New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

x Foreword

elegies, and I wonder if the dead were to talk would they urge the

American poet to go on with claiming the land. The image for me is

much like the rivulet in Boston’s Fenway Park, an emblem of the

marshland this whole area was before landfills and construction.

Often a flock of Canada geese add a feathery component to spring and

autumn blossoming and to deciduous change, and one can forget for a

while the artery of muddy water coursing through the park where mud

persists like the heart’s slippery flesh. The whole image can be likened

to the ancient Chinese character for poetry, the soldier over the heart,

which may say all there is to say about poetry: that it is the struggle to

make artistic sense of life’s complexities, taking the soldier now as the

sublime.

There is something in the river’s own heart that is the heart inside

the heart, which longs to transcend its own self, to acquire the ability

to fly.

Yu Guangzhong has written that the poet can describe the sage’s

experience but cannot be the sage. If the poet becomes the sage, he

must shed himself of his poetic effect in writing, going beyond the

bone to the marrow inside, which is not the sludge but the electric soil

that feeds the light of dancing with the moon. The image here is from

Li Bo.

This dance with the moon is part of the experience of deeper medi-

tation, where one acquires the strength of mind known in Chinese as

ding li.



In deeper states of meditation that come after some years of

disciplined practice, relaxation becomes so deep that the calmness of

the mind will go undisturbed in the midst of various kinds of turmoil

and chaos. This stillness is spoken of in Daoist and Buddhist texts.

While all is whirling about you, you are rooted where you are, watch-

ing all else go by, unmoved but moving on the inside according to the

rhythms established by several years of concentrated thought.

Alongside this deep relaxation comes a clarity that is also quite sparse.

Daoist and Buddhist meditation methods produce this state after a

while, and in the stage known as Samadhi it is more of a constant state

of awareness. The mind is cleaned daily so as to approach this clarity.

In the blues, emotions are still too strong to allow this stillness as tran-

scendence in the blues is more a surrender to struggle—an acceptance

of it as a quality of life. In that way Yeat’s shop may be seen as

something of a blues poetic.

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