NARRATIVE POEM
叙事诗 · Yang Lian 杨炼
PART I
PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM: DREAM OF TIME
Allegro ma non troppo · Three albums · twenty-seven poems
PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM 1
Berne, Switzerland · 22 February–4 May 1955
PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM 2
Beijing, China · 23 July 1955–April 1974 (English edition)
PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM 3
Beijing, China · 4 May 1974–7 January 1976
Room where mottoes of destruction are mumbled
PART I · THREE LENSES OVERVIEW
Lens I · The Date and the Rhyme — form as thought: architecture, grammar and music →
Lens II · The Thousandth of a Second After — memory, archive and historical time →
Lens III · Handed Down by the Wind — ghosts, lineage and intertext →
PART II
WATERMINT ELEGY: TIMELESS REALITY
Adagio pianissimo · Five sequences · twenty-six close readings
WATERMINT NARRATIVE 1 · REALITY ELEGY
WATERMINT NARRATIVE 2 · LOVE ELEGY
1 A street name makes a love look fondly back
3 Anniversary, 9th October 1989
4 Floating away – Written on water
5 Ocean, requiem, the first time and once more
WATERMINT NARRATIVE 3 · HISTORY ELEGY
Qu Yuan, 283BC, the 15th year of King Qingxiang of Chu
Yu Xuanji, 8th year of Emperor Tang Yizong (AD 841)
Thucydides, hesitating before Syracuse
W.B. Yeats, now and in the past, a Co. Sligo cemetery
WATERMINT NARRATIVE 4 · HOMETOWN ELEGY
2 Snow: dirge for another summer
WATERMINT NARRATIVE 5 · ELEGIES, AFTER LI SHANGYIN
PART II · THREE LENSES OVERVIEW
Lens I · The Stave and the Slow Step — form as thought: architecture, grammar and music →
Lens II · A Cell Built in Water — memory, archive and historical time →
Lens III · Your Accent into Mine — ghosts, lineage and intertext →
PART III
RUIN OF SAGES
Allegretto · Twenty-one close readings
Syracusan verses: Ruin of a life
A walk on carved stone with water-bottle in hand
Existence that seems snow – A perfect poem
One drop of inverted reflection
Empty book – Book brimming with fire
PART III · THREE LENSES OVERVIEW
Lens I · The Mask and the Measure Word — form as thought: architecture, grammar and music →
Lens II · Black Enough Not to Dream — time against time: memory, archive and history →
Lens III · The Listener in the Line — the dead who compose us: ghosts, lineage and intertext →
FURTHER READINGS · 延伸阅读
The Matter of Body Temperature →
A reading of Narrative Poem’s recurring images and bodily memories, asking how its spatial architecture makes room for a life’s singular events.
An essay on date, address and mourning, asking how poetry can know what happens only once without reducing it to an example.
A reading of Narrative Poem alongside YI and Concentric Circles, exploring poetic architecture as a place to inhabit, question and transform.
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