New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

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Chapter Eight The Ghost Enters the City: Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis in the “New World” Yibing Huang “Fairytale Poet” and “Rebirth ...

views of Gu Cheng runs as follows: although always knowing how to sing “songs of innocence,” he had never learned how to sing “s ...

In other words, what truly stands as a trial for those “misty” poets in exile is both the utter inexperience in inhabiting a pos ...

synonymous with wilderness as much as with willfulness: “I’m a child who had been wrested away from tradition, and had grown up ...

Gu Cheng’s “anticultural” and “willful” nature is not purely Romantic in the Western sense, but imbued as well with influences f ...

self-reliant life, not relying upon society, you will have to be dragged into the war of nature. In my experience, nature is a b ...

aesthetic device, instead of an existential fact. And I see this as Gu Cheng’s strategy of balancing himself between the Western ...

of what he heralded as “from self to nature” (cong ziwo dao ziran) (Gu 2005a: 99–115). Gu Cheng’s relationship with the city nev ...

The ghost is as quiet as still water, but when it is disturbed, it can also destroy everything. I don’t want to say words such a ...

‘One Man’s City’ (Yige ren de chengshi) is written about myself wandering like a phantom in the city of Auckland, New Zealand, c ...

experimenting with a poetics of spontaneity and free association. However, these free associations, unlike the ones presented in ...

tendency to contrast a stoic and individualistic gesture against a fluid external reality and history. Gu Cheng’s “city” could h ...

the most important functions of his poetry is “exorcism,” which is the only way of reacting against hurts and traumas: Exorcism, ...

the “ghost,” in many ways resembles Michaux’s famous creation of “Plume” in his Plumesequence. Within the space of eighteen poem ...

buce). This tradition has influenced the tide of Chinese culture from a high and distant place. The Daoism of the Wei and Jin dy ...

presented probably the most important manifesto of his poetics, “The ‘I’ Without Purpose: An Outline of Natural Philosophy” (Mei ...

violent sudden death; he might be a wise man, a madman, or a fool; he might be philanthropic, or he might be a beast who concern ...

of the Cultural Revolution. Even if “exorcism” had never been explicitly spelled out by Gu Cheng, the dialectic of this “possess ...

Charles Baudelaire once paid this homage to Victor Hugo, who was then in political exile, and lamented the fate of his native ci ...