酷我-北美枫

[星子]

Regaining Memory: A review of Anna Yin, Farewell to Sunflowers: Poem (English/Chinese), (second edition), http://anna.88just.com., 2007 52pp. ISBN 0-9739148-1-5)

By Terry Barker

Writing in the late 1950s, the Harvard University scholar of Chinese literature Glen W. Baxter noted that, while sometimes using traditional Chinese forms, “modern Chinese poetry” had in general “merely exchanged Chinese models for foreign ones, principally the imagists and Whitman in reverse chronological order.” Baxter went on to point out that in the fluid social and political situation of the country, “no general revitalization of …traditional (Chinese poetic) forms…appeared imminent.”

Farewell to Sunflowers, Anna Yin’s third chap-book of spiritually-sensitive verse represents, I believe, both the recovery of the “vast ocean” of Chinese poetry (as the editor of Poetry of the South calls the legacy) that has started to occur in China in the last twenty-five years, and the turn to healthier and more psychically-balanced or the overly self-inflated Whitman. For Ms Yin, an immigrant to Canada from Mainland China in1999, clearly find inspiration in the poetic tropes of her native tradition, with its combination of Taoistic mysticism and Confucian realism, and (on her own account) in the poetry of the “protesting Puritan” (as Louis Untermeyer calls her) of nineteenth-century New England, Emily Dickinson. This provides the reader with satisfying verse that is (in its English version, at least; I am not literate in Chinese) both deeply Chinese in cultural character, and modern Western in individual perspective, without being narrowly parochial in either respect.
Many examples of this happy conjunction in Farewell to Sunflowers might be cited, beginning with the first (and title) poem in the book, which opens with an expansion of the trope of the Excellent Archer of the Moon Festival who brought down nine suns that were threatening to shrivel up the world:

A million arrows are aimed at the sky
Yet the sun hasn’t been shot down.

The poet, then, “glancing back” sees that the “golden faces (of the sunflowers) are full of tears”, an observation that reveals “mourning grasses (that) burn flames in the wind”, and “duckweeds and swimming fish, those floating clouds and breezes” that “are all behind me in warm waves and lonely songs.” This meditation in turn leads the poet to the contemplative stage of the final stanza which concludes that

In turning, I lose my way
And feel the lotus core in pieces.
With arrows sifting through my hand,
I see sunset in crimson.

The poet has here, apparently, reached the psychics position of a doubting “demythologized” Excellent Archer, a type of modern mysticism holding both belief and skepticism concerning the order of being together within a trust in the “openness” of the self, a structure of consciousness most developed in New England Puritan mysticism, as Eric Voegelin has show (in his On the Form of the American Mind). Marshall Schacht, in his poem “Not to Forget Miss Dickinson”, has (perhaps a bit unkindly) formulated this cast of mind as it was crystallized in the work of the Amherst, Massachusetts, poet in the nineteenth century:

See how the sprightly squirrel mind
Resolves to the kernel love so great
The looking on it sets you blind
An instant, as if in sun or hate.

Observe the “gipsy face transfigured”
Go through the magic burning act
Of singing in a room beleaguered
Up to its sills by the gnawing fact.

New England Puritan mysticism developed as a distinct intellectual tradition, severed from its European roots, so that when its decline into a shallow pragmatism or eccentric esotericism set in during the latter part of the nineteenth century, it had no depth of experience from which to renew itself. This is, one hopes, not an inevitable outcome in the case back to the general history of the West, before the Age of Ideology States, often suffer from a very severe case of cultural amnesia in this regard). The centrality of anamnesis (recollection) in the main (mystic) stream of Western philosophy is expressed in an equivalent way for Chinese though by Ms Yin in the concluding stanza of her poem “ The trip to Lan Hill”:
Night is dark
I hear your words,
Memory is
The first sunray of dawn.

Bibliography

Baxter, Glen W. “Chinese Literature” in Encyclopedia Britannica, (1959 edition) Vol. 5, pp 569-573
Fang, Achilles “From Imagism to Whitmanism in Recent Chinese Poetry—A Search for Poetics That Failed”, in University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, No 13, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1955
Schacht, Marshall “Not to Forget Miss Dickinson” in Bennet, C.L. and Pierce, Lorne (eds), Argosy to Adventure, Toronto: The Ryerson Press/ The Macmillans in Canada,
1955 p. 120
Untermeyer, Louis “Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)” in A Concise Treasury of Great Poem: English and American, From the Foundations of the English Spirit to the Outstanding Poetry of Our Own Time with Lives of the Poets and Historical Settings,
New York: Pocket Books, 1976 pp. 360-361

Voegelin, Eric On the Form of the American Mind, (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 1), Gebhardt, Jurgen and Cooper Barry (eds), trans. Ruth Hein, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995

(Terry Barker teaches Canadian Studies at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Toronto. He is the author of two colletions of essays on the People's Poetry tradition, After Acorn (Mekler and Deahl, Hamilton and Pittsburgh, 1999) and Beyond Bethune (Synaxis Press, Dewdney, British Columbia, 2006).
He is currently working on a sequel volumn, Continuing Chesterton.
_________________

[[ANNA]]

Regaining Memory: A review of Anna Yin, Farewell to Sunflowers: Poem (English/Chinese), (second edition), http://anna.88just.com., 2007 52pp. ISBN 0-9739148-1-5)

By Terry Barker

Writing in the late 1950s, the Harvard University scholar of Chinese literature Glen W. Baxter noted that, while sometimes using traditional Chinese forms, “modern Chinese poetry” had in general “merely exchanged Chinese models for foreign ones, principally the imagists and Whitman in reverse chronological order.” Baxter went on to point out that in the fluid social and political situation of the country, “no general revitalization of …traditional (Chinese poetic) forms…appeared imminent.”

Farewell to Sunflowers, Anna Yin’s third chap-book of spiritually-sensitive verse represents, I believe, both the recovery of the “vast ocean” of Chinese poetry (as the editor of Poetry of the South calls the legacy) that has started to occur in China in the last twenty-five years, and the turn to healthier and more psychically-balanced or the overly self-inflated Whitman. For Ms Yin, an immigrant to Canada from Mainland China in1999, clearly find inspiration in the poetic tropes of her native tradition, with its combination of Taoistic mysticism and Confucian realism, and (on her own account) in the poetry of the “protesting Puritan” (as Louis Untermeyer calls her) of nineteenth-century New England, Emily Dickinson. This provides the reader with satisfying verse that is (in its English version, at least; I am not literate in Chinese) both deeply Chinese in cultural character, and modern Western in individual perspective, without being narrowly parochial in either respect.
Many examples of this happy conjunction in Farewell to Sunflowers might be cited, beginning with the first (and title) poem in the book, which opens with an expansion of the trope of the Excellent Archer of the Moon Festival who brought down nine suns that were threatening to shrivel up the world:

A million arrows are aimed at the sky
Yet the sun hasn’t been shot down.

The poet, then, “glancing back” sees that the “golden faces (of the sunflowers) are full of tears”, an observation that reveals “mourning grasses (that) burn flames in the wind”, and “duckweeds and swimming fish, those floating clouds and breezes” that “are all behind me in warm waves and lonely songs.” This meditation in turn leads the poet to the contemplative stage of the final stanza which concludes that

In turning, I lose my way
And feel the lotus core in pieces.
With arrows sifting through my hand,
I see sunset in crimson.

The poet has here, apparently, reached the psychics position of a doubting “demythologized” Excellent Archer, a type of modern mysticism holding both belief and skepticism concerning the order of being together within a trust in the “openness” of the self, a structure of consciousness most developed in New England Puritan mysticism, as Eric Voegelin has show (in his On the Form of the American Mind). Marshall Schacht, in his poem “Not to Forget Miss Dickinson”, has (perhaps a bit unkindly) formulated this cast of mind as it was crystallized in the work of the Amherst, Massachusetts, poet in the nineteenth century:

See how the sprightly squirrel mind
Resolves to the kernel love so great
The looking on it sets you blind
An instant, as if in sun or hate.

Observe the “gipsy face transfigured”
Go through the magic burning act
Of singing in a room beleaguered
Up to its sills by the gnawing fact.

New England Puritan mysticism developed as a distinct intellectual tradition, severed from its European roots, so that when its decline into a shallow pragmatism or eccentric esotericism set in during the latter part of the nineteenth century, it had no depth of experience from which to renew itself. This is, one hopes, not an inevitable outcome in the case back to the general history of the West, before the Age of Ideology States, often suffer from a very severe case of cultural amnesia in this regard). The centrality of anamnesis (recollection) in the main (mystic) stream of Western philosophy is expressed in an equivalent way for Chinese though by Ms Yin in the concluding stanza of her poem “ The trip to Lan Hill”:
Night is dark
I hear your words,
Memory is
The first sunray of dawn.

Bibliography

Baxter, Glen W. “Chinese Literature” in Encyclopedia Britannica, (1959 edition) Vol. 5, pp 569-573
Fang, Achilles “From Imagism to Whitmanism in Recent Chinese Poetry—A Search for Poetics That Failed”, in University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, No 13, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1955
Schacht, Marshall “Not to Forget Miss Dickinson” in Bennet, C.L. and Pierce, Lorne (eds), Argosy to Adventure, Toronto: The Ryerson Press/ The Macmillans in Canada,
1955 p. 120
Untermeyer, Louis “Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)” in A Concise Treasury of Great Poem: English and American, From the Foundations of the English Spirit to the Outstanding Poetry of Our Own Time with Lives of the Poets and Historical Settings,
New York: Pocket Books, 1976 pp. 360-361

Voegelin, Eric On the Form of the American Mind, (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 1), Gebhardt, Jurgen and Cooper Barry (eds), trans. Ruth Hein, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995

(Terry Barker teaches Canadian Studies at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Toronto. He is the author of two colletions of essays on the People's Poetry tradition, After Acorn (Mekler and Deahl, Hamilton and Pittsburgh, 1999) and Beyond Bethune (Synaxis Press, Dewdney, British Columbia, 2006).
He is currently working on a sequel volumn, Continuing Chesterton.
_________________

[ericcoliu]

Farewell to Sunflowers by Anna Yin


A million arrows are aimed at the sky,
yet the sun hasn’t been shot down.
Glancing back,
their golden faces are full of tears.
Mourning grasses
grow high in my eyes,
burn flames in the wind.

Those duckweeds and swimming fish,
those floating clouds and breezes,
are all behind me
in warm waves and lonely songs.

In turning, I lose my way
and feel the lotus core in pieces.
With arrows sifting through my hand,
I see sunset in crimson.

[[ericcoliu]]

Farewell to Sunflowers by Anna Yin


A million arrows are aimed at the sky,
yet the sun hasn’t been shot down.
Glancing back,
their golden faces are full of tears.
Mourning grasses
grow high in my eyes,
burn flames in the wind.

Those duckweeds and swimming fish,
those floating clouds and breezes,
are all behind me
in warm waves and lonely songs.

In turning, I lose my way
and feel the lotus core in pieces.
With arrows sifting through my hand,
I see sunset in crimson.

[星子]

明天和Terry 讨论讨论。。。
_________________

[[ANNA]]

明天和Terry 讨论讨论。。。
_________________

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[星子]

Thanks Eric to share your view. It is interesting to see different people have their different views.

BTW, TOPS founder Bunny Phoned me to say this review was very good, she would publish it on Verse Afire.

She invited me to join the Nov event to read my chapbook and promote it in Toronto.
_________________

[[ANNA]]

Thanks Eric to share your view. It is interesting to see different people have their different views.

BTW, TOPS founder Bunny Phoned me to say this review was very good, she would publish it on Verse Afire.

She invited me to join the Nov event to read my chapbook and promote it in Toronto.
_________________

[ericcoliu]

I'm happy for you and hope a big success on your book promotion.

Would you mind passing on my two reviews to Mr. Barker?

I would like to have with Mr. Barker an exchange of ideas about the review of your poetry.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

I'm happy for you and hope a big success on your book promotion.

Would you mind passing on my two reviews to Mr. Barker?

I would like to have with Mr. Barker an exchange of ideas about the review of your poetry.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[星子]

Hi Eric,

Sure. I think you may meet each other one day.

Anna
_________________

[[ANNA]]

Hi Eric,

Sure. I think you may meet each other one day.

Anna
_________________