Afterword：I Am a Lark Singing of Rain
Afterword：I Am a Lark Singing of Rain
I entered into the literary world through reportage writing. Tutored by Mr. Wu Ruyi, a pioneer of New China’s sports, famous painter and calligrapher, I learned how to write classical Chinese poetry. When admitted to the shrine of poetry, I was invited to work as website administrator and chief editor of “Chinese Poetry Online”. During this period I founded the Chinese Poems Monthly. Then I joined a website called “Chinese New Metrical Poetry” and was appointed executive administrator of “Modern Poets”, a website founded by the International Society of Poetry and Music (ISPM). I co-founded the New Metrical Poetry and the Anthology of Modern Poets II with Mr. Xiaoqu, a new metrical poetry talent. Till now, six volumes of the New Metrical Poetry have been issued.
The cyber world is of vagarious nature while humanity is not. Rigorous financial work and poetic romance are not contradictory. Either in the vagarious network or in real life, I keep on searching for the true, the good and the beautiful, putting them into poems. In the hustle and bustle of the cyber world, I set my mind writing my dreams into the sky.
My work The Lark Singing of Rain is a bilingual anthology of my 100 new metrical poems composed since 2009. They are not classified by the change of characters, objects or seasons, but by the norms of classical metrics imbued with a sense of modern life, adhering to innovation upon inheritance and improvement through theoretical practice. Most of them have been published in domestic and foreign journals and anthologies, as well as on literary websites.
This anthology took me three years’ study and practice on the new metrical poetry. The poems whose meanings are conveyed either directly or indirectly all followed the principle of “Three Beauties” (beauty in sound, form and sense) advocated by Mr. Wen Yiduo. Once in my article Beautiful! The Unique Paradigm of Chinese Poetry, I wrote: “some people misconceive the connotations of the meter—‘dancing with chains’. In fact, they are ignorant of art, failing to comprehend the dialectical relation between form and content，whereas the perfect unity of the two should be the highest level of poetry. If one may say that the form of classical poetry fails to match modern Chinese, then some free verse poems go to such extremes as to discard the form completely. It remains a good tradition of Chinese poetry that a poem can be sung and recited out loud. It falls into the aesthetic category whether a poem sounds smooth and sweet and whether it is pleasing to the ear and the eye.” Based on my experience in creating poetry, I wrote the essay On the Inheritance and Development of New Poetry, preparing China's new metrical poetry for further study and publicity and to be globally recognized.
“Poetry expresses wills and singing conveys feelings; Sound accompanies singing and meter matches the sound; Different instrument tunes are well knit; men and gods are brought into harmony.” This is Chinese prosody initially advocated in the history of Chinese literary aesthetics. I often wonder about the questions: Where do nowadays poets’ social responsibilities lie? What is a poet? How can one create poems catering to the popular taste?
Every night, I sit still in a space of my own, amid the soft light and music, wandering in my blue dreams and putting them into words for neither acclaim nor applause but my own pursuit, a pursuit that has long been my habit. For this reason, routine lives, featureless scenery and ordinary things gain a gloss of sentiment just like sunshine, moonlight, lake water…and the gloss is more an aura of wisdom.
Sardan once said: "What is love? Love is boundless tolerance…Love is the goodwill of the unconscious and a complete forgetting of the self." So I love my poems and the beautiful pursuit in them. “The greatest benevolence is like water, the highest virtue tolerates all.” Poetry is drawn from life and poetry without passion does not deserve its name.
On the road to learning new metrical poetry, I am indebted to Mr. Huang Huai, a famous poet, Mr. Zhou Zhongqi, a new metrical poetry expert, Prof. Huang Zhongmo, a Chuci (Songs of Chu) expert, Mr. Xiao Qu and Mr. Zhang Xianfeng, two new metrical poetry representatives. It is you who guide me to the paradise of new metrical poetry where I could compose beautiful poems as pure as snow, as proud as plum blossoms. Special thanks go to Mr. Huang Huai, Mr. Zhou Zhongqi and the Elegant Garden Society for providing me this opportunity to showcase my works. It is more appreciated that Prof. Zhao Yanchun spared some time from his busy schedule to write the foreword for this anthology. I owe my thanks to him for his translations of my poems, which sound like creations in English—fresh, beautiful and with exquisite rhyming, setting up a golden bridge that leads my immature poems to the outside world.
My endless thanks go to Mr. Huang Naiqiang, a Chinese writer, president of the ISPM, former president of the New Zealand Chinese Writers’ Association, secretary general of the Peaceful Unification of China Association of New Zealand and Mr. Xiao Kuan, a world-famous artist, painter and calligrapher, for his inscriptions for my anthology.
Thank you all for your help! My every step forward is owing to the kind support from my teachers and friends. I want to express my gratitude to my loving parents and family for giving me a life so beautiful that I can fly happily in the blue sky and write down, with a clumsy pen, all the wonderful things in life.
Poetry requires, above all, passion, succinctness, implicitness, artistic conception, imagination, and rhyme and rhythm. Poetry is a transcendent pursuit of the innermost being. “The Goddess of Poetry is the incarnation of poetic beauty, unparalleled throughout history and detached from the dusty world.” (Some Comments on the Poetics of Translation, Zhao Yanchun)
The verse is composed but for the great seas, whereon the country's splendid chapters sail. The Lark Singing of Rain is the first bilingual anthology of new metrical poetry. I hope this is only a good beginning.
Angela Ren
Beijing, Aug 8, 2012
Tr. Zhao Yanchun
Afterword：I Am a Lark Singing of Rain
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