Words as Grain

In Words as Grain, poems by the Chinese poet Duo Duo are presented in reverse chronological order, beginning in 2018 and ending in 1972. To explain this decision, editor and translator Lucas Klein asserts, somewhat controversially, “the more the poems move into the past, the more they require contextualization for the non-Chinese reader.” Context is not everything, but it is difficult to avoid when considering Duo Duo’s reputation as a “world” poet, a celebrated member of the Misty Poets who redefined the borders of contemporary Chinese poetry in the 20th century.

The newest poems in Words as Grain, which make up most of the work in this collection, explore the spiritual forging of what the poet calls “this other zone between intuition and exegesis” wherein even “a field of leaves pressing on the chest can, if forced, become a world.” Meditative and elemental, these poems often circle around metaphors of stillness, silence, and solitude, which do not erase, but rather “illuminate the bygone things / in the locked-up dimness of the distant past.” 

What might this past be? Duo Duo’s earlier poetry can be more accessibly mapped onto the significant periods of his life, whether when he lived as an exile in The Netherlands, or in response to the dramatic transformations of China’s social and political landscape after the Cultural Revolution. His older poems are not only more ethereal but are also often erratically unsettled, their surprise and surrealism feeling more urgent and somatic. Even the power of words risks collapse, as when a speaker decries “the books I read in the evening / transform into black earth once more.” While he attempts to remake language, to grow these kernels toward new enigmatic relations, the difficulty for Duo Duo lies in the gap between word and world: his elusive poems, like the sun, are always ambiguously “rising from the east / but are unfree, like a coin in global circulation.”