NO POETRY: Selected Poems of Che Qianzi

Che Qianzi 车前子 is a delightful, powerful and restless poet. NO POETRY (Wu shige: che qianzi shixuan 无诗歌: 车前子诗选), ably translated by Yunte Huang, is a welcome introduction to Che’s varied poetic practice. A Beijing resident originally from Suzhou, Che is well-known in China for his painting and prose, as well as his poetry; he is a fully modern traditional scholar-artist. Indeed, he has claimed himself to be the reincarnation of the Yuan dynasty poet Yang Weizhen 杨维桢 (c. 1296–1370). One might consider his forays into “concrete poetry” a contemporary form of the traditional “poetry in painting, painting in poetry” although they can just as easily be affiliated to Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams. Some critics have linked his work to that of the American LANGUAGE poets, but Che’s universe is broader than merely contemporary American or Chinese classical traditions. His diagram poem “Sign: Inspired by a Letter” (“Fu: zimu chanshengde lianxiang”符: 字母产生的联想) recalls, for instance, similar work by Moscow Conceptualist Andrei Monastrysky. Such is the breadth of Che’s cosmopolitan modernity. Nevertheless, while interested in words as things, he does not seek to defeat the communicability of his language, which is a good thing, inasmuch as his writing maintains its translatability despite the very different physical and aural nature of Chinese and English words. It is evident that Che does not want to write the same poem twice. It is hard to say what a “typical Che poem” would be. His lyrics are sometimes sharp and enigmatic, such as “Impromptu”: