This is a great review. Very detailed, all interesting details that make you want to check out the book, the books and the film, the subjects in question.
POETRY
poetry
is impo
rtant
truth
is impo
tent
or is it
or are you
MW February 2017
I wrote this one the day before Maghiel van Crevel’s review of Iron Moon came out. It came out of another poem I wrote after reading another recent post on the MCLC list about an article called Best Investigative Stories in China 2016.
REPORT
every report
every detailed incisive report
kind that makes powerful people squirm
is just as important
as any art
any poem
any church, temple
that makes you pause
think
feel
every report
MW February 2017
It’s hard to say which reports in and from China at any time are the best, rather like it’s hard to say which reports in and from North America or South America at any given time are the best. Anyway, I was feeling a kind of tension akin to a “central question” in van Crevel’s review: ” Is this poetry that happens to be about migrant labor or a manifesto about migrant labor that happens to take the form of poetry?”
I have been translating Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼 and Xu Lizhi 许立志 for a while. They are probably the most famous migrant worker poets in China. I first heard about Zheng in 2008 or 2009, as far as I remember now. Xu became famous after he killed himself in late September 2014. Yi Sha 伊沙 told me about it two or three days later when we met at Vermont Studio Center. I was there to translate Yi Sha, but spending time with Yi Sha always means you get a crash course on current poetry in China, assembled by the most voracious practitioner I have met anywhere.
Yi Sha
SUDDENLY THINKING OF A GOOD POET
Five years ago, passed by in Huizhou.
Jianghu Hai pulled me up on a stage.
Migrant workers reciting their poetry.
I read my own stuff,
then insisted on listening until the end.
For this I received scorn and confusion
from an overseas swindler
and two female poets from Beijing,
who also questioned my motives.
They didn’t know
and don’t know today
Xu Lizhi
was one of those workers
up there on the stage.
September 2016
Tr. MW, 2016-2017
(Original see here)
Xu Lizhi appeared in Yi Sha’s daily series NPC (New Poetry Canon 新世纪诗典) in 2013. Van Crevel lists a few of the English-language reports on Xu Lizhi that have come out after his death. There are also reports in other languages, for example this new one in BosnoCroatMontenegrinSrbation or whatever you call it :). Sorry, no offense intended, of course. It’s a great piece, as far as I can tell, with many translations and references to the book and the film Iron Moon. And there is a long report on Xu Lizhi by Kai Strittmatter in the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 2015. Kai Strittmatter often writes about migrant worker poets. Highly recommended.
The question about one’s motives comes up again and again. So what. Poetry begets poetry, and attention for people and other things. That’s what it’s for.
Best,
Martin Winter