This particularly strikes me: “I mean why should poets feel limited to the terrain of thinking and writing. Why not poems, the action. Yang Fudong’s project underlines where poets do go already – wherever humans are found culturally and we ought to shamelessly seize the project of being actors, sages, scholars ourselves, walking around without a story or a line. Without a panel, a reading or a talk. Maybe just a pulse. And call that art.” This is it exactly, the larger terrain poets should (could) occupy.

Thinking associatively here, your story brings to mind an all time favorite band of poets whose ethos, perhaps, is not so dissimilar to what you describe. The Goliards of the 12th and 13th centuries. Almost all wandering scholars, all working in late Latin lyric poetry. Again and again hounded by the Church and whose most affecting poetry, for me at least, was written to nature, to an unapologetic devotion to carnality and to Venus. Almost all of it rebellious poetry and subversive in the sense that it protested against “the theological distrust of the body,” as one translator put it. Their drinking songs especially have to be some of the world’s best.

Terreson

What an image, and doesn’t that fit in with what Eileen has just written, what’s more the Seven Sages in the Bamboo Forest?

Beautifully written, Eileen–I can’t wait for the discussion!

Christopher