New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Foreword xiii

from this great host of ours. But I am only one poet, and many would

not agree. Still I think the tradition of Chinese poetry is such a strong

force, even in contemporary manifestations, such a strong force that it

can help American poets navigate the great divide we have created in

our own selves. In this way we poets might see the opportunities that

wait for us in deeper levels of acceptance.

Conversely, Chinese poets may see the dangers that await them as

the material world moves over them in the absence of restraint.

Contemporary Chinese poets do not have the same celebrated place in

the society as did their forbears in that long and glorious tradition.

This is thus a more grievous relative anonymity that could make the

Chinese tradition seem less relevant to contemporary Chinese poets

and obscure the ways in which transcendence might embellish the

poetic life. American poetry has only the stepchild’s claim to the

English tradition from its former colonizer.

These two spaces now live in the same time in history, the centuries-

old tradition emerging from its engagement with various forms of

modernism, and this American tradition that is only a few hundred

years into its making and is having to define itself as it goes. The

Chinese entry into the overdetermination of materialism’s carnival and

America’s dizzied stumbling about in its aftermath are an intriguing

place for poets and the poetry they are yet to write. If indeed deeper

acceptance says Western abandon is equivalent to Chinese methods

for transcendence, the question to each might be, “What is the value

of the sublime?” So even if Eliot and Stevens were never to know the

experience of spiritual cultivation that Han Shan knew and practiced,

we cannot take their achievements away from them. But we can allow

ourselves to wonder what their work would have been like had they

known the meaning of making the mind so strong that it does not

shake in a world that is always shaking, a stillness fashioned against

adversity such as the way modern poets are ignored. If they had

known that, then American poetry would perhaps not be the self-

indulgent child that it is.

Yeats felt the difficult realization that transcendence is yet another

several universes away from us. So he would later write about this

deeper distance in “Among School Children” where he wonders in the

last line about knowing the difference between “the dancer and the

dance.”

The heart itself is a gift as is this soldier above it, this reasoning or

essaying toward a larger truth. The heart is a delicate cornucopia of

precious experience, feelings, and emotions that amount to a poet’s

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