Poems from the Tang

Poems from the Tang. An evening in VS280--the grad seminar, which I later began calling Beginnings. It's in the old Room 170--before everything was reworked as a white cube. Spring 2011. The floor is still dark in places--and the parapet walls, de-surfaced by Jill Stoner at one point to reveal their original concrete underpinnings. Likewise the review boards--simple sheets of homosote, on wooden runners, dinged in a few spots at the bottom, joints showing--but an honest surface for work that also wished to revealed a human touch.

The projects here, folded paper, crushed in places, rough and quite inventive. are by Xin Yu, a graduate student in Architecture from Northern China. That's Xin Yu himself, jeans rolled up, jockey cap--his own person, standing with one hand raised. He's about to read to us from Bai Juyi, one of the great poets of the Tang Dynasty, more than a thousand years before...

I love these poems, have for many years--they've saved me at times--more than Rilke, more than the Psalms, with their plain descriptions of a world both lived and understood at one go. To read Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i in the old spelling) is to enter a world of life seen in its plainest terms--a meal, a window, a garden, an afternoon nap, a cup of wine--unembellished because it needs no embellishment. Filled with tans and grays and off-browns--the felt colors that correspond. (As my painter friend Israel Hershberg once put it, colors that have no names...). Just like the old room itself.

When we do one of the poems in class, it's from a David Hinton translation. For me, he's the master. But with Xin Yu present, suddenly there was someone who could read the poems in the original. Not just the words (there are many Chinese speaking students here in CED) but someone who knew the stance, the posture, the physical rhetoric of what makes such a formal poetry meaningful. Meaningful in the very way it's read...which is part of the tradition.

Xin Hu, above, is only just getting started--he hasn't yet taken the stance of the poet--chest up, head firm, one hand behind his back in an unclenched fist--a self-awareness that's in itself more than a thousand years old. And maybe it's better we don't have that moment--to see it here, that is--to make it instantly accessible. Requiring as it does both grace and a certain hiddenness...

Which are also a part of the meaning...

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