Introduction

This week examines how many of our ideas about poetry in the west have their roots in ancient Chinese poetry. It focuses on the poetry of the Tang Dynasty (sometimes also transcribed as T’ang), which included many of China’s most famous poets, such as Li Po, Tu Fu and Wang Wei.

The course looks at each of these poets’ work, examining poetic techniques such as:

• implication and elision: the habit of saying a lot with a little
• balance: how to make form reflect content
• the creation of strong, powerful images

In addition to learning how to adapt these ancient poetic techniques to a 20^th century context, students will also learn about how poetry in imperial China was shaped by external factors: the political realities of supporting life as an artist, the practical realities of where poetry was written, and the biographical realities of the lives of the poets who wrote it. Students will come to understand how many of the things we think of as ‘essential’ or ‘innate’ to poetry are in fact, to some extent, accidents of history.

Contextual Background: Poetry in Imperial China

 The main pathway to success for an artist in China in this period was the imperial examination system. Many artists would take the examinations to join the civil service, becoming mandarins (bureaucratic scholars in the imperial government) and taking up state posts, which would then afford them the security to practice their art in an official capacity. Yet several of the key poets of the period, including Tu Fu and Li Po, resisted this route in different ways.

Li Po chose never to take the exams, which was notable and shocking at the time. He chose to work outside of the civil service, independently, despite having no religious or medical reasons for making this choice. Li Po’s outsider status begins the idea (one might even say the legend) in China of the poet as an outsider. Li Po is in many ways the ‘figure of the poet’ in China because of this, his name conjuring a romanticised sense of what a ‘poet’ is, in the way many people in England might think of Shelley or Byron as their immediate idea of a romanticised image of a ‘poet’.

Tu Fu, meanwhile, did sit the imperial examinations but was failed. Though he was eventually given a government job (more to include him than anything else) he remained an outsider figure because of this failure, something furthered by his often taking the ‘wrong side’ during the political struggles that unfolded during his career. Thus, Tu Fu represents another romanticised idea of ‘the poet’ – as a counter-culturalist, a scandalous figure.

Both Li Po and Tu Fu also travelled extensively in their lives, creating a third romanticised image of the poet – as a drifter, wanderer or traveller. Li Po, for example, had come from the far west of China, growing up at the same time that the Silk Road was being established as a trading route through his homeland.

The poetry of the Tang dynasty is still hugely popular in China to this day – hence the fact that poets like Li Po and Tu Fu remain in many ways the archetypal figures of the poet. Their work has also spread more widely – for example, it was hugely influential on the Japanese art of the 18^th century, such as in Hokusai’s a picture of Li Po underneath a waterfall.

That connection to Japanese painting reveals another aspect of Chinese poetry that students can engage with – its strong connection to visual arts. A lot of early Chinese painting had text with it, creating a strong link between the two arts. There was a tradition of intermingling images with short poetic commentaries on the images – something found on fans, on screens, on other light paperwork. This work was partly ornamental, but also partly meditative – a spur to quiet thought. It was a practice linked to both Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Wang Wei, who was a painter as well as a poet, displays this combination of image-making with meditative, reflective thought. Wang Wei’s poetry also shows his interest in landscape, another common element in both poetry and painting of the time, such as in the rivers-and-mountains school.

As a final bit of context, students should think about how poetic forms are connected to the physical ways in which poems are made. We have seen how writing poems to accompany images on fans and screens created a poetry in which the sense of the visual image was strong. Poems were also written on thin strips of bamboo. This way of physically making poems again affected the form of the poetry – the line lengths, for example, had to conform to the length of the bamboo strips, leading to a tradition of lines being a certain length, a certain number of syllables. That tradition then became part of a tradition of poetic form, one that continued even after the technology had changed.

Furthermore, the idea of a pictorial image is captured in the ideographs themselves, which still retain an idea of the pictorial within them. It is from here, as well as the association of poetry with the decoration of fans and screens, that we get the idea that there is something inherently pictorial about the process of writing a poem – the idea that writing a poem is like ‘making a picture’ in words.

Wang Wei

Good-bye to Li, Prefect of Tzuchou
(tr. GW Robinson)

In endless valleys trees reaching to the sky

In numberless hills the call of cuckoos
And in those hills half is all rain
Streaming off branches to multiply the springs­
The native women will bring in local cloth The men will bring you actions about potato fields
Your revered predecessor reformed their ways
And will you be so bold as to repudiate him?

This poem introduces students to a number of aspects typical of Tang poetry. It mixes the description of a landscape description with political issues and problems of administration. The poem is written to an administrator, in a mode of direct address. The poet evokes population density (something still associated with China today) but also the density and richness of the landscape itself. That is, the idea of density is conveyed through natural imagery, through the description of a landscape which is immensely dense and rich in several different ways. It is a place which brings both privilege (‘the native women will bring in local cloth’) but also responsibility (‘the men will bring you actions about potato fields’); note how the parallelism of these two lines suggests you cannot have one without the other. Note, too, the sense of paradoxical irony, which is often a hallmark of Chinese poetry. The poem is typical in that it operates as a prompt for further thought, an introduction to a complexity, rather than a full explanation or response.

Finally, the poem is highly visual: ‘trees reaching to the sky’, ‘rain / streaming off branches’. The image – as a visual representation which gives a sharp sense of the physicality of something – is often stressed as the key influence of Chinese poetry on 20^th Century modernism. As well as the economy of imagery, the image here is provocative, capturing a moment that seems significant and charged with meaning, like one of Joyce’s epiphanies.

Li Po (also known as Li Bai, or Rihaku)

Typical in this poem is how much is left unsaid by Li Po. Much is there only by implication. This partially arises from a culture in which poems often referred to traditional stories, stories which would have been known and understood by the poems’ readers, as is the case here (See Arthur Cooper’s note beside the poem). The reliance on the unsaid is another thing the imagists took from Chinese poetry.

There is also a Confucian idea of ‘balance’ to the poem, something which comes through, for example, in its use of parallelism. Although Li Po to some extent scandalised the Confucian tradition by not taking the imperial exam, his poetry is still infused with a sense of balance which would have been associated at the time with Confucian thinking. Yet, at the same time, Li Po also brings in his own sense of morals and his own sense of individuality: the idea of keeping one’s own truth, one’s own individual sense of self. The poem, although short and apparently simple, is full of paradox and contradiction.

On visiting a Taoist Master in the Tai-T’ien Mountains and not finding Him
(tr. Arthur Cooper)

Where the dogs bark

by roaring waters,
Whose spray darkens
the petals colours,
Deep in the woods
deer at times are seen; The valley noon;
one can hear no bell,
But wild bamboos
cut across bright clouds,
Flying cascades
hang from jasper peaks; No one here knows
which way you have gone;
Two, now three pines
I have leant against

This poem describes a pilgrimage to a man of wisdom who is not there. It is again a paradox: the poet seeks the Taoist master to learn of his wisdom, yet it is only by not finding the master that he is able to find his vision. In the waiting and not finding, he finds the very thing he is seeking: the stillness (‘one can hear no bell’) and wisdom of the Taoist’s master’s vision. The poem can be read in different, paradoxical ways: on the one hand it is a poem of disappointment, of a failed mission, and on the other a poem of enlightenment, the finding of a kind of presence in absence.

Here we see the influence of Chinese poetry on Ezra Pound, who perhaps more than anyone else did much to popularise Chinese poetry in the early 20^th century. Li Po’s poem ‘The Marble Stairs Grievance’ investigates ideas of beauty and privilege through a collection of ‘white’ images: the pale woman, the white dew. There is a sense that the moon and the woman’s face are paralleled – again we see how the human world and the natural world are shown to effect or even mirror each other.

In Pound’s version, this parallelism is both more eroticised and more orientalised. Students can discuss the differences between the two versions, and more advanced students can be led into a discussion about the ethical complexities of Pound’s attraction to Chinese poetry, and the fact that our views of Chinese poetry are so tied up with those of this complicated and problematic figure. Students can also see the influence of many of the ideas they have been discovering in Wang Wei and Li Po’s poetry on Pound’s classic imagistic poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, which is from the same period. Note the gaps between each phrase or ‘petal’ (this was how the poem was printed in Poetry when it first came out) so that each phrase becomes like an ideogram of its own.

Tu Fu (Du Fu)

Tu Fu’s life overlapped with Li Po; his poetry often praises Li Po, the elder poet, his inspiration. We can see here the influence of the elder poet on the younger. The poem is again a paradox – it is written about a period of exile, resulting from political upheaval and turmoil, yet it is also full of images of the persistence of springtime, of life continuing on: ‘in fallen States… grass and leaves abound’. Yet the poem also ends with the return of strife and trouble: ‘an old grey head / scratched at each mishap’.

Note, too, the comparison again between the natural world and the human one. The poet makes nature sympathetic: drops of dew on flowers are described as ‘tears’, while women and birds both share the same sense of separation (‘parting from mates’).

Contemporary Adaptations

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
Charles Wright (1995)

East of me, west of me, full summer.

How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.
Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.
The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world’s tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

Here we have a contemporary adaptation of ‘Night Thoughts Afloat’ by the 20^th century American poet Charles Wright. Students can see here how the ideas from Tu Fu’s poem have been adapted into a more modern-feeling verse form. Wright’s poem is a reworking of the same trope as in Tu Fu’s, displaying the same kind of thinking (‘night drifts up like a little boat’) while at the same time making small adjustments, such as swapping a gull for a mockingbird.

Confessions of a Drifter
Hugo Williams (1979)

I used to sell perfume in the New Towns.

I was popular in the saloons.
Professional women slept in my trailer.
Young salesgirls broke my heart. For ten years
I never went near our Main Office. From shop to shop
And then from door to door I went
In a slowly diminishing circle of enchantment
With ‘Soir de Paris’ and ‘Flower of the Orient’. I used up all my good luck
Wetting the wrists of teenagers in bars
With ‘English Rose’ and ‘Afro-Dizziac’
From giveaway dispensers. From girl to girl
And then from bar to bar I went
In a slowly expanding circle
Of liquid replenishment. I would park my trailer outside a door
So I could find it when I walked out of there,
throwing back my shoulders at the night — a hero
To myself. They knock on my window this morning. Too late
I wake out of my salesman’s paradise,
The sperm drying on my thigh
And nothing but the name of a drifter in the New Towns.

Easing My Heart
Tu Mu (803-52)

(tr. A C Graham) By rivers and lakes at odds with life I journeyed, wine my freight;
Slim waists of Ch’u broke my heart, light bodies danced into my palm.
Ten years late I wake at last out of my Yang-chou dream
With nothing but the name of a drifter in the blue houses.

(NB: ‘blue houses’: brothels)

A different example of how modern poets have adapted Chinese poetry comes from this poem by Hugo Williams, which is based on a poem by Tu Mu. Tu Mu belonged to the next generation of Tang poets, whose work was influenced by that of poets such as Li Po, Tu Fu and Wang Wei. Students can see how Williams takes the central idea of the Tu Mu poem – the idea of the drifter, the travelling salesman – and expands it into a much longer, expanded version. He turns the merchant carrying wine from place to place into a perfume seller, bringing in typically Williamsian touches (‘the sperm drying on my thigh’) that move the poem far away from its original source material.

Tasks

One

Take the compression of a Chinese poem and pull it out into a contemporary example, as Williams does with Tu Mu.

This works best with one of the shorter poems, such as ‘Quiet Night Thoughts’ or ‘Bathed and Washed’. Students should identify the central idea or trope of the poem and expand out from it, spinning it out into a longer by poem by bringing in material from their own lives and/or adapting the trope into a modern context.

Two

Write about a paradox of disappointment.

Students should think of a time when they have been disappointed by something, or when something has failed. They should then write a poem, following the example of ‘On visiting a Taoist Master in the Tai-T’ien Mountains and not finding Him’, that reimagines this disappointment or failure as a kind of success.

Three

Write a journey as a series of “photographs”.

Students should write a series of short poems which consist of images or snapshots along a journey – perhaps a journey they take often, such as a commute to work or school, or a one-off journey they have made which has left several different, lasting, and most importantly visual impressions on them. They might like to think of this as being a kind of ‘Instagram’ poem – it could even be accompanied by photographs, in the way poems accompanied fans and screens in imperial China, and then published on Instagram or another social media platform.

Four

Write a poem out of “time spent looking”.

Students should sketch a particular scene, first looking at it for five minutes without drawing, and then spending five or ten minutes attempting to draw it, paying as much close attention as possible. They should write a poem that emerges from the thinking that was done during the making of this sketch. This encourages them to draw the thinking of their poem out of time spent looking rather than time spent writing.

Further Reading

Mary Jean Chan – a contemporary poet from Hong Kong, who now lives and works in London, whose new book Flèche explores the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable and weaponised.

Sarah Howe – also born in Hong Kong, Howe is a British poet whose 2015 book Loop of Jade explores her dual heritage.

Yang Lian – a Swiss-Chinese poet, associated with the ‘Misty Poets’ group; he is interested in Pound, and the variations the Europeans did with the Chinese.