By the time of Zheng Chouyu, whose maturation coincided with the
end of the civil war and the retreat of the Nationalists to Taiwan,
modern poetry was ready for those who wished to venture back into
the tradition without abandoning the vernacular quality of poetry that
took a half century to establish. But the issue of the agony of influence
from such a hallowed tradition necessitated a very gingerly approach
to the employment of allusion. Such a border criss-crossing, if you
will, which Zheng Chouyu has traveled upon, could easily have
spoiled the effect of Zheng’s tender imagery and his deftly wrought
assonance, aspects that require not only the nostalgia that the tradi-
tion can provide but also the fluidity possible only in the contempo-
rary vernacular. By the time “Borderline Bar” was written, Zheng had
been engaging in this tightrope act for over fifteen years. Thus, on an
allegorical, perhaps speculative, level, the poet may also be mulling
this figurative breach. It would make sense that he would broach the
issue of the relationship between modern and traditional poetry in his
own work only in the most muted and implicit of ways. What one
finds in Zheng’s path-breaking lyricism, then, in his apostrophes to
unknown ears and monologues on the life of the drifter, is another type
of communication—a subterranean dialogue of sorts between the poet
and his tradition. This dialogue lives in every line of verse and satu-
rates all the diction. It simultaneously communicates and conceals the
layers of tradition and the history that the poet has experienced, either
personally or intellectually through acculturation, and situates him
within the constellation of Chinese poets both ancient and modern.
What one discovers in the poetry of Zheng Chouyu, therefore, and
what accounts for his lasting allure, is beauty in the sounds and visual
imagery of his verse, verse that is not set to predictable end rhyme or
rigid meter but follows the conventions of free verse—somewhere
between the structured conventions of old and the limpid vernacular
prose of the present. There is a sort of babble quality or resistance to
precise interpretation that de Man spoke of, and yet one can almost
read over the shoulder of the poet so that, with repeated readings,
which poetry invites us to conduct, the reader becomes almost one
with the voice of the poem or an “utterer,” to use Helen Vendler’s
terms, of it. We note the sotto voce dialogue with the ancients that
Cynthia Chase shows is common in the lyric and Wai-leung Wong
demonstrates. In addition, we cannot forget the historical and overde-
termined specificities that first provided the fertile ground on which
Zheng has sewn his lyrical seed. Consistencies between Zheng’s poems
can be seen across a wide spectrum of his work, and each of the five
poems examined in this chapter points to a kind of “dislocation,” as
Zheng Chouyu and Lyric Poetry 45