Dangerous Light: Chi Lingyun and her Poetry
Poet Chi Lingyun池凌雲once recounted in an autobiographical essay a story that had obviously haunted her for many years. As a child of five, she was playing by the river with a girl one year her senior when, without any warning, the girl pushed her into the river and ran. Chi was rescued by an adult who happened to be walking by. The other girl never apologized or spoke of the incident; and that small hand on Chi’s back would come to be a metaphor for the mysterious forces of fate in her poetry.[This article is reprinted from Chinese Literature Today, vol. 4, no.2 (fall, 2014), 54-61.
Chi Lingyun 池凌雲, “Yaoji wuming (Dai shiren jianli)” 遙寄無名（代詩人簡歷） (“Sent to an Unknown Distant Place (Replacement for a Poet’s CV)”), in Chi Lingyun shixuan池凌雲詩選 (__Select__ed Poetry of Chi Lingyun) (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2010), 184–85.] Chi not only confronts these forces directly via her illuminating images of fragility and suffering, but her poetry has developed into a method of confronting and combating these dark unknowns. She asks, “Is there really a hand, emerging from the emptiness?”[ These lines from the poem “Massage Chair” capture this sense of the force of an invisible hand. “Anmo yi” 按摩椅 (“Massage Chair”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 58.] An increasingly prominent feminist voice in contemporary China, Chi often draws on personal experience and everyday life to animate her overarching themes of human existence, particularly those related to death, suffering, or assault. If, as she asserts, “Sorrow is ever / the slow walk of maturity,”[ Chi Lingyun, “Yake de Jiakelin yanlie” 雅克的迦可琳眼淚 (“Jacqueline’s Tears”), in Qianxing zhiguang潛行之光 (Stealth’s Gleam) (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2013), 55. All poetry quoted in this article is co-translated by Eleanor Goodman and Shengqing Wu.] she has achieved her virtuosity through an exploration of a “dark consciousness” and by representing sorrow in an artistically sophisticated manner.
Unlike her contemporaries, the majority of whom received a college education and were exposed to various Western books in their formative years, Chi, who was born in a village in Zhejiang Province in December 1966, worked as substitute teacher, manual laborer, and newspaper reporter. Intrigued by words from very early on, she was strongly affected by the local poetry clubs that proliferated in the intense cultural and literary atmosphere of the mid 1980s. She began to publish poems in 1985, and produced her first collection, Darting Snowflakes (Feiben de xuehua 飛奔的雪花) in 1997, followed by One-Sided Dialogue (Yigeren de duihua 一個人的對話) in 2005. Both collections received local recognition, and Chi has continued to pour ever greater energy and creativity into her work.[ Chi Lingyun, Feiben de xuehua飛奔的雪花Darting Snowflakes (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1997); Chi Lingyun, Yigeren de duihua一個人的對話 One-sided Dialogues (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2005).] With the publication of __Select__ed Poems of Chi Lingyun (Chi Lingyun shixuan 池凌雲詩選) in 2010 to wide praise by critics, she firmly established herself as one of the most prominent poets writing in China today. She has maintained her creative output, frequently posting poetry on her popular blog.[ Chi’s blog, “Wennuan wuming”溫暖無名 (Nameless Warmth), can be found at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/chilingyun (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).] Her poems written from 2010 to 2013 resulted in Stealth’s Gleam (Qianxing zhiguang潛行之光), a collection that shows a poet writing at her peak.
Characterized by a strong female speaking voice and lyrical emotionalism, Chi’s poetry is suffused with reflections on personal struggles against emotional and physical wounds, as well as gendered power structures. When Chi was thirteen years old (or fifteen in the Chinese system of counting age), her family arranged a marriage for her just as they had done for her older sister. The family received 290 yuan for the engagement to a local carpenter, a distant relative from the next village. Chi eventually purchased a book on marriage law to try to empower herself, and she came to recognize how women’s complicity plays into their own suppression. As she finally extricated herself from the engagement six years later, she was stigmatized by the same conventional rules that had bound her as a young woman in the countryside.[ Chi Lingyun, “Yao ji wuming”, Chi Lingyun shixuan, 186–87.] Many years later, in a poem titled “Married Young” (Wawa qin 娃娃親) she writes:
Back then we’d never held hands
but I will be punished,
to make it up to him—
let thousands of precious trees topple
and be endlessly taken by him—
many years later, I still hear the sound of the saw.[ Chi Lingyun, “Wawa qin” 娃娃親 (“Married Young”) Ibid., 92–93.]
The grating of the carpenter’s saw is a painful invasion in the speaker’s life, even after the saw itself is long gone. In her autobiography, Chi names this experience “An Exercise in Freedom” (Ziyou lianxi 自由練習),[ Chi Lingyun, “Yao ji wuming,”, Ibid., 186–87.] Chi does not only elaborate on this concept of freedom in relation to her personal fate, but also in a historical context or abstract sense.
Her poem “Sabbath” (Anxi ri 安息日) was written in memory of the political dissident Lin Zhao 林昭, an outspoken writer who was executed on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.[ Chi Lingyun, “Anxi ri” 安息日 (“Sabbath”), Ibid., 20–21.] Its theme of striving for freedom reoccurs in many of Chi’s other poems, such as “Dying Young,” (Shang 殤) which is dedicated to cello player Jacqueline du Pré, whose artistic achievements were cut short by her unfortunate death.
Carrying your early death, I pierced
the evening April winds alone. Everything had just come into bloom
and the free spirit’s dancing
made our boiling eye sockets sink in deep. The only wings we have
return us to the flames again.[ Chi Lingyun, “Shang” 殤 (“Dying Young”), Qianxing zhiguang, 59-60. ]
These images of wings, blooming fire, and of a free spirit are themes that reoccur throughout Chi’s work, and are often thrown into contrast with figures of constraint like handcuffs, darkness, and railings. Influential and artistic woman like Du Pré and Lin Zhao serve as focal points for Chi’s examination of this essential conflict between freedom and constriction. The paradox is in the fact that the wings of artistic creation, or of personal freedom, are still destined to return one to the fire.
In fact, Chi links the act of writing itself to gendered power relationships, and often aligns herself explicitly with exemplary female figures. Her self-affiliation with literary greats like Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Wisława Szymborska, Simone Weil, and many others[ In an interview, Chi listed great minds with whom she felt a strong affinity, and also included male writers such as Celan, Miłosz, and Kafka. Ibid., 206.] have served to shape her self-perception as a female poet. Like many of her generation who found spiritual affinity with Soviet writers, Chi considers Marina Tsvetaeva a sister, muse, bosom friend, and role model: “Marina, beginning today, / I will fall in love with loneliness like falling in love with the ocean, / because I love you I’m happy.” For Chi, Tsvetaeva is the embodiment of “the beauty of tremendous difficulty” (juda er jiannan de mei 巨大而艱難的美). In “Marina Writing Poetry Late at Night” (Malina zai shenye xieshi 瑪麗娜在深夜寫詩) she engages in dialogue with Tsvetaeva, whom she sees as having “an abyss” (shenyuan 深淵) and nothing else in her eyes: “aside from this, only the sweet stabbing black cypress / only the dazzling knifepoint, that calm galloping light.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Bushi huozai, shi shenyuan” 不是火災，是深淵 (“Not a Fire, but an Abyss”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 14, 16.] The abyss and the light are __set__ in sharp contrast, alongside the black cypress that is both sweet and painful at the same time. Language, the passion that these two poets share, is like the point of a knife, on which the poet dances. Chi aspires not only to emulate Tsvetaeva’s commitment to writing, but also her questioning “of the tragedy of existence in general, par excellence, outside a temporal context.”[ Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: __Select__ed Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 211.]
Tsvetaeva is not the only poet to influence Chi; in “Secret Language” (Miyu 密語), the speaker is deeply honored to have the chance to get know Akhmatova.
The loneliness and humiliation she suffered
sought love, its secret language only she possessed—
a “carved cedar chest” in this mortal world.[ Chi Lingyun, “Miyu” 密語 (“Secret Language”), Qianxing zhiguang, 65.]
Like Akhmatova’s poetic indebtedness and affective attachment to Innokenty Annensky, Chi is in great spiritual and literary debt to these great minds and their “cedar chests” of unique expression. In her words, language is “another skeleton of my spirit, giving me a second life.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing” 向低處的聲音致敬 (“Paying Respects to a Low Voice”) Ibid., 208.]
Over the course of an acclaimed series of four poems written in 2004, collectively titled “Cloth’s Dance” (Bu de wudao 布的舞蹈), Chi dramatizes her painful experiences and refigures the female poetic voice. Depicting emotional turmoil, the poems are linked by the central image of a piece of cloth (bu布) that is used to cover a wound. The third poem in the series is called “Weaving” (Zhi 織). Just as it recalls a conventional notion of womanhood and a traditionally female occupation, weaving also becomes a gendered literary production. The poem works with the iconic image of woman as weaver, distantly echoing the canonical song “The Peacocks Fly Southeast” (Kongque dongnan fei孔雀東南飛), in which a suffering daughter-in-law expresses her resentment toward the repressive family structure. In contrast to the image of the daughter-in-law, whose endless weaving fails to win over her mother-in-law, Chi turns the old-fashioned loom into a prophecy of new life.
No one pays attention as the heart runs and disappears
it makes its way along an established track
rebellion always collapses before action is taken
so tiny, it forgets to sip.[ Chi Lingyun, “Zhi” 織 (“Weaving”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 34.]
The poems depict emotional turmoil on the verge of a collapse. It is not an outcry or subjective revolt, but rather the tensions of conflicts and vulnerabilities that charge the poems with potent emotive force. While the series of poems is written in the third person, they are multiple dialogues with the self. The second poem in the series, also titled “Cloth’s Dance,” focuses on a “she” who feels compelled to “madly / entangle her own body in the dark.” When this character’s scars are revealed, a first-person speaker suddenly emerges, deep in sympathy with “her,” obviously another self: “Let someone completely different from me / live inside my body.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Bu de wudao” 布的舞蹈 (“Cloth’s Dance”), Ibid., 32–35.] Pointing to a state of utter loneliness, Chi employs the device of the multiplied selves, an adroit shifting of pronouns (“I,” “she,” or “you”), and even tries “Inventing a Sweetheart” as a mirror-image of the self, all in order to explore self/other relationships and to develop opportunities for self-empowerment.[ “Inventing a Sweetheart” is the title of a poem in which the “we” describes a lonely life that the “her” also suffers. “Faming yige qinaide” 發明一個親愛的 (“Inventing a Sweetheart”) , Ibid., 3.]
Contemporary critic and poet Xi Du 西渡 (the pen name of Chen Guoping陳國平) divides female poets since the late 1970s into three distinct generations. In his analysis, Shu Ting舒婷, Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, and Fu Tianlin 傅天琳, all of whom wrote in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, belong to the first generation of feminist writers. Zhai Yongming翟永明, Yi Lei伊蕾, and others immediately followed in a second wave. Chi Lingyun, Zhou Zan 周瓚, Yu Xiang 宇向, and others, whom Xi Du characterizes as the third generation, became a formidable force after the 1990s.[ Xi Du西渡, “Hei’an shixue de shanbian huo huadie de meili, yi Zhai Yongming Chi Lingyun wei zhongxin, lun xin shiqi nüxing shige yishi” 黑暗詩學的嬗變 或化蝶的美麗，以翟永明、池凌雲為中心， 論新時期女性詩歌意識 (“The Transformation of Dark Poetics, or the Beauty of Turning into the Butterflies: On Female Consciousness Centering on the Poetry of Zhai Yongming and Chi Lingyun”), Jianghan daxue xuebao 江漢大學學報 (Journal of Jianghan University) 29, no. 4 (2010): 11–19. ] While this generational divide is more or less artificial, Xi Du helpfully places Chi’s work within the larger picture of contemporary feminist writing. The concept expressed as “a consciousness of night” (heiye yishi黑夜意識), made famous by Zhai Yongming,[ Zhai Yongming first proposed this concept in her own preface “Heiye de yishi” 黑夜的意識 (“A Consciousness of Night”) to her poetry collection Nüren 女人 (Women) in 1985. She revisited this issue in the mid 1990s in her essay “Zaitan ‘heiye yishi’ yu ‘Nüxing shige’”再談‘黑夜意識’與‘女性詩歌’ (“Revisiting ‘A Consciousness of Night’ and ‘Female Poetry’”), Shi Tansuo 詩探索 (Poetry Exploration) no. 1 (1995): 128 –29.] characterizes the writings of the second generation, which challenged the male-dominated power structure and resulted in an aesthetic aggressiveness and explosiveness.[ Xi Du, “Hei’an shixue de shanbian huo huadie de meili, yi Zhai Yongming Chi Lingyun wei zhongxin, lun xin shiqi nüxing shige yishi,” 15–19. [referring to the same article in note 19]] Chi Lingyun has continued the exploration of this “consciousness of night,” coming to understand writing as “speaking while facing the darkness alone” (duzi miandui hei’an shuohua獨自面對黑暗說話).[ Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing,” Qianxing zhiguang, 216.] Her feminist grounding, however, is much less explicit and iconoclastic when compared to pioneering works by others in the 1980s. Building on her predecessors’ efforts, Chi has internalized a feminist consciousness, but is no longer in an antagonistic position toward the dominant social and gender structures. Instead, she casts this consciousness of darkness into all aspects of existence, lending her experiences a universal sense.
Chi Lingyun writes, “I often see two types of work that have universality: one employs public materials and public experience, and the other reaches universality by way of a deep excavation of personal experience.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Wenxue de bentuxing yu pubianxing” 文學的本土性與普遍性 (“The Particularity and Universality of Literature”), “Wennuan wuming” (posted Nov. 1, 2011): http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_489e52500100lyjk.html (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014)] While Chi herself tends to prefer the second type, her poems also register responsiveness to public events or collective experience. Her attention to this aspect of life is not only a demonstration of the ethical dimension of her poetry, but is also a notable display of empathy and a fine example of how to address collective experience in a socially responsible and artistically mediated way. Chi, who is now the head editor of the literature and entertainment section of The Wenzhou Daily (Wenzhou ribao溫州日報) in the affluent coastal city of Wenzhou, likely comes across disturbing news stories on a daily basis. One case in point is the November 15, 2010, fire that destroyed a twenty-eight-story apartment building in the most heavily populated district in Shanghai, killing at least fifty-eight people. The constant posting and sharing in the social media of horrifying images of the disaster captured the nation's attention and led to public mourning. About two weeks after the tragic incident, Chi posted two poems on her blog that resonated with many of her readers, forging a multivalent public connection between the poet, her readers, and the mourned victims. The poems succeeded in consoling through their elegiac modes of expressions and tropes. The poem “Jiaozhou Road, Shanghai, 2010” (2010，Shanghai Jiaozhou lu 2010 上海膠州路 ) concentrates on the image of burning fire, a figure that reoccurs throughout Chi’s poetry. In this poem’s images of “a burnt skeleton,” “parched lips screaming,” and “scorching hot flint,” death takes on an abstract character. These images seem to speak to torment and suffering in an abstract sense, but the title of the poem, with its straightforward time and location as a reference point, firmly ground it in the current moment. In another poem posted on the same day, “The Chrysanthemum’s Question” (Juwen 菊問), a voice speaks in grief—“More white-colored rites / fall from the sky. More empty earth / comes under the potter’s hand”—rendering a shared sense of hopelessness and vulnerability among the public in the face of a seemingly preventable tragedy. Both of these fire poems emphasize the broad reach of the experience by addressing a collective “you,” which undergoes the torment as one: “you are in the fire, turning colder and colder” (“Jiaozhou Road”), and “you are the same kind of color” (“Chrysanthemum”). When Chi conflates the speaker of the poem into the group—“One by one human puppets / are captured” (“Chrysanthemum”)—the voice shares the victims’ status as powerless “human puppets,” subjected to dark forces.[ Chi Lingyun, “Juwen” 菊問 (“The Chrysanthemum’s Question”) and “2010, Shanghai Jiaozhou lu” 2010，上海膠州路 (“Jiaozhou Road, Shanghai, 2010”), see “Wennuan wuming” (posted on Dec. 1, 2010) http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_489e52500100mp01.html (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).]
“The Death Train” (Siwang lieche 死亡列車) was written after the collision of two high-speed trains in the suburbs of Wenzhou on July 23, 2011. The crash killed forty people and injured hundreds. The quick cover-up and censored media coverage that followed fueled public anger. The speaker in this poem takes on the role of the witness, further testing the limits of language’s ability to speak to disaster and absurdity:
In a broken time, you witness it all
but cannot open your mouth.
The people depend on you
your talents during your lifetime
but the dead language
has eaten all the words of mourning—
when everything is disaster, who can live peacefully?[ Chi Lingyun, “Siwang lieche” 死亡列車 (“The Death Train”), see “Wennuan wuming” (posted on July 29, 2011): http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_489e52500100w4r8.html (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).]
The immediacy and subjective expression in Chi’s poetry are reminiscent of what Adorno means by the doubleness of language, namely a combination of the expression of pure subjective impulses and its “inescapable relationship to the universal and to society.”[ T. W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54, also see 43, 45. ] Rooted in concrete imageries, aided by imagination, Chi is able to elevate subjective impulses and individual experience into a universal articulation charged with emotional force and philosophical pondering. Formally, tensions remain between socially specific topics and highly aestheticized imageries. Crystals, ashes, fire, and a sense of burning—these reoccurring images crystalize Chi’s sense of darkness and pain in a beautiful and highly stylized manner, often mixing pain with pleasure. Her preference for oxymoron shows her dialectic ideas, those ultimately unresolvable tensions or contradictions: “Under the sun, I can't see anything” and “fire will seek warmth from ice.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Taiyang dixia, wo shime ye kan bujian….”太陽底下，我什麼也看不見……(“Under the Sun, I can't See Anything….”), “Huoyan yaoxiang bing qunuan” 火焰要向冰取暖 (“Fire will Seek Warmth from Ice”) [Both are titles of the poems] , Qianxing zhiguang, 112, 166. See Wang Dongdong’s 王東東discussion of Chi’s use of oxymoron, found in “Haibaihe, shenhai zhishang, yu ci de weilai” 海百合，深海之殤，與詞的未來 (“Sea Lilies, the Young Death of the Sea, and the Future of Words”), Hongyan 紅岩 (Red Rock), no. 5 (2011): 50–52.]
In writing about these disasters, Chi fruitfully explores the ethical and political dimensions of the incidents in a mediated manner. These poems involve the traditional feeling of beimin 悲憫, or an empathetic identification with the victims. Many of Chi’s recent poems represent achievements of this type, of extending the poet’s and readers’ sympathetic imagination to the lower levels of society. Chi remains deeply committed to tackling the subjects of poverty, despair, injustice, and death, and is particularly deft at fashioning a melancholic voice; once during a speech presented at a poetry festival in Korea, she remarked upon her preference for a “feeble murmur” (ruo de diyin 弱的低音).[ Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing,” Qianxing zhiguang, 215.] Given the context of her life experience both as a writer and a woman, this “feeble murmur” represents her chosen social commitments against the strident, high-pitched official voice and the omnipresent propaganda. This murmur also fits with her thematic concern about the struggles and pains of life on an existential level: “When the sun rises, all sound falls to a murmur.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Suoyou de shenying douyao wang dichu qu” 所有聲音都要往低音去 (“All Sound Falls to a Murmur”), Ibid., 100.]
As a poet who has been active for thirty years, Chi has dealt with a wide range of thematic material, from the personal and social to the historical. Echoing Rilke’s influential idea of poems as experience, she believes her writing has its deep roots in her own life, but she is also driven to explore the unknown, sometimes even in an apocalyptic sense. In a series of poems called “Incidental City” (Ouran zhicheng 偶然之城) she maps out an imaginary cityscape through an exploration of different alleys (xiang巷). Mixing past experiences and grotesque or downright weird imaginings, these short poems are a rich synesthetic rendition of sensuality, horror, and futurism.[ Chi Lingyun, “Ouran zhicheng” 偶然之城 (“Incidental City”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 90–104.] They are reminiscent of surrealist paintings, a style that may prove to be a future avenue for Chi’s highly original poetic expression. Her other works, in contrast, demonstrate her surgically precise eye for description, and hinge on everyday objects.[ This point is indebted to the stream of discussion led by the poet Bai Hua 柏樺 on the “Jintian luntan”今天論壇 Today’s Forum (posted on May 4, 2010) http://www.jintian.net/bb/viewthread.php?tid=27265 (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).] “Massage Chair” (Anmo yi 按摩椅) depicts the lasting power of fingers, but also explores malicious forces in the midst of this ordinary, concrete experience. Similarly, in the poem “Snake Restaurant” (Zai sheguan 在蛇館), her sympathy extends to the snakes that are about to be cooked, while in her imagination the gluttonous diners simultaneously metamorphose into snakes. No longer on higher moral ground, humans reveal their essential beastliness:
I see open mouths, multicolored and glossy,
one after another new caves are born,
moist and round. They’ve learned to metamorphose
and started to hide their body’s distinctive patterns,
waiting for a small offer of sale.[ Chi Lingyun, “Anmo yi,” “Zai sheguan” 在蛇館 (“Snake Restaurant”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 58, 46.]
Nietzsche famously asked himself: “Is it hunger or superabundance that has become creative?” Chi understands creative hunger and creative overabundance as two different modes of writing. Attributing the writing of the Silver Age of the Soviet Union to “hungry writing” (ji’e de xiezuo飢餓的寫作), which is born of enormous spiritual suffering, Chi explicitly prefers it to writing that comes out of overabundance. She understands “hunger” first in a literal sense, then she further extends this hunger to the realms of the underprivileged and humbled, and to the difficulty of existence in general: “I believe that the attractive power of art lies in its boundless empathy and endless resistance: in it lies the beauty of difficult life.” Further, she considers hungry writing to be “the most pressing necessity in [her] life.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing,” Qianxing zhiguang, 213–215.] Her relationship with language remains intense and dramatic: “Sometimes I touch them [words] like touching gold / and in my heart I have an incurable sense of horror.”[ Chin Lingyun, “Yuyan yu wo” 語言與我 (“Language and Me”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 74.] She is a poet who cannot escape her own sense of responsibility, not just to a suffering public, but also to language itself: “You alone hold back the darkness, / you live for all that you will say.”[ Chi Lingyun, “Shei ye bugan zai hei’an zhong duzi shuohua” 誰也不敢在黑暗中獨自說話 (“No One Dares to Speak Alone in the Darkness”), Ibid., 77.] It is this sense of self-assigned duty, combined with her empathy and expressive force, that gives her verse such power and social importance. Words, music, or other artistic creations become “dangerous light” to combat the darkness.[ Chi Lingyun, “Shang,” Qianxing zhiguang, 59.] In “Words and the Origins of Words” (Ci yu ciyuan 詞與詞源), the poet writes:
That indestructible voice, bearing shackles,
is freer than we are. The lamplight
is planted in the darkness
and everything that is disgraced or oppressed
becomes its new source of light.[ Chi Lingyun, “Ci yu ciyuan” 詞與詞源 (“Words and the Origins of Words”), Ibid., 79–80.]
注释：
This article is reprinted from Chinese Literature Today, vol. 4, no.2 (fall, 2014), 54-61.
1、Chi Lingyun 池凌雲, “Yaoji wuming (Dai shiren jianli)” 遙寄無名（代詩人簡歷） (“Sent to an Unknown Distant Place (Replacement for a Poet’s CV)”), in Chi Lingyun shixuan池凌雲詩選 (__Select__ed Poetry of Chi Lingyun) (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2010), 184–85.
2、These lines from the poem “Massage Chair” capture this sense of the force of an invisible hand. “Anmo yi” 按摩椅 (“Massage Chair”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 58.
3、 Chi Lingyun, “Yake de Jiakelin yanlie” 雅克的迦可琳眼淚 (“Jacqueline’s Tears”), in Qianxing zhiguang潛行之光 (Stealth’s Gleam) (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2013), 55. All poetry quoted in this article is co-translated by Eleanor Goodman and Shengqing Wu.
4、Chi Lingyun, Feiben de xuehua飛奔的雪花Darting Snowflakes (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1997); Chi Lingyun, Yigeren de duihua一個人的對話 One-sided Dialogues (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2005).
5、Chi’s blog, “Wennuan wuming”溫暖無名 (Nameless Warmth), can be found at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/chilingyun (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).
6、 Chi Lingyun, “Yao ji wuming”, Chi Lingyun shixuan, 186–87.
7、hi Lingyun, “Wawa qin” 娃娃親 (“Married Young”) Ibid., 92
8、Chi Lingyun, “Yao ji wuming,”, Ibid., 186–87.
9、Chi Lingyun, “Anxi ri” 安息日 (“Sabbath”), Ibid., 20–21.
10、Chi Lingyun, “Shang” 殤 (“Dying Young”), Qianxing zhiguang, 59-60.
11、 In an interview, Chi listed great minds with whom she felt a strong affinity, and also included male writers such as Celan, Miłosz, and Kafka. Ibid., 206.
12、Chi Lingyun, “Bushi huozai, shi shenyuan” 不是火災，是深淵 (“Not a Fire, but an Abyss”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 14, 16.
13、Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: __Select__ed Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 211.
14、 Chi Lingyun, “Miyu” 密語 (“Secret Language”), Qianxing zhiguang, 65.
15、Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing” 向低處的聲音致敬 (“Paying Respects to a Low Voice”) Ibid., 208.
16、 Chi Lingyun, “Zhi” 織 (“Weaving”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 34.
17、Chi Lingyun, “Bu de wudao” 布的舞蹈 (“Cloth’s Dance”), Ibid., 32–35.
18、“Inventing a Sweetheart” is the title of a poem in which the “we” describes a lonely life that the “her” also suffers. “Faming yige qinaide” 發明一個親愛的 (“Inventing a Sweetheart”) , Ibid., 3.
19、 Xi Du西渡, “Hei’an shixue de shanbian huo huadie de meili, yi Zhai Yongming Chi Lingyun wei zhongxin, lun xin shiqi nüxing shige yishi” 黑暗詩學的嬗變 或化蝶的美麗，以翟永明、池凌雲為中心， 論新時期女性詩歌意識 (“The Transformation of Dark Poetics, or the Beauty of Turning into the Butterflies: On Female Consciousness Centering on the Poetry of Zhai Yongming and Chi Lingyun”), Jianghan daxue xuebao 江漢大學學報 (Journal of Jianghan University) 29, no. 4 (2010): 11–19.
20、Zhai Yongming first proposed this concept in her own preface “Heiye de yishi” 黑夜的意識 (“A Consciousness of Night”) to her poetry collection Nüren 女人 (Women) in 1985. She revisited this issue in the mid 1990s in her essay “Zaitan ‘heiye yishi’ yu ‘Nüxing shige’”再談‘黑夜意識’與‘女性詩歌’ (“Revisiting ‘A Consciousness of Night’ and ‘Female Poetry’”), Shi Tansuo 詩探索 (Poetry Exploration) no. 1 (1995): 128 –29.
21、Xi Du, “Hei’an shixue de shanbian huo huadie de meili, yi Zhai Yongming Chi Lingyun wei zhongxin, lun xin shiqi nüxing shige yishi,” 15–19. [referring to the same article in note 19]
22、Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing,” Qianxing zhiguang, 216.
23、Chi Lingyun, “Wenxue de bentuxing yu pubianxing” 文學的本土性與普遍性 (“The Particularity and Universality of Literature”), “Wennuan wuming” (posted Nov. 1, 2011): http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_489e52500100lyjk.html (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014)
24、 Chi Lingyun, “Juwen” 菊問 (“The Chrysanthemum’s Question”) and “2010, Shanghai Jiaozhou lu” 2010，上海膠州路 (“Jiaozhou Road, Shanghai, 2010”), see “Wennuan wuming” (posted on Dec. 1, 2010) http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_489e52500100mp01.html (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).
25、 Chi Lingyun, “Siwang lieche” 死亡列車 (“The Death Train”), see “Wennuan wuming” (posted on July 29, 2011): http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_489e52500100w4r8.html (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).
26、T. W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54, also see 43, 45.
27、Chi Lingyun, “Taiyang dixia, wo shime ye kan bujian….”太陽底下，我什麼也看不見……(“Under the Sun, I can't See Anything….”), “Huoyan yaoxiang bing qunuan” 火焰要向冰取暖 (“Fire will Seek Warmth from Ice”) [Both are titles of the poems] , Qianxing zhiguang, 112, 166. See Wang Dongdong’s 王東東discussion of Chi’s use of oxymoron, found in “Haibaihe, shenhai zhishang, yu ci de weilai” 海百合，深海之殤，與詞的未來 (“Sea Lilies, the Young Death of the Sea, and the Future of Words”), Hongyan 紅岩 (Red Rock), no. 5 (2011): 50–52. 28、 Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing,” Qianxing zhiguang, 215.
29、Chi Lingyun, “Suoyou de shenying douyao wang dichu qu” 所有聲音都要往低音去 (“All Sound Falls to a Murmur”), Ibid., 100.
30、Chi Lingyun, “Ouran zhicheng” 偶然之城 (“Incidental City”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 90–104.
31、This point is indebted to the stream of discussion led by the poet Bai Hua 柏樺 on the “Jintian luntan”今天論壇 Today’s Forum (posted on May 4, 2010) http://www.jintian.net/bb/viewthread.php?tid=27265 (last accessed on Oct. 20, 2014).
32、Chi Lingyun, “Anmo yi,” “Zai sheguan” 在蛇館 (“Snake Restaurant”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 58, 46.
33、Chi Lingyun, “Xiang dichu de shengyin zhijing,” Qianxing zhiguang, 213–215.
34、 Chin Lingyun, “Yuyan yu wo” 語言與我 (“Language and Me”), Chi Lingyun shixuan, 74.
35、Chi Lingyun, “Shei ye bugan zai hei’an zhong duzi shuohua” 誰也不敢在黑暗中獨自說話 (“No One Dares to Speak Alone in the Darkness”), Ibid., 77.
36、Chi Lingyun, “Shang,” Qianxing zhiguang, 59.
37、Chi Lingyun, “Ci yu ciyuan” 詞與詞源 (“Words and the Origins of Words”), Ibid., 79–80.