Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Low.
Local Reality: Necessary Fiction
The flame extinguished, it's time to clear the ashes,
chaos, seen from a broader perspective,
yields order. Dunes unite with the beach,
the wind's direction and the ocean is also dunes of liquid,
temporal. Swallows fly densely, then scatter,
riding air currents, spiralling, ascending, suddenly entering
strong winds from the sea, like raindrops tinged with rust,
unfolding tilted fans. Those lines, upright thin lines,
slanted, curved thick lines, with sharpness,
assimilated by promenading colour blocks into a vibrant harmony.
Suddenly arriving novelties, in later hours,
meet misfortune, but see from the future's direction,
humbly shrink into a dot, dismissible by architects,
while architecture becomes the fiction of sand and bricks,
viewed abstractly as the provincial government hovering above the city
by designers with inverted telescopes. Magazines advance seasons,
including festivals, weather, sweat. Morning's forecasted drizzle
delays its arrival, postponing the evening's advent altogether.
Who postpones his own life? Shaking off flames from shoulders,
attaining bone-chilling cold from ashes.
Burning is extinguishing. What extinguishes here burns elsewhere,
Revealing influence in the future, but not beyond
the horizon and a gradually narrowing window: a series of nested windows
pushing to the corner of a computer screen,
easily magnify one window, dragging it around aimlessly
until the inertia of reality reaches zero. Like a mouse
clasping onto a clip on its tail. But there are no slogans on the streets,
no red armbands. Only Microsoft's colossal advertisements
continuously zoom in and out of the sky. Like a square basketball hoop
catching the Earth. Deep things manifest on the flat plane.
Things yet to exist govern you, demanding you possess
traits of the worldly. A child aims at you from afar,
a cardboard target collapsing under the pressure of a water column,
slow-motion falling waist-down. Dampness connects grasslands and forests
and farther highways, silence and a family's childhood:
A poem yet to take shape alters your physiological responses.
Who exactly dominates whom? Its future
is your identity. You will never have an identity,
never gather images of yourself scattered in crowds,
a series of nested offices diminishing you to nil.
Some things, in life as in poetry,
will never continue. Continues the weather
and the prelude to weather, the workshops stay idle,
the commuter bus remains punctual. Perfect days continue starting like this:
"It's really cold out." "Yeah, freezing."
"That rain last night, it was pouring."
"Oh, I must've been asleep, didn't hear."
"Raindrops were huge like this."
Another interjects, "More rain tonight."
"What about daytime?" "Same, light to moderate."
Then gazing out the window, repeating landscapes, or catnapping.
In the evenings they discuss stocks, river swelling, the sinking of something，
and the floating of others. Topics from the previous day
don’t continue, but they start anew:
"Bought 'Life'?" They exchange morning papers,
and in the finance section are the changes they care about.
I take it literally, "Life, is it for sale?"
As morning papers, evening papers, weeklies, and dailies, all slap
my forehead, chasing away lingering dreams, I know the numbers
unified content with form has covered our consciousness.
Things along the way, snowballing, enveloping the expanding brain like a runaway.
Local news, the announcer broadcasts in standard Mandarin,
those who missed it read newspapers, without newspapers
listen to recaps, more concise and condensed instead.
A corpse circulates among munching mouths, its odour
permeates every province of the body. A reader reaches climax,
removes his glasses, and raises his voice. They marvel at the cunning of a criminal,
calculating how many Benzes or Crowns he can buy with embezzled funds,
pondering the "additional" income of a factory director for a year,
they instantly became sons of bitches. The universality of fact comes from
standard Mandarin. A culprit steals tyres from a car accident.
People all stand up in public buses, make a saluting glance,
those on the road resemble a black wreath draped over wreckage,
holding an early funeral. Direction and distance become immediate issues.
I sit among the heels of people's shoes, contemplating
how to describe a car accident and how to make the brief things
enter eternity. In it, control death's acceleration
with intonation, line breaks, and punctuation. How to make the absent
present, rewind time. But clearly, there's no place inside
for a soul. For it's inconceivable to imagine a soul
in violent agitation, following the forward inertia of matter
or following God's gravity upward, like a diver with hands raised high
floating towards the surface of the atmosphere. What is a soul?
What's the ratio between soul and body weight? If one
finds oneself floundering amid material surroundings, and appreciates
this floundering, is it the soul at play?
Is it the soul that makes dough ferment and rise?
Local news, radio waves shuttle through the air, saliva and lead type,
coarse fingers stained black, jammed into ear canals, excavating.
The Atlantic swirls like half a newspaper, sucks into a flushing toilet.
Readers of the day-after newspaper feel their appearance is antiquated.
God sits at the computer, rotating, adeptly transforming things
into symbols. Each entity is projected into another space
by corresponding laws. Inside the dark machine,
a tired screw loosens, and a grain of sand trembles
wearing out the heart. What life disallows
finds fulfilment in electronic games, In this regard
computers are as useful as poetry. I love this occupation
this age didn't prepare us for a Troy,
but gave us something better: Pentium, Intel.
is it an abbreviation for "International"?
The Internet spreads the passion of revolutionising viruses
at light speed. Clouds obstruct every harbour,
in science lie factors humans can't predict and grasp,
eventually, human beings will be governed by their creations.
"Seems you’re not doing well in your occupation." In art,
necessary ambiguity yields unexpected meanings,
unlike in science. "I know, I analyse reports, charts,
Yunnan's earthquake and leader's demise, stocks require rationality,
unlike art." Knowledge doesn't bring happiness,
the stock exchange hall turns rational people into intuitive ones.
"This is too negative. Your talent should bring something,
is the remuneration high? Do you want to earn all your money at once
or slowly? Hang out with them! Find a way in." Hang out with whom?
Apart from money, people have no common ground and topic,
listeners' shrewd eyes look like fishes about to slip away,
objects on two planes cause friction, on one plane
lead to a collision. Like two people in love, first collide in thoughts,
then in bodies. Ice rubs leaving behind melting conversation,
a boring conversation exposes the folly of both sides,
turning an abstract person back into a concrete one.
The grand fictional principle governs everything. Most times,
you don't feel reality, only at certain moments does it reveal itself,
stubborn like a rusty nail poking out of a wooden plank, for example
allotting houses, raising wages, assessing professional titles, son’s school enrolment,
money and power fictionalise reality, so you resort to fictionalising poetry,
you can continue like this, at least end up sacrificing for art,
but your son is innocent. Between personal freedom and responsibility,
a deflated ball is kicked back and forth, getting flatter and flatter,
putting everything into poetry is still a paper tiger,
unable to withstand wind and rain, let alone fire burning.
Money, money, money! Money increases in price every day,
a poem used to sell for twenty yuan, now it is only ten.
Elizabeth Bishop said poetry is a sketch of an old Canadian dollar,
white, grey-green, or iron-grey. I think it's more like a cartoon:
metaphors and symbols amend colloquialisms, abstracts distort concretes,
cabbage and tomato prices change daily, like weather,
pedlars and customers tug of war over every inch of land,
one weakens, the other strengthens. But the strongest
is still the dollar. Overlapped elderly faces are repeatedly posted.
The faces of students doing application questions in the market are blurred.
Reality is astronomical figures, you are a decimal point.
how to combat it? You can't even find its nest,
a part of reality can crush you, more terrifying than a woman's parts.
The realism of holding a magnifying glass reflects parts as wholes,
while the romanticism of holding a telescope scorns reality.
How can an observer see clearly what surrounds him?
Attitude towards reality separates crowds in the square,
flower corpses wrapped in plastic bags fly into the clouds,
The face of an island nation living on guano export spreads overhead,
Those who advocate of fiction themselves are phantoms, just pretending to be unaware.
So allow me to fictionalise a true story,
I place it in a loss-making factory in the twentieth century,
on the thirteenth floor, an office overlooking the river, a middle-aged man,
a melancholic love affair. Not in a park, not on
the dance floor of desire spinning, farting, trampling the sea
on the backs of codfish, or the heaven ascending higher and higher in a word,
this took half an hour of collective time and personal passion from him,
including pauses for water and restroom breaks,
he seemingly accidentally brushes her hand on the hesitant chess move,
the coldness inside his body prompts him to grasp it, "Are you cold?"
Her hand coils around his like a warm little snake
(She sat behind him when she was first assigned,
pitied him and his untimely poems incessantly)
her narrow hips make him feel the stinginess of fate,
he starts to elevate, seeking excuses for his timidity,
"Don't think life can be entered endlessly,
only at my age, one can understand love isn't a game,
but a measure of humanity." He quotes others sentences,
playing with childish feelings, "We shouldn't be like this."
Her fluctuating chemical face slaps his moral sense.
"Let's write letters, it's the only thing worth treasuring."
Two years later she's still so thin, except for some parts getting thicker.
He loves her more, and sees it as the end of youth
rather than an episode, nurturing an inevitable old age
with the body. They didn't say goodbye, nor write letters,
he was more like a mentor, accompanying her through the purgatory of youth,
returning her to a happy marriage. The world took away
his last straw, leaving only boring memories and
the agony of visceral shapes. Now he writes these down
as if writing someone else's story, as if he doesn't exist.
15 May 1997-3 December 1997
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