Wind Says: Selected Poetry of Bai Hua

A Prelude to Bai Hua’s Lyricism

ix A Prelude to Bai Hua’s Lyricism Fiona Sze-Lorrain And to finish: I remember only that there was mist. And whoever remembers only mist — what does he remember? — Yehuda Amichai, “Letter” What is lyricism but a walk — an authenticating act of memory — for contemporary Chinese poet Bai Hua? From season to season, he returns to summer in both meditative lyrics and sharply focused vignettes that anchor specific narratives in his poems. Time lost its shoes, meditates Neruda . In a similar manner, Bai Hua’s engagement with summer is a timeless experience which moves through events and dramas re-enacted in writings created at different phases of his life. “Sea Summer,” “Goodbye, Summer,” “Summer Is Still Far,” “Mass Summer,” “Summer Read: Biography of a Poet,” “Summer, 1966,” “Summer Lyric” . . . Why summer — this curiosity opens to larger questions, embedded in a reservoir of autobiographical details, impressions, emotional underpinnings, objects, animals, dramatis personae, muses and musings from the poet’s world. Summer is Bai Hua’s weather for poetry. In a mix of chagrin, old griefs and nostalgic yearnings, he often renews the season as both event and metaphor. A repository of public meanings and collective acts, summer as a sustained projection of Bai Hua’s poetic imagination also centers on intimate moments, ironies, recklessness, and desires. For Balzac, “That rose, like all roses, only bloomed for one morning.” For Bai Hua who asks if summer is far, “That summer, like all summers, only bloomed for one life.” x * * * Drawing, thinking, speaking and ministering — Bai Hua explores language as a multi-dimensional medium in which image and voices mold words and synergies into portraits and encounters. Consider “Character Sketches ,” for example. Any narrative movement that takes place in this sequence of “portrait poems” is patterned rather than plotted. The poet’s so-called experimental work appears to have begun with “Hand Notes on Mountain and Water,” in which he cites sources from Mao Tse-tung and The Pillow Book, while inserting anecdotes, riddle-like observations and travel notes. Bai Hua took two years to complete this quirky poem of twenty-seven odd fragments. I read it as an ancient form of the Japanese zuihitsu, which literally means “follow the brush” — random jottings at specific moments. * * * The strangeness of litany, rhythm and incantation in many tongues inhabit a space the poet later called a “hybrid work,” poems in open dialogue with other texts. In her study on Bakhtin and carnival, French linguistic theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva defines this concept as “intertextuality.” With its mosaic of references and quotes in synchronic and diachronic modes, the materiality of the language fabric in Bai Hua’s recent work can only thicken. More than bearing mere emotional weight, it is as much a palimpsest as a collage of competing and superimposed textual intensities. Verses remain wakeful amidst interchanging tenses and pronoun references within one narrative thread. I am looking at “Curtain Call” and “Wind Says.” The “I” is a construct while “you” and “he” interrupt the habit of rhetorical agreement, creating a new reading gaze at each turn. Writing, unlike reading, is no longer obedient to a linear progression. At the same time we read Bai Hua’s poetry, his poetry is reading us. * * * xi Yesterday, an email arrived from Bai Hua — Can you please remember to date the poems? * * * On the affections and disaffections of landscape, Bai Hua turns to Jiangnan. In Nature and its goodness, he has found a governing vision of transcendence , and a sense of place that further expands the largesse of a poetic self: “Is sentimentality too empty? / Which sadness is sadness? / O, thin, tired man / Look, a spring river is flowing east” (“A View of Jiangnan”). Unlike traditional pastoral poets and landscape artists, Bai Hua does not depict thriving or romantic representations of the landscape. The literal world within and without, here run the undercurrents of poetry. There is neither pastoral contentment nor dramatic exile in Bai Hua’s work. Rather, Jiangnan scenery serves as a sanctuary for him to anchor or reappropriate his poetic existence, perhaps even to attain newer potentials for self-realization. The word “nature” derives its meaning from the Latin nascor: to grow, to arise, to be born. “Two Days in Huangshan” makes a silent claim for an internal and circular odyssey, as opposed to defining a terminal destination. After all, even the poet himself “tumbles from the landscape.” Why then seek Jiangnan...