The full context of Che Qianzi's remarks has me praying for the original
Chinese, perhaps something, simple, like the sense and the meaning have been
lost in the translation. Is this where Roman Ingarden meets Chinese poetics?
Do we dive headfirst into the poem and come up with a fish? I've always
preferred transparency in exegesis --not obsfuscation or transcendentalism.
The blank sheet of paper I can fully understand. But from there on, I am
lost, because it seems from a philosophical point of view a terrible
mish-mash --a poet's credo --one we can applaud, but cannot follow.
The Eidetic -- derived from Eidos and connected with the seven
humanities --the business with images I understand, in as much as it is
subjective and dubious in schools of contemporary psychology and from the
empirical point of view.
I prefer the works of Sun Tungpo the painter who in the eleventh century
informed his readers about painting the "Inner Law of Things" --an approach
that had its origins in Sung Neo-Confucianist philosophy and the concept of
"li" -- Lin Yutng translated part of this work in his "The Importance of
Understanding" Heinemann 1960.
Here is a poem that I find makes an interesting use of the classical Chinese
poem and the postmodern condition. Here we have a fish in a can.
Xia Yu (b. 1956 - a vintage year for poets
A Can of Fish
Lying in the tomato sauce
The fish may not be happy
The sea does not know that
The sea is too deep
The shores do not know that, either
This story is crimson
Besides, it is corny
So it is actually about tomato sauce.
Yours Stephen Pain
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