No Poetry: Selected Poems by Che Qianzi

No Poetry: Selected Poems Reviews

• 
  Jeff

  Describing his own characters as "a churlish language," the Beijing late modernist Che Qianzi (b. 1963) went back in, into characters, into painting (caligraphy its rudimentary techne), into format and book, because, as he tells us, "musicians burn red hot." And poetry steps aside within "a butcher shop," if only "Love's here, falling in love with the light here, | Physical objects with loose boundaries and weak limbs." The second half of the selection is rife with these apothegms, wherein Che plays at all his skills, "There are times," the poet reports, "When I also get called | from behind |But so far, I have not yet | turned around." This is called, again, "Random Note," because what we won't find here is Poetry, just so No Poetry has always been this poet's concept, as it was when the volume's translator, Yunte Huang, first studied the American sinologists at Tuscaloosa in the early Nineties, and began to be aware of those conceptual, or concrete forms Che was putting into these "Dao or Dada" poems. So Che became central to the translator's conception of The Big Red Book, an anthology of twentieth century Chinese literature Huang published in 2016. May there be more of these flowers in that collection's bed.
• 
  Zöe

  Che Qianzi’s bilingual poetry collection No Poetry, translated from the Chinese by Yunte Huang, unveils a literary world, where verses and stanzas are given their wildest forms tracing back to the ancient Chinese characters’ pictographic uniqueness. Words shine through the paper, returning to their distant origins, bringing divination back to practice, honouring the ceremony for words to evolve and transform; leaving infinite openness to readers to interpret, or simply look at. Roland Barthes has called it the “visual uncertainty”, as if it is an insurmountable cultural chasm still growing between various cultures—a task to decipher.
  
  Can we read these poems without interpretation? Treating them as if they are alive, and trying to take the appearance of those poems as they are—a bounding spider or a diligent cricket—and making no effort to decrypt them. Perhaps, that is what the poet intended. Che Qianzi not only brings the pictographic Chinese characters to life in his poetry collection, but also merges symbolic images perfectly in verse, creating an artistic conception that can be grasped but not explained in words. As a result, the rich silence the poet injects into his poems in both a spatial and a philosophical sense projects a bright light on the contemporary Chinese poetry landscape as if a dancing fairy between times and terrains.
  
  Continue to read the review here
  https://chajournal.blog/2021/01/26/no...