大家好，我们是重音社。
“Five Questions with Friends”是我们新开设的灵魂拷问系列，在这里，我们将邀请我们认识的海外亚裔写作者们来讨（吐）论（槽）跨语言写作这个事情。这个名单越来越长啦，敬请期待，漏网之鱼也欢迎在后台和我们取得联系！
Accent: Why do you write in English?Shangyang: As you know I was an engineering major and, unfortunately, I finished the degree. I always wanted to write poems. Since my family was reluctant to fund this construction of a crystal castle in the air, I needed money that could support my life as well as my artistic pursuit. Ever since I started writing in English, I was lucky enough to have received some of the most lucrative stipends and fellowships in U.S—that is to say, capitalism, as much as I despise it, still retains certain minuscule virtues—and I was able to tackle and compose my own artistry at an unencumbered space. Writing in English was never an intention, but as long as it is writing—whatever language it is in—so be it. A：What did you get from your MFA, anything good, awful, or meaningful?S：MFA is like life; the awfulness always precedes and overwhelms. And like life, there are moments one can satiate in afterthought. I’ve encountered some of my best friends in life—brilliant, successful writers whom I love and believe will change the world. But when you are making friends—alas, this inevitable, symbiotic paradox of life—you are also making enemies. MFA teaches me what kind of people to avoid. There has always been a tendency to fantasize and fetishize the MFA world, which I am not a fan of. It is not a paradise. There are more careerists than artists, which is understandable. I try to stay away from all the bureaucrats, hypocrites, and parasites of the literary community, but it seems that they, not surprisingly, outnumber us. Which is always the case in history. To be frank, this whole experience is a disenchantment—yes, it supplies platforms, in my case a rather selective and prestigious one, but so what? This disenchantment teaches me to return myself to the very moment when I first started writing the first line of poetry on the page—this is a lonely task you are undertaking: no one can help you; you are on your own.The letter M in MFA is, perhaps, also an abbreviated metaphor of ‘mudslide’. It’s difficult to keep one’s stance in a mudslide. There is such artificiality in a workshop environment, being constantly gazed upon and reshape one’s vision toward a collective gaze, whose source many times comes from a negotiated mediocrity. I am not completely denouncing such collective effort, but one must keep their own stylistic and aesthetic integrity to not be assimilated by an institutionalized, systematic way of thinking and taste. You want to be a true artist and not a VIP member of a circle jerk.
Perhaps that was all too dark and pessimistic. On a positive note, I have met some of the most precious people in my life, a few of my mentors and friends, whom I have profound bonds with. In this world of destined solitude, they changed my life. And also, for three years, with my financial situation generously supported by the program, I lived carefreely. I was on vacation six days a week. I read restlessly and wrote, accompanied by countless bottles of wine. And that was most helpful. I doubt that will be any other point in my life where I can fully, freely indulge in the art without compromising myself to the pragmatic matters of living. The luxury of time and space is sumptuous.
For those who are thinking it as a platform to start a career…. sure, why not. Though personally, I’d prefer to get plastic surgery at a second-rate hospital and become an influencer on Tik-Tok. Anyway, let’s don’t forget Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson (whose ascetical seclusion), or Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva (whose tormented, tragic survivals, not lives), who writes, “I can eat—with dirty hands, sleep—with dirty hands, write with dirty hands I cannot. (In Soviet Russian, when there was no water, I licked my hands.)” These, perhaps, are the romanticized versions of writers that are less popular nowadays, but why do you write in the first place? I think it is at least useful to keep these seeds of fantasy in our souls, as a simple reminder, or as Robert Frost puts it, “My avocation and my vocation/ As my two eyes make one in sight.”
A: What creative medium do you work in to take a break from your writing? S：Oh god, guilty pleasure? I am not paid enough to disclose that.A：Tell us a book/movie/play/artwork… that you have recently enjoyed.S：Last year, I was in Marfa with friends on Thanksgiving. It is a small town in central Texas devoted to the exhibition and creation of arts. I was fascinated by the contorted, distorted sculptures by John Chamberlain, who uses foam rubber, plexiglass, and aluminum foil to compose a representation of his sexuality. Now that I am in New York, the other day my friend dragged me to MoMA to see a new exhibition of Donald Judd, which we’ve seen in Marfa….But with Chamberlain’s tormented shapes in my memory, the succinct formality of Judd’s geometric investigation once struck me like the moonlight breaking through branches of a pine.Chamberlain and Judd were friends, yet their drastically antithetical works exist, somehow, as symbiosis, a mirroring paradox that reverberates and enlarges our perceptions and aesthetic boundaries of this rigid reality. Few sentences of Chamberlain’s artistic statement are still screwed in my mind, “The definition of sculpture for me is stance and attitude. All sculpture takes a stance. If it dances on one foot, or, even if it dances while sitting down, it has a light-on-its-feet stance….”
A: Share with us some gossip about your writing community.S：Well, there are just too many to tell…. Maybe we should find another time when there are glasses of bourbon in our hands when the oar of wind crosses waves of trees, which buries our voices. Wrapped in a blanket, I will tell you some deepest secrets.Shangyang Fang is a poet from Chengdu, China. A recipient of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and Joy Harjo Poetry Award, he has received fellowships and grants from the Michener Center for Writers, Vermont Studio Center, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Munster Literature Center (Ireland), Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland), and elsewhere. With his debut collection of poems forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, he now teaches at Stanford University, where he is awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry. Social Media Handle: https://www.instagram.com/shangyang_fang/?hl=en
扫码关注重音社助手微信，咨询创意写作相关问题