Wed, Feb 23, 2000 page8

• The poetry of motion has yet to hit Taipei

  • Lee Min-yung
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  Taipei City's mass rapid transit (MRT) system has provided local citizens with a new mode of transportation. I think of the subway scenes overseas whenever I walk in and out of the MRT stations in Taipei.

  I imagine that the subway system will create a new lifestyle, with crowds rushing in and out of the stations and the number of pedestrians increasing accordingly.

  The American poet Ezra Pound's (1885-1973) poem In a station of the metro can now be applied to Taipei's subway scene:

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  Petals on a wet, black bough

  In his memoir written in 1916, Pound said the poem was inspired by the faces of beautiful women and innocent children in a Paris metro train. He tried to grasp how he felt at the time, then came up with this imagist poem. From Pound's poem, I tried to seek the urban scenery in our subway trains.

  But I also thought about the vicissitudes of Pound's life during WWII when he was accused of treason by the US for working under the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

  After the war he was tried by the US and then sent to a mental institution. Twelve years later he was finally discharged with the assistance of several other writers. He then settled in Italy.

  Pound once worked to elevate a younger generation of writers in literary circles such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.

  Pound enjoys a special standing in the history of literature. His peculiar political experiences reflected on the cultural phenomena of the modernist literary movement between WWI and WWII.

  Is the gradually-developing subway culture in Taipei going to be like that of Europe, where the Modernist literary movement took place at the beginning of the 20th century?

  How will the subway culture affect our life if such an atmosphere is reflected in literary movements or literary works?

  However, I hardly notice any new cultural elements in our subway stations and their surroundings. Several underground shopping galleries have been opened in the stations, serving only to exhibit Taiwan's consumer culture.

  Unlike cities in other countries, there is no connection between Taipei's subway and riders' reading habits.

  Every day we see crowds hurrying in and out, but people are rarely seen reading on the trains. Compared with the established reading habits of subway commuters in Japan, our train riders appear to be unusually quiet and sedate.

  A poetry collection, Poems on the Underground, published in London, includes a poem titled Painting composed by Chinese poet Bei Dao (北島) on his daugh-ter's fifth birthday.

  The verse described the moment when his daughter was painting a picture. He said "the sky of a five-year-old is so beautiful," and he also said to her daughter that "your name has two windows." He described himself as being like "a hedgehog in exile."

  Here is an excerpt of the poem (translated by B.S. McDougall and Chen Maiping):

  Who has become a hedgehog in an exile

  Taking with him a few unintelligible characters

  And a bright red apple

  He has left your paintings

  The subway presents its images in poems and poems display images from the subway.

  Are they difficult words? Will our subway form a cultural scene through the intertwining image of poems and view? American dissident Ezra Pound, Chinese exiled poet Bei Dao; the metro of Paris, the underground of London.

  Lee Min-yung is a poet.
• Most Popular

  • 1

    International concerns raised after Lai’s flight blocked

  • 2

    Actor Darren Wang handed six months for obtaining others’ personal data

  • 3

    Starlink reluctant to operate in Taiwan

  • 4

    China teases new aircraft carrier, vows to build up islands

  • 5

    Taipei MRT Red Line extension could open by late June