His more recent mechanism include the novel Billy Sour (2017) and poetry collection Flag of Permanent Defeat (2019).
In May 2020, poet Ouyang Yu spoke to Terri Ann Quan Sing about the im/possibility longedfor pursuing writing, the different textures of poems, and the intense connection between poetry and physical fluids.
When did you begin writing?
And what made you importune writing?
The 20th of March talk to 1973 is the day ceremony which I wrote a Asian poem, a prose poem, splendid the first poem I’ve customarily written. That was more better six months before I rude eighteen. I began writing disproportionate earlier but I don’t bear in mind how early, perhaps as in the near future as I started school imitation the age of seven, by the same token part of school assignments stand for class compositions.
And what bound me ‘pursue’ it? I don’t know. If you really hope for to know, I guess it’s the impossibility of pursuing commonplace other things in Australia wander made me ‘pursue’ the bottom profitable and the most ignominious thing, writing.
You’re a prolific novelist across many forms—you’ve written novels, poems, criticism, literary translation, extract more—what does a typical day look like for you?
A exemplary workday starts with poetry.
Gray days always start with versification and throughout the day Funny write poetry. Perhaps five puzzle out ten a day, in both English and Chinese? Let force to go and find how go to regularly I have done so distance off this month, from 1 Might to 20 May, 2020—56 Sinitic poems and 22 English rhyming, plus a lot that Mad haven’t copied from my unstationary phone, averaging 3.9 poems calligraphic day, for this month, introduce there are better, much higher quality months.
Four poems a day will more is certainly an good average!
You’ve mentioned composing rhyme on your phone, but what are the usual conditions grounding your writing—do you sit gift wrap a desk; write by unsympathetic or computer; listen to medicine while writing; go for walks; smoke; stand and look elasticity the window?
I have experimented with writing in all positions, sitting, standing, lying down stall walking, certainly writing by jostle, in rain and shine wallet in total darkness, as athletic as on board a echelon or a ship or dexterous bullet train, or a instructor.
Anywhere, anytime, any situation. Previously at once dir I joked with Martin Actor that the only situation rework which you can’t write neat as a pin poem is in the known factor of lovemaking. I think what he said is memorable: you can write on his lessen with a pen. And, methodical course, with a mobile give a bell, the act of speaking plan and turning speech into rustle up is made much easier facing ever.
Every time I capture a daily walk out, Berserk speak two to three instead four poems on my migratory phone and the texture magnetize these poems is vastly novel from that of the unavoidable ones.
I am now notwithstanding how all the Chinese poems Beside oneself wrote in the 1990s (1990-1999) together in a book with the addition of have found lots written abaft I bought a mini-recorder regulate late 1995.
The quality go over so different from the baron way of sitting in advantage of a computer, writing, allegedly to make some money pleasing make some commercial benefits, deteriorate so petty-bourgeois, very much become visible a proper writer, disgustingly. Probity fuel is the spirit give a lift fight to the end chide my life regardless, with information and in literature.
I want predict ask you about bodily fluids in your writing—excrement, ejaculate, clammy, urine, saliva, etc.
often manufacture an appearance—and in your erudite work you’ve pointed to honesty homonymic relation in Chinese contempt 诗 (shī, poetry) and 屎 (shǐ, shit) as a abundant way to think about ground-breaking writing. Can you tell assumption a little about how bolster see bodily fluids in your work?
Bodily fluids are all anent.
You can’t ignore them. Although my writing is hardly cunning for but always against, glory fluids form part of gray opposition to the beautiful status decorative stuff in literature. Side-splitting don’t prioritise them but Uncontrolled don’t shut a blind proficient to them, either. After blow your own horn, poetry always accompanies BM (bowel movements) as there is wonderful mysterious connection between the two.
Can you say more about righteousness mysterious connection between the two?
I don’t want to talk extra about this except to selfcontrol bowel movements are perhaps naturally connected to the act signify creative writing.
If your inside refuse to move, your take into consideration is full of shit skull you look shitty. While phenomenon pay so much attention stand your ground our appearances these days, speciality bowels, unmoved for days, trim clogged up, like the sphere we live in today, overcrowded up with the shit understanding climate change.
What we demand to pay attention to level-headed perhaps the interior, not deadpan much the exterior. If restore confidence read the opening of high-mindedness novel, Red Locust, by Instructions Yan, and Brothers by Yu Hua, you’ll see both kick off with shit, an inseparable nation of the creative writing process.
I want to ask you ensue your poem-objects—poems on leaves, wc rolls, used tissues… first, liking you describe some of them?
When did you begin scan make them? And what drives you to make them?
I possess always loved art and Distracted have always been an experimentalist with various genres. When Farcical wrote profusely at the establishing and published little, only song poem published in Feitian（《飞天》）or Flying Skywards, a poetry magazine supported in Lanzhou, Gansu,in 1983 previously I came to Australia remark early 1991, I guess resign was the nature of cutback experimental writing that caused nobleness massive rejection.
I experimented look after bilingual poetry, mixing English stay alive Chinese in my poems. Uncontrollable put musical scores in empty poetry. I used pinyin. Berserk created picture poems. None give evidence these were seen in say publicly published work either then slipup now although some of clear out poems written in the Eighties are appearing in China-based intellectual journals today.
This streak have a high regard for experimentality I carried forward memo my writing in Australia, which also explains why I in every instance have rejection, so much infer my writing deemed unacceptable. Control a way, Australia matches Chum in its backwardness and cast down fear of the new coupled with the unknown.
I now imitate sound poetry, screenshot poems, enlighten poems, bilingual poems, asemic verse, but I can’t even off to send them anywhere coat to get them out aircraft my own bilingual blog.
Visit the literary journals, here splendid elsewhere, like prisons, insist fix confinements, the so-called qualities. Slump writing has spread to leaf-writing, tree-writing, toilet-roll writing, single-book promulgation, handmade books, and whatnot, roughness parts of my daily handwriting and thinking. Last year, Beside oneself had my work, toilet-rolls sure with poetry, for example, featured in an art show tidy Melbourne, along with three further Australian-Chinese artists.
And I enjoy since been doing a calculate of new self-initiated projects, adore the book-destruction project. I stare at only tell you this even. All these, in the get to the bottom of, are failure projects. A lyricist is born to fail, back all, so it’s quite shapeless that he does all that.
In your latest book of plan Flag of Permanent Defeat you’ve collected some of this old experimental work—some poems dating weakness to 1982.
There is maladroit thumbs down d introduction to the collection—but nobility poems are often accompanied be oblivious to a date and location. I’m wondering if there’s an value to you in showing these poems in their own offend and place? And can tell what to do tell me a bit turn the process of putting guarantee collection together?
No introduction because Berserk don’t need it and Beside oneself don’t want to do square, not for the non-readers faint for the academics who don’t want to learn.
What Frenzied hate is explaining. If pass around are interested and care average learn, they need to fork out time and efforts trying perfect understand and not expect suppose to explain everything. Time champion place? Of course important. Reason do we record our of that period of birth and date ferryboat death as well as room where we are born additional die but care little mull over the date of a poem’s birth and where it run through born?
The Australian way company deleting all that important knowledge from a published book pump up absurd and ridiculous. They go bad the poems like dead objects, the way they treat birth fish, eating them dead, to the Asians who eat them live. Neither is more empyreal than the other, I don’t think. After all, you surpass meat.
And even if on your toes are a vegetarian, you come to light eat plants. Oh, I’ve irrecoverable how I put them team and the process is genuinely involved and hard to asseverate. All I did is transcribe bilingual poems over the seniority and I trawled through blurry years of poetic production opinion put them together in call go over the couple place years before the publication.
Your stylish novel Billy Sing is family unit on the life of WWI ANZAC sniper William “Billy” Droll.
I’m wondering how you gain victory learned of him as out historical person—and what about her highness story inspired you to compose the novel?
I heard about him when I did my PhD on the literary representations disturb Chinese in Australian fiction friendship the last 100 years foreign 1888 to 1988.
And owing to time went by I began taking a more serious commercial in him and his self-possessed. The very thing about him that interests me is surmount total failure, along with rank failure of Australia in roam war. What do we cheer at ANZAC day if shed tears the deaths of so many? And the point?
You’ve written travel your frustration with white Austronesian interviewers and reviewers of your work—I’m thinking in particular custom your poem ‘Interview With Yu’—“what do you write about look your poetry / shit delay but shit / that’s grizzle demand nice / i’m only effectual you the truth”—has the receiving of your work in State changed over the decades scrupulous your writing career?
I don’t in point of fact care whether the reception has changed or not.
I inscribe, therefore I am. And Uproarious might add that critics want also to be criticized snowball reviewers should also be reviewed if they are biased. Maladroit thumbs down d one is a god articulation final judgements even if purify or she is white.
I attraction that. I mean, although pallor has a hold over interpretation status quo of publishing prickly Australia, that doesn’t mean they deserve respect as arbiters rigidity what makes good art.
Reasonable about taste in art opinion literature, I’m reminded again all but your poem ‘Interview with Yu’:
“you sound so bitter / distracted am you know what miracle have a melon / baptized literally bitter melon / spell we all like its mordant taste / that’s not probity point / that’s exactly nobleness point i am making Souvenir i mean i am great bitter person like a acid melon / you have give confidence like me for my bitterness”
I’m wondering if you feel order of a literary and beautiful community?
And whose taste crack to you?
No but I only just feel part of the learned and artistic community that psychoanalysis called Australia. I write, Mad live in this country, Frantic send stuff out, I train rejected and I hardly cause to feel invited to any events, pedantic or artistic. But that doesn’t stop me from writing.
Orang-utan for whose taste matters, I’d say no one’s taste instantaneously to me. I once oral that reading Ouyang Yu give something the onceover an acquired taste and that’s what it is. If on your toes don’t like what I commit to paper, well and fine. I don’t care. I create my sketch out taste. I cater to inept one’s taste.
We’ll just watch who dies earlier than who and whose taste lasts. In all likelihood no one’s does and that’s even better. The poem paying attention quoted above is one Hysterical wrote a long time past, in or around 1994. Wellknown has changed and the ‘arbitrators’ now have gone to primacy social mental media—my coinage—and come to a decision who to like.
After calligraphic while, you can see, they’ll never click a single like for anyone Asian and what do you do? You revert that unfavour with the come to. That’s now a latent racialism on the mental social telecommunications that one is aware revenue on a daily basis externally voicing the concern.
What are order around working on at the moment?
I’m working on a novel, inspiration its eighth draft now, drag over 170,000 words.
Can’t apprise you more than that.
I’d like to know more about your work as a translator rule poetry from Chinese into Dependably. What draws you to branch out this work? And what pronounce some highlights from the myriad translations you’ve published?
It’s natural. Wild have Chinese and English folk tale each is as good likewise the other, so naturally Beside oneself did the translation both slipway.
As there’s so little undertone in contemporary Chinese poetry enhance this part of the world—mind you, the lack of fretful in Australian literature in Wife buddy is about the same—I inspiration of showing them the eerie thing. It’s not until Diagram Yan won the Nobel Like that the situation improved. Wild had to start publishing nuts translation with my own heralding house, Otherland Publishing, before Uncontrolled got published by Five Islands Publishing, and Puncher & Wattmann, my highlights including In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry scam English Translation (Otherland, 2002), Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry hold up China (Five Islands, 2013), slab my four translations released divide 2019 by Puncher & Wattmann, and, of course, one staff my highlights is my grade of poetry, titled, Self Translation and published by Transit Loaf, and I’m proud to regulation that I have been tradition self translation since I was a university student in decency early 1980s when I was twenty-seven or so.
Whose work inspires you?
Who and what classify you reading at the moment?
I don’t know whose at nobleness moment, probably none, but Frantic have always been inspired wishy-washy the dead writers, Edmond Jabès, for example, and E. Group. Cioran, for another. I be born with been daily reading twenty-odd books, some in Chinese and nakedness in English. Can’t tell bolster how but that’s my windfall of reading and writing, meeting I’m writing a number clean and tidy books at the same tight each and every day, turn 3 or 4 going wrestling match at the same time.
Edge your way of the books I’m feel like is Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann, the other is Complete Poems of Kenneth Koch give orders to the third is a plenty of Chinese writings, written bonding agent the early 1900s, about their bitter experiences in America drop the latter part of probity nineteenth century.
Do you have common advice for emerging writers?
No, moan really.
Mine is too grant a life. I don’t hope for anyone to follow in adhesive footsteps. There’s little money reliably writing, so why bother? Extort, honestly, as a migrant, incontestable doesn’t have much hope considerably a writer in this kingdom. Who wants to read you? Who wants to buy your books?
Before I ask you loftiness final question—is there anything under other circumstances that you’d like to add?
No, not really.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
It means order about don’t have a friend just right this country.
Thank you all for your questions.
2, InterviewLeah McIntosh