Responding to Poems Matching My Seven-Character Regulated Verse "Southeast," and Some Issues in Writing Regulated Verse

2006/3/3 17:30:17

My "Southeast" is as follows:

A Girl Who Loves Mathematics (Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán)

To the southeast, ten thousand li of sea afloat with sky; one crack in the golden bowl, and one hundred and five years are split.
Blood of fish and dragons, of past and present, still unburied; clam-mirage smoke rises again at dawn and dusk.
In Han and Hua's rise and fall, I stand unworthy before Tang's heroes; in wind and rain, dark and bitter, I think of worthy Zheng.
Let one billion in China rouse themselves anew; wrench up Kunlun and hurl it, to fill the surging waves.

Two people responded fairly seriously. Listed below:

Reading Wolf

The southeast axis is severed; the earth is hard to fill -- blame only Gonggong's unwilling heart.
As stars turn and shift, I watch the Horn Mansion; till seas dry and stones rot, I gaze toward Chang'an.
Chiyou's fog-battles lock up the red sun; Nezha's carved banners cover the dark sky.
Wait until kalpa-waves can seize mustard seeds; then Jingwei herself will fill the ocean's chasms.

Citizen of Caoqiao Pass

Long winds whip my sleeves to brush the sky at will; bold passion spills everywhere to console youthful years.
Looking back, when did I ever begrudge hot blood? Looking ahead, why should I fear wolf-smoke?
Palace feud and rancor are the work of traitors and flatterers; only clear peace over rivers and seas is the way of sages.
Just point at the sand-table and smile; deep gorges and shallow gullies are all lightly filled.

First, these two are probably not very familiar with seven-character regulated verse. In both, more than one line violates the tonal rules -- four lines in the first, three in the second. Of course, poets like the Jiangxi School often deliberately wrote in "twisted" meter, but that's different from the broken meter born of inexperience -- they have their own internal music. Of course, tonal violations are easy to fix. For example, "The southeast axis is severed; the earth is hard to fill" can be fixed by changing word order in that line. "Long winds whip my sleeves to brush the sky at will" -- just swap that key character for a level-tone one, since the original is an entering-tone character. Then there's the rhyme issue. The second poem follows my rhyme scheme, so no problem. But the first uses rhyme positions that cannot be matched with my rhyme set. At least not in seven-character regulated verse. For regulated verse, you can only use the Pingshui rhyme system.

Of course, tonal issues are easy to resolve. The trickier problem is diction. In writing regulated verse, the greatest taboo is using too many prose-style sentences. Both poems have this flaw. Even Han Yu, who championed "writing poetry in the manner of prose," was quite orthodox when it came to seven-character regulated verse. Because regular regulated verse (excluding long regulated verse) is only eight lines. If you use essay-style sentence construction, the whole thing loses all its flavor and becomes a bland speech as tasteless as plain water. Furthermore, the feel of a line is crucial. Some people write many poems, but perhaps not a single line is worth reading. Why? No feel for the language. And often a master can fix things with just a small change, turning it into a good line -- the Jiangxi School specialized in this kind of thing. What makes a good line? First, setting content aside, just in terms of form: the proportion and arrangement of content words and function words must be harmonious. Generally speaking, poetry must use many content words -- function words rarely produce good effects. Second, the tone must be harmonious -- at the very least, similar tonal patterns shouldn't appear consecutively. This way, tonal variation creates complex and harmonious sound. At minimum, a line must meet these two formal criteria to have any substance. As for content, there are many more considerations, which I won't go into here. In short, when writing poetry, use as few expository and argumentative sentences as possible. You can express your thoughts and feelings, but it's best not to tell the reader why you have those thoughts and feelings, or give a judgmental statement. Poetry should not read like an instruction manual or an academic paper. As for the art of choosing the perfect word, that's far too complex to discuss here.

Once diction is sorted out, we come to structure. Eight lines absolutely cannot be written without any twists and turns. Li Bai's weakness in regulated verse (mainly seven-character) was precisely because he was too much a single breath from start to finish. That works for ballads and songs but absolutely not for regulated verse. Of course, Li Bai's five-character regulated verse is excellent, possessing his own very distinctive style. Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei are the three greatest masters of five-character regulated verse, each with a different style. The two responding poems above basically can't be said to have structure. They just said what needed saying and stuffed it into the mold of a seven-character regulated verse. The first one is even weaker in this regard.

Having said all that, let me talk about my own piece. Although this poem is only one of my lesser efforts, it meets the basic requirements. First, a qualified work must have no superfluous characters -- not a single character should be changeable. This is true of my poem as well: eight lines, every character irreplaceable. Tonal patterns and sound harmony go without saying. Moreover, the eight lines vary in sentence structure and flow -- they are not static. This is also very important. The opening couplet, beginning with "To the southeast, ten thousand li...", presents time and space simultaneously, getting straight to the point and grounding the theme. This is what the opening couplet requires: it must ring out and hold firm. The second couplet is actually the best-written of the eight lines. After the opening couplet's "ten thousand miles" and "a hundred and five years" -- such a grand temporal-spatial canvas -- the second couplet is extremely difficult to sustain. Most people's worst couplet in a seven-character regulated verse is the second -- it's usually just filler. Look at Du Fu's seven-character regulated verse, hailed as the greatest of all time: its second couplet, "Boundless falling leaves rustle down; the endless Yangtze rolls on" -- without this couplet, the entire poem collapses. In my poem, the second couplet follows tightly from the first, and its two lines are tightly interlocking. But the second couplet sustaining the first is not enough. It must also lead into the third couplet, or the whole thing falls apart. The transition into the third couplet is fitting in both feeling and logic, yet completely without trace. Only then can it be called qualified. With the first three couplets properly arranged, the closing couplet becomes the natural, inevitable conclusion.