Subject: Appreciation and joy

From: Lou Chen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 1994 12:07:19 U

Appreciation and joy
da4 jia1 hao3:
I agree with all of your comments from different aspects. The feelings and
skills both important, just like the issue of nature and nurture. This is a gu3
lao3 queation! As long as a poem is excellent or good, I don't care the issue.
Something are born with while something you obtain from learning.
Personally, just personally, I don't have much skills. Or I have the skills
while I don't realize them by myself. For me, inspirations are the most
important. I cannot write a poem when I want to write but do not have an
inspiration. Once I have it, the word and sentences just come naturally.
Second, I like to read poems from others. Many times one word or one sentence
from poems of others give me an inspiration that invokes my  yi4 jing4 or
thoughts that have been in my mind.
As to styles for poems, I do believe that a poet always has his/her own main
style at certain period of time although s/he might change later as s/he
experiences more in his/her life and writing. You see, personal life experence
also is very important. Plus many other factors such as personality, gender,
age ..... For myself, I don't analyze skills. As matter of fact, I don't know
any names of skills for poetry. When I say skills, I mean that somebody has
skills. I love to know any skills you have. Please share with me. I will really
appreciate that.
Tell you the truth. I never thought that I would had written and got published
my poems both in China and  America. If you could see some poems I wrote in my
daily several years ago, you would definitely agree with me--all of them are
trash or just daily.  Maybe you don't believe that the real reason I wrote
poems at the beginning because I didn't have time to write articles in Chinese
when I came to America. I wrote my daily in English because I wanted to improve
my English. So the only chance for me to write in Chinese to myself was to
write a few of sentences of 'poems'. I knew that they were not good at all.
However, they were my feelings and emotions. They were the connection and
bridge between all my background including Chinese and current me. So I kept
writting even though I didn't write many. I started enjoying them after I could
write some good pieces.
Last thing I can tell you is that I have many many stories. Now I write poems
as if I wrote novels. In my eyes, sometims one poem becomes a short novel.
Somehow I change subjects or objects (e.g. 'I' and 'you')  and 'yi4 jing4' (eg:
time and space) frequently in one poem. Maybe you could say it is a skill. I
don't know what I should name it if it is. It seems coming naturally after I
have written poems for a few of years. I didn't look for it.
This all I want to say today. I share all them with you. They are just my
poersonal experience.
I am so glad to know all of you although we haven't met one another.  Meeting
or not is not important. The important is that we have some common--poetry to
share. It doesn't matter wherever we are, what kinds of styles or skills we
have. God gives us such a good way to communcate with each other. What we can
say?
All to you from me is my appreciation and joy! I do believe that I will meet
some of you someday at somewhere before going to haven.
Best luck and love,
Luming
P.S.  Wu Yang: If you got the last sentence 'lin gan zhe dong xi jiu shi guan'
from my yesterday's Chinese message, that's it.