Ocean poems unleash wave of creativity
Program on sea-themed works inspires a tide of expressive imagination, Yang Yang reports.
In a time of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been searching for comfort and ways to rebuild spiritual connections with each other. That is why Shenzhen’s Yantian district and online platform The Poem for You initiated a program, Shenzhen Ocean Poetry Season 2022, with the theme “facing the sea, envisioning the future”.
More than 50 well-known poets and writers, such as Ouyang Jianghe and Mang Ke from China, and Shuntaro Tanikawa from Japan, joined the poem-writing event. Pianist Lang Lang and Olympic champion Deng Yaping, among other stars, read and recommended “ocean poems” to the public as ambassadors.
“Now many people are not certain about the future,’’ says Zhang Xuan, who co-founded the platform in 2013.
“This year, a lot of people are confronted with difficulties in life, many concrete ones. Poetry has the power to comfort people. It’s not necessarily a grand power. It can comfort us just like a dim light, a cool wind or breathing.”
Vast and inclusive, the ocean also has a comforting and healing power, she says, adding, when it is calm, it seems to be listening, and when it is rough, it is full of risks, possibilities and the unknown, just like life itself.
In recent years, due to the pandemic, face-to-face communication has not been so easy.
In a video speech, Shahbaz Khan, director of UNESCO Beijing Cluster Office, says while the ocean is a vital buffer against the impact of climate change, it has the power to connect people and civilizations throughout the history and in our common future.
As a creation of human ingenuity inspired by natural wonders, poetry also has this great uniting power, he says.
“It speaks to our common humanity and our shared values, transforming the simplest of works into a powerful catalyst for dialogue and peace,” he says.
Zhang says, “Crossing different cities, regions, professions and ages, we hope to use poems about the ‘inclusive ocean’ that listens to our hearts to give people strength to face up to the difficult time.”
On June 8, World Oceans Day, The Poem for You, a poetry-sharing and culture exchange internet platform, launched an online submission for the Shenzhen Ocean Poetry Season, calling for people to write poems about oceans. Via an online post office, writers can also share their poems with friends.
In one month, the platform received more than 12,000 poems created by people from all walks of life around the country, including a 2-year-old, a sailor, farmers, a teacher of Chinese language, housewives, lawyers, patients with rare diseases, and children living in the mountains who have never seen the sea. On July 11, China National Maritime Day, it released a list of 16 winners.
Born in the coastal city of Shanwei, Guangdong province, 31-yearold Lin Guopeng, working in the new media industry, won first prize with his poem, Haibian Xushuci (A Narration by the Sea).
In the poem, he writes, When I stood on a rock, a particle of sunshine / Or the sound of a waterdrop, fell into my palm / Extending and flowing into the infinite, as if what I held / Was not merely purity and brightness, but in the vast life / A drop of blue touchingness.
“When I was frustrated, I would go to the seaside,’’ he says. “Facing the vast sea, despite the anxieties and worries, I would gradually calm down, becoming open and cheerful again.
“The idea to be free and to surge, like the rolling waves, hit me again and again, as if it was pushing me. For a moment, I tried to kick and break the coastline and to get into the sea to have a profound dialogue with the sea god. I wanted to tell him, I was fully prepared to fight with life,” he adds, explaining the meaning of his poem.
Born in loess, I have never walked out of the vast northwest / Under the blue sky, the Ruhe River in front is as calm as an ocean / Pour a bottle of pure water / White clouds above my head, wind blowing past my ears / The small pool at the foot can also set off surges like an ocean.
The poem, Chishui Ke Xingbo (A Small Pool Can Set Off Surges), written by 31-year-old rare-disease patient Wei Jinzhu from Pengyang county, Guyuan of Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region, won second prize. Due to the disease, he cannot live independently.
“I have never seen the ocean,’’ he says in an introduction of the poem. “In my imagination, sometimes the ocean is calm and sometimes rough. While I was describing the beautiful and vast ocean, I thought of what my teacher Liu Tianwen told me of how to deal with the difficulties that I encountered when I just started learning to write poems. He said, although my body restricts my movement and the space of my life, I should remember that with unremitting efforts, a small pond can also make an ocean surge,” Wei says.
“Even a small pond by the roadside, when wind blows, will ripple. What I want to express in the poem is that even a nobody, when confronted with difficulties in life, if he or she can still face up to them calmly, he or she is a great person,” he says.
Commenting on the poem, one of the judges, poet Li Yuansheng, says that whether personal life is limited or unconfined is relative. “Wei keenly found a niche in the overlapping area of the limitless and the limit, giving his poem a special place to be,” he says.
He found the submitted poems in general were of a relatively high level. What is particularly prominent is that there are many young participants, which means that the theme greatly inspired passion and interest among young people, Li says.
“Besides, the works on the final list are very diversified in artistic styles. Many poems are experimental and their creators obviously tried some brand-new techniques, which is the most precious about young creators,” he says.
“From the submitted poems, we can tell an overall positive prospect of a good life, the future of China and the ocean. They present a vivid cross section of modern Chinese poetry scene, from which we can not only see the passion and spectacular imagination inspired by ocean, but also the progress of poem writing by Chinese young people, the ambitious poetry experiments and language adventures of another generation,” he says.
Yantian, located in the Dapeng Bay, has rich ocean resources and one of the busiest container terminals in the world. Peng Jie, director of the Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau of Yantian — one of the organizers of the program — says that Shenzhen is a coastal city with a reformative and creative spirit, and the free, vast and inclusive sea nurtures both the young city and the people living there.
“While developing the marine economy, we have been thinking about the development of ocean culture,” she says.
“We want to use this program to guide and urge people in Shenzhen to care for the ocean and to be inspired by it in their daily lives, while encouraging poetry lovers from different cities, ages and professions to take part in our activities.”
In addition to the competition, poem-reading events are going to take place in different cities around the country. In Shenzhen, people can read the submitted works on buses and subways, “on their way to work or to the airport, receiving silent greetings from poems”, Zhang says.
“It’s how communication is built.”
They are also planning an ocean poetry forum in Yantian and an ocean poetry concert by the sea, which “hopefully can be held in September”, Zhang says.