Editor's note
"Poetry Collection Recommendation" is a new column jointly established by China Poetry Network and China Publishing Media Business Daily to regularly recommend newly published excellent poetry collections in China, with a poetry collection in each issue and published every Sunday. At the end of the year, the "Poetry Magazine" and the "China Publishing and Media Business Daily" will organize experts to conduct a strict review of the poetry collections recommended in this column, select the top ten poetry collections of the year, and release the "Annual Chinese Poetry List".
In this issue, the recommended poet Yuancun's poetry collection "Painting the Earth for the Sky" will be published by Shaanxi Normal University Publishing House in June 2024. Welcome readers and friends to comment and share!
Introduction to the poetry collection ▍
The poetry collection "Painting the Earth for the Sky" includes 147 poems written by poet Tomura from 2017 to 2021. These poems are the most important works of Tomura's poetry writing in recent years, and many of them are related to the writing methods of poetry, aesthetic orientation, and value identification. When dealing with daily life and poetic experience, Tomura's calm, narrative, and defamiliarized writing attitude close to the essence of life, and the classic writing tradition of Fu Bixing, which we generally believe, can be self-consistently integrated into a poem no matter what the situation, and this kind of lyrical and narrative intertwined writing approach effectively solves the problem of referential reference between poetic imagery and factual poetry and the ability to graft language.
"Painting the Earth for the Sky" is Tomura's sixth collection of poems published publicly, and the poems included in it are consistently obsessed with the pursuit of the duality of human spiritual perception, so that his poems generally have a profound and wise philosophical quality. Yuancun's poetry has a broad vision, not only the national imagination of the Qingdao maglev train and the Zhuzhou high-speed railway, but also the multi-angle personalized and delicate expression of the Yellow River, the falling rain, and even a drop of water.
About the Author▍
Yuancun, a native of Yanchuan, Shaanxi, is a poet, calligrapher and painter, senior editor, a member of the Chinese Writers Association, and a director of the Chinese Poetry Society. In 1993, he was named one of the top ten poets in the country, and in 2022, he was named one of the top ten Chinese poets of the year. He has won many awards such as the 2nd Liu Qing Literary Award (2010), the Golden Camel Award at the 3rd Silk Road International Poetry Festival (2020), and the Best Achievement Award at the 7th China Long Poetry Award (2022). He has published 6 poetry collections such as "Floating Earth and the Common Life", "Direction" and "Selected Poems of the Distant Village", 2 prose collections such as "The Wrong House", and 5 collections of poems, calligraphy and painting such as "Poems and Calligraphy and Painting of the Distant Village", "Ode to Upward" and "Poems, Calligraphy and Painting".
Painting the Earth for the Sky
Selected Poems
More trains are coming in
Time was squeezed into another street, with an old train
Drive into the northernmost square of the factory.
Waiting for a medical check-up, I came when the sun was shining from the roof of the car
Turn around
Cast a shadow on the concrete floor over the machine room.
My shadow and I mirror each other between the two railroad tracks.
The suspended work surface, the agile robot, will be some seeming
Simple things come together.
Let them, as a tough and massive whole.
Catch up with the distance that is owed to us.
Rather than being wrapped in an unfamiliar poster
Waiting for flowers and praise
Strike together. In a place called Xi'an, I saw
Too many miracles
In this way, it was created by a hand higher than human.
Then from one person to another
From one city to another.
More trains will come in and be well conditioned
One by one, the freshly dressed angry horses drove out of the factory in front of me.
I couldn't help the excitement in my heart, so I shouted.
I shouted at them to stop and make more time
Take me from a certain station, a certain carriage of the train
Bring to another, bigger station.
There are also poetry brothers who shook hands with me and said good, and they also did not reserve
Bring them.
The story begins with the bullet train
A story has been dormant for too long, and I can't bear to disturb it.
And the scheming woman
What kind of agreement with a train in the late Qing Dynasty
Not for me to care about.
In Tangshan, I want to see a bullet train, how it is
From the wasteland after the catastrophe, get back up.
The statue standing on the majestic shore is an industrial gold business card that makes people look up.
Walk into the factory, simple work clothes
Workshops and machine tools.
Follow the program you set up before and open it to me
A small set of secrets hidden in the massive array of chips.
I couldn't have found a better word than exclamation
Express my state of mind at the moment.
The numbers and strangers I have silently recited, the revival trumpet
From near to far
There is no chance to meet face-to-face, the whole process of a train from conception to childbirth.
So, my Gengzi summer passed quickly
Some unexpected encounters
It has become a legend in history, frequently appearing at the beginning of the story
Low-key and pragmatic.
The Lackawanna Valley，George Inness，1855
The maglev train made me fly
It's not easy to get a train flying.
On the edge of the continent, an indescribable sea breeze blows in
Qingdao under the sun is a little lighter than heavy.
Between me and it, a maglev train
Fast at 600 kilometers per hour
Push summer into a corner.
Looking at it, I want to fly off the ground.
The squares in overalls let me see some
Unfamiliar symbols, in the eyes of the operating wheel
Rewriting ourselves.
There is a face, not without beauty, swiping open the electronic screens on both sides.
In an instant, I fell into the sea of the Internet
Don't dare to say a word out loud.
A complete layman, by chance.
I was lucky enough to see it
The fastest train in the world, I had a close encounter with it
I can't help but forget some old things.
Everything in front of me is like a prescription prescribed by an old Chinese medicine doctor, and few people understand it
Only scribbled Chinese characters are still legible.
The sea breeze would blow in non-stop, blowing through the rooftops and squares.
In the four directions of Qingdao, the rain is very heavy, so heavy that it is for me
I can't see the real estate on the sea.
I can't even see my own face.
But I could see a maglev train, banging on and on
Delayed flights.
Their differences can be ignored and will not disappoint me.
Good times with high-speed rail
Attracted by a high-speed train, I almost lost
A poet
should be imaginative, with a sense of rhythm.
In a certain section of the Xiangjiang River, I encountered some people who were often encountered
Happy patronizers
Walk out of the factory building and point out the bright things
and by us
It's been talked about over and over again, good times.
More suspense was taken away by a column of Fuxing.
They're faster than my heart beats
Be quicker.
When I came to Zhuzhou, I was a blessed person.
Those industrial parts that can't be named, they have transcendence
Luban's exquisiteness and elegance.
Waiting for me, a northerner who writes poetry, to get drunk
And listen to their alternative statements.
From the side of the car, the light that flicked over
It fills the irreconcilable rift between me and the South.
I know, it's not too hard.
Of course, it won't be too easy.
I just got acquainted with electronic semiconductors, gears and motors.
They have everything, and a sense of direction that keeps clocking in
Essential details, intonation and keywords to become a big era
It deserves my comfort with a poem.
And truly accept what they brought me
The speed and fury of poetry.
Christmas Eve，George Inness
Read Borges on the train
Not far from Wuhan, I was lying on an old-fashioned green-skinned train
Attaching one of the axes
A collection of poems on a vellum cover.
It was a summer morning, and I was in the bottom left corner of the cover
Found Borges, who was very cowhiatish.
This Latinus, who suffers from a serious eye disease, is said to love his homeland.
Buenos Aires, who loved him.
There was also a young and beautiful widow who had the right to inherit his property.
These experiences are briefly written at the beginning of the book.
So, I began to envy his position as librarian.
As for his poetry collection, I read it slowly as the train was speeding forward.
That is, I may be in a state of shaking
Breath
Read one of the poems in the collection.
Or maybe just read the afterword and fall asleep.
I know that when I meet Borges, so will the journey of life
Something unexpected has changed.
For example, when I finished reading "General Kiroga Rides a Carriage to Death."
I burst into tears.
I seem to have seen Northern Shaanxi many years ago, General Liu Zhidan
After crossing the Yellow River, there is no return.
When a short poem "The Butcher's Shop" came into view, I suddenly thought of perfume.
I thought of a certain woman who passed by.
The train is traveling at a speed of 60 kilometers per hour to the three towns of Wuhan.
It happened to be a summer afternoon.
My imagination is made simple.
Or maybe there's a little trouble in mind.
Outside the car window, by the river, a poet paints on the ground
A water duck, busy crossing the river in the evening breeze.
The train passed by, leaving some smoke and dust in Chudi.
A southern face, wetter than the south, more exaggerated than poetry.
She hung on the window across from me
Keep staring at Borges in my hand with beautiful eyes.
I was staring at her, like two voyeurs, like two spies.
And just like that, the train roared across the land
My heart began to go up and down.
I shouted when the high-speed train passed Lanzhou
That summer, I was going to Qinghai, and the sun was scorching along the way
People are particularly prone to sleepiness, and on the high-speed train, I was confused for a while
Just for a moment
As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw a large river running through a city
A middle-aged man
On the big iron bridge, walk like a snake
I shouted: Ah, the Yellow River
The man looked back at me
Continue moving towards the bridgehead. I shouted again: Ah
The strange woman sitting next to me
Stood up and made a false gesture in the aisle
It seems to be evading, and it seems to be deliberately pandering
Left and right are gestures
By the time I came to my senses, it was over
The feeling of desolation in my heart didn't seem to squeeze me
What took my breath away was the sudden realization of myself
Sitting on the high-speed train
How can a cramped carriage accommodate a poet
Blatant noise?
So I was thinking, the city I passed through
It must be Lanzhou
Because in my impression, the Yellow River runs through the city of the provincial capital
Lanzhou is the only one
The man who walked on the bridge must have been a calligrapher
Because the way he looks at me, he is also the only one
Some of the grass was almost blown down by the wind
Moonlight Reflections，Granville Redmond
A train passes through the Kunlun Pass
There is no god who did not come down from Kunlun Mountain.
If you accidentally break the moonshine, those so-called superpowers
It is bound to lose more than half in front of me.
See the snow like ice, and the small wash is like jade.
On the roof of the world, even if the gods are allowed to speak, it is not necessarily
Can clearly tell a train, passing over the ice of the Kunlun Pass
How happy is it? At the very least, it will break the tranquility.
To the chagrin of uninvited guests
You can't stay here and race against time with the gods on the mountain.
And I still love the moonlight on Kunlun Mountain
It's direct, harsh, and translucent
With the humility and mystery of a fairy.
On the way of heaven, their lonely shadows hang low, and they are not in place
It is undignified to be on duty.
I had to change my tone and say hello to them.
In the carriage, I played a game with a sea passenger
The game of the Lower Riba people.
It is as if a messenger with the king's order accidentally fell into the casino.
Under the impassive face
Give me a gentle blow. I know it's not what I want.
Those laymen, on the way to Lhasa, they can't
In place of a poet, he confronts the unreal world.
Impossible to relate
I was frightened by the piercing sound of an avalanche.
So, I boldly reached out
Greet the gods, I just have to look at them, not call them.
Looking at the iceberg outside the car window, I kept retreating into the dark night behind me
I let go of my hanging heart.
Such an encounter is in another time period
Another night, I experienced it.
In Baotou, I thought about it quickly
Not everyone can run faster than the wind
In Baotou, not everyone can be fast
There are some people who, sooner or later, will be by the Yellow River
Get up
The wind ruffled the towel on his head, and he didn't care
Perhaps, they are not the fastest yet
The fastest should be the sapons, which come from the Yin Mountain
慢悠悠underground 来
When you are about to arrive in the city, you will be flaxed, too
It was the wheat, and I stumbled a little
They stopped, no more
Approach the overloaded city. Of course, not anyone
There are such blessings
It can slow down the luxury of the fast, and then let the slow things go
Hurry up immediately
In Baotou, the speed of the deer is the fastest
It can outspeed an eagle
Even faster than high-speed rail
However, in my eyes, none of them are the fastest
The fastest, the sheep grazing in the loop
They run faster than the wind
Sunset，George Inness，1865
Testimonials ▍
The title of Tomura's poetry collection, Painting the Earth for the Sky, is suggestive and defining, and if the extreme language art system of poetry is understood as the art of encompassing heaven and earth, then the title of the book already contains Tomura's poetic ambitions or ideals, as well as his personal understanding and resolute self-definition of the poetics of our time. I have been friends with Brother Yuancun for 30 years, he is the first person of our generation to set out from northern Shaanxi to chase the distance and poetry, he is one of the pioneers of modernism in our land of suffering and glory, roughness and benevolence, he debuted more than ten years before me, and he is a brother and fellow whom I respect very much. He is not only an empirical poet, he is also a conceptual and ideological poet. This era is an era that is difficult to literary, textual, poetic, and poetic, and how we deal with the reality, experience, and human nature of this technological landscape era, Tomura and his new poetry collection "Painting the Earth for the Sky" provide important beliefs and inspirations.
- Yan An
Vice President of the Chinese Poetry Society, Vice Chairman of the Shaanxi Writers Association
After reading "Painting the Earth for the Sky", I think that the meaning of Tomura's poetry should include the following aspects: First, the modernity of poetry. Through the dramatization of poetry, Tomura starts from the most subtle places, placing the vast daily background and humanistic plot in his own irreversible textual exploration, and he uses the symbols of the industrial era to poetically deal with the relationship between classical imagery and modern consciousness. The second is the historicity of poetry. Yuancun's long poem "The High Wall to the North" is a rare epic work with a grand atmosphere, which puts forward his own unique views on the history of the emergence and consolidation of Chinese civilization and the integration of multiple ethnic groups in the Yellow River Valley, and gives a poetic and contemporary answer. The third is the everydayness of poetry. Tomura's poetic texts in recent years have a strong sense of compassion, which stems from the fact that he is very good at dealing with the complex relationship between man and nature, man and man, and man and society through the drama of poetry.
- Feng Jingting
Poet, horticulturist, art critic, and the initiator of the Seven Sons of Zhongnan Poetry Group
Postscript to "Painting the Earth for the Sky".
I have always felt that we must have a cautious attitude when it comes to writing and reading poetry, because after a hundred years of development of modern Chinese poetry, situations and problems have been raised again and again. Is our poetry writing still traditional? Or should we absorb beneficial nutrients from the results of ancient style poetry? In short, we have to face two traditions in today's poetry writing: one is the metrical poetry tradition with a history of more than 2,000 years, which is a fairly stable tradition, and the other is the free verse tradition with a history of only 100 years, which is in the process of change, its internal structure is extremely unstable, it is more disturbed by the outside world, and it is easy to be swayed by new things and fall into an unknown linguistic puzzle. Therefore, when my writing, to be precise, my poetry writing is still in the period of voice change, and there are still many things related to the lack of clarity in the logical relationship between poetic experience and everyday imagery, I still can't come up with an accurate answer to the two poetic traditions, whether to follow the trend, to go back to the stream, or to find another way.
Fortunately, the dissemination of poetry is not something that the poet himself can control, and its effect depends entirely on the reading of poetry, which in essence is the process of identifying a poet's talent. In other words, the practical influence of poetry is extremely limited, and the writing of history is only fragmented, jumping, and unclear, and it is impossible to leave a clear trace on human memory. Of course, I have always thought that a real poet must be synonymous with talent and enlightenment, and there is no shortage of great poets who can leave a name in history with a small poem, but after all, there are more ordinary poets, who only care about the part of life they can feel and use a suitable way of speaking to show readers their scheming, and general language wisdom and life perception.
About 10 years ago, I decided to publish my last collection of poems, Selected Poems of the Far Village, to bid farewell to my status as a poet, and from then on I would concentrate on the study of calligraphy and painting, and no longer care about poetry. But when I picked up a brush and copied the Book of Songs on rough-edged paper, I found an impulse, a kind of guidance, that made me easily return to my spiritual homeland like a sleepwalker. The poems in the "Book of Songs" are spontaneous, natural, fragrant, and the people who work can breathe fresh air freely, put down their farm tools, and run a long way to date the person they like. I couldn't help but sigh: "What kind of scene is this/My God, I want to praise / The ancestors of my Zhou dynasty." ”
I also found that the poems in the Book of Songs have a common feature in terms of expression, that is, lyricism and narrative exist at the same time in a poem, and their importance is obvious, and there is no distinction between priority and priority. For me, this discovery is too significant, and it solves one of my long-standing puzzles in poetry writing, that is, how to deal with the proportion of lyricism and narrative in a poem, that is, how to deal with the relationship between light and dark, virtual and real, more and less. With this realization, my love for writing was ignited again, my enthusiasm for poetry writing became more and more intense, good sentences came uninvited, and writing itself became relaxed and enjoyable. Immediately afterwards, I revisited the development of classical poetry, and found that although the forms of poetry in different eras are changeable, they all have the same lyrical and narrative expression tradition as the Book of Songs, which has always existed, but has been ignored by me. Now that he has woken up, he does not hesitate to use it extensively in his poetry writing. So the state of writing in the past few years should be the best in my life as a poet, I wrote a long poem and three poetry collections, and the urge to write is still there. This strengthened my direction in poetry writing. My poems are ostensibly about objective things, but in fact they point more to a state of mind, or rather, the verses that surprise the reader are essentially the autobiography of a poet. So many daily routines in life have been turned into flying poems by me, and as long as I want, I can dance beautifully on the two nouns at any time. According to my observation, the poet's transcendence in the true sense, in addition to the transcendence of the soul, also the self-transcendence of the way of poetic expression, good poetry, on the surface, is a literary reflection of concrete daily things, in fact, the poet must have ulterior motives. People always hope that their worldview and methodology will benefit the people around them, at least to be recognized by their relatives, friends and future generations, and to help them in their lives. I also have a small desire to be read by more people after the publication of my poetry collection, and I am satisfied.
To be honest, I still have a certain amount of pressure to publish this collection of poems, I am afraid that others will not be able to understand the theme of my poems, and I am afraid that the intention of my language will be misunderstood. What is poetry, how to write poetry, and there are also blind spots in understanding? When I re-read my own poem: "I have painted a man's earth into the sky of many." / I want more people to fly, and the higher the better", I dispelled that concern. I firmly believe that all literature is for communication, and poetry, as literature within literature, communicates more directly. When readers read poetry, it is a collision between spirits and spirits, or a recognition between souls. It doesn't matter whether it is ancient poetry or modern poetry, it is impossible to avoid the poet's expectations and concerns about the real world. To be precise, it is impossible for a poet to give up the life he wants to see, and this desired life is so kind, so real, so unquestionable, and must be expressed in a language that is suitable for it. As I said in one of my poems, "I painted myself in the painting." My hair, my limbs. / And my over-inflated lust is also drawn in. / Don't ask me how I'm doing. My Three Kingdoms, My Water Margin. / My golden plum, my dream of red mansions. / My Condor Heroes have also been painted in the paintings. ”
I know that writing such verses is the most decisive compromise between a poet and the world he has ever fought against, and that it is the insight and insight of man after middle age, and if I can weaken the strength of the human heart a little bit, then I can establish a rough balance between poetry and facts, but I can't do that, because in the long night, the poet can only say what he thinks is the most important, and nothing else matters.
Returning to real life, I found that our poetry is rarely dragged down by time, and it can even be said that poetry cannot change the direction of time and indulge in a vivid and textured language carnival, if we boldly give up the interaction between imagery, context, and rhythm, and directly say our own realistic insight, language affinity, and rich and subtle sensibility of life. So, will I be able to get my old self back in the next moment?
There are many issues involved in writing and reading poetry, but the root cause is the self-discovery of life. Today's world has undergone earth-shaking changes, a middle-aged poet writes hard in order to settle his soul, and always maintains a sense of novelty about the things around him, this sense of novelty can take the poet to find his lost self, but also to take the reader back to the scene of life. In my previous writing experience, I believe that poets have extremely limited discourse power, even pale and weak. The nature of poetry lies in revelation and manifestation, and it is the enlightenment of the metaphysical Tao. Therefore, in my opinion, poetry is the poet's discovery of life, but also the discovery of the poet's inner world, and readers can only gain something by reading patiently, so as to complete the philosophical and aesthetic shaping of their own personality in their daily experience.
I am very grateful to Mr. Liu Dongfeng, President of Shaanxi Normal University Publishing House, for allowing me to publish this poetry collection smoothly, and to Ms. Shu Min and Ms. Peng Yan for their careful editing, which made my poetry collection more perfect and benefited me a lot.
Far Village
December 9, 2023
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Editor: Xinyu, Second Trial: Man Man, Final Review: Jin Shikai