Tianya Qinglü - A Collection of Essays on Love and Passion by Yu Guangzhong

Author: Yu Guangzhong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-12-01
Features: I wrote prose almost ten years later than poetry. When I first started writing, I merely considered it as "after poetry," originally without any intention, but later it grew into its own shade, seemingly winning more readers, so in recent years, when publishing books on the mainland, my collected prose works have outnumbered my poetry collections. However, on the other hand, critics discussing my works have focused more on my poetry collections than my prose collections. I can only blame myself for being divided in my focus, like practicing martial arts gone astray, where my left and right hands have different palm lines. Although I started writing prose later, my path in prose has been steadier, faster, and earlier to reach maturity. When I first started writing prose, I was young and arrogant, boldly claiming that contemporary prose needed a revolution. In the article "Cutting Off thees of Prose," I emphasized that modern prose should pay attention to the density, elasticity, and materiality of language. Later, I also questioned the popular prose sketches since the May Fourth Movement, believing that the scope of prose should not be confined to sketches. If a prose sketch enjoys argumentation, it easily turns into a satirical essay, while if it indulges solely in emotion, it becomes what is called a prose poem. If a prose writer cannot excel in both storytelling and landscape description, but only resorts to empty and baseless subjective emotion, their works are doomed to "tread in the void," unable to "land firmly," let alone transition from the void to the real or create a harmonious interplay between the two.