Poems by Yongming Zhai and Yongming Zhai.

Introduction to Yongming Zhai's Poetry

1. Yongming Zhai: the most beautiful scenery among the third generation of female poets.

Yongming Zhai (1955-) is probably the most concerned poetess in today's poetry world. The main reason is that feminism has been widely recognized since 1980s. As a title or research point, "female poetry" has its own ontological value. In the eyes of many researchers, this is another landscape independent of male poets-Yongming Zhai is the most beautiful one in this landscape.

This is undoubtedly a creative poetess: she began to write poems from 198 1. Up to now, her published poems include Women, Roses Above All, Poems by Yongming Zhai, plainsong in the Night, Call It Everything, and so on. Generally speaking, her poems focus on revealing women's own situation, which is particularly obvious in the early stage (before the early 1990s). This writing orientation or attitude may not be completely conscious at first. Researchers generally believe that the writing of Yongming Zhai and other contemporary female poets has a vital spiritual source, that is, the far-reaching influence of American poetess sylvia plath (1932- 1963), who pushed her tragic self-disclosure to the extreme and showed gloomy passion and almost masochistic emotions when dealing with materials. I directly enlightened a large number of' third generation' female poets, such as Tang Yaping, Tang Yaping, Hai Nan and Zheng, and realized their in-depth, powerful but not intolerant experience and exploration of their inner world and survival destiny, as well as their grasp of the perspective that truly belongs to women. (Li Zhensheng: Chapter 9 Female Poetry: People and Scenery, Seasonal Rotation, P2 16, Lin Xue Publishing House, 1996).

What is the "inner world and survival destiny" of women? What is a "real female perspective"? Obviously, the answer of the former is clear: women are "oppressed" by men and "oppressed" by the civilization built by men. This is not only a problem that women in China have been strongly aware of since 1980s, but also a worldwide problem, which directly triggered the rise of feminism and feminist movements. In fact, Yongming Zhai and others really started their own writing under various traditional prejudices or pressures against women. It is precisely because they are deeply aware that women are threatened by all kinds of discrimination, prejudice and unnecessary pressure in the real society that these female poets turn their brush strokes to "themselves", trying to confront the powerful patriarchal society with an independent posture and the "long-standing" male-centered poetic aesthetics with a brand-new aesthetic way.

In contrast, the latter answer will be more difficult: although the appearance of "female poetry" inevitably has its own independent character in a patriarchal society, the essence of gender is a whole, not a truly personalized writing behavior, but a whole, which contains common factors and inevitably many contradictory factors. In this case, establishing or clarifying "a real female writing angle" will become a. To this, Yongming Zhai's own answer is to "create" a kind of "night consciousness". This unusually firm voice appeared as early as 1984. That year, Yongming Zhai wrote the first work that established his poetic position, a group poem "Woman" composed of 2 1 poems. The consciousness of the night written for this group of poems is also widely circulated-even more widely circulated than the poems themselves. Today, The Consciousness of the Night has been regarded as the "Manifesto of Chinese Feminist Poetry in 1980s" and the theoretical text of contemporary female poetry in China. In this preface, it is often quoted: "As half of human beings, women have been facing a completely different world since birth. Her first sight of the world must have her own emotions and intuition, even some kind of personal resistance. Does she try her best to project life to create the night? And transform the world into a huge soul in various crises? In fact, every woman is facing her own abyss-selfish pain and experience that is constantly disappearing and being recognized-far from everyone being able to resist the suffering of this balance until it is destroyed. This is the first night. When it rises, it leads us into a brand-new world with a special layout and angle, which belongs only to women. The real strength of women lies in not only resisting the violence of their own destiny, but also obeying the truth of their inner call, and establishing the consciousness of the night between the two full of contradictions. " (Night Consciousness, Poetry, 1985 9.

Month 2 1)

In this passage, there are two points worthy of our careful scrutiny: first, "creation", which means that what we want to "create" is originally lacking in reality. Undoubtedly, it embodies the self-consciousness of female poets to express themselves and safeguard themselves; The second is "night consciousness", which basically means that the male world is a bright and violent "day". When women face a male cultural world outside of themselves and their own destiny threatened by this world (the so-called "own destiny" is composed of these two aspects), they should "try their best to project their own life" and "create" a corresponding life that belongs only to women themselves. Since the mid-1980s, many words closely related to black have appeared in women's poems: black room, black sun, black skirt, black cave, black stone, black desert, plain songs in the dark, and even words like pain and death have appeared again and again. Female poets need such words to express themselves-adopting various long-standing idioms that often have some symbolic metaphorical meaning may mean a simple identification with the male cultural world.

So, what is "night consciousness"? Some researchers think so: "The night is an external sign of some internal evil. On the one hand, it shows that their description is not a popular concept in time. This concept regards the fate of women only as a very realistic and inevitably narrow' social problem', but as a universal and metaphysical evil and bad luck to make a positive spiritual commitment; But on the other hand, it unconsciously reveals some passion for self-moral completion, which means self-abuse. It seems that an imposed situation actually realized the catharsis of their inner pain and gained some pleasure of self-appreciation. As far as the confrontation structure of day/night is concerned, this particularly strong sense of kinship with' night' means that their expression symbolizes to a considerable extent that women who have suffered various setbacks in the specific connection between day and the outside world retreat into the dream of night to weave their inner life. " (Li Zhensheng: Chapter 9 Female Poetry: People and Scenery) It can be seen that this kind of consciousness is by no means a simple problem, and it provides readers and researchers with various perspectives.

Second, the introduction of "mother"

Specifically, the poem "Mother" in "Women" is undoubtedly a very creative poem. As an image, "mother" has a symbolic prototype to a great extent. Yu Hua, a male writer, once said: "It is almost impossible to find another word in our language (Chinese), a word that can replace or surpass' mother'. The word mother shows her supreme position in Chinese. Perhaps because of her high status, the meaning of the word mother has become more and more abstract. She is often synonymous with a country, a nation, a famous river and even a political party. " (Yu Hua: "Who is our common mother", "Can I believe in myself", P 1 14, People's Daily Publishing House 1999 edition) Obviously, this image did not appear in this poem, but the "abstract" "meaning" was brought to the trial platform: it is.

But the position at the beginning of the poem is not cold, on the contrary, it contains some warmth or sympathy: "I can't reach too many places, and my feet hurt." What I want to express at the beginning is the general dilemma of women: bound by themselves and various external values. Nature contains some sympathy: "You are my mother, and you woke me up" is not hatred, but gratitude for the birth of this great event.

However, we immediately saw that the poetess was not immersed in this almost natural or instinctive emotion. She deliberately used a cross-line poem: my mother "woke me up" and at the same time "made me a terrible twin in this world with misfortune", and her gratitude immediately turned to accusation: it was my mother who made me suffer the "misfortune" of life.

The understanding of this "misfortune" is accompanied by the "growth" process of women themselves. Although "in your arms, I once showed a mysterious smile", but this is just the feeling when I haven't "grown up". "Smile" is as pure or chaotic as "mystery". With the growth of age, "I" found: "You made me understand everything in a virgin way, but I was indifferent", which

It may have multiple meanings: first, I don't want to live in your way; First, "I" can't "comprehend" the complex and powerful cultural world; Another point is that judging from the following line "I regard this world as a virgin", there is a positive attitude here, that is, "I" tries to "understand" this world-the result is actually conceivable, and "virginity" and "virgin" both contain obvious male perspectives and both succumb to the male cultural world, so the inevitable result of "understanding" is profound. Years sent me to the mill and let me see myself crushed.

These are all signs of "misfortune". Obviously, the experience of "growing up" tells the poetess that in the powerful male cultural world, women are just a weak thing. At the same time, the "mother" is also questioned or resented: since the values pursued by women belong to the male cultural world, rather than the needs of women's own construction or adaptation, then the "mother", as the initial knowledge transmitter of the "daughter" and the natural guardian and helper in the growth process of the "daughter", not only "let me understand everything in a virgin way", is she unconscious? Considering that the male cultural world has a long history and is corrosive and inert, and every individual living in it will consciously or unconsciously pursue and identify with its knowledge system and values, the questioning of the mother image actually has profound internal basis and spiritual clues.

From the perspective of writing, this expression can already constitute a complete theme, but the poetess is not satisfied. Although she questioned her mother's image, she couldn't get away from it fundamentally: "No one knows how much I love you. This secret/part of you, my eyes look at you like two wounds. " This is a complicated psychological reaction: there is both resentment and love-this kind of "love" can only be as "seamless" as a secret: in the powerful male cultural world, the mother is also a weak person-which is exactly in line with the "sympathy" at the beginning of the poem.

Because the image of the mother is no longer stable and the "daughter" is no longer endowed with natural trust, a feeling of despair can be understood in the last part of the poem: "I live to live, and I fight against eternal love with my own destruction/a stone is abandoned until it dries up like bone marrow." The power of "confrontation" is extremely unequal, and "self-destruction" reveals that the poetess is aware of a certain fate of women in the tragic male cultural world-in a deeper sense, it may reveal a certain pessimistic consciousness of the poetess: an independent and free female world may be just a naive and idealistic idea?

In contrast, the mood in the poem is even more desperate: "There are orphans in the world who expose all the blessings, but who knows best/anyone who stands in the mother's hand will eventually die because of birth", and the "orphans" naturally realize the isolated situation; "Blessing" may be illusory, because it cannot alleviate the situation of "orphans"; The interrogative pronoun "Who" may point to the Creator, because it "knows best" the truth: since the mother has no natural trust and is an accomplice in the male cultural world, then her "children" will eventually die in the male cultural order to which she has surrendered-this is a cultural death and a metaphysical death.

Of course, from another angle, we can also say that this restraint actually points to the male cultural world: the stronger the attitude and emotion of questioning the mother, the stronger the questioning and accusation of the male cultural world.

After reading Mother, we can find that the so-called "night consciousness" is far from complete, and there is still a long way for women to "create" a female cultural world parallel to the male cultural world.

Third, the supplementary explanation of "reading tips" in Mother

The poem "Mother" written by the poetess itself means a profound reflection on the fate of mother and daughter from generation to generation. In terms of specific treatment, Yongming Zhai is original. She does not directly criticize the male cultural world, but expresses "female consciousness" through the female image of "mother". It is in this sense that the writing of "female poetry" pays attention to the inner world of women and has ontological significance.

It should be said that the above analysis shows that the semantic context of poetry is basically clear. What is noteworthy is the language used by the poetess. Generally speaking, this is an apocalyptic tone: everything is clearly perceived. Some researchers believe that "this tone, on the one hand, is out of concern and understanding of women's survival and destiny, on the other hand,

Isn't it a poetic transcendence and psychological compensation strategy for women's realistic predicament? (Li Zhensheng: "Chapter 9 Female Poetry: People and Scenery")

Regarding the lyrical characteristics of this poem, I believe that the first part of the Guide has the most clear answer, please refer to it.

Fourth, Tang Xiaodu on Yongming Zhai: