“As I see it, the form of a poem is always an integral part of its content“
East vs West: A Synoptic Cultural Comparison
During the great flood, Noah hid himself in the ark
While Dayu tried to contain it with his bare hands
Prometheus stole fire from Olympian gods
While Sui Ren got it by drilling wood hard
Smart Daedalus crafted wings to fly away from his prison-tower
While Old Fool removed the whole mountain blocking his way
Helios enjoyed driving his chariot all along in the sky
While Kuafu chased the sun to take it down & tame it
Sisyphus rolls the boulder uphill because of his deceitfulness, while
Wu Gang cuts the laurel as a punishment for distractions in learning
It’s incredible how similar and yet so different these paired mythologies are! Western myth appears in this poem to be grounded in artifice and avoidance, whereas Eastern myth focuses on dedication and confrontation. Are these assumptions correct, and how often do you find yourself interacting with myth and cultural differences in your work?
For me, such assumptions are intriguing and thought-provoking enough even if they are not (necessarily) correct. As a comparatist, I often wonder whether there is an intrinsic secret code accountable for the modern success of western civilization, and in writing this piece I realized that the basic code, if any at all, might have to do with the way western people have attached much more importance to tools (artifacts) in tackling challenge since primitive times. Over the past decade, I have written a large number of what I call “billinguacultural poems,” and even published two collections about myths and especially cultural differences – Sinosaur: Bilingual-Cultural Poems and East Idioms – though they have received little attention. To further explore this thematic interest, I drafted a similar cultural-conceptual poem recently, which I would like to share here as part of my answer to the question:
East vs West: a Synoptic Cultural Comparison (2)
1/Philosophy/Ancients
Greek philosophers focused on the relationship
Between man & nature as they walked & debated
While Chinese thinkers were concerned mainly
About how a human being got along with another
2/Language/Inflections
English pays much heed to the formal features of
Verbs/actions, besides its distinction between sex
Cases & numbers of pronouns, while Chinese has
Always remained fixed within its square shape
3/Painting/Traditions
Western painting depends on a single perspective
As much as chiaroscuro to achieve verisimilitude
While Chinese painting is an artistic expression of
Impressions that never have to imitate the reality
Footnote
Westerners keep sharpening their tools to attain
Happiness (through science, or by using power)
While Chinese try to stay with it like a Daoist
How did you go about choosing which myths to include in this poem? Were there others which didn’t make the final cut?
This is an ambitious cultural poem, in which I hope to use a highly condensed literary form to pinpoint the most significant differences between two major cultures. When choosing which myths to include, I have several important considerations. One, the myths must be among the most ancient; second, they should be about the earliest and the most significant events supposedly experienced by ‘modern man’; third, there exists a meaningful parallel or comparability between them. Given this, I had to exclude many myths, such as those about Pangu separating Heaven and Earth with a colossal ax, about Nuwa mending the sky with five-colored stones, about Jingwei filling in the Eastern Sea with twigs and pebbles on the one hand, and the those about God’s creation of man and the world, about the clash of the Titans, and about Jupiter’s love-trick played on Europa on the other.
Except for the last couplet, each starts the second line with “while”. It feels important that you chose to break the pattern here and move this word up to the end of the last couplet’s first line. What is your process like in deciding where to break form, both in this poem and in general?
As I see it, the form of a poem is always an integral part of its content. So, wherever I decide to break form, I would try to convey a meaning through the change. In this poem, I use the conjunction ‘while’ not only to indicate the same timeline but also to emphasize the contrast between the two civilizations. In the last couplet, I intentionally break the pattern in the use of the word to show the continuity of history as well as of such contrast, which, with the passage of time, may or may not really be so striking as before or as people would now tend to think.
