Poundian influences and misty poetics in Yang Lian’s concentric circles

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ezra Pound’s The Cantos is a truly transnational feat, transcending different periods and geographical locations. The epic, ‘a poem including history’, expands the parameters of modernism in space and time, representing a diversity of culture and era through several languages, including Greek, Chinese, Italian, German, and French. The legacy of The Cantos then articulates the formation of a global poetics that has inspired writers, poets, and artists from Russia, Japan to South America. This article attempts to examine the extent to which Pound’s Cantos influenced a contemporary Chinese poet named Yang Lian (1955-). Between 1994 and 1997, Yang Lian, in his own words, attempted to ‘produce a Chinese version of the Cantos’ in his Concentric Circles. Yang Lian, exiled from China on the eve of 1989, adopts an Odysseus-like nomadic life that seeks to take on his own version of periplum. In Concentric Circles, Yang Lian adopts the form of an ideogrammic vortex where images move dynamically, intersecting, relating to one another to catalyse, convey and render emotion organically. This paper attempts to address the transmigration of Poundian influences on Yang Lian’s Chinese epic that exemplifies fragmented pattern, linguistic collage, structural discordance and avant-garde experimentation.