Book Specs 📖

• Author: Xi Chuan
• Genre: Poetry
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing
• Pages: 176

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

A jubilant tirade on modernity, historical iinfluences, and other wandering thoughts from Chinese Poet 西川。

Notes/Thoughts📝

• I bought this book at a bookshop pop-up at Lychuu Baldwin: https://lychuu.com/ I didn’t have prior knowledge on this author but I did like that they had the English and Chinese translations side by side (Although I didn’t find the English translation that good). I had some fun translating a couple of poems but it was tedious. Not only did I have to find the pinyin to read aloud and comprehend the sentence, but then I had to translate it into English for my brain to understand what I just read. Once again made me appreciate the complexity of language and the art of translation. I still have difficulty interpreting contemporary art/poetry, maybe even more than the Classics, at times. It’s a strange feeling because Contemporary feels a little too cool and avant-garde but historical texts make my head explode. Sandwiched between these two worlds, I wonder if I can make space for my own writing.
• Ironically, my favourite part was the interview at the end of the book titled “This Era Should not be Wasted” where Xi Chuan and Xu Zhiyuan (fellow TV personality and author) discuss the influences of their practice, the state of literature in modern society. The conversation illuminates the need for us to write from our histories, and our contexts. Chuan says “…we’re now living in a media society that chases event after event, event after event, with no discussion of historical logic and only manages to convey a kind of visual effect.” Chuan articulated why modern poetry/literature seems superficial. We’ve become centered on our feelings, and write from our “own interiority” when we should draw from the wellspring of our current era, our current experiences. We lack the reverence for our histories. This may be the reasonwhy I always feel illiterate even after reading so much! Will make a note to delve into the Greats and more histories!!!

“Quotes”🗣

“bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms

bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical

like a heavy downpour on a million square kilometres of desert

bloom fantastical indulgence in case even fantasies bloom that would definitely be for you

to bloom with abandon”

“blooming is a game of adventure

it’s happiness finding the opening of the body dark underground water finding a escape”

“Many people have gone, but how many of them were ever themselves?”

“If there’s something you can’t get past then write it out, burden the page with it, like you’re unloading yourself.”

“If you’ve never come across such poems then you’d never know what you have missed but once you do the way it affects you…it’s like a great tsunami crashing over you!

“I tend to think that we get inspiration where we expect it least, and I love to experience the mud and sand of living in an era”

“What would it mean for an era to be wasted? To ignore it, to live totally in your own head, to let this era pass you by. For an artist, you can’t just write your own interiority, you have to have other materials for writing–and life itself is that material.”

“Each of us must undergo a kind of shedding-of-the-skin process, a switching-out-your-bones.”

“Everyone is so noisy because no one really knows each other that well. We don’t dare to be silent together.”