xiv Forewordsensitivity in life, the tendency to perceive and respond to things that
go unnoticed by others; although the poet is no more or less human
than any other person for this sensitivity, he or she is nonetheless chal-
lenged with an awareness of the same. In other words, if we did not
know that we do not know, we might perhaps more blissfully waddle
along, but that is not the nature of sensitivity or the struggle for more
than waddling, such as is the mission of the blues, the acquisition of a
treaty with the heart. Yeats’s rag and bone shop of the heart becomes
the tired fingers of a turpentine worker in the American south finding
his way through his emotional web through a song, the blues as lyric.
Eastern and Western ways differ in their attitude toward a natural
harmony, and this difference makes for different ways of seeing art
and suffering. In Buddhism it is said that to live is to know suffering.
Poets know that to be born a poet is to serve as witness to suffering as
well as joy. Some would say happiness comes with acceptance.
Perhaps, but one thing is certain. Suffering does shake and shape the
world.
The world indeed shakes and has a complex rhythm, which is why
I watched anxiously as Chinese poets from all over the Diaspora came
to The Fenway to share and discuss their own work and their own
selves at this significant point in time as we approach this shifting in
world power with all its accoutrements, the changing of the faces of
the young, the daily opening of Pandora-like boxes of discovery, the
simultaneous enlarging and shrinking of the world and much more. It
is a world where our current lingua franca, English, is like Costco’s,
the behemoth of a large volume shopping venue. Here all sold in bulk
and largeness enables mass consumption so that tasting is impossible.
One can only gulp and gape. As English gulps and gapes, its obesity
flows into the primary art of the language where poets struggle as
sentries. Chinese potentially holds so much for all of us, even as
Chinese poets wonder what it means to be Chinese. This is not just the
heritage of handling matters of emotions and feelings—if we can take
lyricism as being that—but also one of the world’s most beautiful
systems of writing, a system that has had much to do with the culture’s
continuity and one’s sense of being Chinese. This is where we American
poets can come and listen, and that remains my hope as I think of
what it is to bring Chinese poets, members of one of the world’s largest
literary communities to convene in a place where a slow and lazy river
winds and where a flock of geese adorned in nonchalance tip at the
edge of the river and over into the park with its autumnal pavilions of
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