Must modern poetry be obscure?

Not long ago, Chen was invited to participate in a modern poetry essay activity. The organizer provided me and several other judges with more than 50 poems that they initially evaluated, and then selected several first, second and third prizes from these works. It stands to reason that this thing is not complicated for people with certain artistic appreciation ability, and the reading volume is not large, because there are only dozens of songs. But in the process of judging, it makes me quite nervous. First of all, many poems are obscure. They are often read several times, and they can't figure out what kind of poetry is hidden behind their words. The second question that follows is, in the face of such poems, how do you grade them and tell them the order of winning prizes? I was worried about my appreciation ability, so I exchanged views with another old poet who was also a judge. He is an old expert, and his views are certainly more refined than mine, but he thinks and feels the same as me. The reason why these poems can rank among the top dozens in a large number of submissions is obviously not because of the "special care" of any relationship, but represents a universal "hazy" poetic style, which is becoming an aesthetic trend pursued by a large number of poets and poetry lovers. No wonder far more people write poems than read them. No wonder there is absolutely no trace of modern poetry in the sales rankings of major bookstores or online bookstores. In my opinion, we can't just look for reasons from readers, but simply blame readers' ignorance or the marginalization of poetry by factors such as the times and environment. I'm afraid it's not objective. We must reflect on what is wrong with poetry itself. If everyone expresses "abstruse" with "obscure"; How can modern poetry have vitality if it is "crooked" rather than "catchy"? Of course, it is also difficult to go to the public. I read a report recently, which deeply touched me. According to the report, Chai Tian Toyo, a 100-year-old Japanese poetess, wrote a collection of poems, "Please don't lose heart! Translated into Chinese version, the book was just printed, but unfortunately she died at the age of 103 before she saw this collection of poems. Interestingly, this long-lived poetess, who was once popular in Japan, began to learn to write poetry at the age of 92. Writing poetry is entirely to enrich the lonely and boring time in her later years, and she unexpectedly became a famous Japanese poet. Please don't lose heart! 10 month, sold10.5 million copies. The love and belief in life expressed in the poem soothed the hearts of hundreds of millions of people who were sad because of the earthquake and tsunami. So, what poems did she write? I quote one sentence here, that is, please don't lose heart! There are only a few short lines, but people feel a kind of power: I said/don't sigh/tell my own misfortune//breeze and sunshine/no partiality/dream/everyone is equal//look at me/have sad memories/but I still feel/have a good life//so I said/don't be sad/don't. The centenarian has experienced various social upheavals and hardships in his life. When she began to live a quiet and peaceful life, her wife died again, and she had to live a lonely life in a nursing home. At this moment, she was fascinated by writing poetry. Where does she write poetry? She used poetry to add heat to her life, and she used poetry to tell her indifference and feelings after vicissitudes. From the photo, the face with a sunny and kind smile is a poem in itself. Writing here, I suddenly remembered the phrase "Mom, please hold my hand" that made hundreds of millions of people in China cry after the Wenchuan earthquake. It is also strong and clear. From this, I think, whether writing or writing poetry, I am most afraid of "pretending", "pretending to be deep", "pretending to be elegant", "pretending to be like a famous poet or writer, or even pretending to be like a master. To write clearly, we must first understand ourselves; If you want to understand, you must live to understand the writing experience of a centenarian who started writing poems at the age of 92. I wonder if we modern poets can understand the basic truth of writing poetry? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Since the New Poetry Society invited me to participate in this discussion, I will simply express my contempt and add a little to my previous article. First of all, clear your name. Whether the word "obscure" is added to the spread of poetry is a stain. Poetry is an art with language as the medium of communication. The necessity of communication begins with the poet having something to say in his heart, telling his feelings so that others can feel it. Its sociality is undeniable. A true poet does not require the highest degree of perfection. The so-called "perfection" means that the content and form are in harmony, and what is said is exactly what is felt. So a good poem is probably not obscure in the poet's own mind. If a poem is as obscure to the poet as to the reader, there are only two possibilities. Either the author intends to cover up the ordinary things conveyed, or he is unable to do so and his communication skills are naive. In fact, some new poems now inevitably make these two mistakes. We can forgive those who are naive in skills, and we should hate those who are "poor in knowledge and skills", because this trick of "bathing monkeys to win the championship" stems from intellectual fraud and has caused many unfair grievances to real new poetry. We can't hang "obscure" on the ideal of poetry. Let's put aside bad poems and talk about works that are really poems. I think it's easier to understand, harder to understand, and more obscure than to understand. Obscure poetry has no defense, and obscure poetry has a reason. I said in the article "Psychological Individual Differences and Appreciation of Poetry" published in the literary column of Ta Kung Pao: Most good poems can be understood by people who can understand them. The word "can understand" is the tightest here. The degree of understanding varies from person to person. Sometimes not everyone can understand a good poem, and those who don't understand it just can't understand it clearly. Therefore, apart from readers' understanding, clarity is not the absolute standard of poetry evaluation. I emphasize the word "understanding" in order to shift the problem from the poem itself to the relationship between the poem and the reader. As far as poetry itself is concerned, I have said that it should be easy to understand, not obscure; As far as the relationship between poetry and readers is concerned, the comprehensibility of poetry varies with readers' endowments, training and interests. The word "obscure" is often used to describe a good poem that is difficult to understand and is an abuse. I have elaborated on individual differences in my Ta Kung Pao article, and it is useless to repeat them. Now let's talk about the reasons why good poems are sometimes difficult to understand. Let's call what the poet wants to say artistic conception and what he says language. These two components are closely related and inseparable. But for the convenience of talking, we might as well separate them. The difficulty of poetry lies in language as well as artistic conception. There is a saying in China that "words are close but meanings are far away". When the language is near and the theme is far away, the understandability of the language cannot guarantee the understandability of the artistic conception. Tao Yuanming's poems can be taken as an example. But "profound" can sometimes be "near" and sometimes it can't be "near". Difficult artistic conception; Language is often difficult because of it. Li Changji and Li Yishan are more difficult to understand than Yuan Zhen and Bai Ju, and they can be seen in artistic conception and language. Language can be divided into semantic organization and phonetic organization. The former belongs to grammar and the latter belongs to phonology. The organization of meaning depends largely on grammatical conventions. This is deeply rooted in every language. How to think, how to say and how to write are all natural because of habit. Generally speaking, poets have to accept this habit. Even if everyone has his own personality in choosing words and collocations, he will not completely give up the basis of grammar. The bow and scrape of Browning and Han Tui cannot be an obstacle to understanding their poems. Therefore, poetry is difficult to understand in language, and the organizer of meaning is very subtle. Even if there are occasional difficulties, readers can overcome them through hard work. The organization of sound is not like this. This is a subtle trace of physiological changes accompanied by emotional appeal. Poetry is the language of emotion, and the most direct expression of emotional change is the rhythm of sound. This is the lifeblood of poetry. Read a good poem, if you can't grasp the subtle ups and downs of its sound rhythm, you won't understand its meaning at all. Unfortunately, this most important part of poetry is also the most difficult part. Most people are slow to respond to sound. Psychologists have a term called "color blindness", which refers to people who can't distinguish between red, green, blue and yellow. I think they should also create a term "tone deafness", which is very necessary. Most of us are a little tone deaf. This is not to say that you are deaf to all poems, but that you are insensitive to certain sounds. For example, the British critic Johnson Bo Tu only likes to listen to "heroic couplets" but can't appreciate Milton's "blank poems", which is a good example of "tone deafness". "Sound deafness" has its origin, racial differences, habits and self-cultivation. China people read foreign poems, or English people read French poems. No matter how cultivated, there is always a gap in voice. People who are used to reading old poems look forward to the sound mode of five or seven words as soon as they read it, but they always feel uncomfortable with new poems that are already musical. This is just a superficial statement. More precisely, every poet, even every poem of his, has its own special sound rhythm, because it is the expression of special personality and special taste. This is a natural expression, and there is no need for any intentional creation, so poets themselves often cannot analyze and explain it, and even some poets simply deny its existence because they are not aware of it. The most difficult part of poetry-most people call it "obscure"-is its sound rhythm. People who talk about the clarity and obscurity of poetry now don't mention it at all. They seem to think that as long as the meaning of the language is clear, the poem must be clear. This seems to be a failure to realize the crux of the problem. The most difficult thing to understand is the sound rhythm. In addition to this layer, there is a special difficulty in new poetry, that is, artistic conception. Poetry is creation, and the world of poetry is a world reorganized and organized on the basis of reality according to personal perception of the current situation. This kind of organization is often very different from the phenomenon organization (the so-called real world) that is in contact with daily habits. The first is that poetry has a choice, and the value given to things does not necessarily depend on customary standards; The second is to choose future cooperation. The relationship between poetry and things is not consistent with the relationship of ordinary people's habits. The difficulty of a poet's artistic conception lies in the disparity between these two layers. The choice and coordination used in popular and easy-to-understand poems are mostly familiar to people. The less familiar with the method of choosing cooperation, the more difficult it is to understand. According to my personal experience, new poems make me feel difficult to understand, not because the language is obscure, but because of bizarre associations. If there is a connection, there must be a clue. If there is a clue, you can find it. It is not difficult to understand. It is difficult to understand because when the poet connects A and D, the interlocking line between B and C may only exist in the subconscious. Maybe he didn't think it was necessary to expose it and simply omitted it. People who are used to the association mode from A to B, from B to C, and then from C to D suddenly feel strange and "obscure". The novelty of poetry often lies in the suddenness of this association, and this suddenness is based on inevitability. This truth involves imagination and metaphor, which is beyond the scope of this article. It is a poet's difficulty to make association both sudden and inevitable; It is difficult for readers to see its suddenness and inevitability at the same time. The two difficulties in poetry are very subtle, and the difference is thousands of miles. Honesty is the poet's responsibility, and it is the reader's responsibility to strive for understanding. It is the poet's fault that readers make great efforts and find that it is not worth the loss; It is the reader's fault to judge the poet with the habitual and trite association method and accuse him of being obscure. In order to imagine the future of new poetry, both new poets and readers of new poetry should introspect and ask whose fault it is to be obscure. I repeat: honesty is the responsibility of poets, and it is the responsibility of readers to strive for understanding!