The poetic career of Lin Heng-tai (林亨泰) spans nearly sixty years. His oeuvre, unlike that of any other Taiwan poet writing today, encapsulates the entire history of modern vernacular poetry on the island. He was an active nativist poet decades before native-soil (hsiang tu, 鄉土 ) literature gained widespread public attention in the late seventies. Whether he writes socially engaged or avant-garde poetry, his work consistently displays a cool cerebral quality, emphasizing what American poet Ezra Pound termed logopoia , or “the dance of intellect among words.”
Take, for example a poem he wrote in 1988, after his first trip abroad. Entitled simply “Taiwan,” it demonstrates that Lin is no blinkered idealist.
Painted in green
O, Taiwan, beautiful island I've lived here sixty years
This is the first time I've left you
Looking down from the clouds, proves further
O, Taiwan, that you are lovely
Rocky coast inlaid among white waves
O, Taiwan, beautiful island
Away from you for a time
I come back
Leaving the airport, I discover to my surprise
O, Taiwan, that you are a filthy mess
Lin Heng-tai was born in Taichung on February 21, 1924. His mother died when he was fourteen. and his father remarried shortly after the funeral. This had a profound impact on young Lin, who could not understand that his father had remarried because he wanted to have someone take care of his children.
At the age of sixteen Lin moved to Taipei, where he encountered modern Japanese poetry for the first time. As well as reading Japanese poems, the young Lin also read classical Chinese poetry in Japanese translation, and frequented used-bookstores, where he came upon Japanese literary magazines such as the famous Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetics), a showcase for Japan's various schools of modernist poetry. His knowledge of world literature and of contemporary poetry developed rapidly.
During the same period, he also discovered the works of modern Chinese writers such as Hu Shih (胡適), Lu Hsun (魯迅), Guo Mo-ruo (郭沬若), and Lin Yu-tang (林語堂). Lin Heng-tai tried his hand at writing modern poetry in Japanese, but he was not satisfied with his early poems and few remain. In general, they are about youthful introspection and loneliness. Examples include “Dream”:
A person can go forever on a good dream
Because pitiful humanity can't get along without dreams
Dreams are painful, dreams are empty
It's because of the pain and emptiness
That a dream can go on forever
Because pitiful humanity can't get along without dreams
By 1943, Lin was teaching in a local grade school. The war in the Pacific was getting closer, and American planes regularly bombed Taipei, forcing students and teachers to seek protection in air-raid shelters. Lin spent his time in the shelters reading, mostly philosophical works. He also wrote a number of poems, of which "Metaphysician" is one example.
O, you children who anxiously wish to capture
The image of yourself in the mirror
Although it is clear to the eye
The actual thing-in-itself is not in the mirror
Turn around!
It's you yourself
Many of Lin's poems from this period are short, riddle-like or otherwise amusing synopses of philosophical ideas or schools of thought. They also show an early rational bent. For example, “Hegelian Dialectics”:
Hegel says
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis ....
I laugh until I bite my tongue
Joy, sorrow, joy and sorrow intermingled ....
At the beginning of 1945, Lin received his draft notice. He was assigned to a garrison charged with defending the bridges and waterways outside Tainan. With the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945, he was demobilized and returned to Taichung, where he obtained another teaching post. At this time he seriously began writing and publishing poetry.
Until recently, the forties were considered a barren period for poetry in Taiwan, largely because most of the literature produced during the first half of the decade was written in Japanese, and as such has been inaccessible to all but the older generation and a handful of specialists. The second half of the decade, on the other hand, witnessed a good deal of social and economic instability and political turmoil which virtually silenced most writers.
In 1946. at the age of twenty-three, Lin was admitted to the Department of Natural Sciences at the Taiwan Teacher's College in Taipei. Shortly afterwards, he transferred to the Department of Education, where he met Chu Shih (朱實), another student and a member of the Silver Bell Poetry Society. When Chu Shih discovered that Lin was an aspiring poet, he invited him to join the society.
The Silver Bell Poetry Society had been established by three students at the Taichung First High School in 1942. As membership increased, they began to publish a mimeographed magazine of their works, called Green Grass, written entirely in Japanese. After the war ended and Taiwan was returned to Chinese control, the group continued publishing their magazine, but under the new title The Tide. Lin's work appeared in every issue. According to him, the writings became increasingly concerned with social issues and with criticizing the state of affairs in Taiwan.
The young members of the Silver Bell Society looked for inspiration to influential older writers, the most important of whom was Yang Kui (楊逵), a short-story writer and essayist. Because Yang was particularly active in promoting local writing and had many literary friends around the island, he was asked to become an advisor to the society. He submitted poems and folk songs written in the southern Fujian dialect to the magazine. Since Lin Heng-tai lived in the vicinity of Taichung, he would often visit the older man.
Lin next tried his hand at writing poetry in Chinese. In 1948, Chinese translation of his poem “Masseur” appeared in the pages of Bridge, the literary supplement of the New People's Daily:
Although his eyes cannot see
He has no dark nights
When the sun sets and the streets are quiet
For whom does he whistle?
It's as if Pan were
Intoxicated by playing his reed pipes
But it's his duty to
Soothe the sore feet of women
Who have walked too much
To massage the bellies of
The rich who have had too much to eat
To ease the hardened blood vessels
Of a vicious thug
If he could
He would rub out all of these demons
For all the happiness he has given up
The poem, accepting an injunction of Yang Kui's that writers should go to the people and encounter reality, juxtaposes a blind masseur with his wealthy, albeit unsavory clientele. The final stanza states what is hidden in the masseur's heart. The poem elicited commentary from established writers such as Wu Ying-tao (吳瀛濤) and Jui Pi (瑞碧). Both acknowledge that the poem treats the seamier side of life and depicts less than idealistic sentiments, but they also praised it for its truthful depiction of human emotion. The consensus was that the beauty of the work lay in its realistic handling of social inequality and the conflict it produces.
Another poem on the theme of social inequality is Lin's “Walls,” which was written in 1948, also in Japanese:
The kid whose father is called
"Rich and influential" goads his fierce dog every day
Fierce dogs can bite people
The poor kid dressed in rags like a beggar
Was bitten
Some rich and influential families
Have been building walls all year round
But it's said the neighbor is a thief
They talk business all year round on the street
But a graveyard is just off the street
Intelligent people!
Do you know
What will grow
From the seeds you are sowing?
The father is called “cause”
His kid “effect”
Goads hisfierce dog every day
"Result" becomes “cause”
That “result” dressed in rags becomes a “cause?” too
Intelligent people!
No matter how smart you are
No matter how rich and influential
Where “cause” and “result” are linked
How insecure are you behind the walls
You build!
The poem is a simple exposition of Marxist principles: social injustice stems from the unequal distribution of wealth. Yet the irony of this situation is that poverty also breeds revolution, or class struggle. In other words, the rich, through their selfishness, are sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Themes like these were becoming quite common in Taiwan by the late forties, but such social-realist writing was destined to be short-lived. The Silver Bell Society did not long survive the student movement of April 6, 1949.
That day, police began an islandwide crackdown on suspected leftists as well as various students who had taken part in anti-government demonstrations the previous month. Classes were cancelled, so Lin decided to return home and visit Yang Kui. When he arrived at Yang's house, however, he discovered a number of men searching the writer's belongings, and Lin hurriedly made up his mind to head south. While waiting for his train, he saw Yang Kui on the next platform, his hands bound with rope, standing between two men. Yang Kui was eventually taken to Green Island Prison, where he was incarcerated for twenty years. The image of Yang Kui on that station platform has stayed with Lin all his life.
Various members of the Silver Bell Society were detained, (including Lin himself, for a brief period), at least one member was executed for his political views, one fled to Mainland China, and others found themselves harassed by the police. That proved to be the end of the society.
Shortly after classes were resumed at the end of April the Silver Bell Poetry Society, as one of its last acts before it was disbanded, published Lin's first book, Sound of the Soul, in Japanese. Three years later, most of these poems were translated into Chinese and published in the Liberty Evening News. The translations were later reprinted in Lin's 1990 collection, History Cannot Be Stepped Over.
The Silver Bell Society is important for three reasons. First, under the guidance of Yang Kui the society carried on the occupation-period realist spirit in Taiwan literature. That spirit was anti-imperialist and socially engaged, and it found expression in literary works of social realism pervaded with a nativist ethos. Second, the society had an international orientation. The ideas of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Lu Hsun, among others, appeared in the pages of the society's magazine. Literary trends such as Symbolism, Surrealism, and Neo-realism were also discussed. Third, the society displayed fighting spirit in the face of adversity. Before and after the cessation of Japanese rule, society members found themselves confronted by overwhelming difficulties, but instead of capitulating they struggled on, giving voice to the aspirations of the people of Taiwan.
The poems Lin wrote in the forties continued the social-realist tradition of the thirties, a tradition that would be temporarily buried during the so-called white terror of the fifties. The early fifties were a dismal time for poetry in Taiwan. The use of Japanese was prohibited in the official media in 1946, effectively silencing many writers. Martial law was declared in May 1949, and the following year the government set up the Chinese Literature and Art Awards Committee and the Chinese Literature and Art Association. These organizations sponsored literary activities and awards for anti-communist writing, and campaigned for the elimination of anything leftist, pornographic, or smacking of hooliganism from literature.
In 1955 Lin published Long Throats, his second collection of poems, and the first written entirely in Chinese. Some of the poems continue in the vein of his earliest lyrics on loneliness and the individual's inner life. His poem “Rainy Day” is a good example:
it is lonely
smoking on a rainy day
exhaling smoke
on such a day is as lonely
as the sight of one's own shadow
slowly the smoke rises
disappears
and falls with the rain
Many of the poems are early postwar examples of nativist writing. His poem “Dusk” is typical:
mosquitoes
in the banana grove
harassing
This haiku-like poem records a summer scene familiar in rural Taiwan. One can almost feel the long, hot days, the slow rhythm of the farm work, and the appearance of swarms of mosquitoes with the coming of dusk. So much of rural life on the island is embodied in these three lines.
Much of his later experimental work was also presaged by this collection. One poem it contained is “Stream”:
lonely day
clear water
seems motionless
over the sandy river bottom
fish and
fish
lonely day
the transparent wind
takes shape
over the river bank
grass and
grass
With this poem, a new trend in Lin's work began to emerge: concrete poetry.
Concrete poetry is a combination of literary and graphic arts. A concrete poem may yield up its meaning upon being read but, more often than not, meaning is added to the text on a visual level through graphic representation that involves the spacing and placement of characters, lines, punctuation marks, and other elements. Occasionally, meaning resides more in the pictorial aspects than in the poem's syntax. For example, the first and third stanzas of “Stream” are descriptive, while the second and fourth are "concretely" imagistic. In the first two stanzas we can almost see a pair of fish hanging motionless in the clear flowing stream.
Lin's concrete poems began to appear regularly in Modern Poetry. “Accident”, which was published in the October 1956 issue, is a fine example:
The first line would look something like this in English:
car
car
car
The increase in type size with each character gives the impression of a car bearing down on a person. The solid angular line through the text midway through the poem seems to suggest someone being run over by a car, but only after an attempt to dodge out of the way. The large Chinese character surrounded by four arrows shooting outward means “heart,” and the arrows suggest the person's heart is bursting. The final words of the poem give the outcome: death.
In 1956 Chi Hsien (紀弦) invited Lin Heng-tai, along with seven other poets, to form the Modern Poetry Society. This marked the beginning of Taiwan's modernist poetry movement. Nearly eighty poets subsequently joined the society, all of them avowedly patriotic and anti-communist.
Lin regarded the modernist movement as the only hope for the survival of poetry in Taiwan and threw himself into it with fervor. His experimental poems of the period tended to focus on the formal aspects of verse—punctuation, empty spaces, the layout of the text on the page, and even in some cases the actual form of the written character. He wanted to challenge readers to read in a new way. But these poems, for all their formal novelty, are closely tied to reality.
Lin was concerned with examining how our perception of the world is structured by language. This should come as no surprise, given his linguistic background: in school he had been forced to learn Japanese and forbidden to study Mandarin, while at home he spoke the southern Fujian dialect. “People with a knowledge of two languages can be more objective in looking at language,” Lin says. “They can get down to the basics, to what is really important in language.” For him, a person's language determines the way they see the world.
Of all Lin's experimental poems of the fifties, none have received more comment than his poems “Landscape No. 1” and “Landscape No.2,” written and published in 1959. “Landscape No. 1”:
crops next
to more
crops next
to more
crops next
to more
sunlight sunlight shone upon the ears long
sunlight sunlight shone upon the neck long
“Landscape No.2”:
windbreak
outside another
windbreak
outside another
windbreak
outside another
but the sea and the ranged waves
but the sea and the ranged waves
These two poems, which today are considered important examples of Lin's poetic modernism, came under fierce attack when they first appeared. One critic stigmatized them as encapsulating the worst aspect of modern art—its unintelligibility. But while such writing was new for China, similar experiments had been carried out by the Japanese. The Taiwan poet Chen Chien-wu (陳千武) has pointed out that both poems show the influence of Yamamura Bocho, a Japanese imagist poet from the early part of the century.
In “Landscape No.2” we literally follow the eyes of the speaker as he “reads” the landscape. The rows of trees and waves achieve symmetrical resonance from the regular placement of lines in the text. While the poem lacks much in the way of vocabulary, it offers the reader something new on the rhythmic level—the “silences” are as important as what is said. The spaces in the text not only contribute to the way the poem is read, they also stand as a correlative to the lay of the land and the way it is perceived.
Abstract as these formalistic experiments might appear to the reader, they are closely linked to the Taiwan environment. Critic and literary historian Lu Hsing-chang (呂興昌) has commented on the essential pairing of the poems. According to Lu, they depict two facets of people's relationship with their environment in the context of Taiwan. “Landscape No. 1” is flush with the hope a farmer feels when looking at crops cultivated on the land he enriches with his labor. “Landscape No.2,” on the other hand, depicts the trepidation humanity feels in the face of nature. The windbreaks are an attempt to mitigate the damage nature can do. But beyond these man-made constructs, nature waits, untamed, in the guise of the ocean. Even the limited vocabulary of the poems conveys this sense—the oft-repeated words “next to” in the first poem give a feeling of closeness and inclusiveness, while the word "outside" in the second gives a sense of distance, if not opposition.
For years, critics have found Lin's “modernist phase” of the late fifties and early sixties an interesting departure, if not an outright contradiction of the nativist position he had adopted in the forties. Lin, however, has always insisted that his work remained consistent: far from seeing nativism and modernism as mutually exclusive, his writing embodies his own vision of a synthesis of the two.
Lin was a theoretical as well as a creative force behind the modernist movement. After joining the Modern Poetry Society, he published five essays. “On the Modernist School,” “Concrete Poetry,” and “Chinese Poetry and Tradition” appeared in 1957, followed by “On rationality and Lyricism” and “Salty Poems” in 1958. The essays were written to explain the modernist position and as rebuttals of accusations that the modernists were against Chinese tradition. Lin dismissed these charges by using T.S. Eliot's argument that what seems non-traditional today becomes tomorrow's tradition. By and large, Lin's essays are learned, fervent arguments in favor of the modernist movement. But in “Chinese Poetry and Tradition,” he also set himself apart from Chi Hsien on one point---the horizontal transplanting of Western modernism. Lin advocated a version of modernism specific to China.
In 1962, Lin composed his “Song Without Emotion,” a sequence of fifty poems, in just one month. This was his major poetic statement of the decade, and the culmination of his modernist phase. The sequence was published in the Epoch Poetry Quarterly two years later. It is generally considered by critics to be a difficult work—obscure, minimalist, and abstract. But Lin insists that there is nothing abstract about it. He considers it a synthesis of his early nativist poems and his later stylistic experiments, especially his landscape poems. In the sequence, Lin combines and recombines a number of conceptual opposites, such as black and white, love and hate. He says that the sequence is concerned with racial and cultural antagonism, class contradiction, and life's emptiness. The nihilistic tone that flavors many of the poems is typical of Taiwan's modernist writing. One fine example is “poem no. 34”:
white,
why
do you hate?
black,
why
do you hate?
a lovely dawn
you oppose one another
a solemn dusk
you oppose one another
the tears that fall at dawn
dampen the mountains and rivers
the blood that flows at dusk
dye the sea and sky red
Another poem in the sequence that takes up the traditional poetic theme of the irreversible passage of time is “poem no. 38”:
north wind blows
dust flies
white disdains black
black disobeys white
petals fall to the ground
leaves fall from the branches
white is maligned by black
black is harmed by white
birds thick in the clouds
lightning flashes
the whiter the more heartless
the blacker the crueler
The poem suggests that nature originates and survives through violence and death. While the harmony and balance inspired by traditional Chinese ideas of yin and yang are apparent on a conceptual level in the poem, they manifest themselves only through conflict; the idealistic quality normally associated with the Chinese philosophical system is absent. The essence of nature is violence. The antipodes of black and white, the most frequently used pairing in the sequence, can be read on two levels: as philosophical symbols, and (literally) as referring to the black and white of the printed page.
Lin's “poem no. 39” may be understood as a poetic manifesto:
writing poems is not so mysterious
just make white whiter in your writing
just make black blacker in your writing
writing a landscape
is just a matter of
using crops
using crops
using crops
that's all ....
writing poems is not so mysterious
just make white whiter in your writing
just make black blacker in your writing
writing a landscape
is just a matter of
using windbreaks
using windbreaks
using windbreaks
that's all ....
Containing obvious allusions to a couple of his recent works, this poem is typically modernist in its self-referentiality—it is a poem about writing poetry. Lin is suggesting that a poet should stay away from the mysterious and concentrate on the real. “Mysterious poems frighten me,” he says. “People need to examine the 'black' and the 'white' more deeply and not just look at them in a superficial way .... That is one of the poet's functions—to look at the commonplace in a new way and to renew the language.”
In 1963, the Modern Poetry Society was dissolved. The reading public had begun to lose interest in modernist technique, which was already becoming a mannered formalism, especially among less-talented writers. Poets were beginning to think more in terms of content. As content came to outweigh technique, the language of poetry shifted from the difficult and the obscure to the plain and simple, if not colloquial and prosaic.
In 1964 Lin and twelve other poets founded the Li Poetry Society. Lin proposed the name Li, which in English means “bamboo hat,” because he thought this symbol of rural Taiwan summed up the society's goals---the revival of indigenous literary traditions going back to the realist movement of the thirties, and the rejection of the uncritical “Westernization” of poetry advocated by many modernists. The society was the first organized attempt in postwar Taiwan to resurrect the nativist literary tradition. Its membership predominately consisted of local poets and, by means of editing, historical research, and translation, it set out to establish a Taiwan identity through literature. Lin says that the society had no desire to ignore Western and international trends, it simply wished to adapt them to local conditions. The nativist movement, which was to become so famous in the seventies, had emerged.
In 1968, the Li Poetry Society published a collection of five critical essays by Lin entitled The Basic Spirit of Modern Poetry. The essays discussed the work of Hu Shih, Hsu Chih-mo (徐志摩), Chi Hsien, Ya Hsien (瘂弦), Shang Chin (商禽) and Lo Fu (洛夫), and are a mine of information on modern Chinese poetry. Interestingly, the subjects of Lin's essays are all modernist poets. He covers an historical period of approximately fifty years, from Hu Shih's first stumbling attempts at vernacular poetry in the early twenties to the most notable experimental writings of the Taiwan surrealists in the sixties.
Lin's book, with its exclusive focus on non-nativist poets, caused consternation among local writers. He argued that, despite fifty years of vernacular verse, modern poets had not succeeded in developing the medium. He attributed this to the ongoing, pervasive influence of classical poetry. Readers and writers alike had certain expectations that were conditioned by the way classical poetry was written and read. But the two very different mediums of the classical and vernacular had produced vastly different paradigms for reading and writing.
Lin also referred to technology, making the point that the world had changed considerably in recent years and thus required a new sort of poetry. Reading the book, one gets the impression that Lin was treating recent modernist poetry in a retrospective way: he felt that poetry had reached a pivotal point in Taiwan.
The late sixties found Lin undertaking educational research. He published a critical study of the work of the American psychologist and educator, Jerome Bruner, but remained relatively inactive as a poet throughout the seventies, publishing few poems and only eight critical essays during the entire decade. At this time his poetry underwent a drastic shift away from the modernist experimentation of previous years, returning to the realist diction of the forties. His poem “Dirty Faces,” written in 1972, clearly shows the change:
You say your face got dirty at work during the day?
No, you should say it could only get dirty while sleeping at night
Because the first thing all people do when they get up in the morning
Is hurriedly wash their faces.
Of course they have to wash quickly
Not only because they are ashamed to let others see their ugly faces
But because they could actually sleep soundly
All night long---isn't that disgraceful?
At night the world changes, everything changes.
Isn't there more dust on the window sill this morning? Won't the road be even rougher tomorrow?
And won't it all happen while everyone is sound asleep?
Lin had returned to social themes, and this was to remain the focus of his poetry for the next two and a half decades. The poem does not deal with anyone specific issue, but rather the human condition, the general complicity of all men in perpetuating social injustice consciously or, as is more likely, half consciously—through ignorance or an unwillingness to confront truth.
Lin also resumed writing about life around him. “The Incident,” published in the early seventies, is a case in point:
Older brother turned sharply
Braking suddenly
Unprepared, his little sister
Was thrown from the back of the seat
She landed
On her head
It wasn't loud
Bump—not much of a sound
Like a paper carton falling from a high place
She lay motionless on the road
She lay as if she were in bed at home
On a tender evening
She lay as if she were on a grassy field
On a warm spring day
She lay as if she were daydreaming
In a hidden corner of her own
She lay motionless on the road
writing a landscape
is just a matter of
using crops
using crops
using crops
that's all.
---from “poem no. 39”
A little blood flowed from her ears
A few hairs from behind her ears were stuck to the ground
Did she wear a serene expression
Because she didn't have enough time to suffer?
It all happened so fast
Her brother was around twenty-five
She was perhaps twenty
It happened a week ago
And now I pass that spot ...
There are no traces of blood
And once again the cars speed past
One need only compare this with “Accident” to see the shift in Lin's style. While the earlier poem provided a graphic representation of an accident, this one tells a story. The poet describes the scene in an almost journalistic fashion, but one soon realizes that he is not dispassionate in his feelings toward the girl. Lin contrasts the cold, hard details of her death---the sound of her head hitting the pavement and the blood---with the warmth and dreaminess of her youth. The final stanza comments on the inevitability of such tragedies, given human behavior. Although a young girl has died, no one remembers and no one has learned from her death.
For much of the seventies Lin suffered from chronic nephritis. He taught and did some translating, he occasionally served as a judge in poetry competitions, but by and large he stayed out of public view. The seventies were a critical period in the development of Chinese poetry on Taiwan. First, modernism was shaken and undermined by a young generation of poets advocating use of colloquial language to write clear, simple poems and calling for a return to Chinese tradition. Then came a strong resurgence of the nativist movement, beginning with the explosive native-soil literature debates of 1977. The government, which had always been opposed to the politicalization of Iiterature, felt that nativism was veering left and beginning to resemble the proletarian literature coming out of Mainland China. Nativists, on the other hand, argued that political and social issues were a writer's legitimate concern, criticizing the modernists for their lack of social concern and their nearly exclusive focus on technique.
Although Lin followed the debates surrounding modernism and nativism, he did not take part in them. He felt that they were somewhat regressive, if not at times a little ridiculous. The charge that modernism was opposed to Chinese tradition was, for him, merely a restatement of the same old accusations made back in the fifties, whereas he found the nativists' position absurd. Their contention that they were the guardians of tradition against the modernists, who were only interested in imitating Western writing, was, according to Lin, historically inaccurate. That tradition, he says, dates from the twenties and thirties and had been inspired by something as un-Chinese as nineteenth century Western Naturalism. “No 'ism' is good or bad in and of itself,” says Lin. “['Isms'] are just ways of conceptualizing the creative process.”
These debates did, however, have a salutary effect in the long run, for the eighties were to witness the advent of an age of pluralism in literature.
Pluralism has been a catchword in Taiwan since the eighties: post-modern poetry, feminist poetry, political poetry, and much more, as well as Taiwanese poetry in the southern Fujian and Hakka dialects, are all being written, read, and recited. Lin also re-emerged as a poet in this age of “literary democratization.” In 1986 the Li Poetry Society published a collection of his entitled Traces, the fifth volume in a thirty-volume set collectively called Taiwan Poets.
Traces is divided into three sections: the first includes native-soil poems written in the late forties, the second collects Lin's concrete poems of the fifties, and the last contains the few poems he wrote during the early eighties. The small collection provides a good indication of the stylistic range of Lin's work. What is especially interesting about the poems written in the eighties is that some hark back to his earliest native-soil verse, while others seem to continue in the modernist vein of the late fifties and early sixties.
The sequence of eight poems in Traces that was written between 1982 and 1983 has much in common with Lin's modernist poems. Here is “Trace No.6”:
without language
this world
would hold no surprises
with no surprises
this world
would be without love
without love
this world
would be easy to part with
This poem is as conceptual as anything Lin wrote in the sixties. Here he examines language and its centrality to human existence, language as desire. Our contact with the world and with one another is structured by the language(s) we use. Language-marvel-love-desire are all ineluctably linked. Language is the key to the human condition—without it, our own interconnectedness would be severed, life would lack structure, and desire could find no coherent expression.
Beginning in the eighties and continuing into the present decade, Lin's poetry has been predominately realist in style.
However, political satire has become more pronounced in his work. A particularly well-known example is “One Party System”:
the toy piano
on the table
has just
white keys
black keys
all having but
one sound
Such a poem was a natural product of the eighties in Taiwan. Martial law was lifted, political and social liberalization were undertaken, and a host of new political parties emerged as the island hastened toward democratization. In the face of such rapid and thoroughgoing changes, politics became a focal point not only for artists and writers but also in the lives of everyone. As Lin noted, “In the Taiwan writing of the eighties, there is no literature that is not related somehow to politics, just as there are no politics that are not related to literature.”
Many of Lin's political poems comment on the present rather than criticize the past. “Election” is a good example:
When he strides down off the high stage
To shake hands with you and warmly embrace you
Do you forget that he originally came from the high stage?
It doesn't matter how he shows his concern for you, or how he embraces you
You can't call it “democracy” if it comes from above.
True democracy works from below
Elect a person from below the stage
who suffers through the night with you
Support a person from below the stage
who stands with you to protect your native land So that the people below the stage have an opportunity
to manage the affairs below the stage
One would expect such a sardonic poem to have been written in one of the world's “mature” democracies where the political process had lost touch with the grassroots, rather than in a new democracy like Taiwan.
Of all the many contemporary trends, Lin is most enthusiastic about Taiwanese poetry—verse written in the southern Fujian dialect. According to him, all languages have three characteristics: They are unique; they confer identity; and they display an ethic or national character. “I once heard the young Taiwanese poet Hsiang Yang (向陽) recite one of his poems written in the southern Fujian dialect,” says Lin, “and I was greatly moved .... The southern Fujian dialect is what I learned as a child. There are things that can be said in my language that no other language can express.”
Lin Heng-tai has written socially engaged poetry for decades, but he has also been able to embrace and utilize the artistic innovations of modernism. He has blended the best of the new with the traditional, the Eastern with the Western, and in doing so has created a unique artistic synthesis that expresses a reality of Taiwan capable of speaking to a larger humanity. It is Lin Heng-tai's blend of benevolence and artistry that make him one of the island's foremost poets.
John Balcom, formerly an editor at the Free China Review, holds a Ph.D. in Chinese and comparative literature from Washington University (St. Louis). He currently teaches Chinese and translation in Monterey, California.