MCLC: five poets from Nanjing

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: five poets from Nanjing
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To read the poems of these five poets--Dong Sun, Huang Fan, Lu Dong, Hu
Xuan, and Yu Bang--continue reading online at the link below.

Kirk 

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Source: Asian American Writers Workshop (7/2/14)
http://aaww.org/five-poets-nanjing/

An Impossible Present: Five Poets from Nanjing
What time and place can call you home? are you an epiphany? a question? /
Is it something / you only pretended to welcome, something you’ve come to
regret?
By DONG SUN

Nanjing is a tragic city. Its tourist spots are either places where people
died or places people have been buried. Despite having been the capital
during imperial China’s Six Dynasties (220-589), the city is scarred by
the decline and fall of those ephemeral kingdoms. Today in Nanjing few
historic landmarks remain intact, due to successive waves of destruction
inflicted by Mongolian nomads, Manchu occupation, the Taiping Heavenly
Army, Japanese invasion, the Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution. The
city’s real history exists largely in the imagination: in myths and
legends, poetry, drama, and art.

I am not alone in believing that the art and beauty that Nanjing boasts
are what have brought about its tragic fate. Emperor Huizong (1082-1135)
of the Northern Song Dynasty was one of the leading painters of his time.
In terms of delicacy and technique, his art was rarely surpassed in the
centuries that followed, and his personal collections included thousands
of works of calligraphy and painting. Historians have remarked, however,
that his passion for art weakened his political ambition and hindered his
ability to run the country.

Reciprocally, the traumas imprinted in the geographical memory of Nanjing
have continued to inform its arts. The exiled emperor of the Later Tang
Dynasty, Li Yu (937-978), left behind many elegies that centered on
hardship, loss, and bittersweet remembrances of his kingdom’s past glory.
This psychological and aesthetic complex, ineffable and enmeshed as it is,
has created a history and an artistic tradition that is uniquely
Nanjing’s. After all, art is about failure and beauty.

Regardless of where they might originally hail from, all five contemporary
poets in this collection currently reside in Nanjing, and their poems have
been translated to English for the first time. The motif of the city
appears frequently in their work, but the place that they refer to as
“home”, “hometown”, “homeland”, “my city”, or “my country” is actually
rather blurry and fictional. It seems that they are trapped in a place of
familiar strangeness and torn between the anxiety of living in an
impossible present and the wish to enter a home of anonymity and oblivion.
In Hu Xuan’s “The Last Row”
<http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4a055acf010005zg.html>, the speaker sits
comfortably in the back row of a conference room, and excuses himself
totally from any responsibility to communicate and other worldly worries.
In Dong Sun’s “Renunciation” (Cruel Crow, Nanjing University Press, 2011),
the poet buries herself underground, waiting for her lover and prosecutor
to bring her to eternity. In Yu Bang’s “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains,”
the poet loiters, away from his mundane existence, getting “lost” in the
“Fuchun Mountains” depicted in the famous Yuan dynasty painting of the
same name.

The kingdoms in the poetry are gone forever, yet these poets cannot stop
themselves from chasing their echoes and dreams. Haunted by loss and
longing, they remain as “Other” in our world.

—Dong Sun

http://aaww.org/five-poets-nanjing/