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Turning heartache into poetry

Posted on | March 17, 2010 | 2,166 views |

By Adam King

In the days after May 12, 2008, after a massive earthquake rocked Sichuan Province in China, killing 70,000 people and injuring 374,000 more, the Chinese people found solace in their thousands-year-old relationship with poetry.

En masse, the general population began penning tributes to those who lost their lives, to rally the people in support of the rescue efforts and to laud their patriotism because of the quick response by the Chinese government, said Heather Inwood, assistant professor of East Asian languages and literature, whose research paper “Multimedia Quake Poetry: Convergence Culture after the Sichuan Earthquake” discusses how poetry was used by the people, the media and the government and why poetry continues to remain a popular discourse in China.

There had not been this mass outpouring of poetic tributes since the death of Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China from 1949-76. Common people wrote poems and posted them in and around Tiananmen Square just after Zhou’s death. They were copied by hand and read aloud or turned into songs. Eventually the poems ended up in anthologies, and the creativity became known as Tiananmen Poetry.

The poetry about the quake followed a similar pattern, but technology allowed it to spread much more quickly through e-mail and Internet blogs and forums. Poems with 160 characters were commonplace since many people used text messaging as their way to compose and communicate.

Within days of their publishing, the more popular poems were used in multiple ways, such as being set to music and paired with photos of the earthquake for moving video tributes. Newspapers and television stations, which are strictly controlled by the Chinese government, published the more popular poems or read them over the air as a way to show national unity in a time of crisis. Some of these poems also made appearances at poetry recitals and charity events.

The fact that ordinary people — some who had purported never to have written a poem in their life before the quake — ended up writing the most popular poems was a bit of a shocker to the poetry establishment, Inwood said.

Just two years earlier, the Web had been flooded with Internet users  — “netizens” as they’re called in China — deriding a poet who wrote simplistically yet still rose through the official literary establishment.

“Netizens were up in arms saying, ‘If she’s a poet, then I’m a poet,’” Inwood said. “For example, they didn’t see how poetry written in such simple everyday sentences without a lot of emotion, complex grammar or use of metaphor could possibly be considered good poetry.”

Inwood said there has been there has been a growing disappointment with modern Chinese poetry since the early 1990s, the sense that poets have failed and there is a dearth of talent. Part of the reason can be traced to the fundamental differences between modern poetry, which is written in the vernacular language, and classical poetry, which is written in the ancient literary language, and the high regard for which the majority of the Chinese public still holds the latter.

Knowing poetry was a way to climb to power in China up until 1905 because poetry was an integral part of the exam to earn a job in the Imperial government, Inwood said. After the Imperial Examination system was abolished in 1905, poetic experimentations with the modern, vernacular language increased, and debates about what is quality poetry haven’t died down since.

Quake Poetry did nothing to dispel those questions since the most popular of the poems weren’t especially well written. But they touched a national nerve and showed the power of spontaneity even in a tightly controlled information market such as China.

So while the surge of Quake Poetry marked a unique moment in time for China’s populace, Inwood said it doesn’t seem to be a bellwether event for a rise in netizen contributions to the medium or a trend toward reclaiming poetry’s glory days.

“It was confirmation to some people that poetry is a useful literary genre and it can be emotionally satisfying to write poems in times of tragedy or distress,” Inwood said. “There were numerous anthologies published just months after the earthquake. And while there doesn’t seem to be a lasting impact of this poetry tide, it’s hard to say the effect it’s had on people’s psyche. Just because people aren’t writing large amounts of poetry doesn’t mean they won’t be more inclined to do so the next time there is a natural disaster, and in fact we would expect it.”

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