第4章 Spiritual Upgrader on the Quenching (as a preface)

Since 1990s, some poets have abandoned the collective or individual Utopia “rites” to be involved in the vortex of daily experience and trivial things. When we all notice the poetry narration and the exhibition of daily experience in the 90s, the “individualization” (privatization) poetry style, which is relished by poets and poetry researchers, obtains symbiosis and collectivism in this regard. With the great changes of social context and corresponding poetry writing context at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, poetry writing, in some degree, is significant in repelling time & myth, Utopia & fantasy, “pseudo lyricism”, and “pseudo local-color literature”. But the repelling results in a new round of discourse power, namely, worship for “daily experience”. Really, while endowing poetry writing with a powerful “stomach” to contain poetry, “daily experience” also becomes a huge vortex, and an overflowing depth-lacking image parody begins to suffuse. On this basis, Aerdingfu Yiren has to, in his poems writing, form such a realization: most poets should force themselves to slow down their speed of poems writing, while developing an open vision, a strong force of penetration and review ability about reality and history, so as to finally reach the exact and real connection and witness significance which correspond to existence and epoch. “Perhaps we should not have stayed for long / should not have supported you up to the altar / everything here is in the obscured garden / throwing despising eyes to kill or obstruct / the unparalleled dream is turning in the center of the world” (The Mysterious Halo). For Yiren, who is trudging, exploring, and digging on the road of poetry, it is a duty which can not be shirked to open the drift bottle of poetry in the glittering light of night, to dive down in darkness enveloped and squeezed with material desire, money, power, and crazy illusions, to listen to the remote and genuine soul soliloquy from language, nationality, and religion, or to the mysterious calling for a dialogue. All this, no doubt, is the embodiment of conscience, as Brodsky says: “poetry is the expression of human memory.” And from the word formation of “poetry”, it contains memory and “bosom”, as well as the spiritual dimension of religion. It is just in this sense that Yiren really returns to the source of poetry concerning his long poems writing. The drift bottle of poetry made by him is filled with sediment of collective memory, and in the twinkling light the real quietude and self-contentment flash is a must — it is the noble posture of questioning and digging with life-long efforts. Bachelard says, “where there are fireflies, there is memory.” Yes, where there is listening, there is memory. Hence, in the pleading for genuine knowledge of gnawing themes “insight into the present age” and “insight into the soul”, Aerdingfu Yiren exhibits his persevering poetry character and individual stance which is full of conscience, and he bears the memory of history and humanity with poetic language, power of imagination, and unique handicraft.