Before we started this book club, we asked ourselves a "Netflix" question:
"Poetry is useless, so why do we still need to read poetry?"
But without poetry, what are we left with?
In a muddled 996, I did the math on commuting and transportation, watched the clock fade to Monday in play, ate chicken on my day off, took out my phone to take pictures in the springtime landscape, and swiped my friends in the process. In the midst of love after love, I asked myself what the meaning of love was. Since then, the scenery is no longer a landscape, can not hurt the body, excitedly fleeting, grief is the eternal occupation of life.
Love words can no longer be said. When you want to praise something, you suddenly become mute. When you are sad, all you know is that the whole world doesn't understand you. The things in your head are worldly, and the power of imagination no longer exists. In the words of the tour group, the summer band, the world is the world without poetry; with poetry, you are the world.
As Shelley says in Poetry Discernment:
"What virtue, love, friendship, and patriotism would there be in the world, if the spirit of poetry did not fly to the eternal realms where scheming owls will never dare to reach, and give light and fire to mankind? What is the beautiful natural landscape of the universe? If there is none, what comfort have we on earth? What hope do we have for heaven? "
Where is the meaning, the elevation, the destination and the continuity of life? It is what we are born into. How do we become content creators. So for this reading/poetry session, each of us went through a couple of poor poetry books with a few layers of dust and chose a favorite poem to read to the group and to ourselves.
Hairy.G
William Butler Yeats, The Stolen Child
"The pleasure of reading a poem is uniquely personal."
This book of poems was purchased by my mom when she was in middle school. The song "Stolen Child" has had an impact on me that continues to this day.
I love people with fairy tales, and this poem is based on a legend about an Irish child. The poem is very graphic. In a fairy tale you see many elements such as mountains, water, elves and fairyland. However, the poem always repeats the lines "Come, children of the world, to the water and the wilderness / And hold hands with a leprechaun / There is too much crying in the world for you to understand". Thus, the poem is rich and complex with dreamlike colors and descriptions of a fairy-like life on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is based on sadness, reflecting too much pain in the real world.
For me as a child at the time, a fairy tale poem had a feeling of something other than a fairy tale, which brought another way of interpreting it, completely different from the traditional descriptions of happiness and growing up, and a lot of shock.
But this time, I didn't specifically look up the context of the poem and analyze it. The joy of reading a poem is that after reading it, you develop a uniquely personal feeling and understanding.
The Stolen Child
Translated by Li Liwei
On the other side of the lake are the craggy heights of Slius
There, on a shady isle
The heron's wing wakes the wan river-rat;
And there in the magic bucket we hide the berries, and the red cherries
We have stolen.
There, we hid a magic bucket full of berries and
stole red, colorful cherries.
Come, child of earth, to the waterside and the wilderness
And hold hands with a spirit
There's too much crying in the world for you to understand.
There, where the moonbeams beat like waves,
And the dark sands are covered with misty colors,
And in the farthest, farthest rose-garden there are our steps all night long.
We intertwined in an ancient dance,
and hands and eyes were intertwined in a whirling dance,
until the moon was gone.
We jumped back and forth,
chasing the shiny bubbles.
And your world is full of troubles,
And in sleep there is endless restlessness.
Come, child of earth, to the waterside and the wilderness
And hold hands with a spirit
There is too much crying in this world for you to understand.
Little Peach Lightning
Pablo Neruda, A Collection of Questions
"The Power of the Short Poem"
Neruda is the most famous Latin American poet of the 20th century. His life had two themes: one was politics and a diplomat; the other was love. His love poems are also known as the love bible. When he learned that his name was translated as "Neruda" in China because "Nie" has three ears, he said his third ear was to listen to the sound of the sea. He was a very romantic poet.
This is a very special book of poems. The whole book is made up of questions. There are 316 questions*** about the mystery of creation, divided into 74 poems, each consisting of 3-5 sub-questions. Topics discussed relate to nature, religion, literature, history, politics, language, food, technology, civilization, time, life, death, truth, justice, emotions, feelings, etc. The biggest difference between this book and other poems I've read is that in other people's poems we can see complete beginnings and endings, descriptions and scene preparations in the narratives, but this book is all about the questions.
Even with the questions, the sense of picture is very complete, allowing one to see elements of color, space, etc. in it. It has a wide range of imagery, and the short poems are just as powerful.
(The poems are published in Taiwan by Nine Songs, so the following is published in traditional Chinese, the same as the original translation)
Translated by Chen Li / Zhang Wenling
5
What do you guard under the back of the humpbacked penguin?
A camel said to a turtle.
The turtle replied:
What would you say to a mandarin orange?
Would a pear tree have denser leaves than
In Memory of Lost Years?
Why do leaves kill themselves when they
feel yellow?
7
Is peace the peace of doves?
The leopards are all at war?
Why does the professor teach
the geography of death?
What happens to the swallows
who are late for school?
Do they really scatter transparent letters
across the sky?
Shake the Jelly
Frank O'Hara, "Drinking Coke with You"
"How low life goes, how low poetry goes"
Frank O'Hara is one of the most famous New York School of American Frank O'Hara is one of the most famous poets of the New York School. There are no Chinese translations of his poetry in China yet (if you see one, please let me know where to buy it). O'Hara's life experience is closely related to music, literature and art, but his poetry is colloquial and anti-rational. At the time, he was clearly different from other poets, creating a style of poetry that was anti-elegant **** appreciation and anti-aristocratic. In the end, he died in a car crash at the age of 40, which was a very unpoetic way to leave.
His poems are extreme, improvisational and full of absurdity. Many of them captured and captured everyday life. For this reason, he has been called a "spoken word movie poet". Through spoken word, he could paint very cinematic images.
The poem, "Drinking Coke with You," is a classic, popular with American girls. It focuses on many of the common writing techniques of O'Hara, such as his understanding of art history and the names and places of people he likes to list. However, the reader gets a direct sense of the emotion and content expressed in the poem, which can be read as a very personal indictment of someone, but it is also conceivable that the object of the narrative is simply an illusory image portrayed by the poet.
My favorite thing about this poem is that it is rich in the sentiment of life. O'Hara's poems are life. Poetry is as humble as your life. Talking about poetry need not be taken too seriously. Poetry itself should not be seen as a profound art.
Far more interesting than setting foot in San Sebastan, Airon, Ondai, Biarritz, Bayonne
And overshadowed by filling up on Barcelona's Rua de Garcilla
Maybe it's the fact that you look like a more handsome, happier version of San Sebastan in an orange shirt
Maybe it's the fact that I've got a lot of love for you or maybe it's the fact that you love yogurt
Maybe it's the orange tulips shining around the birch trees
Maybe it's the secret smiles we flash in front of the crowds and the statues
It's hard to imagine how something as rippling
solemn and sullenly absolute as a statue could ever be in front of me when I'm with you
and right in front of it.
We can go back and forth next to each other's bodies in the four o'clock afternoon sun in New York
as if we feel the trees breathing through their whirling leaves
while the portrait exhibition we're going to seems to be empty, with no faces on the canvasses, just paint
and you're suddenly amazed at why in the world anyone would ever do that
because I just have to look at you, and I'd rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
Except for the occasional interest in the Polish Knights, but anyway, it's in the Frick
Thank goodness you haven't seen it yet, so we can see it together for the first time
You're dancing, and it's beautiful, and it's making me more or less think of you interpreting the futurism of the world
And you're moving, and it's making me think of you interpreting the futurism of the world.
I don't care anymore about the Nude Descending a Staircase, or any of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, or any of Michelangelo's sculptures, which tend to surprise me.
And what's the point of going on and on about Impressionism?
Because none of them have ever experienced what it's like to have your true love standing right next to you, leaning against a tree at sunset
Or to put it this way, Marino Marini picked out a great horse, but couldn't find a rider as handsome as my lover
In that case, they all missed out on a great deal of their youth
But that would never have been wasted on me. That's why I wrote this poem to tell you all about it
(It's also an interesting structural feature that the first line of the poem goes straight down from the title, and doesn't repeat the title, as well as the last line stating the origin of the poem.)
Liveliness
Xia Yu's "Montmartre"
"Poetry's White Space"
Imagery is one of the things that makes Xia Yu's poems special, and by reading them, you can sense that she writes most of her poems from her personal experience, but not the structure, the structure, or the structure. So her poems give me the feeling that they are like miniature novels with a few missing elements, which don't tell the whole story, but because of that, you can feel the vast space in them.
Interestingly, Xia Yu's alter ego is Li Gedi, a famous Taiwanese lyricist who has written lyrics for Ella Chang, Elaine Chen, Sunny Chen, Jolin Tsai, and Tian Fuzhen, among others, and is perhaps even more famous for writing poems than she is for writing poems herself.
The song "Montmartre", is my first exposure to her work, you can feel the rain on the window in which the mood, but the last repeated the words, she never say what is, only leave white.
Montmartre
The cat in the bookstore
The dog in the tavern
The glass is foggy
For the wipe
For the sight of me walking by
For the blind, dumb look
Are we ever going to die together
We all look familiar
Someone is going up the stairs
And I am not going to be able to see you again. Someone went up the steps
Someone went down the steps
They all knew where they were going from here
Someone argued that it was a fake death
It was raining on the dirt road in Arby's
Smoke and words in the tavern
These buildings and windows are one-sided
Someone would have put up a ladder
And rolled them up
And taken them away
To the blind, dumb stare
To the blind, dumb look
Did we die together?
I ran through the square and the street
with my pullover wet from the rain
and the man who crossed the street before me looked back at me
and said something to me
to hear it again
I followed him into a store where they made keys and soles
and I asked him what he had said
and he repeated it.
He repeated
knowing that repetition makes me happy
XIX
Rilke's "Premonition"
"Poetry is a pure feeling, such as solitude"
Rilke is one of the most famous modern European poets, along with Yeats and Eliot. and Eliot as three of the greatest modern European poets, the theme of his work is roughly divided into two parts, one of reflection on solitude and the other on religion.
What I like about his poems is that they are full of masculinity and philosophizing, which always stirs the soul, although they are more often interpreted as feminine. Another characteristic of his poems is the "sculpture", which can pass through the differences brought by the translation language, no matter what kind of translation version, this charm can be felt by the readers.
So I have chosen two different translations of Rilke's Premonition, one from Beidao and one from Greenland. Bei Dao, perhaps because he is a poet himself, translates the text with a more Chinese poetic feel, as in the line "I recognize the storm, and I am as excited as the sea", which seizes anyone who reads it, and is full of strong images and imagination. And although Greenfield's version is less precise about the poem's rhythm and sense of language, the atmosphere and feeling it conveys are still clear, and the sculpture is still impressive.
So the poem is indeed something less verbal, more like pure feeling, especially when exploring a subject such as loneliness.
Premonition
Translated by Midorihara
I am like a flag surrounded by distance.
I felt the wind blowing, and had to bear it,
when nothing in the lower world was yet stirring:
The doors were still shut, and the chimneys silent;
the windows did not tremble, and the dust lay on the ground.
Yet I know the storm, and it stirs like the sea.
I spread myself and fell into myself
and broke away from myself alone
in the great storm.
I am surrounded by emptiness like a flag,
I feel the wind, and I must bear it;
Everything below is still:
The door closes softly, the chimney is silent;
The window is still, the dust is still heavy.
I recognize the storm and am thrilled like the sea,
I stretch and curl back,
I break away from myself and am alone in the great storm.
I am alone in the great storm.
Luding
Zhai Yongming's "Proof"
"Women's Poetry Writing"
This time, we have selected the work of Zhai Yongming, a female poet from Chengdu. Proof" is from her 1984 poem "Woman," her masterpiece, which shocked the literary world at the time with its shocking female stance.
The 1980s has always been one of my favorite decades for literature, when reform and opening up began, and literature began to thaw and blossom, with the emergence of many excellent poets, and Zhai Yongming was one of them.
Though it's not a good idea to categorize poets by gender, all the female poets I know have very distinctive feminine poetic styles, but compared to Shuting's elegance, Zhai Yongming's poetry is more oriented towards exploring women's life experiences and life journeys, though that world is relatively dark and deep, just as the chaotic and desolate world depicted in Proof.
And it is in this dark night that the self-consciousness of the female subject is shaped step by step, as can be seen throughout the poems in the group "Woman", a naked confession and a keen nod to the world.
Proof
The last light of the evening stings me
Lying on the bare earth, lying proof
One day my blood will mix with the river
With never a sad heart, beneath me
The chalky stones of the sunset reddened ding dongs
Darkness descends on this place when I cross my arms
I have a dream at the moment.
There are dreams in the moment that come to corrupt my age
I am as bewildered as the trap of not knowing what to do
As the drunken gaze of every twilight
I am the night's hidden secrets that cannot be proved
The water changes me, the water paints me in every way
Lonely in its color, it cannot hold me in place
I am the woman of no end
My eyes were amber for a time
Deep inside, making it more inviolable
Enduring a homecoming, the shadow of inner silence
Presented on the stone all night long to prove
That the silence of the sky is by no means human
When I stand up and turn into the green flame of the morning
Shining, but making the fall colder
O women, your sweetness
Was a catastrophe last month
Is serenity today, setting up a little darkness
Comforting myself
After reading a poem, even on a weekday, I feel much more enlightened. In poetry analysis, there is no need for a lot of quotes. The most important thing at the moment is how you feel. It's nice to have poetry.
I would also like to see you continue to regret here and pick up poems with us. It doesn't take long to read a poem before bed and on the way to work. But you can disconnect from real life for a very short time and see a wonderful world that is hard to see.