Calligrapher, designer, businessman, and advertising specialist,the multitalented Bai Chiu is also widely considered to be one of the best poets to have emerged from Taiwan in the post-War period. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he chose to concentrate on the urban aspects of the nativist experience.
Poet Bai Chiu (白萩) has always abstained from stark ideological dichotomies, factional debate, and literary politics, instead seeking to express plain and simple human truths while availing himself of whatever each poetic school might have to offer in terms of form, technique, and theme. His intensely independent and individual voice has made him one of the island's pre-eminent poets.
Born Ho Chin-jong (何錦榮) in Taichung in 1937 during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan (Bai Chiu is a pen name), his early schooling was in Japanese and he did not begin learning Mandarin until the fourth grade. Bai grew up in straitened circumstances, so although he was a good student and passed the entrance exam for Taichung's best junior high school, he had to enroll in a vocational high school. When he was thirteen, his mother became ill and the family was forced to sell furniture in order to buy medicine for her. She died a year later.
Bai still speaks of the trauma of that event, for the memory of his mother's suffering was deeply etched in his mind. His father, a baker, had to work to make ends meet while trying to raise seven children on his own. He recalls that when he got up in the morning his father had already gone to work, so he would have a glass of water for breakfast. At noon he would come home and have another glass of water for lunch. In the evening, an older sister would be home to cook dinner. These experiences profoundly affected the boy.
After his mother's death, Bai began writing essays--some of them were published in a local paper--as a way of grappling with his feelings. He also began to develop what would turn into a lifelong interest in calligraphy. He enjoyed reading classical poetry, but it was not until he one day came across modern Chinese poetry in the school library that his future course was set.
He first began writing poems at the age of fifteen. "I didn't start writing in order to become famous, but rather because I felt an inner compulsion to vent a sense of depression," he says. In the period after the end of World War II there was a dearth of literary magazines and few real models for a young poet. His earliest models were drawn from the twenties, in which dialect played a significant role--modern vernacular Mandarin was then a relatively new medium and poets often threw in a bit of dialect. Bai liked the regional flavor of some poems, so when he first started writing, he occasionally read his poems to himself in Taiwanese, trying to gauge how they would sound to local readers.
During his school years, a classmate introduced him to Stars Weekly. This was a publication of the Blue Stars Poetry Society, a group of young poets known for their romantic idealism. They were widely regarded as the inheritors of the May Fourth Romantic tradition characterized by the works of poets like Hsu Chi-mo (徐志摩). Soon Bai was submitting poems to the magazine on a regular basis. "I wrote very quickly," he recalls. "During class, I wrote poems. By the end of one class I would have finished two or three. As a result, my poems appeared in almost every issue."
Bai initially adopted the titles of poems that had appeared in the Blue Stars periodical, and used them for his own work. Often they were better than the models. He was already developing a mature style. In 1955, at the age of nineteen, he won the Chinese Literature and Art Association's prestigious annual poetry prize for a poem entitled "The Compass," from which the following stanza is taken:
Grasp a universe, grasp a star, on the lonely sea
Our ship advances cutting the waves, forward!
like a shooting arrow
Through the gull-wail of death
Through the distant foggy shroud of dawn
Forward brothers, grasp a universe, grasp a star
We are pioneers of virgin lands on the sea
In terms of language and imagery, this is perhaps one of the most representative of Bai's early poems. It is long, but it lacks narrative progression, instead using imagery to evoke a mood. It shows him to be a conscious artist concerned with all facets of writing poetry, but although it evinces a certain sophistication on a number of levels, it must still be considered juvenilia.
Adolescence is a time associated with solitude and dreams of great deeds and heroism--a time when a person for the first time acquires a consciousness of himself as a unique individual and seeks a means to realize that identity in the world. For Bai, his "compass" in the search for identity was poetry. But just as an individual can search for his or her identity, so can a group of people or a nation. The heroic push into the unknown toward an ideal future is what made this poem popular in Taiwan in the 1950s.
After graduating from high school in 1955, Bai began working for the Provincial Department of Education, and in 1956 he joined the faculty at the Taichung Agricultural Institute. His output remained prolific, and he continued to experiment with technique. Influenced by the older Taiwan poet Lin Heng-tai (林亨泰), for a time he advocated and wrote "concrete" poetry, where the shape and length of the lines form an integral part of the poet's message. He also tried his hand at love poems.
The Stars Weekly could not accept all the poems he wrote, so he began submitting to other important poetry magazines such as Modern Poetry and the Epoch Poetry Quarterly. All groups were willing to claim Bai as one of their own, but he remained unaligned. At various times he served as an editor for the island's three major poetry magazines and was equally critical of all groups and poets. This led one of his fellows to call him a "hooligan poet."
In 1959, at age twenty-two, Bai published his first collection of poems, The Death of the Moth. The forty-five anthologized poems were culled from more than four hundred he had written between 1953 and 1958. This collection was well received. Readers were attracted to its strongly romantic tone and its varied techniques. The poems ran the gamut from mood-evoking works like "Compass" to the pure formalism of his concrete poems. It was an artistic tour de force for such a young writer.
Despite his modernist concern for technique, Bai also profited from reading classical poetry. A love poem like "O, It's Another Rainy Spring Day" shows a familiarity with traditional poetic themes and images:
O, it's another rainy spring day,
flowers fall in the wind
Give me a glass of wine,
for the dusk is fading quickly
I'll wash away my sorrows with wine,
today slips away
Slips away,
leaving me in my room listening to
the tic-toc of the clock
Perhaps tomorrow will be clear and I can meet you
But, but the happy green tree
Has lost another leaf to the jaws of wind and rain
O, another rainy spring day,
beyond the blurred window
A cherry tree is in full bloom,
but the flowers fall in the wind
Give me another glass,
for dusk is quickly fading
Drink up!
Traditional images such as the falling of spring flowers and the coming of dusk are here combined with the modern image of a ticking clock to suggest the passage of time. The drinking of wine to blot out sorrows and to escape the miseries of the world is another theme common to traditional poetry. Here, Bai deftly blends the two to create a modern vernacular poem on traditional themes. Very early in his career, and unlike many Taiwan poets enamored of Western modernism, Bai insisted that poets could not write modern poetry unless they were familiar with the classical tradition.
Many of Bai's poems show a maturity in advance of his years. While some of them are filled with romantic verve, others show a darker, sadder side. This aspect of his work perhaps stems from the experiences of his youth, the death of his mother and the financial hardships of his family. "After Praying," for example, is a poem concerned again with the passage of time and the end--which is death. Here are a few lines.
O, all the lamps have gone out.
Dusk falls.
....
One
by one
the stars
slowly begin to shine in the distance.
An important feature of The Death of the Moth is Bai's afterword, in which he expresses his views on poetry. It stands as a summation of his poetics, which have not changed significantly over the years. For Bai, if a modern poet is to be loyal to his feelings and wishes to express himself fully, he must pay constant attention to technique. It is through experimenting, challenging the status quo, and evolving new techniques that a poet develops the means to express himself in new ways. The poet is always trying to transcend the established order and notions of beauty and art to realize an ideal. Existing forms of beauty stand as a test for beauty as yet unrealized. Only by breaking what is established and fixed can new forms emerge. In a sense, then, the perfect poem is always the one that remains to be written.
Bai is nevertheless adamant that technique alone is not enough. He feels that if a poet is to be truly creative and relevant, he must be faithful to the lived experience of his time. Needless to say, the very medium of his art, language itself, is intimately bound up with that experience: "Poetry can be said to exist in the continuities and discontinuities of language, or the marvels and meaning produced through new ways of perceiving the connections between myself and reality through language."
The sixties brought much change to Bai's life. In 1960 he gave up teaching and took a job at a furniture company. Two years later he married and moved to Taipei, where he started his own furniture company. The following year he became a father. In 1964, the family moved to Tainan city, where he opened an advertising agency, and in March he and a number of Taiwan poets who had grown dissatisfied with the direction of modernism founded the Bamboo Hat Poetry society.
Taiwan's modernist movement in poetry was mainly a continuation of a literary trend initiated in mainland China during the 1930s, which was in large part inspired by Western modernist and avant-garde poetry. Mainland emigres to Taiwan launched the movement in the 1950s in reaction to the then dominant anti-Communist poetry-as-propaganda. Like its earlier phase, the movement was largely Western-inspired. There were even calls for the wholesale rejection of tradition and the import of Western models. For Bai, modernism was not a product of Taiwan, and its concerns were diverging ever further from the reality of the island. According to him, "The themes of poems were becoming ridiculous. There was an emphasis on nihilism, isolation, and things foreign. The links with Taiwan were tenuous."
While recognizing the importance and the legacy of modernism, Bai felt that as a Taiwan poet he was also heir to a rich poetic tradition stemming from the Japanese occupation. During that time, not only did Taiwan writers encounter the international avant-garde through Japanese translation, but a nativist literary tradition also emerged.
By 1965, when Bai published his second collection, a slim volume of twenty-seven poems entitled Windrose, the modernist movement in Taiwan poetry was at its height. He was particularly troubled by two major developments and expressed his misgivings in a postscript to his new collection. First, he thought that the neoclassicism just then coming into vogue with some modernist poets was nothing but empty posturing. Second, he took issue with those poets who had been swept up by a fashionable interest in surrealism and existentialism. He felt they were writing about things of which they were ignorant, and thus their work had little to say to most readers. Bai thought that those who adhered too closely to the more superficial aspects of tradition and those who rejected it outright were both misguided.
In the preface to Windrose, he discussed his views on tradition and the bearing it has on the work of modern poets in greater depth. According to him, tradition is somewhat like arsenic, in that it has the qualities of both medicine and poison. For a poet who is mired in tradition and who lacks a resistant spirit, it will be fatal to his creative powers. Its effects can only be overcome through the powers of resistance. But a mature artistry is impossible to achieve if one tries to maintain individuality while shunning tradition. Only through both receptiveness and resistance can a healthy creativity be achieved. Familiarity with tradition provides an artist with polish and discipline: "Natural abilities shine through polishing, and the amount of polish increases with the amount of tradition accepted."
Technique and imagery remained crucial concerns for Bai; his second collection continues in the same vein as his first, but he exercises greater restraint. While the poems are tighter and there is more detachment, the imagery still occasionally overwhelms. A number of critics see the influence of Western poets like T.S. Eliot and Rilke behind the collection. But traditional Chinese notions of literary structure and analogical reasoning are also evident. Bai's poem "You Are Like The Moon Passing Over the Lake of My Heart" is a good example of how his poetry was evolving:
You are like the moon passing over the lake of my heart
I don't remember when it was
On a lonely night like this
When I went in search of you
Kneeling, reaching out to touch you with both hands
With eyes like a thousand firefly lamps
With a shout that goes on and on like a spring breeze
But you are just light without form
Under the arching sky
You make no sound but echo endlessly
You have no eyes but never stop gazing
Like a dream
Omnipresent though existing nowhere
You are like the moon passing over the lake of my heart
This poem, like many of those in Windrose, has an air of mystery, a riddle-like quality to it. It can be read as a love poem, a poem written for a love recalled, or an ideal love desired. The first stanza reads much like any love poem, but in the second half of the poem the beloved appears as an immaterial object. What is the reader to make of this paradox? Perhaps, on another level, the poem may be read as an account of the speaker's relationship with poetry itself. After all, a poem is composed of words that are as insubstantial as moonlight, but can affect the emotions and leave their traces on the heart, much like light on water.
A number of Bai's best-loved poems also appeared in this collection. With its English title, "Arm Chair" is a perennial favorite with readers:
Arms always held open
In a big, dark room, it seems to stare
In the slanting light, face front
Something seems to leap forward
In the darkness
Your squat frame, firm, like
A catcher waiting for a ball on a field
in the vast twilight mist
Like a will, nakedly
Waiting for the sudden impact of a star
Because its lonely life is silent,
A body without a voice on this earth--
Its unyielding form changes
Into a shining sentence
Standing there in silence
The poem has its roots in the classical tradition of yongwu poems, or poems about objects. It is also reminiscent of modern materialist poems by French poet Francis Ponge, in which the inanimate can be an incomparable source of emotion for the sensibility or ideas for the intellect. In Bai's hands, the chair seems to express its own will: it actively holds its arms open, and it stares. It shares these attributes with human beings but, unlike people, it cannot speak. However, its very form and existence are the stuff of poetry.
In 1969, Bai Chiu published his third collection, Symbolic of the Sky, a book of thirty-four poems. Parts of the book represent a significant departure. He was becoming more concerned with issues of language: in particular, the use of colloquial language as a poetic medium. Although his poems are known for their smooth, readable style, he had grown dissatisfied with his earlier poetry, feeling that it contained too many adjectives, too much complicated imagery. He embarked on a process of simplification. This is especially true of a section of eleven poems titled "Ah Huo's World."
Symbolic of the Sky contains some of Bai's best-known poems about things, such as "Cat" and "Moth". But perhaps the most popular is "Geese":
Still we live and must fly
In this boundless sky
The horizon forever receding far ahead
Leading us on ever in pursuit
It ought to be near but looking up,
it is always just as far away
It's the same sky in which our ancestors flew
The vast emptiness like an unvarying exhortation
Our wings like theirs beat against the wind
A continuation of their will
falling in an unending nightmare
Between the black earth
And the bottomless blue sky
The future is just the horizon line
Leading us on
In our pursuit we will slowly die off, die like
a cooling sunset
Still we fly high in the boundless sky
as solitary as a leaf in the wind
And the frigid clouds
Coldly stare at us
The theme of this poem is not unlike that of "The Compass." As in the earlier poem, we are witness to a journey, but one with no precise destination. A gaggle of geese head toward the horizon; in fact, in generation after generation they are always headed toward it. As such, the poem can be read as a philosophy of life or of writing poetry. The poem suggests that there can be no ultimate meaning or goal in life other than in living it. Or as Bai Chiu says in the afterword to Symbolic of the Sky: "I cannot settle down in one place; for me, the process is the goal. Nothing lies beyond the horizon, so that's where I'm headed."
With this collection, Bai consciously set off to explore new directions, and the poems in the section entitled "Ah Huo's World" represent a distinct turning point in his career. In the afterword to the collection he announces: "We must review and discuss our language." Like many twentieth-century poets in different parts of the world, he saw that language could be corrupted through usage, that it needed to be shaken up occasionally. For if language is not renewed it falls into cliche, or becomes so common that no one gives thought to its meaning any longer.
A poet therefore had to do his utmost to revitalize the language of poetry. Bai sought to do this on the level of colloquial usage. "A Drop of the World" is one of the "Ah Huo poems" and it deals with one of Bai's favorite poetic themes--pitiful existence redeemed through love.
You call me Ah Lan
I'll call you Ah Huo
Who cares what we're called
It's raining heavy outside
We are two drops of rain
For the moment we are one
Hearing the distant canon fire
Roar and shake
The sky
Your heart, thump-thump,
Beats against me
The war is at the front
There in front are the graves
Who cares if it's raining outside
We are two drops of rain
For the moment we are one
Who knows you are called Ah Lan
Who knows you are called Ah Huo
Just one pitiful drop
Falling in the lake
Without sound
And without echo
Just one drop in the world
The world in a drop
In 1969 Bai Chiu moved his family to Tainan's Xinmei Street. Their life there would provide the backdrop for many of his poems. In 1972, he moved back to Taichung where he set up an interior design company. He also published his fourth collection of poetry, entitled Chansons, dedicating it to his "companion on Xinmei Street." Chansons, a book of forty-two poems, was unlike his previous collections in one respect: Bai attempted to provide thematic unity by including only those poems that dealt with his days on Xinmei Street. There is a stronger sense of place in this collection; and in a way, the book can be viewed as an urban expression of nativist concerns. For this reason, many local critics feel this anthology is Bai's finest.
While writing the poems in Chansons, Bai continued to focus on language, refining his use of the vernacular. In terms of theme and content, he concentrated more on everyday life; rather than attempting to make generalized statements about the human condition, he wrote about mundane experiences and feelings about sex, marriage, city life, and modern society, making them the vehicle for expressing the universal. The frame poem to the collection, "Xinmei Street," sets the tone for the entire book:
The sun shines on the lemon tree branches
On little Xinmei Street
Life is bitter
Let's make love
To sweeten this bitter life
This short street
Has no distance and no horizon
A living appendix
Of no use to the world
We are a couple of little people
Who one day will embarrass our son
on his graduation day
Though life be without glory
It is peaceful
Life is bitter
At least we have the freedom to make love
Son, don't peek
Give us a little free time
We'll be people of importance for you in the next life
Right now
The sun is shining on the lemon tree of home
The speaker and his wife are "little" people who live their lives within the circumscribed world of an urban neighborhood. The bitterness of life--a key theme of the entire collection--is represented here by the reference to lemon trees. The only solace is love, which balances the sourness of life with a little sweetness. Any more grandiose ambitions are left for the next generation or even the next life.
Chansons is central to Bai's poetic oeuvre and occupies an important place in the development of nativist literature, because it is one of the few books that deals with urban life. After Taiwan returned to Chinese rule, nativism in literature re-emerged as a reaction against modernism. Taiwan writers looked to Taiwan's rural traditions as the stronghold of values which were to be used to combat the pervasive Western influence of modernism. Deep polarization in literature resulted, with modernist writing seen as urban and nativist writing as rural. But for Bai, this dichotomy was a false one and his book was an attempt to put things right. The themes and language were those of Taiwan.
Occasionally, Bai's use of the colloquial can be quite earthy. In a scatological piece appropriately titled "Excrement," he deals with the theme of aging:
Sometimes you stop and look back
Standing in the bowels of Xinmei Street
Home is a frightful gut
Which has digested your life
You eyeball a seventeen-year-old
Beauty like a ripe, unpicked fruit on a branch
You can't help laughing at yourself
And at the end of life
There outside the asshole
comes an ebullient call:
"Hey old friend, you here too?"
Laughter, in other words, is the only defense against age.
Bai Chiu wrote a number of poems that he chose not to include in Chansons; these he later assembled for a further collection, but owing to the publisher's financial difficulties the book was held back until 1984, when it was published under the title Poetry Square. These thirty-seven poems lack the unity of Chansons and in some ways hark back to his earlier collections in terms of language and style. However, Bai also sounds a new note by including several political poems. "Parrot" is one example:
Do people need suggestions?
The parrot can make an educated decision
Do people welcome new ideas?
Just two people
Make the world too small
And he remembers quite clearly
One unhappy morning
Before the king had finished his analysis
And come to a conclusion
along came democracy
One person offered his suggestions
One offered his new ideas
Which made the king very uncomfortable
They had the intelligence of fools
To believe in democracy
For what is democracy?
The parrot knew all too well
He had no suggestions
He was an intelligent fool
He had no new ideas
He just repeated the king
Verbatim et literatim
In the end
One was thrown into prison
One lost his head in front of the palace gate
And the king
Smiled as he fed his parrot
The moral of this fable is obvious and the satire thinly veiled. Bai was again exploring new territory--political poetry would not be widely written until the late eighties.
In recent years, Bai Chiu has written very little. The three titles he has published since 1984, When the Wind Blows You Feel the Tree's Existence (1989), Self-Love (1990), and Images Drawn from Measurement and Observation (1991) are largely anthologies of his published work in prose and verse. Instead, he has devoted much of his time and energy to his job, and he now holds high-ranking positions in professional associations of advertisers and designers. He has contributed a good deal of time to the Calligraphy Research Society and regularly exhibits his work at their shows. In addition, he is frequently called upon to act as a judge in poetry contests and to deliver lectures on modern poetry at colleges and universities around the island.
Although Bai writes little poetry today, he does follow new trends and avidly keeps abreast of the latest theories and debates. Among the most prominent trends in recent years, and one that has been enthusiastically embraced by younger poets, is postmodernism. Bai's understanding of the movement comes in part from his work as a designer. According to him, postmodernism found its earliest expression in architecture. He feels that the movement has no clear-cut principles and that it is primarily concerned with deconstructing certain aspects of modernism.
Bai sees the postmodernism advocated by younger poets in Taiwan as a continuation of the modernist concern for form and technique. "The modernist revolution in Taiwan is not over," he says. "It has merely revolutionized poetic form. In terms of content and spirit, it is still developing." He believes that the future of Taiwan poetry involves a synthesis of modernist sensibility, regional consciousness, and romantic idealism.
Bai Chiu has made significant contributions to the development of form and technique in modern poetry. In his hands the colloquial language of Taiwan has become a supple medium of expression. And he has expanded the parameters of nativist poetic discourse to include urban life and sensibility. These contributions guarantee him an important place in the history of modern Chinese vernacular poetry.
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John Balcom, formerly an editor of the Free China Review,holds a Ph.D. in Chinese and comparative literature from Washington University (St. Louis). He currently teaches Chinese and translation in Monterey, California.
Copyright 1997 by John Balcom.