Poetry and Poetics

Writing poetry is the beginning of internal exile.

The spiritual exile of poetry writing eventually leads to physical exile.The
poet is either devoured by exile – or its accomplice, death – or
else becomes stronger.The poet’s good fortune depends on
whether he can accept the fate of exile without resentment.
This is what Confucius meant by “know your destiny.”A poet
can turn solitude into a personal luxury, or poverty into a
boundary stone from which to observe the world of ordinary
people. His poverty makes him aware of his plenty at the same
time as it embarrasses him in reality; in a more civilized living
environment, the poet can escape poverty through his creative
labor. As loneliness, poverty, illness and the passage of time
accelerate the poet’s advancement to the brink of death, the
last words to gurgle in his throat are gratitude and praise.
Writing Chinese poetry in a different time zone, making a
foreign country a homeland; when the poet in a foreign land
creates a China in the kingdom of his mind, he becomes its
legislator and king.The poet himself is a China. In this world
the poet can decisively preserve his personality, and make
individualism the basis on which he resists the corruption of
his soul. China follows the poet into exile. My own cycle of
exile reaches an end.
The poet is the servant of language, and even more the
slave of the art of poetry. He hopes for nothing but to give his
all to poetry.The political task of a poet is to defend the sacredness
of his language. Since the beginning of the 1900s, a number
of disasters have befallen the Chinese language under the
name of “revolution.” With the Chinese language abused and
misused for too long, the poet should be a clinician for this
mother tongue.The mission of the contemporary Chinese
poet is to build a historical bridge between the glory of
Chinese classical poetry and the ruins of modern Chinese language.
This is the hope of Chinese poetry in its despair.
In autocratic countries, a poet can be praised as a national
hero. I disdain this role. As Joseph Brodsky says, “A poet is a
hero in his own myth.”
We are all molded by words, and are written on the world
by words.A word can be a world. A poet is both the subject
who creates words and the object created by words. In a spirit
of humility and humanity,we write and serve the language.
It is every poet’s mission to convert this world to poetry;
until then, poetic justice can be done. I have said before, what I
use to resist tyranny and evil is not a weapon, but beauty.
September 1997
Translated by Liu Hongbin with the assistance of Stacy Mosher
and Perry Link
ON THE POET, POETRY AND
POETICS
BY LIU HONGBIN