I am taken with dagong shige, “labour poetry,” a genre that has emerged from the 300 million workers who have migrated across China to the big cities over the past four decades, as described in The Economist:
Its most famous practitioner was Xu Lizhi, who worked on an assembly line for Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm that makes most of Apple’s iPhones. Before he committed suicide in 2014, at the age of 24, he had written almost 200 poems about the drudgery of factory work. Among the best known is “I Swallowed An Iron Moon”:
Here’s the poem.
I Swallowed an Iron Moon, Xu Lizhi
I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw
I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms
bent over machines, our youth died young
I swallowed labour, I swallowed poverty
swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life
I can’t swallow any more
everything I’ve swallowed roils up in my throat
I spread across my country
a poem of shame
Some of the literature refers to powerlessness and homesickness; others are proud and patriotic.
It must be a strange mix of emotions to be part of a movement so strong and so vast which is lifting the largest country in the world out of poverty and is literally building the nation and the world, but at the same time to be, well, far from home and oppressed.
I’m reminded of the British war poets: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen… I mean Dulce et Decorum Est is so vivid and so bitter - it’s a hard read, even with familiarity, and it’s hard to imagine how the imagination could be brought closer to the trenches of the Great War.
What is the role of this kind of art?
Maybe it sits midway between being
a mirror
a memory
the sound of society talking out loud about a colossal event or a becoming; processing it, digesting it for all of us, creating places for our feelings.
Which is vital.
I don’t know about poetry but there were, appointed by the British government, official war artists for the First and Second World Wars.
It is a shame that the government did not appoint official pandemic artists, to document and interpret the empty streets of the lockdown, the paranoia inherent in Covid itself, the masks and the bubbles and the supermarket shelves and the diversity of experiences, the whole 18 months and wherever it goes next.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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I am taken with dagong shige, “labour poetry,” a genre that has emerged from the 300 million workers who have migrated across China to the big cities over the past four decades, as described in The Economist:
Here’s the poem.
Some of the literature refers to powerlessness and homesickness; others are proud and patriotic.
It must be a strange mix of emotions to be part of a movement so strong and so vast which is lifting the largest country in the world out of poverty and is literally building the nation and the world, but at the same time to be, well, far from home and oppressed.
I’m reminded of the British war poets: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen… I mean Dulce et Decorum Est is so vivid and so bitter - it’s a hard read, even with familiarity, and it’s hard to imagine how the imagination could be brought closer to the trenches of the Great War.
What is the role of this kind of art?
Maybe it sits midway between being
Which is vital.
I don’t know about poetry but there were, appointed by the British government, official war artists for the First and Second World Wars.
It is a shame that the government did not appoint official pandemic artists, to document and interpret the empty streets of the lockdown, the paranoia inherent in Covid itself, the masks and the bubbles and the supermarket shelves and the diversity of experiences, the whole 18 months and wherever it goes next.