Poetry as a Form of Resistance: Xi Chuan's Don't Deprive Me of My Complexity

The poem Don't Deprive Me of My Complexity by Xi Chuan from "Bloom."

You can purchase "Bloom," by Xi Chuan tr. by Lucas Klein here.

Chuan is a pivotal figure in Chinese poetic and literary community. Outspoken regarding political needs and with both a reverence and disgust for literature, “Bloom” is full with poems that seem to simultaneously mock high-brow efforts of pseudo-reality in language, as well as contend with the need to address that a writer necessitates complicated inner mechanisms.

“Bloom,” has a wide range of poetry both tender and declarative, at times feeling as though you’re reading someone yelling at you to pull your head out of your ass and at other times feeling as though you’re speaking with a close friend over your shared fourth drink, commiserating over how this all really ended up like this.

I thought Nadine Willems has an excellent write-up of the work here:

How else, indeed, could the poet probe the meaning of being Chinese in the early twenty-first century? The poems see him travelling around the country, preoccupied with the daily routines of urban, globalised, and ever materially richer China with all its paradoxes, taking in traces of its extraordinary cultural heritage along with the prosaic expression of humanity’s vulgarity.

Xi Chuan perceives the past—the immense and ancient past—through the artefacts of the modern—the hurriedly assembled and half-borrowed modern. He juxtaposes the lofty and the mundane, the rusted and the shiny, and plays with the true, the untrue, and the not-so-true, all along calling attention to the incongruities of the present. And as I follow in his words, I become privy to the rhythms that punctuate life in a country of which I know so little.