My Study Office

When I was in Chinese primary school during the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, I liked to read ancient Chinese poetry. It was short, precise, and profound. At the time, vernacular poetry (spoken language) was already spreading. I started to use simple words to write my poems. They were chosen by the teacher to publish on the school’s classroom board. Since then, I have fallen in love with writing poetry. 

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Poetry taps into my feelings and expresses them in language. The genre allows me to write down my feelings of love, anger, fear, solitude, loneliness, and other emotions. I think the most inspiring one is love. 

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I have been married for thirty-eight years. On every anniversary I have written a poem (in Chinese) for my wife. It has become our tradition between us. I like to use simple, short, and clear words to express my feelings for her. It touches her every time she reads them. 

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After I retired five years ago, I attended Central Connecticut State University to polish my English and my writing. I started to translate my poems into English. The last few years, I began to write my poems for her in both languages. The following poem is from last year’s anniversary. 

  

I Want to be a Poet --- 38 Anniversary 

I once said, x

I did not want to be a poet, 

Because the poet’s poems, 

They are always a nostalgia of agony. 

  

But 

After having your love, 

My life is full of sunshine. 

  

You 

Sacrificed your health to bear two sons for me, 

Working day and night to improve our wealth, 

Searched for ways to boost my health, 

  

I 

Never forget your sacrifice, 

Thankful for your contribution 

Appreciative for your concern. 

  

To glorify you, 

I want to be a poet. 

  

Renaissance love poetry often expressed roman passion. Edmund Spencer, William Shakespeare, and John Dunne had all written love poetry. Among them, Spencer’s sonnet LXXL “One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand” is the most famous poem in the cycle. The poem expresses the poet’s extreme feeling for his lover.

 

Amoretti: One Day I Wrote her Name

            By Edmund Spenser

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”

“Not so,” (quod I); “let baser things devise.

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

 

In this poem, Spencer tries to immortalize his loved one by signing her name on the strand, but the waves wash it away. He tries to write it again; the waves wipe it out again. The action of the waves symbolizes how time will destroy all man-made things. His lover tells him that his attempts are in vain, a mortal thing such as herself cannot live forever. It is useless to print her name because she will eventually disappear. However, Spencer tells her that the “baser things” will disappear, but she will live on. Her glorious name will live on forever. The poem's main theme is that even if everything ends, their love will survive. 

 

Even though I love and endeavor to write poetry, the current state of poetry in culture seems diminished into oblivion. The question in the literary world is asked: Is poetry dying? What can poets do for our culture? I did some research and interviewed Professor Sarah P. Strong in her office at Central Connecticut State University.

 

Professor Strong is a poet, and who published two poetry books – “The Mouth of Earth” and “Tour of the Breath Gallery”. Here what her answers on ‘Is poetry dying?’

 

“There were always a lot of people saying that nobody reads poetry anymore or poetry is a dying art. But I would say that the internet has created an incredible platform for more poetry publishing than at any other time in history. More opportunities for poets to read and perform to share their works. They can pose online. People are showing their poems on TikTok. People are posting videos on their social media apps. And there are literary magazines that publish poetry that have only digitalized writing and are well regarded. That would have been unheard of in publishing a decade ago. So, the current state of poetry culture is fine. But the kind of poetry that people engage with has changed, it is fair to say few people are reading the Iliad and Odyssey or Robert Burns. Poetry is always a reflection of the culture that it is engaging with. I do not know what poem is being written now that will be read in the 22nd century. But I am sure that there are some. So, poetry is doing fine.”   

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Then she answers the question of - What can poets do for our culture?

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“I think that we can have a conversation about what people think is important. That could be as big and interesting a topic as the structure of racism, or it could be as small as the joy you see when you see your baby speak their first word or missing your loved one. These three examples are quite different. I personally think poetry can help us to see a new way and give voice to complicated feelings. Even for people who never read poetry and think poetry is not worth a lot. When they get married, when there is a funeral, they are going to read a poem on those occasions. So, I think it will continue to be an important part of transmitting culture.” 

                                                                                               

Arizona State University English lecturer Rosemarie Dombrowski also answers both questions in the following interview which published in ASU News on March 3, 2020.

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“I think poetry is perpetually being lost and found. A lot of contemporary readers have trouble connecting with poetry of the 19th and early 20th century, and a lot of the poetry from the 1970s and `80s is dense and experimental. But I still love teaching it because it’s such a valuable culture record, a literary and aesthetic artifact of its respective time.”

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Dombrowski suggested in the interview that the efficacy of poetry is a therapeutic tool, an augmentative medical treatment for the body, mind, and spirit. Besides, poetry is a form of ethnography. It’s a record of the myriad cultures that have produced it as well as a sociohistorical record of both facts and emotion. She also relaunched “The Revolution” in July of 2019. That was a newspaper of the National Women’s Suffrage Association founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1868 but had ceased published for a long time. She uses that as a platform for feminism and marginalized voices. She believes that poetry is, and has been, a means of coping through personal, cultural, and global crises, and believes that its presence is going to be stronger than ever as we navigate our uncertain present and future.            

 

From the interview and readings of these two poets, I can see poetry will continue to prosper in our culture. In Connecticut, the Connecticut Poetry Society publishes the Connecticut River Review every year. There are many poets who published their poems in the review. They also have contest for poetry.  I still want to express my affection through verse for my wife, my children, and the missing of my friends. I will continue to write my poetry.​