A community for discussion and sharing of poetry.
I'll populate this sidebar with more pizzazz, but for now let’s just get the lights on in here.
Yeesh. Some of the stuff you post, my friend. I really feel like I can grasp this poem in its entirety until the very last line. "You didn't come to live with me." It upends it completely for me, in such a way that I'm left questioning my understanding, reading and rereading it.
Very memorable.
It has a very interesting context! When Yi Lei published this, it was still illegal in China for unmarried couples to live together. That and its acknowledgment (!) of female sexuality made it kind of a scandal in 1987.
It's also a long-ass poem, and as it proceeds Yi Lei says it becomes less literally about its subject's desire for intimacy and cohabitation than a criticism of the laws that prohibit them.
Read in that light, it feels like a pretty daring thing to print as a Chinese citizen generally, and a Chinese woman specifically. I imagine it spoke to her national status as a poet that she was able to get away with it, similar to Ai Wei Wei.
