 
字體：小 中 大 |
|
|
|
| 2026/03/09 18:39:13瀏覽28｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
Chapter Four A Model for Modern Poetry Criticism: Section One: Thinking from Two Perspectives When a critic confronts each poem, he may have to repeatedly think from two perspectives: (1) How to derive, from the poetic text itself, the poem’s basic manifest (external) qualities by using objective theoretical tools such as rhetoric, grammar, discourse structure studies, aesthetics, psychology, hermeneutics, and semiotics, adopting one or several of these theories as evaluative criteria. From the words and sentences within the paragraphs, the critic must identify various clues and induce the poem’s basic manifest qualities. The critic must conduct sufficient discussion of the poem’s formal elements, such as language, imagery, and musicality, in order to complete the poetic construction of poetry criticism, that is, the meta-text of modern poetry criticism. At this stage, the critic examines the formal elements of the poetic text by using rhetoric, grammar, discourse structure studies, hermeneutics, and semiotics to investigate language and imagery; and uses phonology to examine the musicality of the sentences. In doing so, the critic discovers flaws while also identifying outstanding features, which then serve as objective evaluative arguments regarding the expressive techniques of the text. (2) The critic may adopt a specific critical strategy and, based on one or more literary critical theories—such as structuralism, deconstructive criticism, reader-response theory, feminist perspectives, or postcolonial perspectives—conduct deductive analysis in order to uncover certain latent (internal) characteristics of the poem. Readers may perhaps be inclined to ask in response: must writing criticism of modern poetry necessarily involve “quoting classical authorities,” “relying on” these theoretical tools, and “applying” existing literary critical theories as operational methods? Certainly not. On the one hand, citing theoretical sources serves to regulate the critic as a member of the literary community, establishing a logical foundation of Inter-subjectivity at the theoretical level. On the other hand, it provides critics with objective standards of value judgment that can serve as methodological guidelines. The traditional Chinese systems of poetry commentary and lyric commentary throughout successive dynasties mostly lack a complete logical structure. They tend to devolve into impressionistic criticism resembling “after-reading reflections.” Often they discuss only one or several viewpoints. The issues they address are mostly either broad and generalized discussions of style or minor disputes about wording and diction. Such discussions remain at the level of horizontal thinking centered on “viewpoints.” They do not treat the poetic text as a complete spiritual product, nor as a quasi-organism within the concept of a holistic entity. As a result, different individuals express different interpretations, and everyone appears to speak with reasonable justification. In the end, the situation often becomes one in which each excels in his own area but no consensus can be reached, and no objective conclusion emerges that can be accepted by the majority. Section Two: Five Observational Dimensions of Modern Poetry Texts Perhaps because the author has read countless poems and encountered works of many different levels, and because he has long been immersed in the field of literary criticism, his standards for evaluating excellent works are relatively strict and the threshold relatively high. A poem that merely satisfies three basic objective requirements—appropriate and fitting rhetoric, no major grammatical flaws, and a stable structure—can only be regarded as barely passing. If it lacks unexpected creativity or an artistic realm that refreshes the reader’s senses, it remains nothing more than an ordinary piece. In other words, if a poem contains numerous grammatical errors, if its methods of expression fail to adequately convey emotion, and if it lacks appropriate formal design, then it can generally be judged to be an inferior work. As for what is meant by creativity, the author does not intend to elaborate on its essential meaning. However, in his humble opinion, it may be observed from the following five dimensions:
As for artistic imagery, it must be approached through close-reading of the text. Starting from the thematic intention (intension) and from the sentences within each paragraph, the critic explores the author’s latent spiritual activity behind the imagery, including the serious metaphysical propositions implied in the work: the ideological concepts the author seeks to convey, the ideologies expressed, and the values advocated. It also includes aesthetic issues such as the aesthetic experience contained in the work and the author’s aesthetic perspective. Section Three: Example of Poetry Criticism “Sky Burial” ∕ Niuniu [Lin Ya-ruo] Oh Murmured incantations echo across the sky burial platform Our love was once not permitted by this vast world How anxious you are Your vast and powerful wings spread toward the blue sky The author pondered this poem repeatedly and was deeply moved by it. Overall, this poem satisfies the two subjective evaluative criteria of “unexpected creativity” and “an artistic realm that refreshes the reader’s senses.” First, the author discusses the poem from four dimensions of creativity. (1) Selection of subject matter Readers in Taiwan, who live on a subtropical island, are curious about the cultural system of the Tibetan (Tibet) inhabitants who live at high altitudes beneath towering mountains on the “Roof of the World.” Their religious beliefs (Tantric Buddhism), lifestyle habits, and folk customs are all objects of fascination. This poem, “Sky Burial,” concerns the unique Tibetan funerary ritual. Whether the Buddhist story of the Buddha “cutting his flesh to feed the eagle” once inspired the Tibetan people to form this ritual of sky burial is not something the author intends to speculate upon. As for returning the physical body to heaven and earth after life has ended, this may indeed be the disposition most consistent with the order of nature. (2) The structural arrangement of the text and the logical (causal) development of imagistic thinking (imagery) between paragraphs This poem speaks from the perspective of the first-person “I.” This “I” functions as a collective designation for every Tibetan “deceased person” who has undergone this ritual throughout history, rather than referring to any specific individual. The first and second stanzas serve as the opening and continuation. They enter through a realistic scene and unfold with a realistic style of description. In the first stanza, the author immediately pulls the scene onto the screen using a close-up lens, presenting a nearly brutal image: Oh The author—who in this poem is the first-person “I,” the deceased person—is lying naked upon the sky burial platform, witnessing everything the sky burial master is doing to the body: cutting the tendons, slicing the flesh, crushing the bones, and dismembering the corpse. Section Three: Sample Poem Commentary “Sky Burial” / Niuniu [Lin Yaru] Oh Murmured incantations echo across the sky burial platform. In the second stanza, the camera pulls away (to push forward), and the focus falls upon the vultures not far away. The poem describes these waiting vultures as “stretching their necks in eager anticipation,” and then, from a perspective of reflective observation, imagines the “joy and satisfaction of becoming one” experienced by the vultures. In this stanza, the author deliberately avoids the image of the “vulture,” using instead the rhetorical device of metonymy, in which a part (teeth and feathers) stands for the whole (the vultures). Our love was once not permitted by this vast heaven and earth. The third stanza marks the “turn” in the development of the narrative. The first three lines employ retrospective representation, pulling the camera back into the past through memory and presenting a flashback. Through the Buddhist concept of life and death in reincarnation, the poem transitions from the lama to the divine eagle, explaining the karmic relationship across many lifetimes between the deceased and the vulture. This connection links the entangled love between man and woman, creating a mythically tragic and beautiful atmosphere. The final two lines then immediately return to the present reality, using a technique similar to cinematic editing to create a dissolve, skillfully joining the memories of the past with the scene of the present. How anxious you are. The fourth stanza describes the scene of the vultures impatiently scrambling for food. In order to continue the tragic and beautiful atmosphere established in the third stanza, the author again uses the entanglement of male and female bodies as a parallel scene synchronized with the vultures’ feeding. This evokes in the reader a tragic and beautiful association within the realistic setting, thereby softening the sense of terror that might arise from the extreme close-up descriptions in this section. Great and abundant wings spread toward the blue sky. In the final stanza, the author employs a leap in technique, using a camera transition to shift to the vultures that have already eaten their fill. The shot first presents the vultures’ full and powerful wings. After feeding, the vultures spread their wings and rise one after another. The camera slowly pulls back as it follows them, the focal distance extending toward infinity, and several vultures gradually fly farther and farther away in the blue sky. Then the author makes a sudden return, immediately focusing the lens upon the vultures’ “soaring eyes,” and boldly declares that from those soaring eyes he sees “heaven”—a spiritual realm more transparent than the wind, a place entirely free of attachment. Of course, at this moment the author, who is the deceased in the sky burial ritual, has long since been completely consumed by the feeding vultures; the physical body no longer exists, leaving only the unburdened soul drifting freely between heaven and earth. (3) Flexibility of Grammatical Structures and Mastery of Expressive Techniques This poem, Sky Burial, should be classified as a “love poem,” exploring themes centered around love and death and the entanglement between them, with the religious concept of reincarnation serving as the thread connecting the two. Love poems belong to the broader category of lyric poetry. However, in order for readers to fully experience the tragic and beautiful atmosphere of this poem, the poet adopts a “dialogue form” for narrative and lyrical expression. The first-person “I” speaks, while the second-person “you” (the vulture) serves as a specific interlocutor, with both engaged in a dialogue. The dialogue form is widely applied in love poetry. Through the gradual dialogue with the divine eagle—the incarnation of the lover—syntactic (sentence pattern) variations follow the emotional fluctuations of the plot. Although the variations are not numerous, and the author employs many low-density prose syntactic forms to maintain a smooth rhythm, each stanza skillfully balances concrete imagery (representational nouns) with abstract emotional language (thought) and abstract nouns, presenting a “complementary interplay of real and virtual” cognitive imagery effect. Thus, the poem is superficially simple and understandable, yet it conveys profoundly moving and tragic emotional resonance. Among the “love poems” the author has read, this poem is no longer a mundane work; its words are simple, yet its meaning is profound. This demonstrates the author’s sophistication. Consider the following lines as an example: My dear sky burial master (imagery, real scene) In the line “so that the brain that has boiled for a hundred years with longing may catch its breath,” imagery and thought are combined. “Boiled from longing for a hundred years” is emotional language; emotional language is “a product of imagination,” expressing joy, anger, sorrow, or delight, moral or ethical value choices or judgments, rather than concrete objects or real scenes. Once paired with the concrete image of “brain” (a noun as the object), the preceding emotional language becomes a “dynamic adjective.” It is called “dynamic” because “boil” is originally a verb, and “boiling” is converted into an adjective to modify the noun “brain.” This sentence pattern, the author terms “entering reality through the imaginary” or “virtual reality.” Furthermore, the temporal adverb “hundred years” emphasizes long duration and spatial separation, and also carries a sense of exaggeration. Conversely, in “look—my heart bears witness to love with vivid crimson,” the first part “my heart with vivid crimson” is a concrete image, while “love” is an abstract noun. The author calls this “returning from the real to the abstract.” Additionally, it is worth noting that in “my heart bears witness to love with vivid crimson,” “vivid crimson” was originally the adjective “vivid crimson,” which should grammatically be followed by the noun “blood” to form a complete prepositional phrase. However, the author deliberately omits “of” and “blood,” allowing “vivid crimson” to stand in as a metonym for blood—a rhetorical device of substitution, i.e., using a characteristic or marker of a thing to represent it. This poem still contains minor flaws. For example, “My lover, your bright white teeth stretch like the snow peaks here” can lead readers to misinterpret or misjudge, because if “my lover” refers to the “divine eagle” in the later section, then raptors such as vultures do not possess “bright white teeth,” which is a feeding feature found only in humans or carnivorous mammals. Such expression conflicts with common knowledge, possibly causing readers to speculate whether the “lover” here might also refer to a canine or wolf, leading to interpretations inconsistent with the later “divine eagle.” Another example: “rampant and wanton upon my body” contains a grammatical error. Both “rampant” and “wanton” are abstract emotional words. Placing them together renders the meaning overly abstract and difficult to interpret. Moreover, the two words have the same part of speech (both can serve as adjectives or verbs) and similar meanings. If “rampant” functions as an adjective and “wanton” as a noun, there is semantic overlap and violation of the rule against “modifying abstract with abstract” in metaphorical grammar. Nonetheless, the author attempts a rhetorical repair using “wanton” as a metonym for “frenzied kiss.” Simply deleting “rampant” would render the sentence grammatical, allowing the final adjective “wanton” to modify the preceding noun “upon my body” in inverted syntax. Despite these minor linguistic flaws, Sky Burial remains an outstanding work. Overall, it is worthy of praise, especially since the length of the sentences adapts to the plot’s fluctuations and emotional intensity. Short sentences appear during moments of strong emotion, long sentences during calmer passages, creating a well-regulated rhythm. Interjections like “oh” and “ah” also fit the plot, enhancing tone and emotion. The poem’s rhythm, intensity, and melodic ups and downs are balanced. Although written from the first-person “I” perspective in a dialogue form, the author clearly adopts a “recitative” (chant-like) rhythm, producing a sorrowful and tragically beautiful melodic effect while maintaining a light and fluid pace. At the poem’s conclusion, although the transition (camera shift) feels slightly abrupt and stiff, the final line, “Heaven is far more transparent than the wind,” appears understated on the surface. Yet its meaning is profoundly “transcendent,” rich with philosophical depth and religious significance. The line is precise and forceful, forming a melodic peak that hovers suspended in the ethereal sky. Note: Postscript: This initial draft of the poem commentary was written in early February 2002 after reading Sky Burial by the flight attendant Lin Yaru, who wrote under the pen name Niuniu, posted online. On October 27, 2013, Lin Yaru tragically died in a car accident during her backpacking trip in Australia. I had promised to write a commentary for her in life, but it was never fulfilled. This early critique is included here to commemorate this beautiful young woman whom I never met.
|
|
| ( 創作｜另類創作 ) |
