A Conversation with Shang Qin
Shang Qin was born in Sichuan, China in 1930, but has lived in Taiwan since 1950. The author of four volumes of poetry, the now 76-year-old poet is one of the island's most distinguished poets and a master of the prose poem, a genre he helped introduce in the late fifties and early sixties. Although retired for many years, Shang Qin continues to write regularly and is working on a new volume of poetry. This interview took place in a Taipei Starbucks on July 15, the day after Typhoon Bilis struck the island. I had made the appointment before hearing of the typhoon's approach, and had called Shang Qin to postpone the meeting to some day when the weather would be more favorable to someone of his advanced age and physical frailty, but much to my surprise, he insisted on keeping the appointment, saying “It's just a little wind and rain, nothing to be afraid of.” I was even more surprised when, at the end of our conversation, he mentioned in passing that he had Parkinson's Disease, for he showed few of the signs or symptoms I associated with that affliction. On the contrary, he seemed physically quite composed and answered my questions with a clarity and wit that I could not help admiring. Looking into his eyes, I felt he possessed a remarkable strength of character that I hope comes through in the following interview, which contains the gist of our conversation.
Zona Yi-Ping Tsou
Taipei, July 28, 2006When did you start writing poetry?
In 1949 or thereabouts. I was with the Nationalist troops when they retreated to the mountains of Yunnan and Guizhou. I was flat-footed and thus often fell behind. Sometimes I used that as an excuse to try and run away, but I was always overtaken by other troops, who usually took me in without a word. It was a chaotic time, and we were fighting a losing battle. Anyway, when I found myself alone up there in the mountains, I would get these feelings that I wanted to express in words. That was how I began to write poetry.
What were these early poems like?
In the beginning, they were hardly poems, just sighs of emotion. About life, its precariousness, the frustration of not being able to do anything about the way things were. Being caught didn't really matter that much to me, it was all so meaningless. But out of this arose the desire to write.
Were these prose poems?
No, free verse. I didn't start writing prose poems until the late 50s or early 60s, when I became active in the Modernist Poetry Movement spearheaded by Ya Xian and others.
So none of your prose poems reflect this early experience you spoke of?
Some do, like “The Flame.” Once, when one of my close messmates went AWOL, the commanding officers believed I knew where he had gone and so had me interrogated. They tortured me in fact. They beat me with a bamboo carrying pole and even broke it in the process, but I didn't say a word. So then they forced me to lie down on a wooden bench and flushed my mouth and nostrils with water to make me gag.
Was this icy water like in the poem?
No, not icy water, spicy water! Water laced with hot peppers. The poem reflects this experience, but I also transformed it. The persona in the poem is based not on me but on Ma Shan, a character in the Ming novel Feng Shen Bang [The Investiture of the Gods], a general of the legendary Shang Dynasty said to be impervious to injury because he had originally been a candle flame in a temple altar.
You were one of the first poets in Taiwan to write prose poems. How were these received in the beginning?
With indifference mainly. It's a bit painful to talk about. It was such a long time ago.
Were they rejected because of their novelty?
Actually, only one of my poems has ever been rejected, the prose poem “Giraffe.” The editor was the poet Chin Tzu-hao, who returned it with a note that said, “Your imagery is deep and sweeping, but the diction needs more discipline.” Prose poetry was fairly novel at the time, but, from a Chinese point of view, it's not all that different from free verse. Lineation is a modern transplant from the West. Before the modern era, Chinese poetry didn't have line breaks, so you couldn't tell a poem's genre on the basis of its outer form. You could only tell from the language and the rhythm and tonal patterns and such. As my old friend the poet Ji Xian used to say, for the Chinese the modernist revolution wasn't a battle over genres but over poetic language, the abandonment of the classical literary language in favor of the modern spoken vernacular. It was basically a change of language tools. Being a poet who rails against any formal constraint, I naturally gravitated to the prose poem, which has none. For me, poetry isn't a frame but a frame of mind, one that I found as much in certain passages of classical prose as in the classical poetry, such as the Zhuangzi and Tao Yuanming's preface to the “Peach Blossom Spring.” No one remembers the poem Tao wrote on the same subject, only the prose preface, and for the reasons I've outlined.
What writers have had the most influence on your prose poems?
The first that comes to mind is the French surrealist poet Max Jacob. Many people think of me as a surrealistic, but I don't quite hold with that label for myself, although I am in sympathy with the surrealist agenda. To my way of thinking, surrealism is still a kind of realism, a super-realism, more real than real. Much of human behavior is repressed and constrained by social mores, but surrealist techniques are based on Freudian psychology and so have the power to take us under the surface of things, into the unconscious, where so much lies buried.
And the other big influences on your prose poetry?
Well, there's an anecdote in the Chinese Book of Rites that I couldn't get out of my head for years. It describes a starving person who refuses to accept food from someone giving alms because they're offered in such a contemptuous manner. It's not a prose poem, but there's something about the syntax and the quirkiness of the style that I found very appealing.
You attended the International Writing Program at Iowa University. What was that like?
At Iowa, they didn't really teach us much, and very few of us did any actual writing. Most of the time we just hung out together and talked about poetry and drank. We did a lot of that, so much so that somebody said they should rename the program the International Drinking Program. [Laughter.] Others suggested it be renamed the International Fucking Program, for reasons I'd rather not go into. [Laughter.] But I did learn something there. I learned not to confine myself to my old style, and experimented with some new ways of expression. I even wrote some poems, like “Cough,” the preface poem to my collection, Thinking with the Feet. When I was invited to Rotterdam a couple years ago, they asked me to recite a poem about music, but I didn't have any poems on that subject, so I read “Cough,” and they loved it.
You're talking about the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2002, right? Tell me about it?
It was a good experience. I heard a lot of good poets recite their work, although sometimes they lost something in translation. Some poems are well-shaped with deep structures, and have nothing to lose in translation. Others are loaded with so much cultural significance they're almost unfit for translation, like those of my good friend Zheng Chouyu, for instance. Few poems touch Chinese readers more deeply than his, but they are impossible to convey in translation. They're too laden with that cultural nostalgia so peculiar to the Chinese people, the feeling that—to paraphrase a line in his poem “Borderline Bar”—if I took one step beyond the border of China I'd be filled with the longing for home. I doubt Americans have such feelings when they cross the border into Canada.
I wonder if you wouldn't mind saying a few things about the two poems Steve Bradbury translated for this feature, especially “The Cat That Walked Through Walls”? What inspired you to write that? Did you have such a creature?
Not exactly. The poem was inspired by something I'd read in the Liaozhai Zhiyi [Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio] about a being that could walk through walls. I wanted to write something that manifests the human longing to transcend the constraints of time and space and all the rest. But I also wanted to write something about the limitations of love in human relationships, the problem of our never being wholly satisfied with what we have, no matter how good we may have it.
I hope you'll forgive me if I'm being indiscrete, but does this poem by any chance describe your relationship to the poet Luo Ying?
Here we venture into the realm of gossip. But yes, it does describe my relationship to Luo Ying, before we split up. Being married was a bit like fishing. When I go fishing I always come home feeling like the big ones got away, the ones that nibble on the bait but never take the hook, the ones you can't quite see and thus imagine are much bigger than the ones you actually land. That's the way I felt being married. Hence the line, “Happiness is the half that people never get.” Hence the writing on the wall, so to speak.
The Tiananmen Square Incident is obviously the background of “Snow, June 1989.” How did you feel about the incident, and why did you shape the poem the way you did?
One of the things that struck me most about Tienanmen Square was its bizarre timing. Most examples of bureaucratic injustice and betrayal usually get people hot and indignant, but Tiananmen Square left me with cold chills. Coming as it did at the height of summer, in the month of June, the contrast between the summer heat and the chill the incident cast over me put me in mind of the Beijing opera, “June Snow” (Liuyue xue).
Isn't that the story of Dou E, the woman condemned to death by corrupt officials who swore that if she were executed the god's would make it snow as proof of her innocence?
Exactly. Their tears turned to snow. Like a snowflake, this poem crystallized from a very cold source. By the way, I should point out that the title of my poem in Chinese is only “Snow,” not “Snow, June 1989.” Steve was worried non-Chinese readers wouldn't catch the allusions and asked if he could title his version, “June Snow, 1989.” I preferred “Snow, June 1989,” and so that's what he went with.
One last question, why did you center the poem on the act of folding a paper snowflake?
I like folding paper and do it now and then. I learned to fold from my sister, who made the most beautiful paper decorations when we were growing up on Sichuan. She was the best in our town and would paste her creations on the windows and doors. In folding a snow flake, I felt I was both mourning for and giving praise to those who were sacrificed.
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