Books of His Poems
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"Intimate Letters"
to the World
:
Introduction to Chen Li's Poetry
by Chang Fen-ling
Intimate Letters: Selected Poems of Chen Li
In the second book Animal Lullaby
(1980), Chen Li is no longer a sarcastic realist; he turns out to be a romantic-symbolist. The longing for nature and the sarcasm directed at city life are now transformed into wider and deeper thinking about life and time. He builds up a world of imagination and sketches beautiful experiences, trying to seek out of the limited and fragile reality a certain order to fight against the ridiculous and disorderly world. Man's situations on earth, full of chaos and absurdity, are well illustrated in "In a City Alarmed by a Series of Earthquakes." Chen Li sometimes takes a dark view of life: the world is a prison in itself and everyone is born into it as a prisoner ("A Handbook to Prisoners"); people can't be free from fear, and even "a sudden shower" deprives them of the sense of security. However, he is not a pessimist; he is curious and imaginative enough to get joy out of life. In the second collection, there is a recurrent motif— the world is a theater abundant in dramatic scenes. In "The Lover of the Magician's Wife," Chen Li lets one image after another flow out vividly and fluently to express the caprice of the magician's wife and the ever-changing atmosphere of magic; in "Our Ventriloquist Who Is Good at Jugglery," he uses a still larger number of images with a view to presenting before the readers the ventriloquist's jugglery. And of course, the poet proves himself a magician of imagery.Chen Li shows much concern for people who wade through life, suffering from anxiety and fear. They are "alarmed by a series of earthquakes;" they are under the threat of time; they are troubled by desire; they are confined physically and mentally (the mistresses in "A House"); they mourn for the loss of naivety (the teacher in "Among School Children"); they humbly long for human dignity ("The Love Song of Buffet the Clown"). Chen Li's compassion for human plight and understanding of human suffering are clearly expressed in the title poem "Animal Lullaby." Chen Li successfully avoids sentimentality by implying his theme through careful choices of imagery and tone. It is a tranquil and peaceful world, but it's a "garden without music," which may well be viewed as a garden of eternal sleep— a graveyard (the heavy steps of the grayish elephant imply a funeral procession). In this poem (as in "Sending a Cancer Patient Home in the Evening by Way of Su-Hua Highway") Chen Li ironically points out a cruel fact: death seems to be the only solution to human suffering.
Chen Li's humanism is most explicit in "The Last Wang Mu-Qi," which won the first prize for poetry in the China Times Literary Contest of 1980. In this long poem, Chen Li exhibits his talent for narration and lyricism, and finds perfect reconciliation for the contradiction between sense and sensibility, between art and reality. The narrator of this poem is Wang Mu-qi, a miner who died in the mining calamity. Through him, Chen Li attempts to reflect miners' living, presenting before us their fears and nightmares, sorrow and anxiety, dreams and longings. Contrasts are cleverly juxtaposed: we hear Wang Mu-qi's ghost relating the pathetic tragedy, we hear the wretched families' heartbreaking sobbing, we see miners' miserable living conditions and fatalistic views of life, but we also see the Utopian dreamland he pictures in his mind; we see sixteen pairs of "black" images composed into an elegy, but we also see Wang Mu-qi's letter to his wife, which is full of affection and tenderness; we see the distressing plight of the miners, but we also see the poet cynically criticizing those who are indifferent to the suffering. Throughout the poem, the misery of the living is contrasted with the relief of the dead. The dark group of images alternates with the bright one, contradicting yet complementing each other, and the intensity of the whole poem is thus developed.
In the "Rainstorm" series of the third book, The Love Song of Buffet the Clown (1990), Chen Li starts, after an interval of nearly ten years, to pour forth his concern for the land where he lives— its history, its culture, its society, its people. Personal meditation about life and time is now replaced by retrospection on the history of Taiwan and reflection on his Taiwan experience. He writes about those suffering people "Rebelling against the foreign regime while ruled by it. / Raped by the fatherland while embracing it" ("February"); he uses the green onion as a symbol of the native culture of Taiwan, willing to start all over again to get acquainted with and cherish his living environment— its culture, art, literature, history, and everything about it ("Green Onions"); through the work of sculpture The Portrait of Water Buffalo by Huang Tu-shui, a gifted pioneering Taiwanese sculptor, he tries to represent the suffering and tough images of the Taiwanese people, to protest implicitly the injustice of the society, and to go deep into the secret dream of his island ("Buffalo"); he looks forward to a better future: the coming generations appreciate the value of tradition and the land, living in a world of freedom and justice where different voices and concepts are highly respected and tolerated ("A Prayer for My Daughter").
Chen Li has expanded the territory of his hometown into a fountain-head of images and symbols, and Taroko Gorge is undoubtedly an ideal symbol for Chen Li to integrate his Taiwan experiences. "Taroko Gorge, 1989," though not the longest, is his most ambitious poem with a wide field of vision. In this poem Chen Li describes the various and changeable scenic features of Taroko Gorge to suggest the complexity of the fate of Taiwan; he intends to lead the readers to review Taiwan's suffering, to look back on its lost culture, and to realize the fact that it has become a melting pot of different races, different ways of life, and different cultures. With time passing, Taroko may never recover its original and genuine features, but new life brings new warmth, vitality, harmony, and sweetness. The whole poem ends with the Buddhist chanting of the mountaintop temple, with the poet's realization of life— when the human heart is as vast and grand as the natural scenery of Taroko Gorge, all hatred, sorrow, frustration, and bitterness can be precipitated, tolerated, or even soothed, just as the inhabitants of Taroko Gorge have assimilated to one another, accepting racial differences and the sweets and bitters of life.
After the "Rainstorm" series, Chen Li finds a new direction for his poetic style and material in his fourth collection of poetry, Traveling in the Family (1993). Unloading the solemn meditation about history and culture, he turns to his own life experiences for inspiration. He ponders over the essence of life in plain language and restrained sentiment. In the title work, which consists of seven poems, Chen Li transforms a distressing family history into several touching silhouettes of life, in which he proves himself not only a poet with compassion and a sense of calling but a man full of tenderness and affection. Prevailing in this group of poems are images which suggest misery, dark sides of life, and the state of being shattered. What connects the poems is a common theme: the incompleteness of life. However, what coexists with the melancholy images is human warmth— family love, dreams, toughness, and tolerance— with which sorrowful mothers silently embrace "anxious fire" and "the waves that turn back" ("Traveling in the Family"); poor children do all they can to protect their satchels, on which lies their future hope ("Stairs"); the traveler in worn-out shoes remembers the good old days while wandering in a muddy city on a rainy night far away from home ("Shoes"); the aged and sickly grandfather "seems to smell the fragrance of flowers" while waiting for the sunset in a narrow house ("The Garden"). And through the images of circles in "A Rider's Song" Chen Li expresses his understanding and tolerance about life. The bracelet, ring, and necklace symbolize on the one hand the inescapable life bondage and family ties, but on the other, ceaseless human love and life commitment.Chen Li picks up his images and scenes from daily life. Memory is like a scarf which is "used in winter, forgotten in summer" ("An Intimate Letter"); meeting with his mother at the crossroads reminds him of the relation between the family, which is seemingly intimate yet actually alienated, seemingly alienated yet actually closely-related, and which exemplifies human relationship ("An Encounter"); a lonely traveler in a city where the mass rapid transit system is under construction is like a coin falling into "a giant and disorderly public telephone" and trying to "dial out his own voice" only to be rejected ("Mass Rapid Transit System"). In the cup from which we drink water every day, he sees a river in which flow shadows of time; life comes and goes just like a camellia or a jasmine flower blooms and falls ("The River of Shadows"). Life, to Chen Li, is a great magic in itself, and we are all living in an ever-changing world of magic: nothing is eternal and things are not what they appear to be ("The Magician"). Therefore, the poet, a magician of language, conjures many touching scenes of life out of a flash of notion, a fit of emotion, or a piece of music. In his note of "Postcards for Messiaen," he quotes a passage from the Japanese composer Takemitsu, "The joy of music, ultimately, seems connected to sadness. The sadness is that of existence. The more you are filled with the pure happiness of music-making, the deeper the sadness is." And it is true of Chen Li's poetry writing. Lover of the human world as he is, he has a profound understanding of the sadness of existence. The most interesting poem in this collection may be "A Vending Machine for Nostalgic Nihilists." Chen Li designs a game for readers to play. But the sense of fun is not the only thing he offers. He seems to imply that modern men are missing some of the natural elements in life, such as mother's milk, drifting clouds, chirping insects, and twittering birds. But on the other hand, he is offering several types of Utopia for readers to choose from. What a fantastic world it would be if such things were available at any time— hot mother's milk, large packets of drifting clouds, enduring cotton candy, canned daydreams, perfume with the twittering of birds, marijuana of freedom and peace, and white moonlight ball pens! It takes an idealist to invent such a vending machine for nostalgic nihilists. Chen Li's fifth book Microcosmos (1993) is a collection of one hundred three-line poems. Patterning after the Japanese haiku, he doesn't adhere strictly to its traditional verse form, but adds to it contemporary interest, trying to explore new possibilities of poetry. To stimulate readers' imagination with such a concise and compact verse form is certainly a challenge to all poets. These short poems are, at their best, self-contented microcosms, from which readers may derive the delight of discovering new meaning and sensibility from daily experiences. Chen Li seems to have the insight of finding poetry in everything. A remote control, a turning dice, ear wax, a multiplication table, a pelota, a mole, soybean milk, a faucet, an insane woman, a pair of sandals, the towels outside a massage house, a blind men's chorus, an erect penis, TV antennae on the roof, and the flush toilet have as much poetic charm as the autumn wind, solitary peaks, clouds, stars, grass, Bartok, Balzac, Baudelaire, schoolchildren, a necklace, a blue silk handkerchief, tears, sorrow, passion, and love. Through Microcosmos, we peep into the macrocosm, and there lies the greatest joy of reading these modern haiku. Some critic once compared the haiku to a silent bell, and said that a reader must first sincerely learn the skill of tolling the bell before he can hear its mysterious and profound toll. Indeed, a haiku, which is very often a subtle implication through imagery rather than a presentation of any idea, is completed by the poet's imagination as well as the reader's active mental participation. In reading these poems, we are reminded of what Robert Frost said, "A poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom."
Like all the self-conscious writers and artists, Chen Li is never contented with what style he has. He is always dangling among different coordinates of art to locate his ideal position. Therefore, we see different poetic styles and share new delight in his different books of poems, but never before have we got so much pleasant surprise out of his books as out of his latest book The Edge of the Island (1995).One of the most impressive features is its experimentation with verse form, as is seen in the concrete poems selected and translated in this anthology (it is a great pity that only five of Chen Li's concrete poems are included, because the wide gaps between cultural backgrounds and language symbols have made translation difficult). I have made no attempt to translate the poem "A War Symphony" into English, since much of its charm will definitely be lost in the process of translation, and those Chinese characters ("兵", "乒", "乓", "丘") and the verse form with special visual effects speak for themselves. It is not only a poem, but a picture with sound and sense. In the first stanza, we see an imposing military force marching to the battlefield; in the second stanza, we see a pathetic battle scene: some soldiers are wounded with one of their legs missing, and others may be killed, as is suggested by the blanks interspersed between. And in the last stanza all the soldiers seem to be assembled, yet they may have been handicapped or buried in the graveyard ("丘" visually suggests soldiers without legs, and literally means "small hill," where the Chinese dead are usually buried). The hills, though speechless, lay the strongest accusation against the cruel war. "A War Symphony" successfully combines the qualities of images, sounds, and Chinese characters. It is a silent protest against war, a compassionate elegy for the sufferers, and a tribute to the Chinese language.
In many poems, such as "A Prayer of Gears," "Wind Blowing over the Plain," "A Cup of Tea" and "The Autumn Wind Blows," Chen Li exhibits his sensitivity to language and his efforts to re-motivate language (again it's a pity that the barriers between different languages will to some extent deprive English readers of the joy of sharing the wits and ingenuity which Chen Li has shown so abundantly in Chinese). Chen Li liberates some Chinese characters and idioms out of the conventional meanings which are so familiar to people as to be taken for granted. He tries to bring them back to their literal origins and lead readers to interpret them from a long-forgotten yet brand-new angle, just as he looks back on the history of his homeland not only to rediscover but also to re-explore its meaning.
Meditation on the history of Taiwan has been a main theme in Chen Li's poetry since 1989. In "Green Onions," Chen Li reexamines his residence on the island, attempting to re-locate Taiwan in history and in the territory of his life. In "Taroko Gorge, 1989," he looks upon his hometown as a symbol of vitality which comes from interracial hybridization and tolerance; in "Hualien, 1939," he tries to rearrange the scattered voices and scenes of history, re-presenting before us its touching temperament and image as a new-born city in which different cultural and racial elements coexist. In "Formosa, 1661," he brings us further back to the seventeenth century, when the Taiwanese were under the rule of Holland and would soon be governed by Zheng Chen-kong, a general of Ming Dynasty who drove out the Dutch in 1662 and tried to establish Taiwan as a base to regain sovereignty over China. Chen Li boldly combines two seemingly contradictory elements in the poem— the serious theme about history and the imagery suggesting sensuality and sexuality— which contributes to the post-modern interest of this poem. The speaker of this poem is a Dutch missionary with a sense of racial superiority and a sense of satisfaction with his accomplishments on this island. He plays a double role: one who colonizes as well as civilizes the Taiwanese, one who assimilates as well as is assimilated. Chen Li has no antagonism toward these invaders; he even finds something human about them. Toward the end of this poem, the Dutch missionary says, "...I've always thought that we are / living on the cowhide, though those Chinese troops are approaching / on junks and sampans with axes and knives / attempting to cover us with another bigger / cowhide," which sarcastically implies that without respect for the aboriginal inhabitants, any government, even one operated by the race of close blood relationship, may be another form of invasion or colonization. From "Green Onions" to "Formosa, 1661," as Chen Li goes deeper into the history of Taiwan, he has also broadened his definitions of Taiwan. In the process of root-seeking, he has come to realize that the vitality of Taiwan lies much in the fact that it is a melting pot or a palette of various racial and cultural elements. The 17th-century Dutch missionary is no doubt a member in Chen Li's united family of Taiwan. What remain conflicts in politics find perfect solutions in poetry.
In the tug of war between politics and art, the power of the latter can never be underestimated, and in the Chinese painter Li Ke-ran, Chen Li has found living evidence of it. The ruler rules over art with "threats under which even plants were taken for enemy troops," while the artist liberates politics with "knife-sharp brushes and ink" ("The Autumn Wind Blows"). With belief in art, the artist has tragically but heroically survived political pressure and dignifiedly become the master who dominates the territory of beauty and truth. Chen Li glorifies the triumph of art over politics, but he knows well the tragic essence behind. He is never a naive optimist. In "Floating in the Air," he compares a poet to a spider,
occupying a few branches
to spin out poetry—
transparent stanzas interweave an empire,
a self-contained sky
baptized by rain and wind.
And in "The Ropewalker," he compares himself to a comic tightrope walker of a circus, who trembles in the air "cautiously walking across the earth, propping up / the floating life, / with a slanting bamboo cane, / with a fictitious pen." Burdened with thoughts of "time, love, death, loneliness, belief, dreams," the poet is dangling on the rope of art and trying hard to find his balance, just as Kevin Carter is balancing himself between morality and art, conscience and duty, death and beauty, reality and aesthetics ("The Image Hunter").
Chen Li chose to teach in his hometown Hualien ("the edge of the island") after he graduated from university as an English major in 1976, and has been staying at his "seaside classroom" ever since. A poet who so far has not traveled abroad, he once wrote in an article entitled "The Traveler":As long as I conceive longing for the world, I'm on the road. I know the fifty students in
Through reading and listening, he keeps himself well-informed of the world. He writes about his favorite writers, musicians, and artists, and translates works of many poets into Chinese. We find echoes of their voices in Chen Li's own works: the Chilean poet Neruda (in "The Last Wang Mu-Qi" and "Taroko Gorge, 1989," for example), the 18th-century Japanese haiku master Kobayashi Issa (in "A Cup of Tea" and Microcosmos ), the German baritone Fischer-Dieskau (in "Listening to Winterreise on a Spring Night")... He borrows titles from Yeats ("Among School Children" and "A Prayer for My Daughter") and is inspired by the works of Miro, Buffet, Debussy, Messiaen, and Cage ("A Dog Barking at the Moon," "The Love Song of Buffet the Clown," "Footprints in the Snow," "Postcards for Messiaen," and "An Open Cage"). Writing poetry to him is a way to communicate with the world, and each poem is, in some sense, an "intimate letter" to the world.
In his latest collection of poetry, published in June, 1999, The Cat at the Mirror (named after the work of the French painter Balthus), he continues his experiments with new forms and search for new sensibility. To him now, the contents of the poetry are not so important as the style of it. He puts in his poems certain musical elements when exploring various human experiences or emotions; he makes his poems a "composition" of colorful lines or blocks which reflect the joy and sorrow of love, the lightness and weight of desire, the splendor and shadows of existence; he brews the modernistic or post-modernistic wine in the bottles of myths or ballads; with compassionate tenderness and profound understanding, he turns many snowy scenes in the memory into new landscape of life. These poems travel between the real world and the fictitious, go deep into life and transcend it.In the poem "The Edge of the Island," Chen Li compares the Taiwan Island, which lies in the Pacific Ocean and is reduced to one over forty million on the map, to a yellow button lying loose on a blue uniform, and the existence of each individual to a transparent thread. As long as the heart— "another secret button" pressed close to the breast "like an invisible tape recorder"— does not fall off, one can always receive the sound of the world. Humble as a poet is, the pen in his hand can serve as a needle "threading through the yellow button rounded and polished by / the people on the island" and piercing hard into "the heart of the earth that is behind the blue uniform." With profound understanding of life and faith in poetry, the poet turns the edge of the island into the center of poetry.
April 1997 / 1999
Books of Poems by Chen Li
In Front of the Temple
Animal Lullaby
Rainstorm
Traveling in the Family
Microcosmos
The Edge of the Island
The Cat at
the Mirror
New Poems
