Notes and Two Poems from
Stellar Dreams Above The Middle Kingdom
By Karl Young

In 1981, I began Clouds Over Fortjade, a set of screenfolds based on poems by the T'ang Dynasty Chinese poets, Tu Fu and Wang Wei. This worked as a dialogue between the two poets, with a poem based on one by each poet on the opposing sides of each screen. Tu Fu was a committed activist; Wang Wei a detached mystic - the dynamics of the series worked through this dichotomy.
I stopped writing in 1984, leaving the work unfinished. When I resumed writing in the late 80s, I no longer had a printing press or access to a decent library, and couldn't do much with Clouds without these basic tools. While working on Clouds, I sketched out two other sets, one based on poems by Li Po and Li Ho, the other including sources throughout the T'ang Dynasty, with poems by Li Shang-Yin and Tu Mu as centers of gravity. The Li Po-Li Ho series would have carried on the dialogue format. Some of Li Po's poems tend to base themselves in dreams of various sorts, the dreams stretching from Shamanistic visions to drunken projections to dreams in the most literal sense. With or without direct relation to dreams, Li Po's opus included a strong element of wish-fulfillment, something that people often associate with dreams, and a characteristic of the poems that have made them some of the best loved of the Chinese people. Li Ho was an anomaly in his own time, and would have been in nearly any other. Also strongly influenced by Shamanism, Li Ho's visionary poems tended toward what we might now think of as surrealism or altered states of consciousness. Their disconcerting qualities left poets of his time confused. He is a poet who defies categorization -despite the supernatural currents of his poems, he also showed rigorous self-discipline and social commitment. Li Shang-Yin and Tu Mu tended toward voluptuousness missing in other poets of their age, and a sympathy with the feelings of women largely absent among the most highly recognized poets of their time. This series suggests a more difuse configuration than the dialogue form would allow.
In the late 1980s, I did some single page workings of Clouds and the other sequences, and some spin-offs as part of a collaboration in 2000. At this point, I know that I won't be able to finish Clouds, nor would I be able to do the other two series along the lines of my original conception. But it seems that I might as well see what I can do with what I've got, however limited that may be. I'm working largely from old notes, and the process becomes more mechanical than creative. Threads of dreams and astral imagery work their way through these poems. They otherwise follow no plan and I don't have any goal in mind other than working out what I've got and seeing where that leads. As disconnected poems, these may make more sense, or at least allow me a bit of extra freedom, than the larger structures I initially had in mind.

Two Poems presented at Sugar Mule:
Poem based on Lin Shang Yin's "Lo Yu Fields"
Poem based on Lin Shang Yin's "Chang O"

See also samples from Clouds Over Fortjade
And the essay, Chinese Dialogues and Couplets
Copyright © 2001 by Karl Young


Notes and Two Poems from Stellar Dreams Above The Middle Kingdom By Karl Young In 1981, I began Clouds Over Fortjade, a set of screenfolds based on poems by the T'ang Dynasty Chinese poets, Tu Fu and Wang Wei. This worked as a dialogue between the two poets, with a poem based on one by each poet on the opposing sides of each screen. Tu Fu was a committed activist; Wang Wei a detached mystic - the dynamics of the series worked through this dichotomy. I stopped writing in 1984, leaving the work unfinished. When I resumed writing in the late 80s, I no longer had a printing press or access to a decent library, and couldn't do much with Clouds without these basic tools. While working on Clouds, I sketched out two other sets, one based on poems by Li Po and Li Ho, the other including sources throughout the T'ang Dynasty, with poems by Li Shang-Yin and Tu Mu as centers of gravity. The Li Po-Li Ho series would have carried on the dialogue format. Some of Li Po's poems tend to base themselves in dreams of various sorts, the dreams stretching from Shamanistic visions to drunken projections to dreams in the most literal sense. With or without direct relation to dreams, Li Po's opus included a strong element of wish-fulfillment, something that people often associate with dreams, and a characteristic of the poems that have made them some of the best loved of the Chinese people. Li Ho was an anomaly in his own time, and would have been in nearly any other. Also strongly influenced by Shamanism, Li Ho's visionary poems tended toward what we might now think of as surrealism or altered states of consciousness. Their disconcerting qualities left poets of his time confused. He is a poet who defies categorization -despite the supernatural currents of his poems, he also showed rigorous self-discipline and social commitment. Li Shang-Yin and Tu Mu tended toward voluptuousness missing in other poets of their age, and a sympathy with the feelings of women largely absent among the most highly recognized poets of their time. This series suggests a more difuse configuration than the dialogue form would allow. In the late 1980s, I did some single page workings of Clouds and the other sequences, and some spin-offs as part of a collaboration in 2000. At this point, I know that I won't be able to finish Clouds, nor would I be able to do the other two series along the lines of my original conception. But it seems that I might as well see what I can do with what I've got, however limited that may be. I'm working largely from old notes, and the process becomes more mechanical than creative. Threads of dreams and astral imagery work their way through these poems. They otherwise follow no plan and I don't have any goal in mind other than working out what I've got and seeing where that leads. As disconnected poems, these may make more sense, or at least allow me a bit of extra freedom, than the larger structures I initially had in mind. Two Poems presented at Sugar Mule: Poem based on Lin Shang Yin's "Lo Yu Fields" Poem based on Lin Shang Yin's "Chang O" See also samples from Clouds Over Fortjade And the essay, Chinese Dialogues and Couplets Copyright © 2001 by Karl Young