204 chapter five
by the echo of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer).^19 If we,
poets, live for beauty by writing poetry in order to feel and to express
feeling, the poem’s last two stanzas make sense:
But we hope not for an outcome in which souls are made to lie idle and words
blackmailed.Poetry guides the dead and the next generation.Other passages in the series confirm these hints at a high-blown, cult-
ish poetics, even if they regularly do so in tongue-in-cheek fashion.
This happens, for example, when the poet’s receptiveness to signals
from a Muse-like, supernatural source is outlined in the seventh stanza
of «Night»:
I have brought you a searchlight, there must be fairy maidens flying over your
head at night.I and you can be read as two sides of the same person, one a rational
daytime creature and the other the nighttime poet. While the poet is
prompted by an external inspiration (fairy maidens), raw materials are
provided by his own experience, converted to memories. From the
fifth stanza of «Night», and the eighth of «Salute»:
Memory can create brand-new thingsand
Memory: my textbook.As for spectacular products of the poet’s imagination, the impossible
is frequently possible in «Salute». The following passage, from the
fourth stanza of the series’ eponymous second poem, invites quota-
tion all the more because it expresses the wish to provoke feelings in
steel, conventionally symbolizing a type of heartlessness that comes
with strength:^20
To want to scream, to force the steel to shed a tear, to force the mice used to living
in secret to line up and appear before me.(^19) Coelho 1995: 132.
(^20) The text published in Flower City has sound an echo for shed a tear; the latter occurs
in Wan Xia & Xiaoxiao 1993 and is one of Xi Chuan’s corrections to the text in The
Nineties.