Where the Sentence Breaks, I Begin

You describe the poet not as a custodian of nation or nostalgia but as a cartographer of fracture. A maker of forms that fail beautifully. A being that crosses over the thresholds of grammar, time, and self.

You say, “A poem is nothing but an attempt to transcend the boundaries of language,” and I nod, for isn’t this what it has always been? A leap into the abyss, line by line, seeking coherence over completion. Voice over victory.

The wall you climb isn’t just Berlin’s. It’s also the wall between the visible and the sayable, between being and speaking, between suffering and the word that might still redeem it.

I hear echoes of the philosopher in his cell, in his skin, undergoing a spiritual exorcism not of clarity but of breaking. To write from exile, you suggest, is to write as one who has been removed from the mother tongue and yet insists on midwifing new speech from it.

Your shift from “poet of China” to “poet in Chinese” to “poet in Yanglish” mirrors the dissolution and reinvention of self that exile demands. The homeland becomes grammar. The sentence becomes soil.

And what you say of “political poetry” strikes with precision: that resistance cannot live in slogans, cannot be painted onto poems like propaganda banners.

Real resistance is metaphysical. It begins at the limits of language, where we cease to be citizens of a nation and become citizens of the void. When we write from that space, we don’t raise fists; we raise forms.

You are, like Qu Yuan and Du Fu, a poet of rivers. One carried forward by loss, writing not to escape death but to accompany it more truthfully. Your poems are not meant to be domesticated. They are meant to howl at the grammar until the grammar breaks open and lets something feral and holy through.

There is, in your voice, something I recognise. That sense that poetry is not a vocation but a condition. That to be a poet is to live inside the question, never outside it. That the poem is not the product but the pilgrimage.

the poet walks a corridor with no doors
carrying a lantern that burns from both ends
each wall is a tongue. each silence a mother.
he doesn't ask to be understood
he asks to be broken cleanly by the truth.

In response to In Search of Poetry as the Prototype of Exile