Walking on East 41st St. just east of Fifth Avenue, this poem stared up at me as I stared down at my feet. Embedded on the sidewalk, it’s one of 96 such plaques with poems and literary quotes selected in the 1990s and placed there on the two blocks leading to the New York City’s main public library - the one with the famous flanking lions.
I couldn’t recall either the poet or the poem but it connected, as it had that very Chinese “voice” and language that is so appealing: deceptively simple in imagery yet complex in how it joined disparate ones. I was intrigued, especially as his birth-year (1956) would make him my generation. Was he a Chinese-American, born there or here, but writing in English? A Mainland Chinese still there (or here) translated into English? Researching led to the unexpected.
First, the plaque needs to be updated: Gu Cheng (male) died on Oct 8, 1993, in New Zealand, hanging himself after having killed his wife with an axe. They - her name was Xie Ye - had immigrated to New Zealand after leaving China in 1987, after he had become a literary celebrity following the end of the Cultural Revolution. A prominent member of a group of modernist writers (“The Misty Poets”, a pejorative - meng dong - by the authorities meaning “obscure” or “hazy” ), his poetry was well-known and popular, his poems being both surreal and grounded in every day life and appealing to a generation tired and disaffected by the dullness and propaganda of official writers..
A poet’s death, particularly one with the tabloid drama of a murder and/or suicide, will always add an * to their work, becoming an unavoidable filter or lens through which it will be interpreted. I only knew the poem and the poem met my criteria for inclusion.
As for the poem itself, picture the poet, in loss and mourning, visiting the grave of the loved one, unable to use his medium and the tools of his trade to express…
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