In Poland and China alike, poets born in the 1970s were the first generation in the modern history of their respective countries to not define their identity along the lines of historical grand narratives or vis-à-vis spectacular historical events. Sometimes called in the Polish context Generation Nothing (pokolenie nic), they were not united by any specific common experience, goal, or battle. To many older authors, they were the lucky ones, who just got in on the act and could enjoy new and unprecedented freedom and the fruits of economic and technological development (as a result of democratic transition in Poland and the policy of “reform and opening up” led by Deng Xiaoping
The world the Post-70 (70
As noted in the introductory chapter, each poem without exception to a greater or lesser extent contributes both to negotiating the shape of (national) poetry at large and to the picture of its author’s singular poetics. Nevertheless, the distribution of interest between these two aspects of literary activity in local poetry discourses has significantly changed over time. The spectacular debuts of the first two protagonists of this chapter, Krzysztof Siwczyk (b. 1977) and Yin Lichuan
Were we to generalize, we might say that with regard to the general topography and main focus of poetry-critical discourse, poets born in the 1980s in China at the time of their debuts were in a similar situation to poets born in the 1970s in Poland at the initial stage of their careers. The two authors discussed in section 2, Tomasz Różycki (b. 1970) and Li Hao
1 Initiations: Krzysztof Siwczyk and Yin Lichuan
Krzysztof Siwczyk and Yin Lichuan appeared on the poetry scene almost out of nowhere. Before his spectacular debut, Siwczyk, then still a high school student, had for some time read and practiced poetry at home in one of the apparently lesser poetic regions of Poland, namely Silesia. Yin Lichuan, before writing her first poem, had studied French in Beijing and filmmaking in Paris and had not been interested in poetry at all. Both entered the stage without prejudices, expectations, and calculations, with similar concerns and themes to raise in their poems. Like in the case of “one dawn, two evenings” apropos Czesław Miłosz and Ai Qing
In the following sections, after a brief reconstruction of Siwczyk’s and Yin’s artistic paths, we will witness what I playfully call an intertextual date, when the I-speakers from their respective poems exchange meaningful looks on the opposite sides of a sportsground’s fence. I will take this unique opportunity to invite them for a longer man-woman intercultural con-versation on the experience of initiation, coming of age, early adulthood, identity formation, the role of sacrum, and the complex interactions between local and global factors in the era of transformation, including the problem of perceived provinciality of their respective native places, which both authors had to cope with early on in their writing.
1.1 First New Voices after the Polemics and What Happened to Them Later
In Polish literature, seventeen-year-old Krzysztof Siwczyk’s enter-the-dragon debut is comparable only with that of Rafał Wojaczek in 1965 (as Jakub Winiarski first pointed out1) and perhaps with Dorota Masłowska’s (b. 1983) cult hip-hop novel Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną (lit. “Polish-Russian War under a White-and-Red Flag”2) of 2002 written when the author was a third-grade high school student.
Siwczyk’s first poems appeared in 1994 in a poetic brochure published by the NaDziko (“GoWild” or “Wildly”) group, established by his older friends based in his native Silesia district, the most industrial area of Poland. The same year, he won a one-poem competition organized by a local poetry club called Perełka (“little pearl”) in his hometown of Gliwice. In 1995, he published the poetry collection Wild Children (Dzikie dzieci), which immediately drew the attention of critics. It won first prize in the Jacek Bierezin National Poetry Competition and received an award from Culture Times (Czas Kultury) magazine.
Commentators were struck by the maturity of his sincere (but not naive), simple (but not vulgar), and detabooized (but not desecrating) account of coming of age in a “depersonifying stone world,”3 as Paweł Majerski described Silesia in his anthology of Silesian poets. Tomasz Majeran emphasized the ease with which Siwczyk overcame the dualism that marked the poetry scene, noting that the young author “on the one hand, skillfully operates with elements of classicizing forms, and on the other, eagerly reaches for the colloquial idiom, purportedly typical of the ‘Barbarians.’”4 Karol Maliszewski, in turn, wrote that the I-speaker in Siwczyk’s collection “waits and strains his ears. His generation, too, is waiting for something,”5 taking Siwczyk’s debut as a portent of something new that was going to happen in Polish poetry.
Siwczyk did not disappoint those who pinned his hopes on him. In 2006, Piotr Śliwiński recalled Siwczyk’s debut book as a prelude to what in the mid-2000s already counted as an impressive and mature oeuvre:
Out of the banal, he extracted singular elements, initiatory motifs such as love, eroticism, the feeling of belonging to the surrounding world; at the same time [he showed] a growing indifference to this world, disbelief and the yearning for belief, [seeing] parents as both loved ones and strangers, and happenstance as the source of crucial choices in life. […] This persistence in forcing his way toward himself, accompanied by the increasingly acute awareness of the difficulty of this task in the following years, remained a hallmark of his poetry.6
As Śliwiński and many others observe, “this persistence in forcing his way toward himself” has been the only unchanging characteristic throughout Siwczyk’s unbelievably dynamic and diverse oeuvre to date. His next collection after Wild Children, titled Emil and We (Emil i my, 1999), was written in the nihilist spirit of Emil Cioran. After that, in several books, the author meditated over what philosophers like to call the fall into language, consistently unmasking the slippages of its hidden mechanisms. In his recent collections, Siwczyk gradually regains his former trust in the written word as a medium for existential expression. This is visible in particular in the book-length nine-part (resembling the term of pregnancy) long poem Where Either (Dokąd bądź, 2014), written before the birth of his daughter. In a sense, in Where Either the poet returns to initiatory motifs, this time experiencing his initiation into fatherhood.
There are some uncanny poetic coincidences in Siwczyk’s life that stimulate readers’ and critics’ imagination alike, although the poet—unlike Świetlicki, who eagerly cites his quasi-mystical connections with Mickiewicz—is far from overemphasizing their importance. Siwczyk attended the same high school in Gliwice as Adam Zagajewski and Julian Kornhauser, leaders of the New Wave. Unlike the Brulion poets, he avidly read the New Wave authors, and—as he recalls—was pleasantly surprised when a question about the New Wave appeared in his final high school oral examination. He also recalls fondly that Kornhauser’s visit to Gliwice once saved his skin in a mathematics class:
At grade four, shortly before the final high school exams, in a math class, I was asked a question about probability. I had no bloody idea how to answer. And then the door opened, and someone entered and said that Kornhauser was in Gliwice and had an author’s meeting in the city. As the school verse monger, I was delegated, and rescued. Later, I acquainted him. Today we are friends. And I’m in a very close relationship with his son Jakub, who is an outstanding poet as well, and almost a professor.7
In an essay describing the atmosphere of Gliwice during the period of transformation and the place of poetry in this reality, he adds:
Standing at the school bulletin board, I used to read poems written by graduates of this noble institution. The very way in which the surname “Kornhauser” sounds delighted me. There was something provocative, rough, and strange in it. In “Zagajewski,” in turn, a Parnassian undertone could be heard. For a young man attending a high school that was focused on the production of mathematical-physical brains, the school bulletin was passé, but it referred one to the distant, analogue era of samizdat and underground publications. This fact alone spoke in favor of the bulletin board heroes. It allowed them to be perceived as candidates for models with whom one can identify oneself, for a teenager who could thus set himself apart from the mass of colorless, mutually indistinguishable adolescents.
Reading poetry proved to be a challenge thrown in the face of the pragmatic majority of the would-be economists, informaticians, etc. Reading poetry also turned out to be a glove thrown to the city, which, after the transformation began in 1989, decided to put some technological makeup on its face.8
Gliwice, although seemingly anything but poetic, is also the city where Tadeusz Różewicz settled in 1949 to join his wife-to-be and stayed for almost twenty years; it is where he wrote his most important works. Siwczyk saw him once in a cemetery, at his mother’s grave. The young poet expressed his admiration for Różewicz on many occasions, as the one who “reached the limits of what is expressible in literature.”9 In a recent interview from April 2020, commenting on the Covid-19 pandemic and life in quarantine, Siwczyk invokes Różewicz as a “master of isolation” and a “prophet of apocalypses”:
Isolation is something that needs to be learned. One of the masters of isolation was Tadeusz Różewicz. I don’t know how many times in my life I’ve been reconfirmed in my belief that Różewicz was a prophet of apocalypse. Let’s add in haste: a prophet without followers. For followers always deform and trivialize the ascetic rule of the apocalypse.10
Krzysztof Siwczyk’s good friend, the poet Maciej Melecki, cofounder of the NaDziko group, was born in Mikołów, a small city in Silesia and the hometown too of Wojaczek. When Lech Majewski, the director of the movie Wojaczek (1999), first read Melecki’s poems, he immediately decided that he wanted him to write the playscript, not knowing of his connections to Mikołów. When Majewski’s team arrived in Mikołów for trial shots, Siwczyk happened to be in the city. Passing nearby, he stopped to observe the staff’s work. The director asked him for help because he needed someone to walk in front of the camera to test some technicalities. As he did an old woman appeared, looked at Siwczyk, and exclaimed, “Oh, Rafuś!” (a diminutive of Rafał), mistaking him for Wojaczek, who had died almost twenty years earlier.11 And thus Siwczyk got the main role and subsequently won several prestigious prizes for his performance at various festivals in Poland. He was also nominated to the European Film Award, along with Richard Harris and Brunon Ganz, and was subsequently offered a role in a Wim Wenders movie. Yet he rejected this and other offers and continued his career as a poet. Only once did he make an exception. Ten years later, he agreed to take part in the production of a noncommercial film titled Expelled (Wydalony, 2010), based on Samuel Beckett’s plays with a playscript written again by Melecki.
Instead of a career in the film industry, Siwczyk started to cooperate with the then niche Mikołów Institute located in Wojaczek’s old family house. Today, the institute is a renowned cultural organization. Melecki is the director, and Siwczyk serves as the deputy director. They publish a literary journal, Arkadia, and a literary series, The Library of “Arkadia” (Biblioteka “Arkadii”), and undertake various initiatives promoting poetry.12
…
In 1999, the year when Siwczyk was taking his first steps in the film industry, Yin Lichuan, fed up with European life and cinematography, decided to go back to Beijing.13 Within a few months of her return, the twenty-six-year-old graduate of the Department of Western Languages of Beijing University and the Parisian College of Cinematography (École supérieure d’études cinématographiques) made her name as a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and charismatic organizer of poetry events. Unknown, with no experience of literary writing, and unaware of the growing animosities on the poetry scene, in August that year she surprised prominent poets in both camps with an invitation to a national poetry reading to commemorate Jorge Luis Borges. The event was dedicated to her friend, the emerging poet Hei Dachun
Yin’s first published work was the essay “Patriotism, Sexual Suppression … and Literature: Open Letter to Mr. Ge Hong … bing” (
In 2000, Yin’s short stories and poems started to appear in unofficial literary journals. One of them was Lower Body Poets (
The first collection of Yin Lichuan’s works, Even Better (
The determination to explore the dark side of social life is manifest also in Yin’s 2002 novel Fuckers (
Yin’s activity as a poet at the time centered on poetry websites and later also on her blog, which she launched in 2005. In the period 2003–2004, she was invited to international poetry festivals in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. In 2006, her friend and former Lower Body poet Huang Lihai
The same year, on June 14, Yin posted on her blog: “From today on, I will play a director,”28 and so she did successfully for several years. Her debut The Park (
Twenty poems Yin created at irregular intervals during her career in the film industry, along with a selection of her earlier works, are included in The Doors (
After many years of different artistic and personal choices, in the experience of parenthood Yin’s and Siwczyk’s literary paths come closer to each other again. The childhood and youth experiences that feature in their debut and early poems echo in their later work as they ponder on the future of their children and their relationship with them.
1.2 Poems Dating Poems
The intimate con-versation between Krzysztof Siwczyk’s and Yin Lichuan’s poetry which I present in this section begins with an intertextual “love at the first sight,” perpetuated in Siwczyk’s “Warm-Up, Cooling Down” (Rozgrzewka—stygnięcie) and Yin’s “Sportsground” (
When I first observed the correspondence between these poems, my imagination produced a suggestive picture of a teenage Siwczyk staring at a slightly older Yin Lichuan as she plays with other girls. And another one: Siwczyk as the man with a cigarette from Yin’s poem. After all, distance is “but a matter of geography,” and imagination covers such distances in the blink of an eye.
Besides the obvious convergences in terms of the scenery and topic, this association came to me so quickly perhaps partly because of the direct juxtaposition of the themes of sport, disease, and a romantic thread in Yin’s “Sportsground,” which is present also, although in different configurations, in other poems by Siwczyk, most prominently in “A Fall: Playing a Doctor” (Upadek—zabawa w lekarza). There, “I” recalls a cycling accident from his childhood in which he broke his collarbone. A “friend from the fourth floor” (koleżanka z czwartego piętra) visited him at home every day as a “doctor”; she injected his teddy bear with ink, and “slightly touched my cheek with her lips to check / whether everything was fine with my eyes” (zahaczała wargami o policzek sprawdzając / czy wszystko w porządku z moimi oczami).31 So, who knows, perhaps Yin’s and Siwczyk’s textual avatars met already in earlier childhood, before that “date” on the sportsground.
One problem posed by Yin’s “Sportsground” in a closer reading is that we do not know on which side of the wire net the I-speaker actually was in the scene recalled in the second part of the poem—that is, whether her contact with the man with the cigarette was just eye contact and she describes her childish infatuation that stimulated her imagination, as in the case of Siwczyk who remembers how he naively created a love story in his mind, or whether the experience was less innocent, to put it euphemistically. Taking into account that Yin basically has no problem with straightforward descriptions of sexual acts, one could assume that this might have indeed been some less tangible, elusive experience. One example of her straightforwardness is “Justice” (
Siwczyk is not always innocent in his poems either, but, in general, he tends to be much more subtle than Yin. In “Emptying” (Pustoszenie), he too describes what was likely his sexual initiation, but in much less extreme conditions than Yin’s sex in the snow—at home, and carefully arranged beforehand:
The above text sheds yet a different light on Yin’s “Sportsground.” In light of “Emptying,” “Sportsground” might indeed be read as a narrative of sexual initiation. Before, sexual experience had appeared to the I-narrator to be something mysterious and magical, but when the imaginations turned into reality, only some strange void remained that one cannot verbalize and explain: a mixture of satisfaction, disenchantment, and disbelief, accompanied by a weird feeling of the unreality of everything (“What was between me and that man?”).
This kind of elusive experience of derealization echoes in another poem from the same collection: “Bed” (
Yin sometimes acts as if she is afraid to show her more sensitive side. Especially in her early poems, when it comes to socially engaged topics, she writes in a way that resembles Yu Jian’s and Han Dong’s laconic idiom, as van Crevel noted,36 but at the same time, she clearly subverts or even derides it. In Even Better, we find two texts that encourage associations with Yu’s “Luo Jiasheng” (
One may venture that in this poem Yin, intentionally or otherwise, sets Yu Jian against Han Dong, in whose poem “A and B” (
“A Woman I Know” begins with an elliptic description of a car accident: a woman rides a bike with one hand while fixing her hair is hit by a truck. Yin comments:
This poem, although more dramatic, bordering on cruelty, is also more complex than “Retired Worker” and contains a hue of self-mockery. The author ridicules her own automatic assumption that she knows everything about people she encounters, and her tendency to pass judgment based on appearances. It also smuggles in some emotional content, if only in parentheses, as a brief digression which suggests that the scene of the accident will long haunt the witness.
Similarly, the high-and-mighty, excessively self-confident attitude, specific to some of the Brulion Generation poets, is something that Siwczyk tries to deal with in his early work. In the poem that opens Wild Children entitled “My Youthful Narcissism” (Mój młodzieńczy narcyzm), the I-speaker recollects his friendship with an old woman:
Siwczyk, unlike many of Yin’s male friends from the Popular camp, apparently has no ambitions to be a tough macho. He is almost religiously solemn in reconstructing his adolescence, with all its mixed emotions, naiveties, expectations, discoveries, and concerns.
In contrast to Siwczyk, in Even Better Yin Lichuan opens up perhaps only in one poem, namely “Mom” (
The observation that one’s parents are getting old can be one of the most shocking discoveries of adolescence, one which sparks an acute awareness of the passing of time. It also marks one’s symbolic psychological disconnection from one’s parents, a moment in which one no longer feels organically linked to them, and instead starts to perceive them as strangers and look at them with a new critical distance. Some children strive to intuitively protect themselves from this experience, trying to push this inconvenient and disturbing knowledge out of their consciousness. Siwczyk as a fourteen-year-old boy has similar thoughts to Yin. In “Parents Sleep in the Afternoon: I’m 14” (Rodzice śpią po południu—mam 14 lat), he imagines his parents in their bedroom and compares his mother after her last diet first to Jesus Christ on the cross and then to a woman painted on a match box (the latter image is, in his opinion, more beautiful).41 In another poem, “Hurraaay! A Sparrow Is Dying, My Mother Sleeps Safely” (Hurrraaa!—Wróbel zdycha—matka śpi spokojnie), he recollects how he would monitor his mom’s afternoon naps, checking every now and then that she is still breathing.42
Besides the vicarious experience of the inevitability of time, which they realize observing the bodies of their parents, the subjects of Siwczyk’s and Yin’s poems face the necessity to consciously define their relationship with the surrounding space. The two authors share the painful awareness of provinciality of their native cities, but finally come to embrace the “provincial” atmosphere and “provincial” aesthetics.
Yin was not born in Beijing but in Chongqing, some 1,500 km away from the capital. She was the third child and only daughter in her family of five. Both her parents were teachers, her father at a university and her mother at a high school. When Yin was one year old, her dad was assigned to work at Guizhou University, and the whole family moved to Guiyang, where the poet spent her early childhood. In 1980, when she was seven, after many failed attempts her father managed to obtain permission for the family to relocate to Beijing. He was convinced that only in the capital city could they live a decent life and give the kids a chance at a better future. As recalled by Yin in the essay “Commemorating Beijing” (
In the poem “For This One Glance” (
Yin’s reconciliation with her native country and the city of her youth, despite the many absurdities she detects in the way they function, is an important stage in the process of self-identification. It is no longer the city that describes her and determines her actions; instead, she starts to describe the city and gives meaning to its various locales, associating them with different experiences from her life.
In the final poem from Wild Children, “Alright” (Wszystko dobrze), Siwczyk likewise meditates on the debatable aesthetics of his surroundings. His window view consists of “trash container car park empty carousel blocks of flats skyscraper / trash container / blocks of flats skyscraper nothing blocks of flats road sign” (śmietnik parking pusta karuzela bloki wieżowiec / bloki wieżowiec przerwa bloki i znak drogowy)—all of this makes for a “living zone of death” (strefa zamieszkania śmierci). But “it’s alright” (wszystko dobrze), concludes the I-speaker, “I have nested in the place / where the bed sags a bit I also tamed // the cold tape along the edge of my blanket” (Zagnieździłem się w tym miejscu / gdzie nieco zapadł się tapczan / Oswoiłem także // zimną tasiemkę obszywającą koc).47 Poetry can exist without a special landscape, be it the leaking roofs of village cottages (like in Yin’s “For This One Glance”) or the stunning cutting-edge architecture of modern cities, which was nowhere to be found in Siwczyk’s Gliwice in the 1990s.
Moreover, unlike many other seedy cities in Poland that required modernization but might at least exhibit some remnants of their former glory, such as picturesque old markets and churches, Gliwice has never been particularly famous for its sightseeing value. The complicated history of the city and the entire Upper Silesia is a central problem of many of Adam Zagajewski’s poems and one book-length essay, Two Cities (Dwa Miasta, 1991), referring to Gliwice and Lvov, where the poet was born. It is also important in understanding Tomasz Różycki’s work, to which we will turn in the next section. Situated on the borders of Poland, Czechia, and Germany, for many decades,
the region [of Upper Silesia] used to be a genuine melting-pot. This is where Polish, German, Jewish, Silesian, Czech, and also Ukrainian and Belarusian elements met and clashed, creating a new form of borderland culture. The trajectory of this historically Germanic region describes a centuries-long battle for ownership, in which Poland and Germany were the main contestants.48
After World War II, Silesia, together with several other regions known as the Recovered Territories (Ziemie Odzyskane), was detached from Germany and incorporated into Poland. The German population of the city was forced to return to their homeland, and their houses were assigned to Poles who had been relocated from Eastern borderland territories which, in turn, become part of the Soviet Union.49 Yet this multiculturality was never acknowledged by the Polish communist government, which carried out the politics of homogenization, more or less actively destroying all manifestations of heterogeneity. Thus Gliwice became a city that could boast neither national tradition nor multiethnic diversity on which rich local culture could be built. In a place like this, conceives the young Siwczyk, there is no material for poetry. Therefore, a poem must come from inside and must be carried to term in the poet’s body, not lower body, not upper body, but exactly in the middle, in the womb, under one’s heart. “Alright” ends with the lines:
There is one more resonance between the work of Krzysztof Siwczyk and Yin Lichuan worth highlighting, one that surprised me when I reread their oeuvres with a compairative eye since I had tacitly assumed that this is not a topic that might be of any significance to Yin. Siwczyk is very much concerned with the question of God. In roughly half his poems in Wild Children, he makes explicit allusions to the Christian faith or its symbols, which constitute an inextricable part of the landscape of everyday life in Poland, as the reader may remember from my discussion of Lei Pingyang’s
There is one poem in Yin Lichuan’s oeuvre, “In a Little Town” (
Strictly speaking, this is a physically impossible scene, but the preceding lines shed some light on it. “Then too I had nothing to do / with myself” (
1.3 Siwczykfication of Yin Lichuan? Affordance and Concordance in Compairative Reading
Yin Lichuan’s poetry does not hinge on ostentatious blasphemy and cheap exhibitionism, as some critics tend to see it. Instead, I posit, it stems from a specific mental disposition, which makes the poet feel overwhelmed with, and thus unreceptive to, many forms of transcendence and metaphysics in art and in life alike. This type of sensibility, even if often disguised as irony that borders on cynicism, by no means should be perceived as inferior to, or taken less seriously than, the sensibility of those who feel comfortable among elevated ideals and metaphysical visions. Disentangling Yin from the Chinese literary-historical context of her writings, which I have attempted by bringing out resonances between her poems and those of Krzysztof Siwczyk, allows one to see those features of her work that have been effaced in the local Chinese discourse but which were felicitously recognized and appreciated from the very beginning in Siwczyk’s oeuvre by its Polish commentators.
The fact that Siwczyk’s work was approached within a clearly different paradigm of reading, although it shares many features with Yin’s poetry, resulted arguably from several factors. The first and most general reason is that Polish poetry discourse at the time was entering a different phase than the Chinese one. This phase was aimed at the increase of pluralism: authors who maximally constricted the spaciotemporal horizon of their poetics, and filtered the world through their subjective consciousness and body, like Siwczyk, were particularly welcomed. Second, Siwczyk’s poetry did not need to break any taboos, as most of the taboos had been already broken by the Brulioners and the “cursed poets”; therefore his work did not shock anybody and was received with a greater attention to detail. Last but not least, Siwczyk is a man. Many lines of his poetry that were considered neutral in terms of their compliance with social conventions, or even taken as a manifestation of the author’s tenderness and delicacy of feelings, might have incited scandal rather than encourage incisive, nuanced reading had they been written by a woman.
It is not my intention to question Yin’s choice to join Shen Haobo and others in the Lower Body group, particularly since had it not been for their influence, she may have never started writing poetry. But it is true that by so doing, she automatically made herself a particularly easy—much easier than her male friends—target of superficial criticism based on stereotypical, biased readings. A double label stuck to her poetry. On the one hand, like the entire output of the Lower Body group, her work was inscribed into what we may term as an after-polemic; that is, a still distinct dichotomy inherited from the older generation, gradually evolving toward a dialectic phase. In this configuration, Lower Body was located on the opposite pole to Academic(ized) Writing (
Yin Lichuan’s poetry collection Even Better is not very poetic; her novel Fuckers also appears rather mediocre. Were it not for her identity as an ideologist of the great Lower Body poetry, based on her writing alone she wouldn’t have gained the recognition she enjoys now. As far as the superficial glamlit authors are concerned, their performance is more important and more attractive than their writing. Yin Lichuan didn’t avoid this trap either.55
In the following part of the essay, Ta Ai substantiates her statement, arguing, among other things, that during poetry readings Yin performed her poetry in a way that provoked sexual reactions in male audiences and that her writing boils down to “selling sex” (
In his essay “The End of the ‘Lower Body,’” Duo Yu finally admitted their mistake, and said the movement shouldn’t be continued. He explained: “This is a double-edged sword. Emphasizing the importance of the body will always be crucial and ingenious. The problem is that in our focus on the body we should emphasize ‘body writing’ and not ‘writing body.’ We should allow body to write itself, and not try to achieve a provocative effect by writing about body.”56
Van Crevel showed that Lower Body has little to do with glamlit, if only because, unlike the fiction of Mian Mian or Wei Hui, their poetry could hardly generate any financial benefits,57 and I entirely subscribe to his argument. But if it was not a market-oriented enterprise, perhaps indeed, as Duo Yu suggests, it was a provocation for provocation’s sake? And if that was the case, then what does it mean?
I submit that if Yin really did aim purely to provoke, this would mean, first and foremost, that she was not a very good and determined provocateur. She either did not want, or perhaps was not able to, fully control the confessional undercurrent that at times surfaces in her verse; especially in poems written roughly since 2003, this happens increasingly often, and in the newest works included in The Doors there is virtually only confession. Yin-mother, Yin-director who produces movies like The Park, where she tries to rethink her relationship with her father, and Yin-essayist who produces long pieces about her childhood included in 37.8º—these are still the same as Yin the author of Even Better, even if the distribution of emotional and rhetorical accents is different. Shen Haobo put it very clearly introducing her debut book, alluding to the famous “Song of Everlasting Sorrow” (
The lucky Yin Lichuan on whom alone the emperor’s love of three thousand beauties was placed, without that pain and the force that pulls her down, wouldn’t her “Fly” [the word is provided in English in the original] change into a balloon’s “Fly” [ibidem]? And wouldn’t the hollow balloon fly too high and bang?58
As the old polemics gradually faded away, Chinese critics and scholars since the 2010s have started to interpret Yin’s early work differently. She has been read more carefully and not only as part of a general phenomenon that played a specific role in negotiating the definition of national poetry. Many readers have attempted interpretations that show Yin’s contribution to the reflection on more universal social, ethical, and philosophical problems, mostly through the prism of feminist thought; for example, “Mom,” as Bao Yuqi
In any event, it is interesting that Yin Lichuan’s and Krzysztof Siwczyk’s early poetics seem to interact with one another more dynamically and productively than with their respective local contexts. I believe in the power and importance of such cross-cultural readings because they help look at poems in a way that is free from bias and essentially disinterested. They allow one to distance oneself from the specific hierarchical structures of the source discourse and focus on a given text’s multiple affordances more than on its concordance with locally dominant trends, hierarchies, or expectations. This is one reason why I chose Li Hao for a protagonist of the next section, a young poet whose collection Homecoming (
Thus Li’s poetry started to circulate in foreign literary discourse before it was actually absorbed and “managed” (i.e., pigeonholed or compartmentalized) by broader audiences and literary-critical discourse in China. One can therefore attempt a reading that is virtually free of poetry-political baggage and its affordances have not yet been reduced to concordances. I will undertake such an attempt by compairing Li Hao’s long poem “Homecoming” with Tomasz Różycki’s book-length poemat Twelve Stations. This is certainly not to say that the context from which the texts emerge should be ignored. Rather, the operation consists in suspending the immediate context into which they fall after being created in order to see how they behave in a different force field, con-versing on the compairative stage.
2 Solastalgia: Tomasz Różycki and Li Hao Saving Singularity of Names
Whereas Krzysztof Siwczyk and Yin Lichuan finally managed to nest in their native places, Tomasz Różycki and Li Hao never experience the comfort of self-identification with/through a place. On the one hand, they cannot fully accept their here and now in modern, rootless cities; on the other, they are aware that the roots that some older authors have persistently searched for no longer exist other than in narratives passed on by former generations, in vicarious, increasingly mythicized (post)memories. Even the places they recall from their childhood, have during their years-long absence been transformed to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. This arouses the feeling of what ecopsychologists call solastalgia, a term coined by Glenn Albrecht drawing on the Latin word solacium (“comfort”) and the Greek root algia (“pain, suffering, sickness”). The notion, as Kimberly Skye Richards explains,
convey[s] the anxiety caused by the inability to derive solace from one’s home in the face of distressing events. It is part and parcel of a new abnormal of the Anthropocene, characterized by uncertainty, unpredictability, chaos, relentless change, and deep distress caused by a changing climate, erratic weather, and species extinction. Solastalgia might be precipitated by the dwindling numbers of salmon in a river; the eradication of buffalo on the plains; the hyperextraction of natural resources through logging, mining, and tar sands development; or urbanization, through the construction of condos, ski hills, and golf courses.61
The two poets share the experience of estrangement from a place caused by its irrevocable transformation, a disturbing awareness of being homeless at home. But they do not turn their back on their homelands. Instead, their attitude might be described with a metaphor proposed by Naomi Klein:
When I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relation, I don’t hate my mother because she’s sick, or because she’s been abused. I don’t stop visiting her because she’s been in an abusive relationship and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship because it’s a relationship of nurturing and caring.62
Różycki and Li, too, try to save and rebuild as much of their homes and their personal histories as possible through literature, even if they do realize that the obtained image will always be pitifully defective.
2.1 Homeless at Home
Różycki’s hometown Opole has a similar history to Siwczyk and Zagajewski’s Gliwice. Its industrial landscape is a legacy of two centuries of Prussian and German rule over the city. The multiethnic population, in its turn, reflects the complexities of postwar European territorial policies. Like the Zagajewski family, Różycki’s grandparents had experienced a belle époque era in Lvov’s history, that is, the interwar period, and its dramatic fate during World War II. After the war, when Lvov was incorporated into the territories of what is today Ukraine, they were forced to leave. The city functions in the family memory as a traumatic but sentimental narrative, which Różycki has regularly taken up in his works since his debut collection under the self-suggestive German-language title Vaterland (1997). The modern epic, or mock-epic (poemat heroikomiczny), as critics frequently call Twelve Stations,63 is his most extensive attempt to deal with this mythical infernal paradise and utopian hell.
In Twelve Stations, Różycki describes a family pilgrimage to a little town called Gliniany near Lvov. The narrator, Grandson, is assigned a mission to gather the family, from its oldest generation to its youngest, divided by conflicts and animosities and scattered throughout Poland, in order to travel together to their native place and rebuild a local church. The oldest family members claim that they can remember where golden ritual utensils were buried before the war and volunteer to help excavate them. Once the squad is ready, they board the train at Opole, heading to Lvov, but the expedition never reaches its destination and the train itself turns out to be a ghost train, driven by the narrator’s late Grandfather. Meanwhile, as they set out to fulfill their mission, their Silesian homes and gardens face destruction.
The structure of Różycki’s work is reminiscent of the twelve books of Adam Mickiewicz’s national epic Pan Tadeusz, while the invocation of Opole that precedes the narrative proper is a pastiche of the most famous lines of Mickiewicz’s masterpiece, that is, the invocation of Lithuania. The family saga, sketched against the historical background of the country, is an immediately obvious play on the saga of the aristocratic Soplica family in Pan Tadeusz. On the train, however, where the living family members are accompanied by those who had died long ago, the story arguably resembles more Mickiewicz’s Romantic-patriotic drama Forefathers’ Eve (Dziady), whose title refers to an ancient Slavic feast commemorating the dead, a context that might be an interesting interpretive perspective also for Li Hao’s “Homecoming.”
“Homecoming” develops around a similar concept of traveling to a nonexistent place. In the opening lines of the text, when the I-speaker crosses the river approaching his native village, a soul of a suicide whom he used to know in childhood emerges from the water. The wanderer offers to lead the man’s soul to his old family home, knowing that he would not be able to find his own way because since his death everything had changed in the neighborhood; housing developments had reached the countryside, a railroad had been built, old houses had been relocated. Like Twelve Stations, “Homecoming” crowns the years-long process of the author’s self-identification both as a person and as a poet.
In the eponymous poem and in the entire collection alike, besides Miłosz and Gu Zhun
2.2 In Search of Lost Spacetime
In her essay on Zagajewski and Różycki, Ewa Stańczyk, following Mary Louise Pratt, refers to Upper Silesia as a “contact zone.”66 This contact zone, however, is a place not only of intercultural but also interepochal encounter. Those who moved there come from not just a different space but also from a different time—and they continue living this foreign time in their new homeland. One of Grandson’s tasks before the expedition is to save, and fix, an old pendulum clock from Babcia’s (Grandma’s)67 house before one of his uncles comes up with the idea of selling it and spending the money on alcohol. There is a telling scene in which the oldest members of the family try to carry the big and heavy clock down the stairs, only for it to be permanently wedged in the door, blocking the staircase. It is as if time itself has got stuck in this narrow, unfamiliar space, an unsightly industrial landscape.
History left an indelible imprint on the Różycki family. They could not agree on their attitude to Ukraine—a country which centuries ago had been brutally colonized by Poland but yet waged a massacre of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943 known as the Volhynian slaughter, officially recognized by the Polish parliament in 2016 as a genocide.68 These family conflicts are a microcosm of Poland’s public discourse today, particularly the messy official politics of memory that continues to hamper the development of a modern, democratic, and tolerant society. One of the many manifestations of this collective disease of memory is the emergence of the All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolska). This ultranationalist organization of young people, which carry out mass “patriotic” demonstrations and marches, for instance against homosexuals, refugees, Jews, people of color, and many others, and which shout slogans such as “Poland for Poles,” is parodied in the below scene of a family fight:
Eventually, the family arrives at a consensus, mostly thanks to the irreplaceable mediation of vodka. No one expects that the worst is yet to come. Returning to their roots, they discover that the peaceful landscape they had left behind has since been annihilated. The narrator paints an apocalyptic vision of allotment gardens deserted not just by humans but by all living things. His detailed description spans two pages, from which I shall quote but a brief excerpt.
This is followed by the plunder of the family home:
Decomposition of spacetime in Różycki’s poetry results in the decomposition of the subject. The “I” in Twelve Stations, argues Justyna Tabaszewska,
on the one hand, is immersed in what constitutes construction material of cultural memory; on the other hand, he fights in vain to disentangle from the clichés of memory, to recreate memory that is free from patterns imposed from outside. The disintegration of the subject is directly linked to the loss of trust in cultural and collective memory. The subject, losing the possibility of self-definition through identification (or just simple negation), is doomed to tracking the traces of the past that may allow him to confront both individual and cultural memory.72
Różycki helplessly tries to distinguish some consistent patterns in the “entropic,” “uncanny,” “quantumesque” tangle of these traces of the past. But the longer he seeks, the more complex the map becomes. He wants to escape, discover new lands on which human feet have never left an imprint, but there is no way out. The poet’s next collection Colonies (Kolonie) from 2006 opens two perspectives signaled in the title. In Polish, the word kolonie may mean a summer camp for kids; so one perspective may be the poet’s return to childhood, to the very beginning of the process of self-identification and replaying this process in an alternative way, blocking the historical element. The second meaning of kolonie brings to mind expeditions to unknown, exotic places, and filling in gaps on the map with a narrative of one’s own, as in colonization. Neither of these two solutions, however, proves effective.
In 2013, Różycki published Tomi: Notes from the Stopping Place (Tomi. Notatki z miejsca postoju), in which he rereads his personal history, the history of poetry, and the history of modern Europe through the history of Ovid’s exile, as an “archetypical and universal image of the condition of the artist in a society which does not understand him,”73 and also of the condition of every human being thrown into history. In his sojourns across Europe, the author meditates on the impossibility of refuge from the hell of memory. The following fragment may be taken as the final break with the illusions and hopes he entertained in Twelve Stations:
The history of the fall does not end with the hell of the camps, because later comes the entire eternity of existence after and in spite of it. How long shall the memory last? How capacious is it? Century by century, we add new stories of slaughters and crimes. Hell is a place where all damned souls atone forever. Isn’t memory a hell, then? I’m drinking Zweigelt in Café Westend and I’m thinking about it. If the human fall is a result of the contravention of the laws [Różycki doesn’t specify what laws] and reaching for God’s “qualifications” to gain knowledge of good and evil, then consciousness is a manifestation of it. We are banished from paradise, consigned instead to this other place, one that is densely covered with the traces of memory. We are alive, but we’ve lost our illusions forever.
How was the blood mixed? Or perhaps a more essential question is, where does the need of separating it come from, the necessity of checking, the necessity of asking such questions? Blood separated from blood—this must hurt a hell of a lot.74
Li Hao’s village, too, is a cross-generational and cross-cultural contact zone, and a very specific one, where the blood of grassroots Chineseness and Catholicism has been mixed for two centuries and now is being brutally separated by the government. It is quite common for elements of Judeo-Christian culture to permeate the poems of poet-academics who like to manifest their familiarity with world literature and the Western tradition. In their work, religion functions as part of intellectual rather than spiritual heritage of humanity, a text of culture that enters into dynamic interplay with other texts growing out from the local Chinese soil. Yet one hardly ever comes across images of Chinese communities for which Christianity is an integral part of everyday spiritual life or indeed any individual Chinese poet whose identity has been (co)shaped since early childhood by the Christian ethos and doctrine. Li comments on this when discussing his poem “Lord’s Siren” (
I believe this poem emerged directly from a triple axiological chaos: first, Chinese people’s experience of the Christian God and faith; second, the impact of Christian culture on the Chinese, the way it molds their personalities; third, the process of mutual blending, rejection, and fission of the traditional Chinese countryside (influenced by Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism) with Christianity.75
The author sees these three levels of chaos from three perspectives: that of a villager, that of a wanderer in the city, and that of a university student. The three perspectives most clearly intersect in the poem “A Village Cemetery” (
They [the countryside and the city] produced an irreducible tension in my mind; these two forces accompanied me along the way to self-identification, toward my own self which begged to be completed but was constantly torn asunder by the hand of the epoch. Increasingly powerful and complex, they would often throw me alone onto a bridge or lock me behind some door. In this stage of my writing, as a young poet who was looking for language, trying to internalize various experiences, and pondering existence, I felt these forces traversing my body and soul, trying to contribute to the formation of my (or, the entire generation’s) intellect; but at the same time, they also brought a strange blend of pain, despair, struggle, ideals, and violence.76
The poet knows that for a person with such a diverse and ambiguous life experience, whose identity, consciousness, and language are marked by a profound split, the village will never be home again; “pure countryside poetry is not possible,” his “throat will never be a virgin throat and [his] voice will never be a natural voice.”77 So, why does he want to return? Or, rather, why does he have to return?
2.3 Saving Names
I think at least part of the answer can be found in the final scene of Li Hao’s “Homecoming.” The poem closes with an image of an angel with a catheter projected onto the landscape of a cemetery where the souls of the narrator and of a girl dance a frantic danse macabre on a grave.
Your hand in mine on top of a grave we sing and dance all around wheat fields wave like a vast sea in our waists like your long dress flying in the wind grabbed by its stream
We tightly embrace each other’s body we kiss each other among broken gravestones and burial mounds we roll about in the dance of a white bowl and red bowl
We take off each other’s clothes we make love like crazy we tenderly touch each other’s genitals like we used to touch the sky in our lifetime like when we stood out of God’s sight watching after the angel with a catheter closing the gate in the fence
我牵着你的手我们站在坟顶上喜乐地唱歌跳舞四周随之而起的麦芒浩如烟海一阵又一阵滚动的麦浪在我们的腰间如同你那飞入风中被风卷起的长裙
我们紧紧地拥抱着彼此的身体我们亲吻我们在到处都是断碑到处都是土坟的墓地上打滚我们在一只白碗和一只黑碗的舞蹈中
解开彼此的内衣我们疯狂地做爱我们温柔地抚摸着彼此的性器就像我们在生命里抚摩过的天空就像我们站在天父之外目送着戴尿管的天使关上篱笆之 78
This final image was inspired by a real person: a girl Li Hao met in Beijing, who attempted suicide by throwing herself off the eighth floor of a building. She lived but her urinary system has since remained dysfunctional. Li took care of her for three years until she was able to continue living on her own.79 At the same time, however, it also brings to mind Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and Walter Benjamin’s signature essay “On the Concept of History” inspired by the painting, with the famous passage:
There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awake the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland80
Benjamin’s essay offers a messianic historiosophy, crowned with the image of Angelus Novus, a postspiritual angel. This messianism, however, is not to be confused with the messianism as part of the Romantic paradigm in the work of Mickiewicz and other nineteenth-century Polish poets, whose echoes are found in World War II poetry as well as in New Wave authors and the Classicists of the Brulion Generation. It is a historical-materialist messianism which proceeds from the assumption of the impossibility of salvation in the religious sense of the word and takes this very impossibility as an ethical imperative to set a new, human-made metaphysics in motion. Parts II and III of the essay explicate the philosophical premises and their practical implications:
II
[…] The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this.
III
The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgment Day.
Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland81
Li Hao might be considered an epitome of a chronicler in the Benjaminian understanding of the word. He does not disguise himself as a priest, as some poets do. Instead, he just solemnly observes the secret protocol which binds the dead and the living and gives a detailed report of the perpetual ceremony of the guard change between generations, with all its serious, cruel, surreal, embarrassing, frivolous, and grotesque moments. The power that rests in the chronicler’s hands is a manifestation of the same weak messianic power as the one that rests, for instance, in the hands of the translator in Benjamin “Translator’s Task”; the relationship between the dead and the living is analogous to that between the original and its translation, metaphorized by Benjamin in the image of “a tangent [which] touches a circle fleetingly and at only a single point, and just as this contact, not the point, prescribes the law in accord with which the tangent pursues its path into the infinite.”82
This is the law of “fidelity in the freedom of linguistic development,” as Benjamin calls it.83 But it can also be extended to personal and artistic development as a continuation of the work of others, which yet does not limit one’s imagination and creativity. Moreover, as Adam Lipszyc shows in his study Justice on the Tip of the Tongue (Sprawiedliwość na końcu języka, 2012), this is also the same mechanism that Benjamin detects in his analyses of Bertolt Brecht’s theater and of Karl Kraus’s criticism, where the idea of citation, mentioned in passing in “On the Concept of History,” is explicated. Citation creates ruptures in the structure of what Benjamin calls the “myth,” and helps save the singularity of the “name,” another important notion in his philosophy. The name is, says Lipszyc, “a connector between the world of language and the ethical order.”84 It constitutes an epitome of a messianic act, characterized by Lipszyc as follows:
The messianic act is perfectly actual, perfectly ephemeral, perfectly contemporary, but exactly for this reason it is also the most substantial, meaningful, eternal. This actuality is a form of existence of eternity, because it is performed through repetition—not so much a mythical repetition as a destructive repetition: the logic of the “source-at-the-destination” [źródło-u-celu] broken by the act of destruction, the logic of citation as retributive and redemptive repetition of the word entangled in the myth; this destructive repetition brings out the name.85
The issue of “names” blurred in the all-encompassing mythical element is crucial in “Homecoming.” Consider, for instance, the opening episode, where the narrator encounters the spirit of a suicide. He calls the specter by his name, Yuan Baomin
你 是不是因为汀桥变成了金桥辛庄变成了新庄李围孜和犍围孜都搬走了而剩下的老宅子被挖成了水塘连泥土也卖给了西宁铁路你很担心再也找不到回家的路还是你听到磨刀和猪吼就会无比饥饿你上来吧坐在我身边我给你点支烟暖和暖和我保证给你指路 86
Thus the narrator and Yuan Baomin’s spirit travel together through the forest until they approach a pond where Yuan Changhui
By dint of traditional folk beliefs, the woman’s story is linked with the story of a girl, someone else’s daughter, who fell from the bridge some time earlier:
Then, we learn about a heartless official who took land from peasants to build estates which “grew like bellies of pregnant women” (
In a ruined cottage nearby, the narrator sees the shadow of a boy who died from rat poison. A few steps away there is a pond into which the traveler jumps naked to catch fish as in his childhood, but the fish he catches proves aggressive and hits him in the nose. Thus, “through blood [he] returns to [his] previous incarnation” (
We do not know the identity of “you” with whom the narrator sways on a tree branch and later dances on a grave in the following, final scene in the poem in which Eros and Thanatos unite in a sexual act “beyond Father’s sight.” In this ecstatic sexual intercourse between bodiless spirits, again, the Christian notion of an omnipotent and omnipresent God is “adjusted” to the framework of human imagination shaped by the vitalism of indigenous beliefs and natural cosmogony. The closing image of the sick angel with a catheter who approaches the gate may be read as a negative of the biblical scene of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. The angel, a spiritual being, banished and humiliated in the experience of carnality, approaches the gate, perhaps—as Benjamin wants—carried by the storm of History, to leave the garden, while the humans remain inside it, under the tree, which is reminiscent of the Tree of Knowledge, and celebrate the conquering of Eden. But this victory is just an illusion. What is left of the paradise is in fact a vast, ruined graveyard, a domain of death.
Messianism so understood, whose spirit permeates Li Hao’s poetry, may also prove an effective interpretational perspective for Tomasz Różycki’s Twelve Stations. Różycki, too, sketches detailed portraits of people and places, although he does so in a much more humorous way, and his descriptions are fictionalized to a larger extent than Li’s. Below I cite one example of such a portrayal of Babcia’s neighbor, Mr. Antonów, whom Grandson and his friend visit to ask him to fix the broken clock which got stuck in the door:
Other heroes and locales are treated in a likewise vivid, extensive, digressive, playful but tender way. Every single life counts in this simple and profoundly noble world and when someone’s time runs out, it is like the entire universe has collapsed. Thus the simple story stretches across one hundred pages, on which Różycki one by one saves the singularity of names from the catastrophe. The last one to be rescued is his late Grandfather, together with his beloved locomotive Basia, in the closing scene:
The imagery in these final lines of Twelve Stations resonates with the imagery in the final lines of “Homecoming”: here, too, a strange atmospheric phenomenon works like a portal between physical and metaphysical worlds, throwing the narrator back into reality, in which only some scattered pieces of transcendence remain. Sauternes and Bingen are nonexistent cities, or perhaps not even cities but other unidentified locales or objects, whose names Grandson read in Mr. Antonów’s notebook during the aforementioned visit to his apartment and repeated every now and then like a magical password to another dimension. In “Homecoming,” the devastated Eden is abandoned by an angel; in Twelve Stations also other living creatures evacuate themselves, and humans are left alone suspended between life and death. At roughly the same time, Różycki wrote a poem titled “Scorched Maps” (Spalone mapy) in which he recalls his trip to Lvov in 2004, reconfirming the apocalyptic intuition:
In yet another poem, “Entropy” (Entropia), from the debut collection Vaterland, he sighs that Lvov has become such a burden for people that it would have been better for everybody if it had been burned down.95
Finally, for all their doubts and fears, both Różycki and Li Hao muster up their courage and creative energies to attempt a messianic gesture, in the Benjaminian sense, that is, to save the dead from oblivion and eternal homelessness, but they feel that what they can offer is but a pitiful, grotesque ersatz of a true salvation in religious understanding of the word: a derailed ghost train, an angel with a catheter—a contingency plan in case God does not exist or has no better option in reserve. At the same time, in this “secret generational agreement,” saving the singularity of others’ names is necessary to define one’s own singularity, “on which the past has a claim,” to use Benjamin’s phrase, and which is likewise always doomed to incompleteness and perhaps will only be consolidated by the generations to come.
Różycki tries to counter the transitiveness of existence with the aesthetic form which in his short lyric poems is always highly refined and disciplined, drawing on traditional canons of poetic beauty. On the one hand, as Irena Grudzińska-Gross suggests, this is “one of the ways in which Różycki expresses loyalty to the past.”96 On the other hand, this is also a way to keep his singular self in one piece, and a symbolic investment in his literary afterlife. The trajectory of Li Hao’s poetry since 2017, when the Homecoming collection was released, is difficult to trace, for he was not permitted to publish anything else after the ban on the book in question, but from my own personal communication with the poet and the several manuscripts I had the privilege to read, I can tell that he tends to go further into metaphysics, and his messianism takes on an increasingly religious—though certainly not naively religious—dimension. To my knowledge, the contemporary Chinese poetry scene has not yet birthed any metaphysical poet, or minimally one who would gain some broader recognition, so Li Hao’s artistic path is certainly worth further attention.
3 Singularity vs. Generation
Each of the four authors discussed in this chapter has her/his specific poetic diction, interests, and ambitions. One thing that connects all of them, and at the same time distinguishes them from most of the authors born in the 1950s and 1960s—that is, the Third Generation in China and the Brulion Generation in Poland—is what might be provisionally described as a (literary-)historically neutral starting point for their writing. From the beginning, they took to poetry with the aim to find their own voice rather than to reform poetry as such. Their artistic singularity was not defined against one poetic tradition or another, be it in a diachronic or synchronic dimension, nor was it defined in relation to mainstream poetry discourse through self-positioning on stage or backstage.
Yin Lichuan, although she started from a position that could be perceived as neutral, with little knowledge of the local poetry scene, ready to host Popular and Intellectual authors alike in her poetry gigs, was quickly drawn into the dialectics of the local Chinese poetry field force, which at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was so active that it was really difficult not to be sucked in by it; Yin, with her rebellious character, was particularly prone to the influences of the vagabonds of Poetry Rivers and Lakes. While this certainly does not imply that she betrayed or sold out her singular talent, as a result of her choice it appeared almost impossible for Chinese critics to read her poetry otherwise than in connection to the Lower Body group and against the background of the earlier Intellectual-Popular polemic. Interestingly, comembers of the troupe, including Shen Haobo, who wrote the introduction to Even Better, from the beginning saw much richer and more ambiguous meanings in her poetry than external observers and were not so quick to identify her work as obscene provocation. In any event, it is only when she actually stopped writing and withdrew from the poetry scene altogether that alternative interpretations of her work begun to pop up in literary-critical discourse. Starting his career some ten years later than Yin, Li Hao found himself already in an entirely different situation—one that would probably be considered normal to poets in most Western countries—experiencing all the advantages and disadvantages of being left alone by society, albeit, unfortunately, not by censorship.
Różycki and Siwczyk, debuting in the mid-1990s, soon after the most intense phase of the polemic between the Classicists and the Barbarians had passed, were spared the doubtful privilege of being counted as members or allies of one camp or the other, although, theoretically, based on a superficial identification of the themes and style of their debut collections, Siwczyk might have ended up among the Barbarians and Różycki the Classicists. Polish literary-critical discourse indeed very quickly reoriented itself and started inventing, and importing, new “reading tools” that would better fit the multitude of individual singularities. This shift to pluralism manifested itself in, and was facilitated by, a great abundance of literary-critical scholarship devoted to the work of single living authors. Literary-critical discourse in Poland moved, in a surprisingly short period of time, from principally studying literary cohorts, movements, and great debates, to principally studying individual authors and their works.
In China, one can come across dozens of mutually competing poetry series and anthologies, including the monumental two-volume Selected Poems by the Post-70 Authors (70
In China, the “generational” thinking remained quite distinct not only among critics but also to some extent among poets who tried to define their specific role in the development of national poetry. As Zhang Qinghua
The square of the Post-70 poets is more interested in postindustrialism and in the urban context; it enquires into the awkward existence and spiritual experience of one generation. […] Since the asceticism of the epoch of collectivism started to inevitably disintegrate, social trends have been increasingly shaped by commerce, money, material desire, and utilitarianism. The “red” revolutionary education and traditional rural life instilled the spirit of sacrifice and pure ideals in them, yet growing up in the ever more complicated social environment, they became a conscious but confused, idealistic but utilitarian, conservative but rebellious, silent but ostentatious generation.99
He Guangshun
Obviously, they still share the desire of classical poets or those representing the generations of the post-50 and post-60 to enter the history of literature, the anxiety of waiting, the unsettled consciousness of time, as well as the sense of mission and of their own prophetic role inherited from the ancient classics and traditional literati. At the same time, they also share the anxiety of competition and the anxiety of immersion in new media that is characteristic of the generations of the post-80 and post-90. Between the inherited historical mission and the anxieties of modernity, they have developed their own specific understanding of history. Their work extends as a bridge of communication or as a chasm of fracture between the ancient times and the modern and future time.100
In this light, an interesting proposition is that of the poet-cum-scholar Chen Chao
4 Toward Poetic Imaginations
Different modes of the evolution of poetry discourse in Poland and China at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are very clearly reflected in the different trajectories of the evolution of poetic imagination. In 2009, Chen Chao published an essay titled “Twenty Years of Avant-Garde Poetry: A Transformation of the Forms of Imagination” (
All of them, although from different angles, observe complex relationships between history and reality, history and culture, history and language, history and power. In their eyes, poetry is not just an obsessive pursuit of beauty or emotion (
嗜美遣兴 ) but an exploration of concrete modes of life, existence, and historical context. They use a simpler and more direct style to express their critical attitude toward contemporary culture and language, in a discursive, circuitous, dialogical, or ironic way. In terms of literary taste, there are poets among them whom I not necessarily acclaim, and some to whose writing I feel I am not yet used to, but I can recognize their serious approach to writing and trust their talents. Each of them has the awareness of “bearing responsibility,” be it with regard to historical existence or to the art of poetry itself, although the way in which this awareness is manifested differs from the older generations; they write in a more natural, unrestrained, and concretized manner, grinning mischievously, heedless of waves and storms.103
Chen Chao’s much-needed efforts to bridge the gaps and reunite the poetry scene, reconciling various standpoints without detracting from the singularity of individual poets, are worth appreciation; the author’s suicide two weeks before the publication of the abovementioned monograph was an irreparable loss to Chinese verse. But his initiative was continued by other scholars. For example, in 2016, Zhang Weidong
If we look at the Polish poetry scene from the angle proposed by Chen Chao, we may note that for some time its evolution took an exactly opposite direction. “Individualized historical imagination”—albeit to my knowledge the term itself has never been used in Poland—was the dominant mode of reading and writing poetry until the second half of the 1980s and the emergence of Brulion authors; in the late 1980s, it was polarized and evolved into two distinct strands: the “everyday-life imagination” and “spiritual-transcendence imagination,” to use Chen’s notions, of the Barbarians and the Classicists, respectively. In the mid-1990s, instead of a dialectical (re)synthesis, which happened in China according to Chen, the two modes of imagination further split into a pluralist mosaic, which Marian Stala described using the notion of “emboldened imagination” (ośmielona wyobraźnia) coined in 1999.105
Unlike Chen Chao’s relatively precise term, which determines a concrete mode of imagination, namely, one that processes historical reality, Stala’s proposition emphasizes imagination’s intensity without referring to any specific function or form in which it is presented. His coinage gained great popularity in poetry discourse in Poland. First used to characterize the work of Roman Honet (b. 1974), since the 2010s it has returned regularly in critical studies and appeared in the titles of doctoral theses also in reference to other authors, especially Radosław Kobierski (b. 1971) and Bartłomiej Majzel (b. 1974). Poets as different as Tomasz Różycki (b. 1974), Justyna Bargielska (b. 1977), Konrad Ciok (b. 1987), Juliusz Gabryel (1979–2018), Łukasz Jarosz (b. 1978), Iwona Kacperska (b. 1976), Piotr Kuśmirek (b. 1978), Joanna Lech (b. 1984), Maciej Melecki (b. 1969), Joanna Mueller (b. 1979), Przemysław Owczarek (b. 1975), Tomasz Pułka (1988–2012), Robert Rybicki (b. 1976), Robert Miniak (b. 1969) and Małgorzata Lebda (b. 1985) have from time to time been mentioned in this discussion as well.106 On top of that, many older or late poets have been reread through the concept of imagination, for example Stanisław Barańczak (1946–2014) by Jacek Łukasiewicz107 or Bolesław Leśmian (1877–1937), Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński (1921–1944), Tadeusz Nowak (1930–1991), and Józef Czechowicz (1903–1939) by Anita Jarzyna.108 This illustrates a significant, overall, and almost immediate shift from the focus on defining (national) poetry toward the focus on individual singularity, not just in Polish poetry as such but also in Polish poetry criticism.
If I were to distinguish a dominant trend in the variety of “emboldened imaginations” in Polish poetry, I would say that most of them have been oscillating around what might be called cognitive imagination, oriented toward the epistemological discovery of a certain truth, be it intellectual or spiritual. Two texts that may suggest this type of cognitive imagination are Charles Baudelaire’s ecstatic praise of imagination as “the Queen of Faculties” from the Salon of 1859 and Gaston Bachelard’s “Copernican Revolution of Imagination.” Baudelaire writes:
How mysterious is Imagination, that Queen of the Faculties! It touches all the others; it rouses them and sends them into combat. […]
It is both analysis and synthesis […]. It decomposes all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with rules whose origins one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of newness. As it has created the world (so much can be said, I think, even in a religious sense), it is proper that it should govern it. What would be said of a warrior without imagination? […] The case could be compared to that of a poet or a novelist who took away the command of his faculties from the imagination to give it, for example, to his knowledge of language or to his observation of facts. What would be said of a diplomat without imagination? […] Of a scholar without imagination? […] Imagination is the queen of truth, and the possible is one of the provinces of truth. It has a positive relationship with the infinite.109
Bachelard seconds him:
[a] man is a man insofar as he is a superman. A man must be defined by the tendencies that impel him to go beyond the human condition. […] The imagination invents more than things and actions, it invents new life, new spirit; it opens eyes to new types of vision.110
It is to the author’s imagination that poetry owes its “bipolar” quality, to which Colette Gaudin refers, in the introduction to her edition of Bachelard’s On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, saying that “every work of art has two poles: the presence of a singular being and the ideality of communicable meanings. Poetry is that zone of language in which originality is impregnated with potential universality.”111
The interest in cognitive imagination might be taken as another example—along with the continuations of female androgyny—of the long life of modernism in Poland, in line with the simple, but in my view most convincing, distinction made by Brian McHale between modernist writing as writing characterized by the epistemological dominant and postmodernist writing as leaning toward the ontological dominant.112 Joanna Mueller, endowed with perhaps the most original and self-conscious language imagination among Polish living poets, in her essay “Stratigraphies” (Stratygrafie) strengthens the connection between the author’s epistemological activity and the development of individual singularity invoking George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation. Steiner makes a case that Western literature conforms to a set of what we might generally call epiphanic grammars, taken as secular reinterpretations of religious structures of Christian thought and ritual:
At every significant point, western philosophies of art and western poetics draw their secular idiom from the substratum of Christological debate. Like no other event in our mental history, the postulate of God’s kenosis through Jesus and of the never-ending availability of the Saviour in the wafer and wine of the eucharist conditions not only the development of western art and rhetoric itself, but also, at a much deeper level, that of our understanding and reception of the truth of art—a truth antithetical to the condemnation of the fictive in Plato.113
Mueller accepts Steiner’s perspective, bringing one particular element of inexhaustible epiphany-through-art into focus. She draws attention to the fact that while the creation process abounds in various epiphanies, for each word transmits numerous meanings that stem from its participation in various discourses, it is the author who ultimately sieves these meanings, deciding which of them to foreground and which to efface.
The term stratygrafie, in Mueller’s paramorphological rendition of the word, carries a double meaning. One is based on the interpretation of strata as a Latin word for “layers”; in this sense, a text understood as a product of stratigraphy is a palimpsest in which different levels of content can be distinguished. The other is based on the interpretation of strata as a Slavic word that is homophonous and homographic with the Latin strata, meaning “loss”; thus “stratigraphy” can alternatively be explicated as “writing loss(es).” Mueller explains:
Each poem, painting, or sculpture is a sort of stratigraphic system, in which from under the layers on the surface (to which the author says “yes”) emerge “strata/losses” marked with negation, doomed to nonexistence.
Steiner doesn’t position himself among the advocates of genetic, psychoanalytical, or deconstructionist methods of exploration of artistic works. He is not particularly interested in the author’s unconsciousness and its role in the process of precipitation of semantic sediment negated by consciousness. Grammars of Creation are located on the side of the author’s consciousness, which in the final shape of their work embraces its rejected versions not by a Freudian mistake, but with full awareness and premeditation.114
The “precipitation of semantic sediment” requires some explanation. It is part of a bigger signature metaphor coined by Mueller, which reemerges in many of her critical writings. The author visualizes poetic works as chemical solutions characterized by various degrees of saturation of meaning. A language poem is a supersaturated solution whose creator aims at dissolving “maximum in minimum.” Oversaturation with ambiguity leads to incomprehensibility of a text, or—as some say—hermeticness. But,
fortunately, as the history of the linguistic laboratory shows, the notion of supersaturation is relative and changes with the broadening of readerly expectations. The surplus that yesterday couldn’t be dissolved and was precipitated […], tomorrow may prove to be a precious crystal. What yesterday’s readers rejected as cocky mumbling, grammatic eccentricity, or impossible utopia, today turns out to be an underappreciated experiment: Khlebnikov’s zaumny [trans-sense] language, Białoszewski’s speech-centric grammaturgy, or the “impossible poetry” achieved by Karpowicz.115
Mueller’s striving for what she terms the maximal saturation of poetry with meaning illustrates Steiner’s argument that both science and art have always sought—and should always seek—the understanding of the greatest mysteries of the world, and that, in this joint search, the languages developed by science and art are getting ever closer to each other:
In our age of transition to new mappings, to new ways of telling the story, the natural and the “human” sciences (sciences humaines) present a spiralling motion. […] Knowledge proceeds forward technically, in its methods, in the ground it covers. But it seeks out origins. It would identify and grasp the source. In this movement towards “primacy”, different sciences, different bodies of systematic inquiry draw strikingly close to each other. […]
Though the conditions of “strangeness” and “singularity”—terms that reach as probingly into metaphysics or poetics as they do into the physics of cosmology—during the initial particle of time may still escape our computations, late twentieth-century science is now “within three seconds” of the start of this universe. The creation-story can be told as never before.116
Steiner’s reflection brings us to the threshold of the issues that will be discussed in chapters 6 and 7, which are focused on poetry’s search for what I referred to as capital-S Singularity; that is, to the limits of language, and, in practice, to the limits of the modernist paradigm.
That said, it is of course not true that phenomena that might be considered products of “emboldened imagination” in China did not exist at all. In fact, they had appeared there some twenty years earlier than in Poland, and in the mid-1980s there was a moment in which it might seem that Chinese poetry discourse would develop exactly in this direction. But it was brutally reoriented by history. A symptomatic case is that of Zhou Lunyou
In 1989, after June Fourth, Zhou was imprisoned and transferred to a reeducation-through-labor camp where he spent two years. His prison poems, for example “Imagining a Big Bird” (
[I]magination is not an empirical power added to consciousness, but is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom; every concrete and real situation of consciousness in the world is pregnant with the imaginary in so far as it is always presented as a surpassing of the real. It does not follow that all perception of the real must be reversed in imagination, but as consciousness is always “in situation” because it is always free, there is always and at every moment the concrete possibility for it to produce the irreal. There are various motivations that decide at each instant if consciousness will be only realizing or if it will imagine. The irreal is produced outside the world by a consciousness that remains in the world and it is because we are transcendentally free that we can imagine.118
Subsequently, in the early 1990s, Zhou developed the concept of “red writing” (
Winiarski 1996.
Translated as White and Red in the UK and Snow White and Russian Red in the US.
Majerski 2000: 14, trans. J K.
Majeran 1996: 7, trans. J K.
Maliszewski 1996: 193, trans. J K.
Śliwiński 2007: 291–292, trans. J K.
Siwczyk and Lichecka 2017, trans. J K. On that note, Julian Kornhauser is also the father of Agata Kornhauser-Duda, Poland’s current first lady, but it is well known that there is a wide gulf between Agata on the one hand and her father and younger brother on the other in terms of political views. In 2016, Jakub famously said that he would not be surprised if President Andrzej Duda would one day be brought before the State Tribunal.
Siwczyk 2016, trans. J K.
Siwczyk and Lichecka 2017, trans. J K.
Siwczyk and Lichecka 2020, trans. J K.
Niemczyńska 2014.
Skurtys 2019.
This section draws extensively on my biographical essay on Yin Lichuan included in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Krenz 2021b). I retain here the original references to primary sources.
Yin, Liu, and Qiao 2002: 276, trans. J K.
Shao 2012, trans. J K.
Yan Jun 2002: 235, trans. J K.
Yin and Zhao 2010: 182.
Nanfang Dushibao 2012: 145.
See discussion of the term’s translation in van Crevel 2017c, esp. pp. 47–48.
van Crevel 2008: 309.
Ibidem: 307.
Yin 2006a: 26.
Shen Haobo 2001: 2.
Ibidem: 4.
Yan Jun 2002: 284–285.
Hu Chuanji 2008.
Li Shijiang (undated), Wu Ang (undated), Shen Haobo (undated).
Yin 2006b.
Siwczyk 2006: 12, trans. J K.
Yin 2001: 200–201, trans. J K.
Siwczyk 2006: 10, trans. J K.
Yin 2001: 181, trans. J K.
Yin 2003: 48–49.
Siwczyk 2006: 22, trans. J K.
Yin 2001: 192, trans. J K.
van Crevel 2008: 328.
Yin 2001: 182, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 205–206, trans. J K.
Siwczyk 2006: 5, trans. J K.
Yin Lichuan 2001: 190, trans. J K.
Siwczyk 2006: 13.
Ibidem: 33.
Yin 2003: 4–5.
Ibidem: 20.
Cf. Krenz 2018: 61–62; 2020b.
Yin 2001: 197–198, trans. J K.
Siwczyk 2006: 39, trans. J K.
Stańczyk 2009: 53–54.
Ibidem.
Siwczyk 2006: 39, trans. J K.
Siwczyk 2006: 20.
Ibidem: 23, trans. J K.
Yin 2006: 81–82, trans. J K.
See, e.g., Yin et al. 2002.
Ta Ai 2005: 95, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 98, trans. J K.
van Crevel 2008: 320–321.
Shen 2001: 4, trans. J K.
Bao Yuqi 2011: 143; Jiang Lili 2009: 60.
Zhao Bin 2008; Zhou Xiaoxiang 2017.
Richards 2019: KL 5212.
Quoted in Richards 2019: KL 5279.
See, e.g., Kudyba 2010; Maryjka 2016; Dobrzyńska 2019; Johnston 2019.
Li Hao 2017: 106–107, trans. J K.
Quoted in Li Hao 2017: 192–193.
Stańczyk 2009.
Babcia means “grandma” and is normally used by kids to refer to the mother of one of their parents. Bill Johnston decided to leave the word untranslated in its original form perhaps in order to emphasize the Polishness of the woman. Traditional Polish babcias are very specific personas: unconditionally, though perhaps embarrassingly, loving of their grandchildren, for example overfeeding them with bigos and other simple dishes from Polish cuisine or secretly smuggling food into their belongings (in Twelve Stations, Grandson, in a most inopportune moment, discovers a piece of stinking rotten fish in his backpack!).
On the interactions between poetry and the Różycki family history, see Grudzińska-Gross 2012.
Różycki 2015: 182–185.
Różycki 2015: 216–217.
Ibidem: 224–227.
Tabaszewska 2013: 114, trans. J K.
Różycki 2014b: 15, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 154, trans. J K.
Li Hao 2017: 208, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 187–188, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 191.
Li Hao 2017: 171–172, trans. J K.
Li Hao, personal communication with the author, May 26, 2020.
Benjamin 2006: 392.
Ibidem: 390.
Benjamin 1997: 163, translated by Steven Rendall.
Ibidem.
Lipszyc Adam 2012: 343, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 348, trans. J K.
Li Hao 2017: 155–157, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 160–162, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 162, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 163–164, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 167, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 171–172, trans. J K.
Różycki 2015: 102–105.
Ibidem: 244–247.
Różycki 2013: 106–107.
Cf. Grudzińska-Gross 2012: 5.
Grudzińska-Gross 2012: 98.
Zhang and Meng 2016: 22.
Chen Zhongyi 2008.
Huo Junming 2011: 2, trans. J K.
He Guangshun 2017: 42, trans. J K.
Chen Chao 2009.
Chen Chao 2014.
Chen Chao 2009: 36, trans. J K.
Zhang Weidong 2016; Jiang Tao 2016; Yang Shangchen and Li Luyan 2018; He Xuefeng 2018.
Stala and Marecki 2000.
Orliński 2012.
See, e.g., Łukasiewicz’s speech on the occasion of Barańczak winning the 2009 Silesius Poetry Award; quoted in Nurek 2009.
Jarzyna 2017.
Baudelaire 2014: 91–92.
Bachelard 2014: KL 1258.
Ibidem: KL 651–652.
McHale 2004: xii.
Steiner 2001: 55.
Mueller 2010: 96, trans. J K.
Ibidem: 94, trans. J K.
Steiner 2001: 9–11.
Zhou Lunyou 1999: 109–110.
Sartre 2004: 186–187.