Tag: Hongkong

Slaves Who Wrestle to Be Free

kevin

Albus McInerney edits a literary magazine.

 

When Rami proposed an issue on poetry and urbanisation, there was a pause. Not an entirely apprehensive pause – but one that betrayed, perhaps, a certain weariness, as though malls and motorways might be too familiar, the alienation and angst of city life too well trodden for new discoveries.

Rami has lived in Tokyo and Sao Paulo and she made a documentary about popular poetry in Mozambique, which offered her an opportunity to spend three months in Maputo – so she is more than familiar with the myriad possibilities and pitfalls of concrete conurbations and their reflection in verse.

‘Industrial decline?’ Patrice asked.

‘And growth,’ Rami said.

‘Exploitation of city-dwellers?’ Dimitri suggested.

‘Opportunities too,’ Rami said.

‘I’m from a small town,’ Kim said, ‘picket fences and such. Cities were about freedom, or at least the idea of freedom. Our urban myths began at the Greyhound station.’

‘Whitman?’ Patrice suggested tentatively. ‘Celebrations of cities becoming cities – New York especially?’

Patrice travelled East after graduation and landed in Tokyo when a degree from the Sorbonne opened multiple doors (he was pals with Mishima for a while), so, I was surprised at this bee-line to the Atlantic coast rather than somewhere in Asia.

‘Migration,’ Dimitri said, ‘the city as a place of opportunity.’

‘It has relevance, certainly,’ Rami said.

I’ve noticed that, when Rami begins a discussion, she stands to one side to see how it will develop.

‘Patrice, you live in Hongkong,’ I said.

‘Past its heyday,’ he replied, rather quickly, ‘All the way down from here.’

‘There’s a whole school of poetry about urban decline,’ I said.

We seemed to be floating into unfamiliar waters – which, of course, is generally not a bad thing.

‘I’m from a city in the north,’ Patrice said – unexpectedly: he rarely speaks about France. ‘Haven’t been there for forty years. I’m told it’s nicer now. Wasn’t when I grew up.’

‘Which city,’ Dimitri asked.

‘Roubaix, next to Lille.’

‘I’ve been in Roubaix!’ Dimitri said. ‘With a bunch of literary types from my side of the continent – we ran a workshop for schoolkids, part of a cultural exchange. Some terrific architecture – fabulous textile mills. It was like landing in another world!’

‘When I grew up the factories were still sputtering,’ Patrice said, ‘and there was no place for poetry.’ A note of melancholy for the briefest moment pointed to an aspect of Patrice’s personality I hadn’t seen before.

‘We had poetry in our factories,’ Dimitri said, with a jovial and more familiar relish for absurdity. ‘The workers were encouraged to attend lunch-time readings – celebrating the achievements of the regime for the most part. I will leave you to judge whether the experience was one of mass appreciation!’

‘Our urban poets were genuinely popular?’ Kim said. ‘They still are.’

‘And we are speaking of . . ?’ I may have allowed a certain scepticism to bubble to the surface.

‘Blues,’ Kim said, ‘and all the things that came from it.’

‘What about you, Albus?’ Rami asked.

‘I’m with Patrice,’ I said, ‘exiled from another century, but there are lines that conjure up the city I remember. We could allude to them in our urban poetry edition.’

‘And they are?’ Dimitri asked, ever to the point.

‘Out of this ugliness may come,’ I began, without hesitation

some day so beautiful a flower

            that men will wonder at that hour

remembering smoke and flowerless slum

            and ask

                        glimpsing the agony

            of the slaves who wrestle to be free

‘But why were all the poets dumb?’

‘That’s it!’ Patrice said with an emphasis just short of vehemence. ‘That’s my town!’

‘Mine too,’ I said.

‘They weren’t dumb,’ Rami said. ‘And they aren’t dumb. We have a great deal of ground to cover. Our different cities have multiple voices.’

‘Including,’ Kim added gently, ‘our cities from long ago, Patrice.’

‘Distant worlds,’ Patrice said. His tone had become more thoughtful. ‘Slaves who wrestle to be free.’

‘Stories of exile, no doubt,’ Dimitri said, ‘and all that’s left behind.’

I’m looking forward to this issue. More than motorways and malls, clearly.

You Can’t Keep a Good Poet Down

kevin

Albus McInerney edits a literary magazine.

Patrice is French by nationality, a specialist in Comparative Literature by profession, and a poet (of the avant garde variety) by avocation; he lives in Hongkong. The present unpleasantness between China and the United States, together with domestic developments in both countries, may have a bearing on all of these things.

One might have expected poetry to be immune from the knee-jerk tit-for-tat of diplomatic disagreement, but the current geopolitical debate involves issues of principle as well as the insecurities of leaders in Washington and Beijing. Global power shifts have impinged on arguments about fundamental rights – the rights of ethnic minorities in China, for example, to maintain their own culture, or the rights of citizens in the United States to protest against their own government. The rather unattractively strident personalities of the respective heads of state have compounded the issue – reducing finely calibrated strategic calculation to the logic of the playground: he stole my teddy bear, so I’m going to hide his tennis ball, and so forth.

In the midst of this outbreak of Sino-American argie-bargie, Patrice has composed a lyrical and metrically disciplined celebration of Hongkong, a city threatened, among other things, with collateral damage from the dispute between the two superpowers. The poem is a meditation on collective creativity – a social dynamic that invariably baffles insecure rulers. Those who are familiar with Patrice’s present circumstances might view this as something of a retreat – from the barricades to the boudoir, as it were, since the focus is personal rather than polemical. Yet, I’m inclined to view it as an exemplary exercise in moral pedagogy, de haut en bas. When the bullies fight over teddy bears, the scribe celebrates the beauty of the playground.

The Chinese poetry tradition is filled with testaments to truth in the face of the unwise or unethical exercise of power.

Po Chu-I, a thorn in the flesh of the T’ang emperor, had the gift of getting straight to the point, as in:

Who does the weaving, who wears the robe?

A poor woman in the glens of Yueh, a lady in the palace of Han.

And his descriptions of human peccadilloes are so astute they could apply to military and paramilitary martinets in Xinjiang or Portland today:

A show of arrogant spirit fills the road;

a glitter of saddles and horses lights up the dust.

I ask who these people are –

trusted servants of the ruler, I’m told.

In the same poem, after painting a picture of smart suits on generous expenses dispatched to sort out uppity citizens in a distant province, Po Chu-I makes the incontrovertible point that restoring order isn’t a matter of stilling dissent but of addressing injustice:

This year there’s a drought south of the Yangtze.

he notes, adding with devastating simplicity that

In Ch-u-chou, people are eating people.

But literature doesn’t have to be overtly political in order to be to be politically relevant.  Cao Xueqin’s 18th century novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, elegiacally celebrates the foibles of humanity under the mandate of heaven, undermining that very mandate by showing that the best ordered empire is riddled with disorder – because human beings will always be that way.

You can’t keep a good poet down, or as the Ch’u Tz’u of the Chou dynasty would have it:

The swift-winged bird does not travel with the flock;

from times past has this been so.

How can square and round be made to fit together,

How can those who travel different roads plan for one another?

Which validates, I think, just about every argument that has ever been trotted out in defence of poetry, its relevance and its power. Presidents may come and go, but poetry has a way of circumventing order from above – and this has certainly proved to be a very durable as well as a very necessary contribution to the common good.

Our Poetry Party

kevin

Albus McInerney edits a literary magazine.

Our Poetry Party

Kim proposed that we organize a Zoom reading.

I’m obliged to admit that I responded with a soupçon of misgiving.

Not so, Marianne. ‘It will be a global event! We can divide it into sections – Poems of Resistance! Poems of Exploitation! Poems of Engagement!’

‘You’ve already given this some thought?’ I asked.

‘It isn’t rocket science!’ Marianne said. ‘It’s what we are already doing – but with a different platform!’ I noticed she was speaking in exclamation points.

And, she is right, of course. Zoom and other devices of relatively recent vogue lend themselves to performance – plays and concerts and all kinds of entertainment – so, why not poetry?

Perhaps it’s the word ‘performance’ that I had difficulty with. Poetry is cerebral, contemplative – isn’t it?

‘And we can have a competition!’ Kim said, adopting Marianne’s exclamatory manner. ‘We can have prizes!’

‘Prizes!’ My misgivings multiplied.

‘A poetry slam!’ Marianne said. ‘A global poetry slam! Why not prizes?’

‘But . . .’ I began.

‘A bit of a departure from our regular beat?’ Dimitri said. He has a cooler head than me, but he is often just as sceptical about things that are new and disconcerting.

‘Would the performers submit their work in advance,’ Patrice asked, ‘so that we can check the suitability of the poems they propose to read?’

I wondered if Patrice was showing an untoward though entirely understandable reaction to Hongkong’s new security law. In other matters – free metre and the imaginative deployment of sprung rhythm, for example – he is all for radical departures.

‘Albus?’ Kim asked.

‘It’s an interesting idea,’ I said.

‘That’s what you say when you think something’s a terrible idea,’ Dimitri said. This was true.

‘We don’t have to call it a poetry “slam”,’ Marianne said. I believe she may have identified the snobbery that fuelled at least a part of my scepticism.

‘It would certainly suit the current circumstances,’ Patrice acknowledged, ‘and it is a logical extension of what we’re already doing. It would be an opportunity for new voices to be heard.’

‘As long as we know in advance what the “performers” are going to say?’ I suggested, no doubt a little snidely.

‘No,’ Patrice replied firmly. ‘I erred on the side of timidity there. If it’s to have resonance, poetry cannot be muzzled!’ Despots ought undoubtedly to tremble in the face of statements such as this. I could see that Patrice was coming round to Kim’s idea.

‘What about practicalities? Logistics?’ I asked, taking refuge, I am ashamed to say, in the sort of territory where spurious objections live. ‘Do we even know how to organize an online poetry event?’

‘Well, we do publish an online poetry magazine,’ Dimitri pointed out with rather magisterial simplicity. ‘We should be able to manage a virtual reading.’

‘We’ll put out the word on social media and publish the link,’ (I’ve noticed that since she sold the film option for her verse epic about nineteenth century transpacific migration, Kim has become something of a dab hand at the jargon of today) ‘and if more than fifty people log on, we’ll have a smash hit! Fewer than that would come to a real event. I have some students who can set up the Zoom meeting. I’ll ask them.’

And so, On Lines is going even further online. Our first Global Poetry Party will not be competitive – no prizes. It will be open to all. And there will be no vetting, so we may get into trouble (if we’re lucky).

As I consider these things, it occurs to me that this project, about which I was initially lukewarm, is a celebration of the free and expressive creativity that makes poetry matter. I’m a little sheepish that I had to be persuaded in the first place. In this respect at least, the exercise seems to have blown away some artistic cobwebs. Another unexpected dividend in the age of Zoom.