Abstract
In Duoduo’s poetry since the mid-1980s there is a fundamental paradox which lies in the relation between the aim of his poetry, to which he refers as “Dao”, and his linguistic manipulation. For Duoduo, today’s culture is loaded with overdeveloped theories, and the creativity of poets is seriously undermined by “the invasion of knowledge”. So Duoduo employs meta-poems to express this understanding of language, knowledge, and poetry. His meta-poem often comprises not only an aesthetically constituted poem but also reflections on poetry, especially on its genesis and development in history and personal writing, as well as on how to read and interpret it. Duoduo also employs self-contradictory language to destroy the referentiality and logic of ordinary language. The language of Duoduo’s poems often incorporates great tension and drastic contradictions, which are reinforced by prosodic movements, hence it incorporates the quality of “gesture”. Duoduo’s challenge to normal modes of expressing meaning and representing experience, his pursuit of a new poetic world and linguistic paradigm are now more and more welcome by Chinese readers and younger poets.
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Notes
Beidao (1989, the back cover).
Duoduo (2010).
Duoduo (2005a, p. 189).
Duoduo (2005a, p. 279).
Duoduo (1998, p. 99).
It should be noticed that the prosodic structure of the original poem is largely changed due to the change of the sounds and syntactic orders when they are translated. I discuss elsewhere the prosodic structures of the original works of Duoduo, see Li (2011).
Richard (1961, p. 542), my suspension points.
Friedrich (1974, p. 88).
van Crevel (1996, p. 255).
Ibid.
Duoduo (2010).
Sited from Friedrich (1974, p. 33).
Schorlars find interesting affinities and differences between Mallarmé’s poetics and the Daoist philosophy; see, for example, Mauron (1968).
Duoduo and Jin (2005, p. 183).
Duoduo (2002, p. 205).
Yang (1995, p. 249).
Huang (2005, p. 262).
van Crevel (1996, p. 251).
Ibid., p. 251.
Ibid., pp. 251–252.
We would like to add that, despite the problems we address here, Mr. Crevel’s book shows great value and exerts influence on many fellow researchers, especially his thorough analysis on Duoduo’s early poems.
Duoduo and Jin (2005, p. 182).
Duoduo (2005b, p. 39).
Blackmur (1952, p. 5).
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., pp. 20–21.
Bakhtin (1984).
Yeh (2011).
Blackmur (1952, p. 19).
Duoduo (2002, p. 105).
Chinese people refer to their native country as “Middle Earth” (“zhongtu”), and all foreign countries as “oversea” (“haiwai”). “Sea” (“hai”) is often connected with foreign countries. “Haigui” (“sea turtle”), for example, is a Chinese folksay denotating those who study in foreign countries.
Blackmur (1952, p. 13).
Buluociji (2007, p. 92).
Yeh (2008).
Elsewhere we have discussed the difficulties which modern Chinese poets faces in creating new prosodies other than meter and the contribution of Duoduo to the development of Chinese non-metrical prosody, see Li (2012).
In the time before 1999, Duoduo published only two volumes of poems; and their copies are very limited. The situation was change only very recently. In 1999 and in 2005, tow volumes of his works were published in large quantities.
Qian (1990, p. 198).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Prof. Michelle Yeh at UC, Davis for her careful revisions and insightful suggestions for this essay, and the reviewer of Neohelicon for his/her enlightening comments.
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Li, Z. Words against words: poetic reflections and linguistic manipulation in Duoduo’s poetry. Neohelicon 39, 485–498 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-012-0139-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-012-0139-8