Yang Jian 杨键

Yang Jian was born in 1967 and lives in Ma’anshan, Anhui Province. He began writing poetry in the 1980s and has continued ever since. He has received numerous awards including the Liu Li’an Poetry Prize, the Rougang Poetry Award, the Yuan Kejia Poetry Prize, the Chinese Literature Media Awards’ Poet of the Year Award, the inaugural Li Shutong International Poetry Prize, and the Shan Hua Literature Prize. His poetry collections include Dusk, At the Old Bridge Bridgehead, Shame, Weeping Temple, Selected Poems of Yang Jian, and Waters of the Yangtze. He has had two collections appear in English: Long River (Tinfish Press, 2018) and ​Green Mountain (University of Hawaii Press, 2020).

On his poetry, Yang Jian writes:

I like small, fragile poems. Loud poems close my ears; poems that are all about style my eyes don’t register; clever poems my brain doesn’t take in. I don’t like poems that are grandiose and epic — how terrifying. I like poems that are small and easy to overlook but that somehow in an instant get right into your heart. Sometimes you can smell out a poem, tell at a single glance whether the poem is real. I want to write poems that are small but endless. I’m tired of poems with beginnings and endings. Poems that are born and then die don’t satisfy me. What’s the point of a poem like that?

But how to write a small, endless poem — what that should sound like, what that should look like — that I don’t know. I just know it’s little, quiet. It might even abandon this life and enter into the unborn. I might not be able to write one, but at least I can hope, pray, that I might. In a poem that like that, time and space might change, be transformed. Attention would clear away obstacles. Everything would come from that place that flames can’t burn, that water can’t wash away.

What I want is to have never written poetry. Poems I’ve written in the past don’t seem like mine anymore. What I want is for every time I write a poem to be the first time. I want to have never written a line of poetry in my life. Whether modern Chinese poetry can have a voice, face, depends on whether we can rise above the world and see it as it really is. Maybe then I can write a bit of poetry.