“Verses on-the-go”: a one-day poetry performance event in Shanghai
by MARTINA BENIGNI
“Cloudlike bright cherry blossoms, fallen to the ground become poems,” read the announcement of the poetry reading performance that took place on March the 30th 2024,[1] posted on WeChat,[2] a Chinese popular social media. The event (literally “activity”, huodong 活动) was held in Shanghai Yonghe East Road, jointly organized by Mingyuan Group, Mingyuan Art Museum and Ming Tea House, celebrating the cherry blossom season. Gu Gang 古冈, poet and editor, responsible for the Museum’s poetry activities, was the host. Said announcement provided information on the where and when, on the local poets invited and on the various activities taking place, nothing suggested the “itinerant” poetry performance I was about to witness. In that period, in fact, I was in Shanghai for my fieldwork and, eager to know more about the Shanghainese poetry scene, I decided to go. The following brief analysis aims to give readers a glimpse into the kinds of poetry performances held in China, arguing that such events can retrieve poetry from its alleged marginalization while enriching people’s lives through poetry incarnated in the poets’ voices, gatherings, and, specifically, its silent yet tangible presence in the cityscape. To emphasize such aspects, I will focus on the context and the modalities in which the performance was undertaken, rather than on the texts tout court.
The peculiarity of the performance here presented is that it was designed as a walking one, hence “on the go”, since poets would stroll back and forth while reading their verses, acting and interacting with the audience and the environment. As claimed by Craig and Dubois, such cultural happenings work simultaneously as “a social space of activity and relations” (2010, 442); in this sense, the event let poetry literally take up urban space: hung on trees or written on posters shattered here and there along the street. Together with the audience – including passers-by – television and different media representatives participated too. The whole event, consisting of Gu Gang announcing the poets one by one, exchanging a few words with them, followed by the poets’ reading, was recorded by cameras and smartphones, and later also aired on China Dragon TV.[3] What struck me was the possibility given to poetry to effectively inhabit the city, expressing its symbolic and factual value through a performance in which walking while reading poems functioned as a powerful claim for poetry’s presence in the metropolis. Notably, each poet had a different reading style, related to factors such as the peculiarities of one’s own voice, experience as performer, or contingencies that will be discussed later. In Chinese, “poetry reciting” can be referred to as langsong 朗诵, a term denoting a formal, stylized way of reading aloud marked by emphatic delivery and rhythmic cadence, similar to declamation. With the rise of modern poetry, roughly in early decades of the 20th century, the so-called “free verse” made its way into Chinese poetic tradition, also influencing poetry recitation, or reading (aloud), leading to a gradual avoidance of this declamatory posture. In the case of our performance, the preferred mode of delivery was the langdu 朗读, closer to ordinary reading and characterized by a more spontaneous, colloquial tone. To understand the implications of this event, I adapt Osborne and Skoulding’s works to my case study. Deirdre Osborne’s concept of “landmark poetics” (2016, 197), used for Lemn Sissay’s poem set in a sculpture, may partly account for the one-day poetry installations available in Yonghe East Road. “Landmark poetics” analyzes poems inscribed on monuments and how they affect people (ibid, 199):
Unlike poetry spoken or performed aloud, the reception of landmark poetics is unmediated orally or aurally […] its actualizing is dependent upon the paradox of public introspection – in the mind’s eye and internal voice – of the reader and spectator.
Osborne’s considerations partially adapt to our case here: the poems were indeed performed orally, but just for the time of the event; before, during and after it, the verses were written on colorful posters and hung on flyers along the street, virtually open to be performed, or “activated”, by anyone the whole day. Poems stood there alone most of the time, actualized by “the public introspection”. If no one noticed them, they would never be activated, as if they never existed. Such poems’ meaning, “ever-present” (for that day) and in total display, depended on factors like chance, and walker-readers’ willingness to pause and read them. Such works were probably merely seen, or partially read, limiting their impact and likely leaving their completion to people’s imagination, creating new poems which would forever rest in the passers-by’s mind. Osborne (2016, 200) mentions Michel de Certeau’s idea of the city as space of enunciation:
Like de Certeau’s pedestrian enunciation, the landmark poem is “caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present […], and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. If the individual encounters the (already made) poem as a passer-by or in visiting it by design, de Certeau’s “triple ‘enunciative’ function” of the pedestrian speech act gains another aspect as the walker then becomes a reader, speaker, or viewer of the poem in relation to the spatial signification they uniquely activate in relation to it. Their picking out of “certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret” is governed by an ensemble of ambulatory possibilities which is dependent upon “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege” […].
Both for Osborne and de Certeau, readers as passers-by actualize “only a few possibilities” (de Certeau 1984, 98) of those available, for such texts rely on chance and choice in unpredictable ways. Yet, the poetry performed, written and displayed on Yonghe East Road entered “into conjunction with lived spaces”: during and beyond the performance the road was filled with poetry waiting for eyes to be enacted, while entering “into relationship with its surroundings, material and social” (Skoulding 2016, 447). Held in a public space, in fact, the performance created a momentary poetic utopia in the middle of the city. Voiced in movement, the poems were delivered and received in an unusual way, also influenced by the contingencies related to the site of the collective ritual itself. Such elements were the traffic noise, people talking on their phones or stopping to ask for information, birds chirping, etc., shaping the whole aesthetic experience from different sensory perspectives. Audience and performers felt abstracted from the everyday life scenery while deeply engaged in it: “through movement, the poem inverts and suspends the structures of the city while remaining engaged with them,” to refrain Skoulding (ibid, 255). Moreover, during the whole event Yonghe East Road functioned as a ritualized space, since it was set “to provide context” (Fenner 2021, 3). The stage of such ritual corresponded to the boundaries of the poetic “heterotopia,” i.e. the two sides of the road, meaning an actual site functioning, in a given situation, as a “counter-site”, “simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault, Miskowiec 1986, 24) at once in and out everyday life conventions.
To conclude, this poetry performance sheds light on current initiatives within poetry performance’s state in China, revealing how space for the poetic word can be re-claimed, making it visible and present. Such performances, then, can work as alternative resistance practices to the ongoing marginalization of poetry in a society seemingly fully dedicated to profit and consumption. As concrete manifestations of poetry existence and social values, performances, especially if held in public spaces, let poetry (re)access people’s frantic lives as a material, incarnated presence. The poetry reading here presented, undergone as a collective rite in the middle of the bustling metropolis, re-humanized sites mostly associated with consumerist – unpoetic – culture, opening alternative spaces for poetry and its practice.
References
Craig, Alisa, Dubois, Sébastien “Between art and money: The social space of public readings in contemporary poetry economies and careers”, Poetics 38/5 (2010), 441-460.
De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Stephen Randall Trans.), Berkley, University of California Press, 1984, 229 pp.
Fenner, David E., “Reading Ritualized Space”, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 44/1 (2021), 1-11.
Ming Yuan Museum (Shanghai mingyuan meishuguan 上海明圆美术馆), “Yugao |Chengshi·Yanzhi×Mingyuan·Yinghua ling” 预告| 城市 · 言志 × 明园 · 樱花令 (City·Words× Mingyuan· Cherry blossom order, Ming Yuan Museum上海明圆美术馆, 26/03/2024, ⟨https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tGz4Yy2tyU76ix2NZw8EJw⟩.
Osborne, Deirdre, “Set in Stone”: Lemn Sissay’s and SuAndi’s Landmark Poetics, in Gräbner, Cornelia et al (eds), Perfoming Poetry, Brill, 2016, 197-218.
Skoulding, Zoë, “Absent Cities: Text, Performance, and Heterotopia”, in Gräbner Cornelia et al (eds), Perfoming Poetry, 247-262.
[1] Part of this blog-like article is based on the related paragraph of my work-in-progress PhD thesis.
[2] Ming Yuan Museum (Shanghai mingyuan meishuguan 上海明圆美术馆), “Yugao |Chengshi·Yanzhi×Mingyuan·Yinghua ling” 预告 | 城市· 言志 × 明园 · 樱花令 (City·Words× Mingyuan· Cherry blossom order, Ming Yuan Museum上海明圆美术馆, 26/03/2024, ⟨https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tGz4Yy2tyU76ix2NZw8EJw⟩. Accessed 30/12/2024.
[3] The entire episode, twenty-five minutes long, is available here: ⟨https://www.kankanews.com/detail/LMwVGkd712z⟩.
I am grateful to Gu Gang for letting me use his personal pictures.
Author Bio:
Martina Benigni is a PhD student at Sapienza University of Rome. She focuses on Chinese contemporary poetry with special attention to women’s writings. She is working on a project about the poetic practices of an all-female poetry collective based in Shanghai: Chengshi manyouzhe 城市漫游者 (The Flâneuses). Deeply interested in literary translation, she is now a trainee in the Officina Permanent Translation Workshop directed by the sinologist and well-known translator Silvia Pozzi. She translated into Italian language Chinese poets like Zhai Yongming, Wu Ang, He Xiangyang and Wang Jibing. She published her first poetry collection in 2021.