Ideogrammic Methods: The Space of Writing & Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Long Poetry

When the Chinese poetry tradition is held up comparatively with the traditions of poetry in the West, essentialist views have often noted China’s “lack” of the epic as a genre, and yet seminal American modernist Ezra Pound based the “ideogrammic method” upon which he built his collage epic Cantos on his understanding of the Chinese written character. Can this disjunction be rectified in the long poems of contemporary Chinese poets? Looking at the long and serial poems of the contemporary Chinese poets Yang Lian 杨炼 (b. 1955) and Xi Chuan 西川 (b. 1963), both of whose work exists in conscious dialogue with Pound, I propose to engage with the conference’s quest and question of locating the contemporary long poem in space—defined, for the purposes of my fifteen-minute presentation, in and between tradition and writing. Specifically, I will look at the ways in which Yang Lian’s Yi (a poem of sixty-four sections based on the Book of Changes [I Ching or Yijing], named with a character of his own invention) and Xi Chuan’s Thirty Historical Reflections 鉴史三十章 (a sequence that has grown beyond just thirty) read the Chinese past through a Poundian-inspired poetics to simultaneously create and question a new tradition of world literature. Given that time—and space—will be limited, I will necessarily focus my attention to the luminous details and ideogrammic moments of Yang Lian’s and Xi Chuan’s poetries, dismantling the epic to the constituent ideogrammic basis upon which it has been built.The presentation can be uploaded to the nzepc website either as a video, or else as an animated PowerPoint file.Also worth noting may be that Yang Lian has been a New Zealand citizen since the early ’90s and has an nzepc page at http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/yang/