One glaring similarity is that both countries create a good deal of highly allusive, atmospheric writing that, through arresting, resonant lines, calls forth a strong mood without necessarily conveying to the reader a discernible subject. It would be more acceptable, I think, to look at the Chinese compositions in relation to contemporary U.S. It would be inexcusable, of course, to judge this or any volume of verse exclusively according to its awareness of socio-economic conditions, and I don’t mean to do so here. Wang, in typical agit-prop style, takes the voice of a worker in one piece, saying, “From the chicken-wired window, we watch our boss / In his limo, plump kids and new wife behind tinted glass.” Wang is not a one-note writer, however, and in a poem about a sour Chinese expatriate who is dourly watching a little immigrant girl in a Park Slope playground, she skillfully shapes a poem that gives voice to multiple political perspectives. Moreover, Mair is getting at the ability to publish such verse, not write it, in that the only unflinching protest poems about working conditions were written by one of the few poets in the book who live outside China, the U.S. Rather, I think, he’s referencing the cris de coeur lamenting sweatshop conditions in the rapidly industrializing cities. Recent Chinese films, such as Summer Palace and Lost in Beijing, have been banned because of their sexual explicitness. But…the in-house censor chopped out a few of my favorites.” By “opening up,” he is not referring to poets, for example, giving frank expression to eros. In a letter I received from Denis Mair, primary translator of the new bilingual anthology Current Chinese Poetry, edited by Yang Siping, he notes that “10 or 15 years ago a large state press like Shanghai Literature Press would not have gone near these poets. Yang Siping, ed., Denis Mair, et al., trans.Ĭurrent Chinese Poetry: Chinese English Reader
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