Chapter 76 Talk about free verse (1)

(December 8, 2004) It is said that no one writes poetry now, and the recession is getting worse. I don’t think so. Poetry is born in everyone’s heart, and it will always exist and be beautiful.There are many boys and girls who write poetry in our class, of course, it is very personal.But this can also explain the problem. Writing poetry (mainly free verse) is very common among my peers, and she is also indispensable in the class magazine I run.It is conceivable that poetry will be equally alive when we are masters of the world.I think people get the idea that poetry is bad because the poetry published in the press is so bad.Indeed, when I read it, I would sigh that the world is going from bad to worse.For example, three of my poems were selected and published by "Poetry Magazine", and I finally got them (in fact, no one sells them in the market).

From this, I understood that it is not that people have forgotten poetry.Everyone is writing, not for any reason, just for themselves, this is the most real state of writing poetry.So why don't people read poetry publications? Because the so-called poets who rule the public press are self-righteous people, and I mean the mindset in which they write poetry.It's okay to write poems for yourself, but if the poems you write are published in magazines that everyone reads, then they should have a certain degree of universality and resonate with people.They wrote poems without any intention of showing them to others. They groaned and groaned without knowing what to say. They really defiled art! The only thing I am lucky about is that readers can understand the three poems I published in "Poetry Magazine".A good poem in my mind—the three elements of words, thoughts, and personality are all indispensable.Where is poetry unfathomable? Those who write "disgusting stuff" think that they have to elevate it to a seemingly unattainable level to write unintelligible.I remember that when "Selected Poems of the New Moon" was published in 1931, Chen Mengjia wrote a preface, which mentioned that their creative direction was to advocate mellow essence, meticulous technique and rigorous rhythm.A group of people who write poetry out of love for poetry is like a spring of fresh water.The preface expounds their own understanding of poetry and their imagination of the future development direction of new poetry, which is very important.Looking through the poems of the Xinyue Poetry School, such as Xu Zhimo, there is a kind of rhythm like ancient poetry everywhere, and the rhythm influenced by Western poetry.Speaking of him alone, the reason why "Farewell to Cambridge" has become a classic, I think its structure has a lot to do with it.The pieces fit neatly together.I don't like long sentences, and wanton punctuation in a line hurts me even more.Therefore, poems like Zhimo’s "The Great Commander" written due to the war are too long, not neat, and the rhyme is very irregular (I pay great attention to this. Recently, my poems basically rhyme to the end, and it is very convenient to read aloud) , it can be seen that he cannot be contaminated by the dust of reality.

The shortcoming of early poems such as the Crescent Poems is that the transformation of the vernacular is not complete, just like the works of Lu Xun selected in our middle school textbooks, people often laugh at them, similar to "I haven't seen them until now, maybe Kong Yiji is indeed dead" Strange statement.Another point to mention is the way of expressing ideas.Wen Yiduo's famous poem "Dead Water", the wording is too dirty! There is also "Night Song", I can understand the shaping of its artistic conception, but it starts with a toad and ends with an old woman, and there is a blood-like hideousness in the middle , Hu Song's emanating words are not beautiful.Xu Zhimo's "The Great Marshal" also has this problem. It tells a story about burying a dead body or even a living person in a very colloquial way.In Wilde's preface to the novel "The Portrait of Dorian Gray", he shockingly—allow me to express my excitement, because Wilde's preface is absolutely—saying that all art is useless, what is this? Meaning? That is to say that he believes that art does not serve reality.He said that an artist is the creator of beautiful works.Wilde did just that.

Not to mention whether this kind of thinking is right or not, I still partly agree with it.So coming back to poetry, if someone stains it with dirty words, for whatever reason—even because there are many dirty things in the world, I am the first to not bear it.I don't read many poems, so the examples I can list are limited, but they are definitely used to express my views on poetry.There are a thousand Hamlets in the hearts of a thousand people, and a person who writes poetry, of course, has a poem in his own mind.Poetry is invisible, there is no absolute right or wrong, this is its greatness, anyone will use their own standards to shape it.

Let me talk about the issue of "Poetry Magazine" that published my work. There was an article in it about what free verse is good and what is bad. It listed two poems that also talked about mothers. First Shu Ting is good.I think poetry cannot be judged so easily, because it has a strong personal color.Just like my classmates who write for themselves, how do you evaluate their poems? The only thing that can be judged is the skill of writing poetry, but sometimes when the skill is not important, how do you judge?