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 a decade later than poetry. When I first started writing, I merely considered it as "after poetry," originally without any intention, but later it grew into something on its own, seemingly winning more readers, so in recent years, my collected works in mainland China have outnumbered my poetry collections. However, on the other hand, critics have discussed my works more in terms of poetry than prose. I can only blame myself for being divided in my focus, like practicing martial arts gone awry, where my left and right hands have different palm prints. Although I started writing prose later, my path in prose has been steadier, faster, and earlier to reach maturity. When I first began writing prose, full of youthful vigor, I boldly claimed that contemporary prose needed a revolution. In the essay "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 leans too much toward argumentation, it can easily become an essay; if it indulges too much in emotion, it turns into what is called prose poetry. A prose writer who cannot excel in both storytelling and landscape description, and instead relies solely on empty, baseless subjective emotion, will inevitably only "dance in the void" and fail to "land on solid ground," let alone move from the void to the real or create a harmonious interplay between the two.