What's the difference between foreign modern poetry and China modern poetry?

Let me talk about the plight of Yu Nu first.

Because of its uniqueness and profundity, Yu Nu's poetry is not only a new "work" but also an "event" for contemporary poetry circles. People are surprised by Yu Nu's writing, and the enthusiasm for talking about it as a poetic phenomenon is far greater than the enthusiasm for entering the connotation of his works.

Indeed, in what sense I have been hesitant to talk about the poet Yu Nu. If you can't change the name of "Yunu", there is no need to say it. Because "saying" is discovery and naming for slaves, not repetition and applause. "Yunu" is a word of Yunu himself. Maybe once I say it, it will leave me like a wounded bird. If we start from the significance of jade girl's writing and the aesthetic aspect of poetry, we will also face problems. As a person who is extremely avant-garde in poetic concept and language at least in this era, we don't need to dwell on the significance of Jade Girl to contemporary poetry. According to the traditional poetry appreciation method, it is absurd to enter the slave world from the analysis of his poetry works. According to roland barthes's theory, Yu Nv's poems are not "readable texts" at all, but "writable texts". We are expected to be the reproducers of texts and meanings as readers, but we are not expected to achieve the author's original intention in reading and analyzing. Because of the "writeability" and fuzziness of Yu Nu's works, our painstaking interpretation may not be in line with the author's mind. Therefore, it is best to read Jade Slave as a matter of different opinions. Some people are amazed with excitement, while others are puzzled. But for me personally and some poets around me, facing such poems is a kind of joy in my heart. Because of the strangeness of these poems, we see the secret of existence and the wonderful correspondence of words. This kind of writing should undoubtedly be held high. Sometimes we have to say.

About five years ago, I was lucky enough to get a business card from Yunu. I have forgotten how to arrange and print the names of poets. What impressed me was that there was such a poem on the back of the business card:

He is walking in the street with an alarm clock.

They looked at him.

"Don't look at me, look at this alarm clock."

He pointed up with his hand.

They turned around.

Look at his fingers.

-short poem (14) 1

This poem made me laugh at that time. The situation of the poem is like a farce, which is very interesting, but at the same time we are also referred to by the poem: we are those "them": a person walking in the street with an alarm clock, and we are watching such excitement; The man pointed to remind us not to look at him, but to see what he was holding high. But we don't look at what he is holding high, but at his fingers.

Franz Kafka (1883- 1924) once wrote a novel called The Hungry Artist: Circus Performs Hunger for the World! The artists were kept in cages and performed for 40 days. There are only clocks and water in the cage. People watched and wondered if the artists would go back for dinner at night. Kafka's absurd drama may mean: the expression of hunger may not lie in how many days the artists can persist, but in the fact that the hunger of the soul itself has been vividly shown! Someone reminds us how scarce this era is! But people don't understand it, but they pay attention to the so-called artistic process of artists and the authenticity of their starvation. If the behavior of walking down the street with an alarm clock in the short poem (14) is regarded as a kind of performance art, its moral is roughly the same as that in The Hungry Artist: that person wants us to look at the alarm clock instead of pointing at it. Look at the alarm clock itself and see the warning of this behavior to us. This kind of performance art is to express the "warning" itself.

For a long time, Yu Nv has been regarded as the extreme avant-garde in China's contemporary poetry. Yu Nu's paranoid language experiment and the interruption of conventional culture and meaning chain make people feel at a loss and secretly surprised. Wheaton's contemporary poetry has really been nothing new for a long time. For this era, Yunu is like a clockwork alarm clock, which makes people sleepy and nervous, complaining and waking up. In the sense of "warning" to contemporary poetry circles (the creative death of language, reading and writing), Yu Nu's special writing "behavior" is greater than his writing "content". What he wrote was pointing to the finger of the alarm clock. Therefore, from the characteristics of performance art, it is a question whether we pay attention to the roar of the alarm clock or study the finger pointing at the alarm clock.

Second, the fast knot of the body

When we have to talk about women's writing, we must know what is in women's poems. I just came to say what I saw. The basis of Yu Nu's writing lies in his sensitivity to the besieged and bound "body" as "meaning" in individual existence. The human body is a seriously ill prisoner. Yu Nu's writing is related to this "body" is not free.

People's bodies or parts of their bodies are soaked in bottles filled with potions, and "bodies" are besieged, dismembered and searched for each other in poetry ... This is a common situation in Yu Nu's poems:

A plastic face, immersed in the morning light.

In female lubricating oil

-"Girlfriend"

A fish, swimming around in formalin.

At that moment, I had a bottle-like premonition: he and her

Eyes and torso, mechanical devices for two blind people.

Will be torn apart in the garden

-"Witness"

He asked her to open the glass cover

He said, I'm coming.

His body is getting darker and darker.

The whispers of bats grow moss.

-"Blind Shadow"

..... that day.

She got up the earliest, but she couldn't find herself.

-"Memory (2)"

The intern nurse guessed in the dark and she saw it.

A pair of limbs are climbing a tree.

Connecting branches on an empty stomach

When the apple appeared, it had been rotten for a year.

She started scraping bones for it.

Yeah, still young.

Still an unsterilized child.

-Patient

I'm in a bad mood when I ask and answer again.

Ask me silence again

Hands in the city, outside the city.

-"Muttering, a hand in the city"

The post office is closed.

The chain is broken.

……

Half the bodies were sent,

Half of the body takes medicine and sleeps.

-"Blind Letter"

……

Judging from the above impression, Yu Nu is very similar to the common performance art of this era-he likes to show his body to the world in a bottle filled with drugs to show a besieged idea. As a "poet", Yu Nu deserves our analysis of his life experience as an artistic act (unintentional act becomes the spiritual background of poetry art). Although these behaviors are extremely painful for the poet himself, they may be necessary for his later poems. Jade girl is sick, I'm afraid many people know. Many words and situations in Yu Nv's poems are related to hospitals and medicine. In order to cure this disease, one summer he was exposed to the sun for four hours every day. At the same time of exposure, he began to write the famous long poem "The Beast". Skin diseases besieged the slave's body, and his freedom was severely restricted here. The struggle against skin diseases may lead to Yu Nu's poetics: in fact, the flawless body is also being dismembered and bound-that is, the rigid world of this meaning and its stale language. As the carrier of culture, language is both noumenon and skin, and its symptoms are more serious. The task of poetry is to liberate the human body.

The smell of medicine permeates the poems of female slaves. For Yu Nu, illness is both a personal experience and a poetic symbol. Yu Nu's unfriendly experience of illness and human body is a stagnation and starting point of his creative psychology. In a poem, he described the bound state of human body as "a bottle filled with water":

The bottle is tied with a rope,

The sound can't come out.

Insects in the senses are spinning around.

A hook is growing.

The curve of being eaten.

Original fish.

Every word is true.

He sat in the concept,

Open your mouth and tie a knot.

-"Bottle of water"

In this world where language and meaning are established, people are like a bottle filled with water, bound by the rope of meaning, and it is difficult to make a real sound. There is a fluid inside and a solid outside. Sitting in a concept, trying to express, but opening your mouth is a fast knot. This is the poet's wonderful description of human ideographic state. Can poetry untie this knot that binds the body?

Third, the alchemy of language

The cage of "body" lies in the meaning and value endowed by the world, which are based on the firm and established relationship of "language-signified meaning". The liberation of "body" must break the chain of this "relationship", and the establishment of a new "body" in the free world can only be in the new language rules. The language strategies in Yu Nu's poetry creation are very rich. We can see many new poetic language rules that he tried and expounded in his specific writing and poetic theory.

For the poet Yu Nu, "body" has at least two meanings. One is the body of an adult living as a physical body; The other is the human senses that are suppressed in the established language and meaning. In the first sense, "body" is full of all kinds of senses, memories and words. It is rich, vivid and even independent. However, in the second sense, due to the compulsory designation of the complex feeling of "body" by the established language and the significance carried by language in the world, "body" becomes simple and loses the freedom to be expressed. Generally speaking, "meaning" is expressed through language, which is just a humiliating transformation of "body".

Kafka, the master of modernist novels in the 20th century, vividly described the "metamorphosis" of body and soul that modern people can't escape. A few years ago, Yu Jian, a great poet in China, praised Yu Nu, a poet living in Anqing, an inland city in Anhui Province, and called him "Kafka of China", which shocked me very much. First of all, Yu Jian's judgment deserves respect. Secondly, I have always been in awe of slave's writing. Apart from the small staff of the same institutionalized company, what are the similarities between Yu Nu and the famous Kafka? Yu Can nu compare this? I'm afraid the similarity between the two lies in the poet's extreme understanding of modern people's situation and his extreme experiments in writing practice. In Kafka's works, the "body" of modern people is transformed into a beetle, and under the torture of wonderful modern rules, they can only die of depression. In Yu Nu's poetic practice, the "body" of modern people seems to have escaped by his unique language magic and become another or real one.

Jade girl may not be satisfied with the use of the word "magic" in her poems. He wrote in a poem called "Net":

…… ……

I dozed off in the thick obesity.

Thirty years old, people are pupae.

A 30-year-old pupa, he can't be.

Always be vigilant.

That day, I was in the mirror and received it.

A man, holding a cloth bag, asked me.

I went in, he said, otherwise, I would be lost.

I'm afraid of this causality, I don't think so.

This is magic.

I was tired of my existence ten years ago, that's fine.

Not just meat.

Possibility is possibility.

I'm soaked, but I can't see a drop of water.

Yunu doesn't think this is magic, but it is a very real "causal relationship" in existence. In his poetry thesis "Semantic Load of Multi-directional Feeling", he wrote: ... magic is magic, which is a habitual title and definition of magic. I deliberately deny it here and describe it as "causality", which leads to ambiguity and contradiction. I received a man in the mirror. The man in the mirror is like a magician, holding a pocket and shouting "I" at it, making "I" disappear. This is not magic, but a very real situation in the soul. The relationship between "I" and myself, as well as the existence and concealment of the soul, has been truly materialized here. This real picture of existence comes from Yu Nu's unique thinking and language. We can call it alchemy instead of magic. The prevalence of "alchemy of language" in China's poetics probably comes from the French symbolist poet arthur rimbaud (1854- 189 1), whose poetry creation is quite experimental. In The Alchemy of Language in A Season in Hell, he said, "... I create. At first, it was an experiment ... writing poems with hallucinations ... at first, it was an experiment. I write silence. I write night. I write down what I can't express. I catch fleeting fantasies ... "... Rambo and Jade Girl have similarities in poetry creation, poetry attempt and language fantasy. Yu Nu's poetry is also a kind of "alchemy of words (language)".

Yu Nu called that real picture or situation of existence "the law of cause and effect". What does he mean by this sentence? "Artificiality and causality between words: Artificiality refers to the relationship between words attached to express meaning. Causality refers to the essential, interactive and neglected sensory relationship between words. " His "causal relationship" turned out to be the "sensory relationship" with the least causal relationship. He has a poem called Causality:

Between two days and two nights

On the photosensitive foil outside the window

She woke up.

I became numb the next day or so.

It was so quiet that the tip of the needle flashed.

What is the cause and effect between these seemingly unrelated images? In fact, what makes poetry have complete semantics is the split and fleeting feeling in existence. "Wake up ... their cause and effect are intertwined, but poetry presents them here in an abnormal language way.

Here, I describe Yu Nu's poems as a kind of language alchemy called "body" freedom. His poetry basically subverts the established meaning of communicative language with an "anti-language". Let the sensory, perceptual and complex "body" be "released" from the bondage of communicative language and established meaning. "Body" has been truly expressed in Yu Nu's poems. It may be dirty, bloody, dirty and gloomy ... but it must be true. It can be said that the "body" once bound by language and meaning has gained unprecedented freedom here. Yunu is a person who has a clear understanding of language and meaning. In his view, language, as the carrier of culture, its abstraction and generality greatly obscure the specific form of the things it refers to, and modern language has lost its function of describing "things". Meaning is people's subjective division, generalization and fiction of the world with the help of language. Because of the doubts about language and meaning, the corresponding doubts about reading and writing are revealed. Because "meaning is always set and prepared as a kind of knowledge accumulation ... reading is only a self-test to test the reader's education level, and it is a kind of non-literary reading ... Aesthetics is not its purpose, at least not its first purpose ... Writing has become a footnote to find virtual value in the meaning catalogue." Yu Nu's writing is a deconstruction of communicative language and established meaning, which can be said to be an artistic revolution to emancipate the mind and accumulate a deep "body". However, the protagonist of this revolution is the language of poetry, and the goal of the revolution is to overthrow the fashionable contemporary poetry style.

Fourth, present the reality of individual existence.

How does the "body" gain freedom in language? What is the goal of Yunu's language strategy?

Yu Nu's effort is to express the instantaneous existence state of the body as truly as possible in a unique language. In his view, the sense of absurdity and division is the authenticity of the world. Language should be able to express the real state of an individual's instant existence, and can "present" the inner feelings of absurd and divided existence and unforgettable truth.

In Yu Nu's own words, his poems are "wordless". Yu Nu's poetic attempt should be the closest to phenomenology in philosophy, trying to reach the state of the world before it was recognized by "meaning". To express the unspeakable or impossible in poetry, besides silence, we should work hard on the language itself. Yu Nu's language practice is probably the most complicated among contemporary poets, and his various language experiments are ambiguous, wrong-meaning, strong-meaning and chaotic. For a reader who lacks language awareness, if he directly talks about the author's expression of meaning in reading for a long time, he will definitely be at a loss when facing female poems. Indeed, some people accuse Nu's poems of being obscure, and even accuse his experiment of a random collision of words. This accusation is absurd. Obviously, the probability that words can "collide" with Yu Nv's poems is zero.

From the perspective of anti-language, anti-culture and anti-meaning, it is difficult for us to see the difference between Jade Slave and the previous poetry groups of "right and wrong" and "stupidity". Feifeiism holds high the banner of non-sublimity, non-culture, non-value and non-language, and transcends logic, rationality and grammar. "Rough people" declared that "disturbing, destroying or even blowing up the closed or pseudo-open cultural and psychological structure", 6 showed explicit anti-lyrical, colloquial, violent and pornographic humor and ridicule. Strictly speaking, they all provide a good warning behavior for the poetry writing of an era, explaining the crisis of poetry and the necessity of innovation, but as poets, their behavior is greater than the text, which is well known. If we take the poetic text of Jade Slave seriously, we can see that Jade Slave is far from right or wrong. Yu Nu doesn't oppose anything for the sake of opposition, but he points to the truth of existence, the truth of existence is unique, and what kind of means is secondary. Therefore, it is difficult for us to point out the style of Yunu's poems. He is not necessarily colloquial, nor is he necessarily anti-lyrical, anti-sublime, anti-rational, and so on. Only with language can we achieve the real moment of existence and the real state of individual existence. In this sense, Yu Nv's poems contain many elements, and those who are particularly critical of poetic images and situations are profound and strange to read; People who emphasize lyricism can find deep and full emotions in it.

A drop of eye drops flowed from the tap.

my friend

Come all the way to see me.

I broke out in a sweat while guessing.

Get your hands off the wall.

In order to avoid what happened to her

I tied my body in a fast knot.

I stuffed my head into my hat.

I shaved with a razor this summer.

The snake's whisper is tortuous.

The door opened.

(a plastic face)

A plastic face, immersed in the morning light.

In female lubricating oil

-"Girlfriend"

This is probably the most common poem in Yu Nv's works. The connection between languages is sudden and the events are simple, but the (psychological) relationship between the situation and the characters is complicated. "Girlfriend" comes to see "me", which is also a daily life situation that people often encounter. What drips from the faucet is a drop of water that is difficult to drip, much like a human eye. "A drop of eye in the faucet" is an instant impression. The difficulty of dripping water corresponds to the significance of people walking a long way. "guessing" refers to the difficulty of communication. In order to avoid the trouble (maybe quarrel) caused by communication, "I" simply tied my body into a deadlock, kept silent, or didn't express my heart. But no matter how I pretend and how I escape, my girlfriend will always be the winner. "Whispering of Snakes" and "A Plastic Face, Immersed in the Morning Light" are also very delicate and true to women. The last paragraph describes the instant true feelings of "I" to "girlfriend", and it may also refer to things related to sex. Look at another short poem that may be about young love and sex:

There are yellow flowers in my dream.

Set the love between men and women and the bad luck of yellow flowers pouring water into one

Dreaming of mango in the distance

Dream of the snakeskin of youth

One hand, crawling all over my body

It's late at night, and everyone who should come back has come back.

Humidity parasitism

I am surrounded.

Virgo is compared

-"Forbidden Zone"

The feeling in sleep, the feeling of youthful body, the boundless melancholy, the sex and love that have to be faced, the passion and burnout of human beings, the excitement and hopelessness ... The emotion pointed out in the poem is not clear, but we can link it with unique language and images to restore our feelings in that situation. With concise words, it presents a unique personal instant feeling. Moreover, the feelings in Yu Nu's poems are not his own. Because of the strangeness of the connection between the languages he chose and the strangeness of the situation, people have a sense of freshness when reading, and on the other hand, they can get a sudden resurrection of individual feelings that other poetry texts can't restore. This long-dormant affection can only be revived in the words and situations of the jade girl. Although it is a "writeable text", the writeability of Yunu's poems is not an associative game brought about by random collision of words, but an internal reality that individual existence is covered and forgotten. Witness, resume, and online articles are actually quite lyrical, but Yu Slave's lyricism is often hidden behind strange languages. The long poems "The Beast", "Cheating" and "Relaxation" look ferocious, and the sentences are inexplicable and hard to find. In fact, after careful reading, we find that these are rare experimental texts of contemporary poetry since the 1990s. The words created by Yu Nu may be obscure, but they must be worth pondering. Maybe you are not necessarily happy to see it, but there must be a truth or truth hidden in it.

Indeed, when reading Yu Nv's poems, we have a sense of pleasure, that is, there are many feelings that are used to and difficult to grasp in daily life, but in Yu Nv's poems, they are really besieged. The poem The Night's Watch is an example. It is a painful thing to be disturbed by flexible mosquitoes and flies when sleeping, just like a feeling that comes to mind and cannot be expressed. The poet's capture process is wonderful, with words! Use direct language! "I" catch flies by saying "flies" and express "flies" by saying that flies are close to the essence of "I" (blood-sucking). At the end of the poem, describing the buzzing of flies as a pair of big earrings hanging on their ears is really objectifying the sound into a physical feeling, which is close to the reality of existence.

The clock struck twelve.

I caught a fly in a mosquito net.

I don't need my hands.

This process is very simple.

I use understanding and cursing

I said: fly, I said: blood.

I said, I'll cancel you at twelve thirty.

Then I'm like a drop of medicine

fall asleep

The clock strikes thirteen when

The buzz of flies: a pair of big earrings

Still ringing in my ears

The psychology, impressions and feelings of biting us are unforgettable and cannot be retained or repeated. They are all captured in the mosquito net of poetry by Yu Nu like bugs. In the pursuit of the real state of daily life in contemporary poetry, Yu Nv is a model to the end, and the vanguard of Yu Nv's poetry lies in this: poetry is to convey the true feelings of existence, if it is not true, it is better not to write; If it is for the sake of truth, we can sacrifice the normality of language and the fluency of meaning. Pioneer means that the person who walks in front is a pioneer and has a positive meaning; In Yu Nu's view, the kitsch and mediocrity of contemporary poetry cannot be tolerated. He wrote such a poem, which is actually a tradition of seeking truth and a real "vigil" for the dead. It seems to be an indomitable "pioneer", but in fact it exposes the dying appearance of contemporary poetry in some aspects.

Five, lifelong opposition

How to describe the image of jade slave as a poet in contemporary poetry?

People's pursuit of the ready-made meaning and value of the world is so rash that the poet has long made a mockery. In fact, this behavior of seeking knowledge is no different from that described by the poet in his short poem "Cremation": "An elephant and a group of ants/ants carve elephants//The nose of the world is too long or too short", and the ants just touch the elephant. It is a sad thing that the pursuit of literature has become the norm today. More sadly, we have been drifting with the flow and living in this bubble-filled literary world:

The bottle chased the river.

My late-night hobby

I walked onto the deck.

I put the food I ate all day.

I threw it all up on the deck.

One day at a time.

There is an empty wine bottle floating.

I mourn for the people who took this ship.

-"Navigation"

Yu Nu's unique poetics was not born, but after years of long-term practice, his understanding, tolerance and dissatisfaction with traditional poetics broke out in the early 1990s. In a literary resume, there is his history: "1September 1988, he wrote a long poem" Destruction ",which is a summary of the lyric poems of the previous four years. Is a full stop, marking the end of the era of personal lyricism. Since then, old works over the years have been destroyed. In June, 5438+00, he founded Yehai Poetry Society with his poetry friends. 1June 1989, Yehaishi was listed as an' illegal publication' and was seized and summoned by the public security organs. " In the Chronology of Jade Slave Literature, Jade Slave "1992 12" began to write defiantly against the rules out of dissatisfaction with the popular taste and inertia of poetry and doubts about his early creation. Yu Nu expressed doubts about all kinds of lyrical, narrative or oral writing popular in this era. In his poems, he called it a "bubble" and opposed it all his life:

I have opposed blisters all my life.

Dictators, eunuchs, musicians

A good doctor, a couple

Flower dealer

I have opposed it all my life.

Bubbles emerged from the water.

-"The Sea of Bitterness"

What rules does Yunu despise? In fact, it is mainly the ideographic rule of poetry: meaning is conveyed by language, ignoring the characteristics and complexity of language itself. Yunu's suspicion and subversion are very thorough. He questioned language and meaning itself. The problem with poetry is that these two basic aspects are out of order. First, his strategy is to break the normal signifier-signified chain in culture by using abnormal language (such as ambiguity, misinterpretation, strong reference, random meaning, etc.), so that the language is deformed and the meaning is in crisis, thus making reading difficult and reproducing (meaning) possible (rather than passively accepting), thus releasing complex "body" writing. In Yu Nu's view, the world is a "nominal * * * structure". "Nominal * * structure" refers to the unnatural state of human psychology and society formed by the formatting of the world under language and the confirmation of the world by language ... another state opposite to the above nominal * * * structure, which I often call "speechless". It is people's understanding of the world before using language. This kind of understanding is a pure individual feeling that is not interfered by the outside world, and it is the original understanding. "(Semantic Load 4 of Multi-sense) In this world of name and reality, people are like the bottle of water mentioned earlier." I have been opposing/bubbling all my life. Yu Nu called this life a "sea of suffering", which shows the difficulty for Yu Nu to stick to his own poetics. Some scholars once called Chen Duxiu a "lifelong opposition" 8-because his personal thoughts were always different from the mainstream ideology, and he insisted on his own opinions even if he ended in tragedy. "Dictator, eunuch, musician, good doctor, lover, florist" ... Contemporary poetry is full of all kinds of characters and fashionable words. Here, we can see that another Anqing native, Yu Nu, also played the role of fighting against mainstream discourse and fashion discourse. Adhering to the cleverness, pioneer and stubbornness of Anqing people (another stubborn Anqing person is Haizi), Yu Nu is the "lifelong opposition" in the poetry circle of this era.