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This is a spoken word poem that I originally wrote as part of a performance project during the museum night in Antwerp, but later expanded into a full piece!


profound and simple in its delivery and its relation to how we all feel when it feels like you're in a loop of living. Thanks man coming in hot with the prose skills.

Harry Potter Lol GIF by Sky
 
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I'm quite shy about most of my work, but here's one of my latest (dregs) experimental poem I've written. It's personal, but I'd appreciate any feedback or thoughts:


Sapped of strength, bare bushes buried in snow

Flayed shreds of bark sprinkled by the dark eyed juncos

Who chase the crows from the carrion stink,
Im really loving it. Im apprehensive to give my take as it may reveal a deep projection, but i'll risk it. I almost feel like its painting a scene of experiencing the presence of a dead body in the wilderness, possibly of either an enemy you arent comfortable with killing or a friend who died.

at any rate it provoked this emotion from me, which is successful of any art form.

share more! you got moves.
 
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wow really appreciate it!! yeah i wrote these to the tune of Nefertiti by Wayne Shorter for a demo i did a while back:


View: https://kliffi.bandcamp.com/track/nefertiti-live-at-home


ps French Symbolism is amazing! the opera Pelleas et Melisande by Debussy is probably my favorite piece of music full stop.

I would have never guessed! Debussy is such a delight to listen to; after reading Rimbaud for the FIRST time last year (I don't know why I didn't read him when I was younger...) I became obsessed with the poetry and other art forms of the mid to late 19th century, especially the French! I'm still trying to parse through the symbolists before I get my feet wet with the OG surrealists, to get a better understanding of the metamorphosis between the movements.
 

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Im really loving it. Im apprehensive to give my take as it may reveal a deep projection, but i'll risk it. I almost feel like its painting a scene of experiencing the presence of a dead body in the wilderness, possibly of either an enemy you arent comfortable with killing or a friend who died.

at any rate it provoked this emotion from me, which is successful of any art form.

share more! you got moves.
Thank you! I really appreciate your feedback; it means a lot to me! This was written while someone close to me was dying, and it put me into a very particular mindset, thanatopsis is the only word to say it but I'll risk sounding pretentious, but yeah... Let me sift through some of my notebooks and we'll see what's good enough to post.
 

kliffi

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I would have never guessed! Debussy is such a delight to listen to; after reading Rimbaud for the FIRST time last year (I don't know why I didn't read him when I was younger...) I became obsessed with the poetry and other art forms of the mid to late 19th century, especially the French! I'm still trying to parse through the symbolists before I get my feet wet with the OG surrealists, to get a better understanding of the metamorphosis between the movements.
ahhh nice! I'm pretty uninitiated with French Symbolist stuff, most of what I know of it is from vocal settings by Poulenc/Duparc/Debussy of stuff like Péladan and Apollinaire. I just studied a lot of Late Imperial Chinese stuff like Yuan Hongdao and Zhang Dai in college and that stuff has a similar lyricism and ~languor~
 
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Wholly shit, that's awsome. I am scared of spoken word, as in I get nervous preforming my poetry, so I assume I would have a tough time with it, that being said I very much appreciate for your work for the content and for the fact that it takes alot to put your self on display with your work as apposed to the safety of written poetry with a pen name. But over all I love this one.
Thank you, I really appreciate that :)
 
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ahhh nice! I'm pretty uninitiated with French Symbolist stuff, most of what I know of it is from vocal settings by Poulenc/Duparc/Debussy of stuff like Péladan and Apollinaire. I just studied a lot of Late Imperial Chinese stuff like Yuan Hongdao and Zhang Dai in college and that stuff has a similar lyricism and ~languor~
oooh, what a coincidence! I've read a lot of ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry and got into it in the past. Only more recently have I procured a nice beefy collection of Chinese poetry covering approximately 3000 years and am obsessed with it.
Not being educated in anything Chinese, let alone their poetic conventions, I can't speak for the translations, yet I still love the relationship they have with nature, exile, and bucolic themes which border on the metaphysical sometimes. Most of all it's the imagery that gets me.
After FINALLY learning about kishotenketsu only after hearing it in a review of an obscure Japanese film, did I realize this was the once unnamable pattern that I loved so much about the shorter Chinese verses! Understanding this and piecing together the amazing style of imagery some of the poets conjure, I think I've discovered the secret to recreating modern verses with the same timeless feeling, as well as pretty sly haiku too. It may not be a secret at all, but to me it was a revelation like no other!
Aside from this, Ezra Pound (politics aside, never conflate the artist's private beliefs and their work!!!) took a lot of inspiration from the Japanese and Chinese and penned some very beautiful imagist poems, but as for the translations he "did", that's another story. To me he was a brilliant fusionist and no matter the things he did later on, his influence was indelible, and showed Westerns how amazing Eastern poetry can be. He was the first modern poet I read after a dreadfully long binge with the Romantics, why Pound precisely? I saw the book on day in the library, opened a random page, and started from there. No kidding.
Specifically your poem reminded me of a few of Paul Verlaine's poems in the wonderful collection Romances sans paroles.
Also, can you recommend to me good guides on understanding the conventions behind some periods of Chinese poetry? While reading poetry, I mostly skip the scholarly notes and dive right into the poems, and thus usually miss some little nuances.
 

kliffi

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oooh, what a coincidence! I've read a lot of ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry and got into it in the past. Only more recently have I procured a nice beefy collection of Chinese poetry covering approximately 3000 years and am obsessed with it.
Not being educated in anything Chinese, let alone their poetic conventions, I can't speak for the translations, yet I still love the relationship they have with nature, exile, and bucolic themes which border on the metaphysical sometimes. Most of all it's the imagery that gets me.
After FINALLY learning about kishotenketsu only after hearing it in a review of an obscure Japanese film, did I realize this was the once unnamable pattern that I loved so much about the shorter Chinese verses! Understanding this and piecing together the amazing style of imagery some of the poets conjure, I think I've discovered the secret to recreating modern verses with the same timeless feeling, as well as pretty sly haiku too. It may not be a secret at all, but to me it was a revelation like no other!
Aside from this, Ezra Pound (politics aside, never conflate the artist's private beliefs and their work!!!) took a lot of inspiration from the Japanese and Chinese and penned some very beautiful imagist poems, but as for the translations he "did", that's another story. To me he was a brilliant fusionist and no matter the things he did later on, his influence was indelible, and showed Westerns how amazing Eastern poetry can be. He was the first modern poet I read after a dreadfully long binge with the Romantics, why Pound precisely? I saw the book on day in the library, opened a random page, and started from there. No kidding.
Specifically your poem reminded me of a few of Paul Verlaine's poems in the wonderful collection Romances sans paroles.
Also, can you recommend to me good guides on understanding the conventions behind some periods of Chinese poetry? While reading poetry, I mostly skip the scholarly notes and dive right into the poems, and thus usually miss some little nuances.
no way! Ezra Pound is probably the most important translator (or mistranslator lol) from Chinese to English, which goes to show how ineffective so much sinological scholarship ends up being--the sinophile (mostly discounted as a scholar by modern standards) Ernest Fenellosa wrote some amazing lectures on Chinese translation and East-West poetics (I love "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry") though and all of Pound's Chinese translations draw on Fenellosa's notes. *vaporfootnote: Shoutout to Civic Duty Records' coinage "mistranslationwave", I think it's one of the best terms to describe what vaporwave has done for plunderphonics.

When it comes to drawing out the history of Chinese poetry, the Chinese imperial "canon" is extensive has done a lot of that work, but it ends up being kind of useless for actual fans of poetry because the official canonization was overtly politically motivated. There are a lot of great sinologists like Burton Watson or Haun Saussy who work to add nuance to the usual paradigm of dynastic poetic conventions from Han (rhapsodism) --> Jin-Wei (mysticism, Daoist-Buddhist fusion) --> Tang ("golden age", Li-bai, naturalism, eremitism, proto-imagist) --> Song (post-eremitism, lyricism) --> Ming (my favorite; post-classicalism, 性靈 "spiritualism", more experimental, decadent) --> Qing (neo-classicalism, return to old)

I think the best way to start is to find collections of specific poets rather than historical anthologies especially when it comes to later imperial stuff because the amount of poetry being written in the Ming Dynasty is incomprehensible. "Pilgrim of the Clouds" by Jonathan Chaves is a great read even though the translations aren't my favorite, just a great microscope on the actual lives of poets, which is crucial for so much later Chinese poetry because there were so many schools and styles coming and going all the time. Or you could forget the whole thing and just read good old Zhuangzi over and over, which is what I tend to do :)

My favorite part of Classical Chinese poetry is the genre of regulated verse; the lyric unfolds and becomes geometrical and precariously balanced; so hard to capture those conventions into any other language (especially Modern Chinese, ironically!)

here's a translation of Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) I did in college that I think gives a sense of the intense personalization that came into late Ming poetry, much more emotionally charged than the remote spiritualism of Tang imagery that so much Chinese poetry has become known as, but its still delicate. Yuan Hongdao is (in)famous for meticulously breaking rules of regulated verse to the effect of off-kilter prose-poetry:

細鳥傷心叫,閑花作意飛。芳蹊紅茜雨,古澗綠沈衣。
豔女逢僧拜,游人緩騎归。幸隨真寔友,無復可忘機。

no. 3

hear the fragile bird's
heartbroken call

a wildflower knows where it goes

flowered path fallen blush
by the ancient stream
garments soaked to green

she stays and prays
as tourists go drifting home
lucky to be with a good friend

goodbye forgetfulness
 
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no way! Ezra Pound is probably the most important translator (or mistranslator lol) from Chinese to English, which goes to show how ineffective so much sinological scholarship ends up being--the sinophile (mostly discounted as a scholar by modern standards) Ernest Fenellosa wrote some amazing lectures on Chinese translation and East-West poetics (I love "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry") though and all of Pound's Chinese translations draw on Fenellosa's notes. *vaporfootnote: Shoutout to Civic Duty Records' coinage "mistranslationwave", I think it's one of the best terms to describe what vaporwave has done for plunderphonics.

When it comes to drawing out the history of Chinese poetry, the Chinese imperial "canon" is extensive has done a lot of that work, but it ends up being kind of useless for actual fans of poetry because the official canonization was overtly politically motivated. There are a lot of great sinologists like Burton Watson or Haun Saussy who work to add nuance to the usual paradigm of dynastic poetic conventions from Han (rhapsodism) --> Jin-Wei (mysticism, Daoist-Buddhist fusion) --> Tang ("golden age", Li-bai, naturalism, eremitism, proto-imagist) --> Song (post-eremitism, lyricism) --> Ming (my favorite; post-classicalism, 性靈 "spiritualism", more experimental, decadent) --> Qing (neo-classicalism, return to old)

I think the best way to start is to find collections of specific poets rather than historical anthologies especially when it comes to later imperial stuff because the amount of poetry being written in the Ming Dynasty is incomprehensible. "Pilgrim of the Clouds" by Jonathan Chaves is a great read even though the translations aren't my favorite, just a great microscope on the actual lives of poets, which is crucial for so much later Chinese poetry because there were so many schools and styles coming and going all the time. Or you could forget the whole thing and just read good old Zhuangzi over and over, which is what I tend to do :)

My favorite part of Classical Chinese poetry is the genre of regulated verse; the lyric unfolds and becomes geometrical and precariously balanced; so hard to capture those conventions into any other language (especially Modern Chinese, ironically!)

here's a translation of Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) I did in college that I think gives a sense of the intense personalization that came into late Ming poetry, much more emotionally charged than the remote spiritualism of Tang imagery that so much Chinese poetry has become known as, but its still delicate. Yuan Hongdao is (in)famous for meticulously breaking rules of regulated verse to the effect of off-kilter prose-poetry:

細鳥傷心叫,閑花作意飛。芳蹊紅茜雨,古澗綠沈衣。
豔女逢僧拜,游人緩騎归。幸隨真寔友,無復可忘機。

no. 3

hear the fragile bird's
heartbroken call

a wildflower knows where it goes

flowered path fallen blush
by the ancient stream
garments soaked to green

she stays and prays
as tourists go drifting home
lucky to be with a good friend

goodbye forgetfulness

Yes! In my copy of Pound's complete poetry and translation (excluding the Cantos) I glossed over a section which dealt with the fiedlity of the translation and his handling of Fenellosa's notes, especially with Noh plays. I like your advice about starting with specific poets; I read a collection of Cold Mountain, Li Po & Du Fu before venturing into my specifically Chinese volume, and found some different translation and other poets I like too!
Much respect for studying Chinese classics in college! Mandarin scares me, but nothing compares to reading poetry in its untranslated glory.
I'm listening to a lecture which covers Zhuangzi's philosophy, but I never knew he was a poet (even though some of the best philosophers/mystics are, take Rumi for example)! I'll check him out now!
What a gossamer poem and fine fine translation from Yuan Hongdao, absolutely beautiful and, speaking from the writer's perspective, embodies the whole essence of poetry, no matter what part of the world you are from or time. It's so difficult for me to find Westerners who compare to this minimalistic headspace.
Chinese poetry is so fascinating it's hard for me to figure out where to begin! But has there ever been a single poet who scoffed at the stringent conventions, and did what Walt Whitman did, in a sense?
 

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Chinese poetry is so fascinating it's hard for me to figure out where to begin! But has there ever been a single poet who scoffed at the stringent conventions, and did what Walt Whitman did, in a sense?
Cold Mountain is wonderful, a true translator spirit. But speaking of Zhuangzi, his Daoism is absolutely astounding, but his writing is stylistically one-of-a-kind, and it became the template for so much prose and poetry alike (which in China has always been extremely fluid, basically just referring to genres of indirection or inflection; line breaks, for example, did not properly exist). Zhuangzi is definitely the Walt Whitman of China in a sense, although displaced in time, his text subverted conventions (his stories even feature a hilarious caricature of Confucius) so thoroughly that writers that would try to emulate him (basically everyone, especially hermit-poets) were still finding themselves antiquated by how impossible and timeless his writing is.

Yuan Hongdao is definitely another figure like Walt Whitman, his 性靈派 (something like "natural expressionist school") of poetry was seen as shocking and perverse and was censored in the Qing dynasty up until the end. His works resurfaced in the Republican era and Lin Yutang and Lu Xun credit him for creating a template for modern Chinese poetry and short-form prose.

I would also recommend woman poets from China like Li Qingzhao, they weren't so caught up in the canon politics of career writer-bureaucrats, so their works have always held up for having a humanistic and early modern sensibility.

So many of the most avant-garde poets from premodern China are only being unearthed from censorship and examined since the past several decades. There are also really cool cliques of new classical poets from the early internet that made some pretty wild and inventive stuff like Lizi-lizi-lizi 李子栗子梨子. I did some translations of that stuff for £âïn's DreamProxy #2 last year.
 
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Cold Mountain is wonderful, a true translator spirit. But speaking of Zhuangzi, his Daoism is absolutely astounding, but his writing is stylistically one-of-a-kind, and it became the template for so much prose and poetry alike (which in China has always been extremely fluid, basically just referring to genres of indirection or inflection; line breaks, for example, did not properly exist). Zhuangzi is definitely the Walt Whitman of China in a sense, although displaced in time, his text subverted conventions (his stories even feature a hilarious caricature of Confucius) so thoroughly that writers that would try to emulate him (basically everyone, especially hermit-poets) were still finding themselves antiquated by how impossible and timeless his writing is.

Yuan Hongdao is definitely another figure like Walt Whitman, his 性靈派 (something like "natural expressionist school") of poetry was seen as shocking and perverse and was censored in the Qing dynasty up until the end. His works resurfaced in the Republican era and Lin Yutang and Lu Xun credit him for creating a template for modern Chinese poetry and short-form prose.

I would also recommend woman poets from China like Li Qingzhao, they weren't so caught up in the canon politics of career writer-bureaucrats, so their works have always held up for having a humanistic and early modern sensibility.

So many of the most avant-garde poets from premodern China are only being unearthed from censorship and examined since the past several decades. There are also really cool cliques of new classical poets from the early internet that made some pretty wild and inventive stuff like Lizi-lizi-lizi 李子栗子梨子. I did some translations of that stuff for £âïn's DreamProxy #2 last year.
Thank you for the thorough reply! It is incredibly uplifting to communicate with someone who is passionate and knowledgeable about poetry, especially non western poetry these days! I think it such a shame the western world, even academia, overlooks such amazing poets and traditions (most people, even scholars have forgotten about Orlando Furioso and Jerusalem Delivered...)
Taoism is such an interesting system of beliefs. I found it quite difficult to get into, especially after (mistakenly) reading the Secret of the Golden Flower (translated by Thomas Cleary), but gleaning some basics would be wonderful, only when I end up finishing the tomes I've started this year! Your description of Zhuangzi has echoes of Aristophanes, my favorite comedian. Here are some questions floating around in my head I'd like to ask. Feel free to pm me if it's easier.
- Where can I find your translations on Lizi-lizi-lizi?
- Tell me more about censorship in Chinese poetry, contemporary or even in the past (generally speaking, because Chinese history is enormous). Censorship is an interesting topic that may have some relevance in the future.
- What translations or volumes of Zhuangzi and Yuan Hongdao do you recommend?
- Also, are there any contemporary avant-garde Chinese poets (language doesn't matter) you recommend?
- On another curve of the road, have you read the major Chinese classics, such as Journey to the West, Water Margin, etc, and can you recommend any great translations for those? I've read Dream of the Red Chamber years ago and loved it, even though it was the least action packed out of them, but it's such a lovely amazing story.
 

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An Haiku (in my mother tongue) I did on the first day of confinement here in my hometown:

Folha em Branco
Branca é a cor
do vazio do tudo
de um novo ser.
 
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Plurality​

BY LOUIS MACNEICE
It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks—
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all
And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.
The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,
His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal, refusing to allow
Division or dispersal—Eternity is now
And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see
Postulating a dumb static identity
Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without
Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,
Action along with error, growth along with gaps;
If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.
No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,
That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because
It is something that began and is not what it was,
Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,
Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,
Its entity a denial of all that is not it,
Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,
An absolute and so defiant of the One
Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,
Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought
And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.
World is not like that, world is full of blind
Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,
Swollen or diminished according to the dice,
Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.
You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form—
Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm
And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,
Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,
Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet
Would not be worth achieving if the world were set
Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb
World should find its voice for good and God become
Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between that meaning and the matter it should fill
Time's revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).
Man is man because he might have been a beast
And is not what he was and feels himself increased,
Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet
Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget
The means within the end and man is truly man
In that he would transcend and flout the human span:
A species become rich by seeing things as wrong
And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.
Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death's inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.
 
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