Nameless Flowers PA

by Crippen,Aaron

• ISBN13: 9780807615485
• ISBN10: 080761548X
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-04-18
• Publisher: George Braziller Inc.

Summary

While critics were calling him the harbinger of a troubled and new Obscure movement, the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution was taking his poems to heart. Nameless Flowers traces Gu Cheng's work from the lurid early lyrics that made him a literary star to the late expressions of dark beauty that predicted his second exile and tragic death. Though rooted in classical Chinese poetry, Gu Cheng's poems show traces of Western influences as diverse as Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, and entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. His poems embrace animate and inanimate beings from the vast Chinese masses and Mongolian plains to minuscule insects and pebbles. It is this simultaneous vision of the little man and the faceless mass that has made Gu Cheng one of China's most fervently loved poets. Nameless Flowers includes memoirs by Gu Cheng and his father, writer Gu Gong, which vividly recount the poet's path out of rural exile to the Democracy Wall in Beijing and to the podiums of Berlin, London, and New York. Fans of writers such as Li Po, Basho, Hans Christian Andersen, Sylvia Plath, and Bei Dao, who was his friend, will readily recognize the powers of this eclectic and mystic poet.

Table of Contents

Introduction	9	(10)
Poplar	19	(1)
Nameless Flowers	19	(1)
Life Fantasy	20	(2)
A Generation	22	(1)
The Finish	22	(1)
The Gaze	23	(1)
Photography	23	(1)
Lotus Flower Peak	23	(1)
Oyster	24	(1)
Fossil	25	(2)
Blinking	27	(1)
To Andersen	28	(1)
The Martyred•The Hopeful	29	(3)
The Path	32	(1)
Martyrdom	33	(1)
Water Country	34	(4)
Huadiao Soliloquy	38	(2)
Love Me, Ocean	40	(2)
Prayer	42	(1)
Road	43	(2)
Copper-Colored Cloud	45	(3)
Far and Near	48	(1)
The Alley	48	(1)
Valediction	49	(1)
Avoidance	49	(1)
Parting Thoughts	50	(1)
Feeling	50	(3)
I Seek You	53	(1)
from The World and I	54	(5)
Evasion	59	(1)
Curriculum Vitae	60	(1)
Farewell, Cemetery	61	(7)
Say No More, I'll Not Submit	68	(2)
The Snow's Smile	70	(2)
I Sing My Own Song	72	(1)
Anonymous Grass	73	(2)
Premature Seedling	75	(1)
The Return (1)	76	(1)
Summer's Start	77	(2)
I'm a Willful Child	79	(3)
We Believed	82	(1)
Horse Carts	83	(1)
The Prairie	84	(1)
Discrimination	85	(1)
For My Departed Grandmother (1)	86	(1)
In This Broad Bright World	87	(1)
The Return (2)	88	(1)
It Was a Loess Road in Winter	89	(1)
Legal Case	90	(1)
One of My Springs	91	(1)
I Can Breathe Like the Green Grass	92	(1)
Two Souls' Chorus	93	(4)
For My Departed Grandmother (2)	97	(2)
Old Man (1)	99	(1)
Back	100	(2)
The Buddha Speaks	102	(1)
Life's Aspiring	103	(1)
An Imperialist Soldier's Judgment Day	104	(1)
Sometimes I Really Feel	105	(1)
The Outskirts	106	(1)
Villagers	107	(1)
On the Sinister Side of Night	108	(1)
Summer Outside the Pane	109	(1)
Dream Garden	110	(1)
At the Door	111	(4)
The Coming	115	(1)
Sleeping Soundly in Daytime	116	(1)
Against the Current	117	(2)
The Marionette Art	119	(2)
I Once Was the Smallest Flame in the Fire	121	(2)
Safe on the Strait	123	(1)
Old Man (2)	124	(2)
Strange Land	126	(1)
The Pure Land	127	(1)
Poverty Has a Chilly Nose	128	(1)
Expansion	129	(1)
I Admit	130	(1)
A Deserted Village	130	(1)
Maybe I Am Blind	131	(1)
Zoo Snake	132	(1)
I Am Still Reaping That Golden Tobacco	133	(1)
Ark	134	(1)
After the Air Raid	134	(1)
The Source	135	(1)
River Mouth	136	(1)
Account	137	(1)
A World of Odes	137	(1)
Nature	138	(1)
A "Movement"	138	(1)
The Experiment	139	(1)
Mistake	139	(1)
The Soul Has a Lonely Dwelling	140	(1)
The Beginning of Chaos	140	(1)
It Is the Trees' Power to Swim	141	(1)
Wildcat	141	(1)
The Stopping	142	(1)
Zhitang	143	(1)
Arrow	144	(2)
Thoroughfare 145 Grave Bed	146	(1)
The God Says	146	(3)
A Brief Self-Introduction	149	(14)
Gu Cheng and Poetry	163