Teresa Mei Chuc (Chúc Mỹ Tuệ )
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From Hope to Darkness and In Between

6/19/2011

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An annotation of Over Autumn Rooftops by Hai Zi.

      “In bluing river water/ wash both hands,” begins the first poem, “Farming People,” in Over Autumn Rooftops by Hai Zi, a book of poems spanning his entire life. The book is organized chronologically. His early poems reveal a vibrant, descriptive language that radiates light through its diction, concrete images, and ideas. They reveal a somewhat naïve poet who is in the throes of life and landscape. The first line of the first poem of the book shows a theme that echoes throughout the book from early poems to later poems. However, the kind of washing changes; in the beginning the poems are more playful, but as they progress, there is more and more blood being washed from the hands and the poems venture into darkness both literally and figuratively.

      Throughout the book, barley fields, wheat fields, water, earth, and nature from Hai Zi’s childhood recur, the speaker’s interaction with the fields; however, changes.  As I was writing this annotation, I was trying to keep in mind the organic organization of the poems in the book - what journey the poet is taking the reader on and how his/her perceptions will change from the beginning to the end of the book, what kind of “growth” will occur in both the poet and the reader.

      Hai Zi takes the reader on a journey of innocence and awe into the deep, dark, core of the earth and humanity. Both perspectives are real and full of strength, but as the yin-yang symbol suggests, we can’t escape the darkness that bleeds into the white light and the white light that bleeds into the darkness. These are inseparable truths. From “Poem Offered into the Dark Night,” Zi writes, “The sky has nothing/ why does it comfort me// desolate earth after bountiful harvest/ people take away the year’s yield/ take away the grain,/ ride away the horses/ those people left in the earth are buried deep…”  There is abundance in nature and then the vastness of death when that is taken away; and what is left in the earth are the dead people.

      In his poems, nature, for example peach blossoms, represent the beauty and brutality of human existence as sure as the cycles of nature.

Peach Blossoms

on a cart golden in the light of dawn

blood-red, exploded open

bastard daughters of the sun

blood slowly flowing

like the inside of some revolutionary group

a machete, savage and desolate on the grasslands

(1989)

 
      In the book, the gradual development of perspective takes the reader deeper and deeper into a dark, painful realm where eventually Zi concludes in his poem “Wheat Fields and Poets,” “wheat fields/ others see you/ and think you warm and beautiful/ but I stand at the center of your painful interrogation/ burned by you/ I stand in the sun   painful awns of wheat.” And in “Earth. Sadness. Death,” he writes, “…bundles of my bones form rooftops on the water, remnants of humanity.”  There is a sense of huge hopelessness, this darkness that the poet himself could not escape from in life. Perhaps it is due to this overwhelming abyss that the poet died by throwing himself in front of an oncoming train.


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Hai Zi

3/31/2011

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I am currently reading Over Autumn Rooftops, a collection of poems by Hai Zi translated by Dan Murphy. I consider myself lucky to have chanced up or discovered him.

Here are some poems by the wonderfu poet:

The Arles Sun*

            
- for my emaciated brother

"All the things I have created in nature are chestnuts snatched from the fire. Oh! Those who do not believe in the sun betray God." **

go south
go south
your blood, without lovers or springtime
without the moon
there isn't even enough bread
friends even scarcer
only a throng of suffering children, gobbling up everything
my emaciated brother, Van Gogh, Van Gogh...
from beneath the earth vigorously spurting forth
like a volcano with no thought for the results
cypresses and wheat fields
and you
spurting forth your remaining time
just one of your eyes could illuminate the world
but you use your third eye, the Arles sun
to burn the starry sky into a crude river
to burn the earth into its rotation
raising your yellowed spasmodic hand, sunflowers
inviting all those who have pulled chestnuts from the fire
not to paint again Christ's olive garden
if you must paint, paint the reaping of olives
paint a violent ball of fire
to substitute for the father of heaven
washing life clean
red-haired brother, drinking up the absinthe
you light this fire
burn


*Arles is a small town in southern France where Van Gogh created 70 or 80 paintngs during the most brilliant period in his career.
**The two sentences in the quote above are apparently taken from two separate letters Van Gogh wrote to hs brother Theo. 

~

from In Requiem Mozart says

"in the wheat fields please
sort through my bones
like bunches of reed catkins
...pack them into the box of my violin and carry them back..."

~

Peach Blossoms

on a cart golden in the light of dawn
blood-red, exploded open
bastard daughters of the sun
blood slowly flowing
like the inside of some revolutionary group
a machete, savage and desolate on the grasslands
1 Comment

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    Teresa Mei Chuc is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction.

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