Abstract: As part of the 6th Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics (CAAP), this conversation was held featuring Chinese poet Yu Jian, American critic Marjorie Perloff, and other poets and scholars. This paper documents the essential parts of the discussion based on its video recording. Mr. Yu Jian’s poems are seen as sharing similarities with those of the Language School Poetry, yet with the idiosyncrasy of the Chinese writing. The Chinese/American cultural and linguistic nuances are then compared, hence the issue of translation of poetry. While poetry translation remains challenging and controversial, it is possible when translation is done with the ideas and creation done with the forms. The elephant image in Yu’s poems is interpreted by the poet as the idea of infinity embodied in the image of the animal, rendering the poet and the reader an endless space for imagination and reflection, so is the way Yu reads his poem in the end as an explanation of the poem.
　　Key words: poetry; Yu Jian; language of poetry; translation; globalism
　　Participants: Yu Jian is a well-known Chinese poet and professor at Yunnan Normal University (Kunming 650500, China). Marjorie Perloff is a famous poetry critic, president of Chinese Association for Poetry and Poetics, and fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hao Guilian is professor at Yunnan Normal University (Kunming 650500, China), and moderator of this conversation. E-mail: emilyhao@126.com. This conversation is part of the 6th Convention of Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics (Kunming, Nov 3-5, 2017), mainly between Yu Jian and Marjorie Perloff. It is also attended by poets and scholars such as Kinereth Meyer (Israel), Youngmin Kim (Korea), Luo Lianggong (China), James Sherry (USA), John Solt (USA), Sun Dong (China), and Xu Jiangang (China). Lu Wenling and Liu Chan serve as interpreters. The text of the conversation was complied by Lu Wenling based on its video recording.
　　標题：对话于坚：中国与世界的诗歌交流
　　内容摘要：作为中美诗歌与诗学协会(CAAP)第六届年会的重要组成部分，我们采访了中国当代诗人于坚，由美国评论家玛乔瑞·帕洛夫等诗人和学者共同参与。本文在访谈视频记录的基础上，摘录了对话的要点。大家普遍认为于坚先生的诗歌与语言派诗歌有众多相似之处，同时又具有显著的中国诗歌的特质。访谈中诗人和学者们还比较了中美文化和语言的细微差别，并进一步提出了关于诗歌翻译的问题。虽说诗歌翻译极具挑战并且争议不断，诗歌创作主要与形式相关，但对于诗歌中思想层面的翻译仍然是可能的。在有读者问到关于诗人作品中“大象”的意象时，于坚解释道，他赋予大象这种动物以无限的观念，赋予了诗人和读者无限的想象及反思的空间。诗人最后读了一首自己多年前写就的一首小诗，令人回味无穷。
　　关键词：诗歌；于坚；诗歌语言；翻译；全球化
　　对话人简介：于坚，中国著名诗人，云南师范大学教授；玛乔瑞·帕洛夫，美国著名诗歌评论家，中美诗歌诗学协会主席，美国艺术与科学院院士；郝桂莲，云南师范大学教授，本次访谈的主持人。本次访谈是2017年11月3日至5日在昆明举行的中美诗歌与诗学协会第六届年会的一部分，主要在于坚和玛乔瑞·帕洛夫之间展开。参加访谈的还有来自以色列的学者金纳乐斯·迈耶，韩国的金英敏，中国的罗良功，美国的詹姆斯·谢利、约翰·索尔特以及中国的孙冬、徐建刚。云南师范大学的陆文苓和刘婵两位年轻的学者担任翻译。访谈文字内容由陆文苓根据视频资料整理而成。 　　Hao Guilian (Hao for short hereafter): Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, thank you for attending this roundtable discussion of “Poets on Poetry.” Let me briefly introduce Professor Yu Jian, a native poet, who also teaches in the department of Chinese literature in this university (Yunnan Normal University). As one of the pioneering third generation poets in China, Yu Jian’s reputation has reached much beyond his birthplace. He was born here in Kunming, grew up and received education in Kunming as well, though his formal education was interrupted by Cultural Revolution, like many young people in his generation. His writing career started in the 1970s. He and Han Dong, together with a few other poets, commonly regarded as representatives of the so-called colloquial poetry, founded an unofficial literary journal called Them in 1984，challenging the poetic style of “Misty Poetry” represented by Gu Cheng, Shu Ting etc. Since then, Yu Jian has written numerous poems, No. 6 Shangyi Street (1985), File 0 (1994), Flight (2000) are among the most distinguished ones. Some of his poems have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish and other languages, and have received many awards in different countries. Besides writing poetry, he is also an excellent essay writer, having the intellectual power like Susan Sontag or Hannah Arendt, yet without sacrificing the regionality that he so openly adheres to. He often teasingly addresses himself as an amateur photographer, yet the photographs he has taken and the books on photography show that he is only the opposite. He kindly gives out a copy of his recent poetry collection in English to each guest here, which has been translated by different translators, but has not been officially published yet. Today we have the great honor to have invited not only our local poet, but also poets and poetry critics from different places in the world to have a conversation here. The conversation is open to everyone.
　　I. Commonalities and Interaction in a Global Context
　　Poetry is discussed in the context of world literature, specifically, the contexts of Chinese and American poetry. More crossover is seen in the modern poetic world, as in the cases of Chinese poets reading American poets, and Pound’s writing on Chinese bringing back the Chinese tradition to Chinese poets. In Yu’s vision, poetry can be international in themes, but its delivery lies in the varieties of languages, which contribute to the creation of poetry and its implicit meanings within the languages. Meanwhile, intertextuality between poetry reading and Jazz music is discussed as well. 　　Marjorie Perloff (Perloff for short hereafter): How about we start with the poet, your own understanding of poetry?
　　Yu Jian (Yu for short hereafter): Since this is a China-US poetry discussion, I’d like to talk about my relationship with American poetry. The interaction between American poetry and contemporary Chinese poetry is very subtle and interesting. There was a famous literary movement in China called nalai zhuyi①advocated by Lu Xun. For Lu Xun’s generation, it means direct import [of Western ideas and styles], but since my generation, it has become a reality. So as a young man when I read poems written by American poets, I didn’t take them as foreign poets, feeling like they were Chinese poets. So being at this discussion, I feel very happy and excited. The first Western poetry collection I read was an American one. That was in the 60s, when I was a fifth grader and did not know much about poetry. It was Longfellow’s poetry that I first read. But when I started writing poetry, as an adolescent, I wrote in classical Chinese style--metrical poetry. Later a lot of books went underground during Cultural Revolution. Many of these books were good ones that were kept and shared, secretly. It was at that time that I read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I was deeply influenced by the book and stopped writing in classical style. I started to try the new style. This experience is mentioned in my books.
　　Then in the 1980s, Ezra Pound’s poetry was introduced in China. Reading his poems gave me a déjà-vu feeling, as if I had read them in my dreams. So I think the Cultural Revolution in a way cut the connection between classical Chinese literature and the contemporary one. It was translation, the translation like Pound, that helped me to revisit my own tradition. So here lies the subtlety of Chinese/American literary exchange. When I realized the excellence of Chinese classical poetry, I didn’t gain such understanding through direct reading of classical Chinese literature, but through reading Pound and understanding the messages. Because in the past, China was an enclosed and self-contained society, it lacked a mirror, like that of Narcissus in Greek mythology. So the introduction of Western culture is like a mirror for us. We can see ourselves in this mirror.
　　Goethe once put forward the idea of world literature, but I think when he presented this concept, he was not very clear what world literature actually meant. That is because, at his time, globalization had not started yet. But today, as I said earlier, we come to a real understanding of what world literature means, and that is why we are having this important convention here in Yunnan Normal University. 　　Perloff: So I noticed you have written about airplanes. You have a lot of airplanes in your poetry. Have you traveled a lot? Have you been to the United States?
　　Yu: Yes, I have been to the United States. I was invited by Stephen Owen to do a poetry reading at Harvard University many years ago. I’ve been to the States many times and done poetry reading in quite a few cities there.
　　II. Language of Poetry
　　The second topic discussed involves language used in poetry, in particular, the use of common speech, and the movement of Language Poetry. Poetry writing is seen as a construction in and of language itself. This style is employed among certain Chinese and American poets, as shown in Yu Jian’s poems and those of New York School, and collaborations between the two sides.
　　James Sherry (Sherry for short hereafter): I noticed your new book, Flash Cards, was partly translated by Ron Padgett. Have you met him?
　　Yu: Yes, I’ve met him. We are good friends. I was actually talking to him the day before yesterday. I also stayed at his place in the States. I invited him and Anne Waldman to attend the second Southwest Associated University Literature Festival (2015), which was held here at Yunnan Normal University as well.
　　Perloff: As a young man, were you part of a group with poet friends here in China?
　　Yu: In the 80s, because we have just got out of the darkness of Cultural Revolution, the mainstream poetry school was leaning on the left side, more of a complimentary kind. I was more like a folk poet, being underground with the grassroots. We had our own poetry magazines but they could not be officially published. We were in some way related to the language school②, and I have had a good relationship with Professor Zhang Ziqing③. Our emphasis is that poetry ends in language. Poetry does not have an ideological lineage. It is a construction of language itself. That was what we did in the 80s.
　　Perloff: I think this has more in common with the New York poetry, Frank O’Hara for example. Your opening lines for Flight is very much like some of the Frank O’Hara poems, very common to humors, certain surreal elements, certain surrealism. Don’t you think so, James [James Sherry]?
　　Sherry: Yes, I think it has more to do with New York School. When I was in China in 1993, I met Zhang Ziqing, and he translated this book, for Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. So I think that the poets I met there, Che Qianzi and Huang Fan, more focused on the written Chinese character, while your writing seems to be more involved with the common speech and colloquial speech. 　　Perloff: Yeah, colloquial speech, and quite accessible.
　　Yu: Sure, the foreword of this book [of mine] is written by Ron Padgett, in which Padgett writes that there is a similarity between my poetry and that of Frank O’Hara.
　　Perloff: Yeah there is something interesting there.
　　Meyer: You mentioned Whitman, and also I found it extremely interesting that you returned to Chinese classical poetry through Ezra Pound, in other words, you came back to yourself by reading someone other than Chinese poets. I would like to know what other poets you have read, in translation or not, that may have influenced you, because the whole return to colloquial language is of course very prevalent, for American [poets], even Yeats said he wanted to do the same thing, to get that to the spoken world.
　　Yu: Professor Meyer, I have heard you are from Israel. I have read some Israeli poets, and met some of them, too. Through reading Western poetry and Chinese classical poetry, I feel there is a truth in common: this reading enables us to find poetry again, as well as its essence. It is a means to an end. The greatness of poetry means that there are no national boundaries. [Meanwhile] poetry is behind the great wall of language, yet it is this wall that leads us to freedom. If the Tower of Babel were built, and this wall disappeared, then I think poetry would not exist in the world.
　　John Solt (Solt for short hereafter): Mr. Yu, I am curious about your relationship with Japan, because you mentioned Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman. Have you been to Japan, or are you familiar with some of the Japanese poets? Because I noticed especially in Flight, it is a bit like Shiraishi Kazuko and Yoshimasu Gozo, who are heavily influenced by Jazz. I was wondering if Jazz influenced you as well?
　　Yu: Yeah I have read some Japanese poets before. I like Matsuo Basho very much.
　　Solt: Matsuo Basho was a great poet, but [he was] before Jazz time. Were you influenced by Jazz?
　　Yu: In the 70s, we were able to assemble a radio to listen to VOA secretly. That was the first time I heard Jazz.
　　Solt: I see. I just want to add that there was a movement at that time in America, also in Japan, which is reading poetry to Jazz. And I think Yu Jian’s poems, especially Flight, will be wonderful if read to Jazz, which I recommend you to try it sometime.
　　Yu: I’ve done that at bars in Kunming. I have musician friends who played music for me, which was very nice. I think poetry in itself contains elements of Jazz, especially Eastern poetry, the improvisation and the blended whole yet with contingency in detail. The reason I like Jazz is this resemblance between the music and the eastern poetry. In fact, Li Bai’s poems are very much like Jazz. 　　Xu Jiangang: Mr. Yu, you used to be an underground poet, I am still an underground poet. While others write on romantic themes, I write about themes on workers, peasants and prostitutes. For me, there are two kinds of poets, one writing for the sake of art, the other for the sake of life. I want to write for life, for common people, as in “truth or reality lies in the heart of poetry”. What do you think?
　　Yu: I agree. But whether it is for art’s sake, or for life’s sake, it is all poetry.
　　Solt: I am interested in your movement from an underground poet to an above-ground, acknowledgeable poet. I noted you also mentioned that the job of a poet is to care and illuminate the people. I am interested if your underground self is still there, and I am wondering, do you ever feel limits on yourself, as an acknowledged famous Yunnan poet? Do you have to sometimes cross out lines and say “this is going too far” or do you just let it all out?
　　Yu: I have not changed my writing, even after I won Lu Xun Award for Literature, the highest award of the kind. I think that is a progress of Chinese society today. As for the limits, I do not feel any limits, either.
　　III. Cultural Differences, Linguistic Nuances and Translation of Poetry
　　Global as poetry can become, differences in languages and cultures still exit, hence the issue of translation. Translation between Chinese and English poetry is debatable, or seen as another creation based on the original poems. Cultural nuances of poetry are shown in the themes, pathos and ethos in different regions of the world.
　　Sherry: I would like to get back to the question of world poetry. What are the characteristics for you of poetry that gets beyond the great wall of language and what are the ways [by which] we can do that?
　　Yu: For me, this is an issue of translation. I think it is very interesting to talk about this when it comes to English and Chinese. An important thing for the Chinese language is that it not only has pinyin, the phonetic representations, but also characters, which [makes Chinese] an integration of forms, sounds and meanings. When a Chinese poem is translated into English, it becomes only phonetic representations, while characters are lost. On the other hand, when an English poem is translated into Chinese, it is added with characters. So I think it is impossible to do translation between the two languages. That is because for a poem, aside from its meanings, there are also the characters or the words, which indicates the poet’s aesthetic sense concerning the forms. This is like Chinese calligraphy, different people write the same word differently through their body movements. Poetry writing is similar, because the writing is in fact very concrete, filled with vitality, which cannot be entirely translated. Then how can we communicate between the two languages and do translation? I think we can look at the ethnic ideas, the worldview, and the messages in certain nation’s poetry, and get these translated. It is at this level that we can communicate. So reading Western poetry, I feel I cannot learn from its languages, but I can learn from its worldview. So translation is not just a mechanical transmission of languages. It is a process of creation. There are many translators who have done translation for my poems. I have complete trust in them. I think so long as this translator understands my meanings, then he has to create my poems on his own according to the original meanings, yet in a new linguistic context. I think this is a test for the translator. I am very liberal when it comes to translation. 　　Sherry: So I think we were talking earlier today about a Chinese idea of translation, which is to capture the seed, to transplant the seed and then let the seed grow itself, in the other place. Does that help?
　　Yu: Well, for me, that is impossible. You can only see the seed in this setting, and let it grow in your soil. If you want to transplant this seed, it is entirely feasible in languages. As I said, how can you ‘transplant’ a [Chinese] poem without its characters? Chinese characters are a very important part of Chinese poetry. Taking my poetry as an example, I am not just displaying my lines to express its meanings, but the whole form of the poem is also very important. In my poem “File Zero,” I deliberately wrote my lines like a wall, so that reading the characters is like entering a prison, creating an effect of depression. The Dutch translator of this poem told me that he had nightmares for a year when he was translating that poem, so the characters did visually create a gloomy vibe for the poem, and that is very difficult to be translated.
　　Perloff: I want to say I disagree with you about globalism. I already have been persuaded by that. To me, that is a meaningless term. What is ‘global’? I don’t think this poetry is global. As you pointed out twice that losing the Chinese characters makes a great difference, or adding them with English poetry. Many things are different. I will just take one element: there is not a lot of love poetry right now in the United States. The kind which is very pleasant, very funny and the juxtapositions are very interesting and amusing. We don’t have that kind now. We don’t have love poetry in the US right now. And if there is, it is one of the gay love poems, the ones like Allen Ginsberg’s, who did right to love poetry, and once being asked why he was the only poet writing love poetry at the time, he said “it is very simple, because we sublimate them all the time.” So it goes into the poetry. The treatment of sex right now in America is something, women poets especially, something not so pretty and complicated and there are lots of emphases on violence and rape. And you would not get this kind of poem [the poetry kind that mentioned earlier]. I am thinking about a Polish poet, a very fine poet, but his poems are so dark. I almost can’t take it. I mean, he has a vision and he lives in Sweden. A Polish living in Sweden, global in a way. But everything he writes is how horrible the world is, how terrible it is, in comic ways, but still almost too much, and certainly not love poetry, and nothing pleasant about meeting friends or meeting a swan in Denmark or this kind of thing. But in general [there is no simple love poetry] and that is just one example. I don’t understand why we even want to talk about globalism in poetry, when we are sitting here, having to wait for the translator. We can’t talk directly on poems. So why is it more global than anything we ever had? In the old days, when people work with poetry, they knew the languages, which, after all, made quite a difference and then they certainly could talk about poetry. So it is just personal. Whenever I hear the word ‘globalism,’ which I hear here of course every five minutes, I do a kind of double take because I don’t get it. 　　Yu: [For the lack of love poetry in contemporary English poetry], I think it is the result of the priorities on ‘technology’ and ‘reason’ in the West. There is a great lyrical tradition in Chinese poetry. Our poetry often relates to life. Confucius also said that poetry can gather people. If your poetry is just individualist or egoistic expression, it won’t be popular in China. So we are deeply influenced by this idea of poetry being able to unite people. In Chinese culture, poetry serves as religion. China is not a religious society as that is in the West. So in China since ancient time, it is cultured teaching (wenjiao④) that has been a religion. There is a word in Chinese wenming, meaning to illuminate the darkness of life with culture⑤. This is a Chinese tradition. This is not like in the West, where for religion, one can go to a church, and a poet completely expresses himself or herself, and works on the rhetoric, and when this gets to the extreme, poems can become just figures of speech. In China, poetry tradition does not go that way. Here if a poet cannot influence others’ mind like enchanting them or conjuring their souls, or to enlighten the reader about life and the meaning of existence, he won’t be able to go far in poetry in China.
　　Perloff: Well that proves my point. I was trying to say that I am interested in the difference, the cultural difference that strikes me, how interesting and wonderful that things are different. After what we considered, there are cultural factors. I was recently in Singapore attending a poetry festival, and everybody there was a poet. You have no idea how many poets there were. You have all the young people writing poetry. And all the poetry I read were about sad love affairs, losing the person, not getting what you want, and that seems to be a big theme. I don’t know why and haven’t analyzed it, but sure I could analyze “why is that so”? Also, it is true that they all have day jobs, and at night they write poetry instead of writing novels, because some of them told me that they can write it [poetry] faster than writing novels. It was totally a different atmosphere when it has to do with a nation, what the background is, I guess colonialism. I think China has a wonderful poetic heritage. You are dealing with an incredible tradition, one of the greatest traditions in the world, the Confucian tradition. So of course the poetry is going to be pretty different. Of course there are always some things that poetry across nations are in common, but I think the differences are often [impressive], which is just my view. I think this is a very different poetry, but I don’t see here, for instance, once I read it that, no offence, correct me if am wrong, is that there is not much evil or anything bad. It is quite jaunty and cheerful 　　Yu: That is because in Chinese culture, there is a belief in the earthly, in the secular life, while not much belief in heaven. So whatever darkness we experienced or experience, we have a love for this worldly life, having a kind of optimism that enables us to adapt to different circumstances. The origin of the Chinese language was a means to communicate with gods. It is a language meant for poetry writing. Inscriptions on the oracle bones, the oldest written Chinese, are records of the communicative moments with gods. So today this language [Chinese] can still be used for poetry writing. Since one important feature of poetry is its uncertainty, contracts written in Chinese often cause problems. So contracts are better off written in English, because the English language is comparatively more accurate, while the poetics of the Chinese language lies in the fact that a word has to be understood through its use. Taking ‘Dao’ as an example, in certain contexts it means truth, in other contexts it means a road, or it can be used as a verb meaning to say something. So Chinese in itself is full of poetic nature.
　　Kinereth Meyer: Did I understand correctly that you feel that figures of speech should be avoided? Somewhere in our earlier discussion, did you say that?
　　Yu: Not exactly. There is a Confucius idea in Chinese “rhetoric is based on truth and sincerity.” If there is only rhetoric without sincerity, then to us this is not good. The highest rhetoric is in connection with sincerity, the true essence of life.
　　IV. Yu Jian’s Poetry Writing: Themes, Images, Inspiration, Style, and Significance
　　This part is mostly about Yu Jian’s poetry writing. Nostalgia is discussed as a theme in Yu’s poems. According to Yu, this theme indicates a collective memory of turmoil moments in Chinese history, and the Chinese language, for its long history, has been playing a role of spiritual home for its people and culture. Images are discussed as both potential inspirations and symbols in Mr. Yu’s poetry. In particular, the image of elephant bears the meanings of both the actual animal and the idea of infinity, leading the writer and the reader to a greater imagination and reflection. Inspiration is also discussed in terms of writing, which for Mr. Yu, can be a matter of sudden inspiration or constant revision. The discussion ends in Perloff’s question on one of Yu’s poems, and Yu’s answer with mystique and his own reading of the poem, making it a poetic response regarding the significance. 　　Sun Dong: I find nostalgia is a very important theme in your poems, as well as in many other famous poets’ works. Many poets write about reminiscences of early childhood life, agriculture, industry, about traditional Chinese literature in the past. To their frustration, the homeland is changing so fast, so people feel alienated from their roots, from where they come from. The more they are alienated, the more they want to go back to their childhood or the past. What do you think of this theme?
　　Yu: Right, today we are gradually losing our hometown. This can be shown in this room we are gathering. All the facilities, including our clothes are from the West. Chinese architecture and décor used to be all about painted pillars and carved beams. But now we cannot see these in this room. But Chinese people have lost their home more than once before. So in Chinese culture there is not much fear of losing home. That is because of the idea of “move” or “mobility.” In the past, Chinese architecture was structured by soil and wood, which was intended not for durability but for convenience. The loss of home has happened quite a few times in Chinese history, like in the late East-Jin Dynasty and in Yuan Dynasty. People lost their homes. But one great thing that protects us is the Chinese language. It is like a guardian angel for us, and in my opinion, it is like what religion is in the West. Thanks to this language, Chinese people could go through upheaval moments in thousands of years of history. Today it is easy to see China’s fast economic development in the past forty years, yet the reason for this development is the Chinese language, which is a language that has been used for five or even seven thousand years. The power of Chinese is so great that any person, if not completely illiterate, can still write certain characters that were written on the oracle bones. The characters I use to write poetry today can stem from inscriptions on the oracle bones, Li Bai and Du Fu, but probably it is not like this for English. So I think Chinese is forever our last shelter. If we lose this home, we are over.
　　Youngmin Kim: I enjoyed this conversation very much. I’ve been thinking about the Chinese language myself. With Pound, you are looking at ideogram. Listening to your earlier talk, I realized that the Chinese characters are like a kind of body, body of the spirit, involving both the individual consciousness and the collective consciousness of the writer. All these movements form a construction, which is a kind of emotional attachment to a particular occasion. My question is, when you construct a particular kind of poetry, do you have a picture, a big map in advance, or do you gradually construct a map as you go along? In other words, are you a poet of open form, or close form? How do you construct your poems? 　　Yu: For me, it is not necessarily the same process. It really depends on the moment. Sometimes it is the old memory, sometimes an image of a certain landscape or people, and other times a word. For example, I have a poem about ‘mother’. It was inspired by a clothing tag I came across at a store, with “100% cotton” written on it. I immediately thought of ‘mother’. I went back home and wrote the poem.
　　From the audience: I noticed the image of the ‘elephant’ is often mentioned in your poetry. What does the elephant image mean in your poetry? My second question is: what is your view on improvisation and revision in your poetry writing?
　　Yu: First I’d like to talk about the elephant in relation to reality. I live in Kunming, where there is a close relationship between the elephant and this city. There is a street in Kunming called Xiang Yan Street, literally meaning “Elephant Eye Street,” this is because traveling merchants from Burma and Laos used to ride elephants to Kunming and fasten the elephants on that street. When I was a kid, I could still see stone posts for fastening the elephants. My home is close to the zoo, where I can see elephants. The elephant is a very important animal in my life, not just an idea. I like this animal very much. When I traveled along Mekong River, I saw a lot of them, too. Secondly, xiang, the word for ‘elephant’ in Chinese has interesting meanings. On the oracle bones, the inscription of the word means infinity, so enormous that it has no ends. Though this concept of infinity is an abstract one, in Chinese it has to be embodied in something concrete, in this case, the animal elephant. I think this is very interesting. So far I have written eleven poems on elephants. So the image of an elephant to me is not just something concrete in my life, but also refers to the metaphysical. It is like the story of blind men touching the elephant, getting a little part every time, but it is all these little parts that lead to something huge behind. Writing on the elephant image leads me to a bigger whole, something profound that enables me to find more meanings in life.
　　As for the second question, I think poetry writing is sometimes the result of sudden inspiration, which is what I did with some of my poems. I did more of this kind when I was younger, but now I have come to think that poems are done through revision. Like what you mentioned with the image of the elephant, the slow movement of the elephant resembles the process of revision. Only through constant revision can the poet find what he really wants to say. At first, this poem may lead you to what you think it will be, but through revision, you realize it is actually something else you intend to say. Also, I think it is difficult for a given word to mean what is really meant. So with some poems I wrote, I did not feel they were strong enough when I first finished them. Yet I did not have better words yet, then sometime later it dawned on me that I should use this or that word. Then revision came, and I was satisfied. 　　Perloff: Could you comment on these lines from Flash Cards?
　　Under the moon the poet waits for his inspiration
　　like a nurse at the airport
　　white sheets folded back  waiting for a patient,
　　like mummies in the desert
　　waiting for the finger nails of archaeologists
　　Of course they are false similes, because nothing could be more different than a poet waiting for inspiration and a nurse at the airport, and I think the nurse doesn’t want to wait for the patient--she has to take care of the patient, and god knows, mummies don’t want fingernails of archeologists poking at them. But I just wanted you to comment on it, because it is such a strange but brilliant poem, very well done.
　　Yu: I don’t know who wrote it. I can’t explain. I completely forgot. This is like an elephant you have raised. When it grew up, you let it go and set it free. I don’t even know why I raised it. I was thinking how I came to raise it and let it go. To make up for what I just said, I’d like to read that poem for all of you, in Chinese. [Yu Jian did a reading of the poem. Applause.]
　　Hao: Well, today we had a very good discussion on poetry, plus an excellent reading of a poem by Yu Jian himself. It has been a wonderful afternoon. Thank you all for participating in this conversation. Mr. Yu Jian will join us for an outdoor poetry reading this evening as well. All are welcome. Thank you.
　　Notes
　　①nalai zhuyi, “拿來主义” in Chinese characters, does not have an English equivalent word. It means to bring in foreign ideas and technology in an active and selective way. Translations of it include coined words such as borrowism, borrowlism, and copinism, which are not widely accepted in this sense yet.
　　②According to Academy of American Poets, “the language school of poetry started in the 1970s as a response to traditional American poetry and forms. Coming on the heels of such movements as the Black Mountain and New York schools, language poetry aimed to place complete emphasis on the language of the poem and to create a new way for the reader to interact with the work. Key aspects of language poetry include the idea that language dictates meaning rather than the other way around. Language poetry also seeks to involve the reader in the text, placing importance on reader participation in the construction of meaning. By breaking up poetic language, the poet is requiring the reader to find a new way to approach the text.” Poets associated with this movement include Silliman and Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, and Bob Perelman. Nov. 29, 2017. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-language-poetry
　　③Zhang Ziqing (张子清) is a poet, translator, and professor in The Institute of Foreign Literature, Nanjing University, Nanjing; guest Research Fellow of Chinese American Literature Research Center, Beijing University of Foreign Studies, Beijing.
　　④wenjiao, in characters文教. Here wenjiao is used in its traditional sense in Chinese, which is to guide literacy education with classic thoughts, including thoughts of Confucius and other classic Chinese thinkers. The basic idea was to “respect four techniques, to establish four arts, and to train literate people with poems, classics, rituals and music.” See Olson & Torrance, The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009: 402).
　　⑤wenming is translated into English as civilization or culture. Here wenming is explained in its original sense in Chinese.