Re-contextualization

For Chinese EFL learners, using English as an intercultural and multifunctional medium to actually do creative writing, or in other words, to create ‘contact literature’, is probably one of the most effective ways of getting to know how to become culturally sensitive, broad-minded, and eloquent. As the foreignness of the English language may give them new cultural perspectives, the very process of writing ‘contact poetry’ in English may help EFL learners to acquire new techniques of self-discovery, find new voices of self-expression and international communication, and foster their bilingual ability to articulate a global vision. Ideally, EFL learners participating in task-based and outcome-based poetry writing workshops in English are willing and able to conduct a positive language transfer experientially, to internalize or take in some English model poems as a type of comprehensible input on purpose to generate their own poetic output, and eventually better their language competence through actual language performance.

Teaching poetry writing workshops in English in China means re-contextualizing both the entire mode of a Western-style writing workshop and all its unusual products of formal diversity and thematic multiplicity. The poetry writing workshops, as a counterattack against the controversial examination-oriented educational structure, provide EFL learners with a collaborative experience of experimenting with the English language in terms of poetic creation, and poetizing cultural diversity and universality simultaneously. Paul Magrs states in his article ‘Dynamics’ that ‘workshops aren't – or shouldn't be – a competitive space. You are not there in order to look the most brilliant. You are there to present your work-in-progress and engage with other people's work-in-progress’ (Reference Magrs, Bell and Magrs2001: 319). At my poetry writing workshops in English, I have been guiding my students – senior English majors, M.A. candidates, and in-service EFL teacher-trainees – to use familiar figures of speech to create new images, and to re-contextualize individual thoughts and emotions in such a way that they become universally significant.

At the very beginning of the poetry writing course, some of my students do not respond enthusiastically to writing tasks. From those who think too little of poetry writing comes the complaint that ‘poetry writing will be entirely useless in our future careers’. And there are others who think too much of poetry writing, saying that ‘we have not written any type of poetry before, not even in Chinese. Poetry writing in English is absolutely beyond our reach’. To ‘coax, provoke, stimulate, encourage and challenge’ (Boran, Reference Boran2013: 50) would-be EFL poets, I endeavour to affirm that ‘language without poetry does not exist and all language-users are poets at least part of the time’ (Whitworth, Reference Whitworth2006: 55), that poetry writing is and will be useful, because its actual process, among other things, trains one to be sensitive, imaginative and creative so as to fulfill the personality requirements of almost all present-day careers, and that there is no mystery about poetry writing, and progress in poetry writing can be made only when one puts pen to paper. Fortunately, my students of all kinds have been cooperating more and more enthusiastically with me. They may have no subjective initiative to write poetry in English by themselves, but they are able to produce surprisingly good poems if they are properly encouraged or challenged to write. It is they who comment jokingly that ‘poetry is nonsense, and poets are nuts’. It is they who try their best to write poetry as amateur poets.

Technically speaking, many of my students are rather at ease in their use of English when writing prose, and have already laid a good foundation for poetry writing in English without knowing it. So I first tell them that poetry as a kind of verbal art is not essentially different from prose, and that ‘[what distinguishes poetry] from prose is that there are no extra words, and the words that the poet uses have a sound value, as well as a meaning value’ (Castillo & Hillman, Reference Castillo and Hillman1995: 31). I also quote from Gregory Trifonovitch:

The following student writing sample by Aijun Luo shows that his style is not only acceptable, but also highly recommendable, since it is lucid and open-minded enough to re-contextualize what is typically Chinese into what is universally understandable.

Here, the multivalent word ‘mandarin’ (denoting a national language, a native fruit, or a Chinese Qing-Dynasty official) carries historically and psychologically re-contextualized implications. This poem is not so much a narrative sequence as a free and imaginative organization of deliberately fragmented images. By first gazing upon the mandarin at a close but critical distance, by cherishing a paradoxical attitude of both detachment and attachment toward it, and by eating it at the end, the ‘I’ may interiorize or personalize historical lessons and national infamies, but at the same time may also go well beyond self-pity and narrow-minded patriotism, starting to seek new meanings in a much broader context – with innovative energies gained from the past.

Re-creation

Creative writing is supposed to create or re-create. What may poetry writing workshops in English help each EFL learner to create or re-create? At their best, they may help to create or re-create an eye for beauty, a taste for verbal art, and a voice of self-expression – ‘a recognizable combination of tone and subject’ (Anderson, Reference Anderson2006: 192). They may also help to create or re-create links between writers and readers, between feelings and meanings, between facts and truths. They may help to create or re-create channels of intercultural communication as well. Obviously, for Chinese EFL learners, poetry writing in English and intercultural communication are two interactive processes. Poetry writing is by nature communicative, and the global language of English used to generate poetry writing outcomes allows intercultural communication to take place between and among all the global villagers who understand English.

As Philip Gross says, ‘creative writing courses need to show examples of a range of ways of working, so that each learning writer can arrive, through experiment, at their own’ (Reference Gross and Turley2011: 68). At the outset, I strongly recommend my students to read both Western model poems in English and Chinese model poems translated into English, and let them know what the criteria of good writing are. Furthermore, I encourage my students to do writing exercises of imitation as tasks of re-creation in order to find kindred spirits in those model poems, and meanwhile fashion their own poetic styles. Through reading exemplary texts, my students can expect to develop a broader poetic vision - in the sense that they become able to see how human nature has been defined and portrayed metaphorically in different cultures, and how the universal writer's mentality has found poetic expression in particular images. Clearly my teaching approach is different from that of Stephen J. Davies, who reflects on his own experience of teaching poetry writing to EFL learners in Japan in the following way:

By contrast, I do not believe that the act of imitating is necessarily inimical to the act of thinking for oneself. I consider imitation to be one of the legitimate and indispensable activities in EFL poetry writing workshops.

As exemplified below, model poems can be taught as significant sources of inspiration for multiple objectives. For instance, Emily Dickinson's poem ‘I'm nobody! Who are you?’ can be used to explain the various possible identities of the ‘I’, the poet-speaker, an imagined person, or a dramatis persona. John Keats’ poem ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’, to display the affinity between beauty and truth. Archibald MacLeish's poem ‘Ars poetica’, to describe the ambiguous nature of poetry. Walt Whitman's poem ‘Song of myself’, to lay stress on the transcendent value of the commonplace; and Robert Frost's poem ‘Fire and ice’, to illustrate how the rhyming words of a poem are grouped into a pattern of comparison or of contrast.

Paradoxically, it can be creative to imitate model poems in diction, sound or syntax, and to make parodies out of them, or allusions to them. My students think for themselves, and take pleasure in making their own poetic statements that are artistically suggestive of certain model poems. Here are two examples of this kind: ‘Give me those six little chickens that are singing a sweet song’ (which is imitative of Walt Whitman's alliterative line ‘Give me the splendid silent sun with his beams full-dazzling’), and ‘Poetry is the demon with dimples’ (which is imitative of Emily Dickinson's metaphorical line ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers --’).

The importance of model poems can never be overlooked at poetry writing workshops. Inspired by the ideas, motifs, techniques, cadences, and/or sounds of a model poem, Chinese students strive to offer their own poetic descriptions in English – plus noticeable Chinese cultural connotations. The following poem by Ying Liang is structurally a partial imitation of Ezra Pound's well-known poem ‘In a station of the metro’. Culturally, it draws upon the traditional Chinese implications of the ‘two magpies’, and re-creates them as good omens, announcers of good news, and bringers of ‘double happiness’ against the coldness and barrenness of the bleak background.

In her poem ‘Road tree’, Li Tang, another student of mine, imitates Robert Frost's poem ‘Tree at my window’ in terms of imagery, tone, and conversational rhythm, but ingenuously humanizes and personifies the road tree in a present-day urban setting, where the first-person speaker identifies with the tree, establishes an intimate bond between the ‘you’ and the ‘me’, and meditates on the sordidness, noisiness and indifference of a modern city, and on the loneliness of the human or non-human individual, thus re-creating a lifelike image of the dislocated and alienated modern self, and showing the essential human need for genuine social communication, verbal or non-verbal.

Re-integration

Paul Mills says that ‘experience beyond the personal range of the writer can still be felt – through imagination. Another of its attributes is the desire to reach and acknowledge as real other people's worlds’ (Reference Mills2006: 16). As a unique enterprise of bilingual creativity, and as a re-integrated act that legitimately invites investigations from diverse perspectives across divergent academic disciplines, Chinese EFL learners’ poetry writing practice is sure to encourage their philosophic self-understanding, and their imaginative association with the rest of the world. Using the global language of English for genuinely creative purposes, my students naturally heighten their awareness of the interrelatedness of objects, events and people around the globe. They think and link to re-integrate the beautiful and the truthful as an organic whole, and they write to sympathize, to empathize, and to love. By writing poetry in English, each of them creates for himself or herself a ‘poetic identity’ – ‘different from autobiographical self’ (Hanauer, Reference Hanauer2010: 62). The following student writing sample by Pengpeng Hou sufficiently indicates that its first-person speaker is spiritually elevated to transcend the limits of the self, and establishes a loving connection with the whole human race.

The imaginative re-integration of a similar kind can also be seen in Lei Wang's writing sample ‘Coal’, but it seems to take place on a broader basis, even broader than the existing world, as it simply transcends time, space, and human empirical knowledge.

This poem re-integrates multiple types of images from the remote past and the immediate present – factual and imaginary, down-to-earth and sublime, human and natural, transient and transformative, dead and deathless – so that it surpasses any mechanical, quantitative descriptions of coal, becomes a new myth of coal on its own, and shows the magical process of the wonderful metamorphosis of dark coal into a valuable source of light. Metaphysically speaking, this poem is a timeless incarnation of many lives and many possibilities, in which the past, the present and the future are juxtaposed into a synchronic order, the earth is reborn into a global stage for the enchanting performance of the coal-consuming flame, and the burning fire of coal is universally associated with the perpetual life-force of poetic imagination and inspiration, transforming dead facts into living truths.

While writing poetry in English, Chinese EFL learners are given the opportunity to examine the intricacies of both languages by trans-creating the ‘untranslatable’, and re-integrating two diverse modes of expression by honouring their innate peculiar features. It is through this bilingual process that they consciously search for universality-in-diversity, and gradually acquire the ability to connect the separated, which in essence accords with Georg Simmel's theory (Reference Simmel, Frisby and Featherstone1909 [1997]: 171):

Here, on the terminological basis of ‘contact literature’, I would like to refer to connectedness in this context as ‘contactedness’ or ‘contactivity’, which paradoxically implies distinctness. Without distinctness there is no point to connect or contact. Similarly, without the notion of the other, there is no notion of the self. To explore the other (language, poetry, or culture) is a way of knowing the self. The phonetic, lexical and syntactic otherness of English inspires Chinese EFL learners to contemplate on the uniqueness of their native language and its cultural assumptions, and to create poetic effects of an intercultural nature, and show universal human values with diverse images and rhythms. After all, ‘contact literature’ is meant to contact, to show, and to be shared. ‘Showing is sharing – always the nice thing to do’ (Smith, Reference Smith2007: 185).