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The Poetry of Gu Cheng

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“On 8 October 1993, on Waiheke Island, New Zealand, Gu Cheng, one of the most well-known of China’s “misty”(menglong) poets attacked his wife Xie Ye(1958-1993) with an axe and then hung himself. Xie Ye died of loss of blood on the plane taking her to hospital, Gu Cheng died in his sister’s arm after she cut him down from the tree he hung himself from.” Gu Cheng, (September 24, 1956 – October 8, 1993), was a prominent modern Chinese poet, novelist and essayist who influenced the Chinese literary circle for generations by his brilliant poems, essays and beautiful thoughts of ideas that he has always been my absolute favorite poet of all time. As the result of anti-bourgeois sentiment of the China’s Cultural Revolution, Gu cheng’s father was accused of being capitalist and was “exiled” to the a rural part of Shandong province, where he was raised as a peasant without any formal education. The distinctive sense of “nature” was formed in his mind and provided a perfect place for his natural innocence to grew which later expressed in his poems. In this case, really tugged a string in my heart. Sense Gu Cheng (1956-1993) The sky is gray The roads are gray The buildings are gray The rain is gray Through such dead ashy gray Two children walked by One ponceau One viridescent The poem was constructed with two stanza; each with four lines. However, the first stanza was overwhelmingly crowded with the color gray--sky, the roads, the buildings, even the rain is gray. I started getting a bit of confused as the poet just flooded gray in my eyes until I realized Gu was just foreshadowing and setting up for the colors in the next stanza. There’s an altogether different world in the second stanza:”Through such dead ashy gray/Two children walked by/One ponceau/One viridescent” Look how beautiful this is! Gu painted such a splendid impressionism masterpiece by just simply capturing three colors: gray, ponceau,

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