xii Forewordless or that one carves a single letter at a time in a word as opposed to
a single word at a time in a line, a simplistic reading that is more the
linear determinations of a material society.
Maybe Eliot was feeling a need to give out of poetic compassion as
he tried to lay to rest Wordsworth’s ideas of the place of emotions in
the poetic consciousness as he wrote “Tradition and the Individual
Talent.” It is tempting to think he was simply being egotistical, look-
ing to conquer the crown of King Poet, or that it might have been the
more admirable motive we can perhaps think of as more tolerable, the
ego’s struggle between self-justification and a genuine appreciation of
what we think is good poetry. In either case his path was not the same
as a Han Shan who gave his personal life over to esoteric methods of
spiritual cultivation and to write from the various dimensions of that
way of experiencing life, although there is some evidence that he still
suffered with envy.
So, at this point in time Western poetry may have more to gain from
a more participatory involvement in Chinese culture. Yeats and Pound
had tangential interests in Asian culture. Neither worked at fluency in
the Chinese language and neither seriously pursued the practices of
inner cultivation in Buddhist or Daoist methodologies. However, there
are more Westerners these days who do participate in these ways. We
can now look to the effect of this even as we go beyond Ginsberg and
the Beat generation’s American style fascination with Zen and like
matters. This fascination emerges from America’s crisis of faith in its
material reality, the thingliness of things—to borrow from the New
Critics for a second—has become the weightiness of weight. The
machine that produced this wealth is now threatening to consume the
entire world, certainly America, if we do not feed this maker of things.
New Criticism and its child, the American creative writing workshop,
have produced a giant of a child that is too self-indulgent to be
embraced in the public.
Contemporary Chinese poets emerge from centuries of poetry,
much of it attuned to the art of living, of observing human and natu-
ral circumstance with a singular concision in the language, of bringing
eons of meaning to a single lift of a tea cup to the lips. Some still do
write traditional verse, but the greater majority write in and to this
material world of ours that grows more material with every passing
second, as we weigh the planet by converting it into things, as the
increasing weight is the planet’s annoyance, which is our own annoy-
ance. Maybe that is now a more important reason for poets to scribble,
to remind ourselves and thus the world that we are not beings apart9781403976079ts01.qxp:Layout 1 11/9/07 8:47 AM Page xii