Green. Crisp. Clean.
Has a Strong Core.
Can Bruise Easily.
Got Crunch.
Could be a Handful.
Looks Pretty in Solitude.
Hits Newton on the Head.
Keeps the Doctor Away.
Worth Nibbling.
Monday, June 28, 2010
David versus Goliath...
Just want to pay my tribute here to Lu from Taiwan. Man, you played a beautiful, beautiful game against Andy Roddick, and sent the no. 5 seed packing from the Wimbledon tournament. Whilst watching you I too was induced to cry out "Ga Yau!" like your fellow countrymen and women. Love the different answers you found for Roddick's fabled serves. Even a non-sports-fan like me feel compelled to salute you. RESPECT!!!!!
As I myself have previously written, poets aren't just artsy fartsy narcissists with castrated manhoods. I really appreciated 梁文道 mentioning gutsy contemporary Chinese poets like 楊牧 and 陳智德 in his essay cited above. There are also plenty of war poets in the English canon like Wilfred Owen and Rudyard Kipling, the existence of whom flatly contradicts Daisy Wong from Lancashire Road's false dichotomy between poetry and heroism (Owen and Kipling had diametrically-opposed takes on war and imperialism, but they both wrote inspiring poetry on the subject of war and country and believed in the power of poetry to effect change in society), a false dichotomy that was proclaimed, with her usual self-aggrandising bravado, in her most recent blog-post entitled "別纏住我的裙腳":
So according to Wong above, a man who writes love poems cannot by definition be the kind of man who could carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, who could ever effect any real change in society, or who could ever amount to any greatness.
Ha! As if! She must have never heard of W.B. Yeats then. Not only is Yeats famous for his love poems to Maud Gonne (e.g. "He wishes for the cloths of Heaven", "No Second Troy"), but he is also at the same time famous for his poetry which mocked the rich and powerful in society, championing the cause of the poor at a time when it was deeply unpopular to do so ("September 1913"); and as a committed nationalist, his poetry also provided intellectual succour for the Irish resistance against British rule (e.g. "Easter, 1916").
Oh, and don't give me the crap that Yeats's the exception that proves her rule -- there are plenty of poets, apart from Wilfred Owen and Rudyard Kipling as already mentioned, who wrote genuinely heroic poetry -- heroic in the sense that they are unflinching in laying bare the social injustices and the human folly of their times -- such as Siegfried Sassoon, Walt Whitman, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, and so on and so forth. And, if my poor Chinese serves me, aren't there plenty of heroic poetry in the Chinese canon also? Even an old romantic like Li Bai wrote about the "Nefarious War"?
And, at the most basic level, as Leung himself has noted in his essay, poetry gives due respect to the fundamental relation between language and reality. Poetry speaks truth to power like no other medium, and beauty itself, by its mere existence, is already an affront to brutality. To indulge in the beauty of language, even in (or especially in) poetry dedicated to love, and especially in the times of war and social upheaval, demands both courage and a special kind of wisdom, a kind of wisdom that says, "We shall not let the ugliness of this world numb us to the existence of beauty; we shall not allow rationality to annihilate fancy; we shall not let hatred triumph over love."* To describe romantic poets as 廢人 and a waste of space, as Daisy Wong had done, really says far more about her lack of reflexivity and appreciation of the arts and humanities than it does about the poets themselves.
Funny how Wong always professes her Anglophilia and snobbishly boasts about her tastes in all things refined and enlightened, and yet seems to not even have gotten a GCSE level's grasp of English literature, or perhaps just literature in general -- a more laughable philistine and fraud I'd never seen**.
Perhaps let me conclude this post with a declaration by a group of Southern Chinese poets who travelled to Hong Kong in 1947 (一九四七年詩人節宣言／黃藥眠), taken from 《香港文學散步 (增訂版)》(p. 174, 2009, 3rd reprint) (Note: every single Chinese word below was slowly inputted by me, word by painstaking word as unfortunately I'm not trained in any Chinese inputting methods).
The declaration may be a tad melodramatic in places, and the politics it expressed may be out of step with the times (the optimistic sentiments expressed between the lines regarding communism being able to serve the public good are certainly misplaced, although their reading of the causes underpinning the social injustices they observed were accurate), but remember this was 1947, when China was in the throes of the civil war after World War II, and in any case, the central message about life itself being an expression of poetry is not outdated even more than two thousand years later:
How ironic that this quote from 1947: "而最少數人掌握着統治的極權，視勞役眾人為天賦權利，不惜採取高壓手段，以屠殺、放逐、監禁種種野蠻的行為，加之於勞動人民身上，甚至出賣祖國、出賣最多數人的勞動成果，以博取外力的援助，來延長它殘暴的統治。 這是歷史的不幸，這飢餓的時代，血的時代，比起屈原的時代還要慘苦，更為黑暗。" still pretty much applies to "modern China". To those who are infected with HIV/AIDS because they had to sell their blood due to their poverty, to those whose children suffer from cancer due to contaminated foodstuffs and who were brutally silenced when they dared raise their case, to those who are driven to the end of their tethers through inhuman hours and work pace demanded from their factory bosses, it is tragic and unjust that this line dated from a war-torn China in 1947: "這飢餓的時代，血的時代，比起屈原的時代還要慘苦，更為黑暗。" still resonates to this day.
Throughout the centuries thus, across both East and West, a simple fact remains: poetry continues to speak truth to power. Always has, always will.
* Readers interested in understanding the kind of wisdom it takes to indulge in fanciful verses in times of war and social upheaval, beyond what my plaintive plea above could ever hope to encapsulate, should read (or re-read) "1984" by George Orwell.
** Once upon a time I thought Wong was somewhat genuine -- not "genuine" as in whether she is a "she" or a group of bloggers or what have you, I really couldn't care less -- but in the sense that she could appreciate how intellectuals could easily be found amongst the so-called grassroot classes (even though she blogged about it as if she's just discovered a whole new continent), but given her latest offering, she's reverted right back to the stereotype of the bourgeoisie. But I guess she has form in this -- given how she self-styled herself as a "Bo-Bo" ("bourgeois bohemian") whilst being totally oblivious to the fact that her very lifestyle contradicts David Brooks' thesis about NOT indulging in acts of conspicuous consumption and respecting 1960's liberal values. Pity she's turning out to be just a phoney, though I'm still willing to be surprised...
*** For the life of me I can't find a way of inputting this particular word, it kind of have connotations of "輕鄙" and "輕挑", can somebody help? (Update 12 July: Thanks to LCL for his kind assistance in inputting this Chinese word).
(Btw, for my previous almighty rant in defense of poets and poetry, see here)
Further listening:
For a completely anti-utilitarian take on poetry (something I'd imagine the Daisy Wongs of this world could not abide), the below is brilliant (thanks to Lu for sharing):
...how seriously wrong my last poem sounded when people may mistake the name of my friend's late pup Villy as, well, Willy. What was meant and expressed as a sad poem took on a whole laughable yet sinister quality and became a tasteless knob joke, which is sickening when I wrote it in order to commemorate the life of a hapless little puppy.
(So yes I've taken down the poem, just when I thought I had cleaned it up about right. Sigh... What price an innocent mind?).
(Actually, after further deliberations and minor amendments, the relevant post is reinstated on Wednesday, 2nd June, 2010).
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Think in pictures. Inter-cultural. Love art. Love books. Passionate about social issues. Not bored nor scared by politics. Inspired by intelligent women asking awkward questions, of others and of themselves. Cannot abide wilful ignorance. Have finally at long last found my own home sweet home, yay me!
