrutinizes it, maintains the natural ecology and human spiritual ecology, upholds the dignity of poetry, expresses the stance of poetry, and gives people the height of spiritual yearning.
Naren Qiqige has been looking for beauty, she came out from the general description of grassland scenery, looking for poetry in the world, language elegant, rhyme flow, between the look forward to the discovery of beauty, beauty, even if sometimes with tears, with some melancholy and bitterness, such as the bitter vegetables she depicted. But read on, will find that it is a piece of grassland, just like the name of her poem "flowers pushing flowers to open", extremely colorful and gorgeous beauty, magnolia, cherry blossoms, purple leaf plums, and then switched to rapeseed flowers, soft, bright and shiny, golden lamps connected to a piece of ...... Let's keep our eyes open and look at the grassland full of flowers.
Originally published: Literature and Art Daily 2010-09-03