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.
Revolving Door
Those who rise early in the morning
are the obverse and reverse of all things,
the tremor between two poles,
the days gone by and the body yet to come,
language lying in the tomb of the mouth,
the perspective that unites Babel, brick kilns and Ferris wheels as one.
He hurls a lone spear toward the wall,
and he himself is that trembling wall，
both the child upon the altar and the ram,
the traveler on the train with his back to the forward track,
holding up a mirror to search for his own shadow.
Forever turning a windmill of glass blades,
he fuses Hamlet’s hesitant contemplation
with Don Quixote’s reckless deeds,
unites Don Juan’s flesh and Ophelia’s madness into a single whole.
He is self-fertilizing pollen and quantum entanglement among stars,
Escher’s Red Ants, water flowing upstream,
monks treading downward, the Möbius strip,
a multidimensional creature reaching straight
to the sphere’s core without crossing its surface.
He is the still point of time, the alchemist
and his earnest formula, the spear turned away from death,
drawing a perfect circle, a cross suspended midair,
the spiral stairway Yeats climbed daily toward the Black Tower,
the converging point of two spinning cones moving toward each other.
He is the anti-romantic son who gives birth to his own father,
the unmoving flying arrow, the one wrestling with the invisible till dawn
whoever he strikes down, he becomes him;
then raises a ladder to heaven upon solid rock,
this is the final struggle, and also the last supper.
