Musicality and Metaphor in the Poetry of Zhang Zhihao

Abstract

Focusing on a group of poems about the art of poetry writing, this article analyzes how contemporary Chinese poet Zhang Zhihao achieves musicality and metaphorical expressions in the poems. It also discusses ways that Zhang’s felicitous use of words, detail, structure, and form have impacted my English translation of the poems. Operating at the intersection of poetry study and translation practice, this article argues Zhang’s poetry of the everyday, which he articulates as “whatever the eye sees is poetry” is marked by technical virtuosity, melodious language, and vibrant images. This poetry distinguishes itself by inheriting the neatness and musicality of the classical Chinese poetry and echoes modernist American poetry on multiple fronts.

Acknowledgment

“Poetics of the Everyday” was first published in Copper Nickel in spring 2023.

Notes

1 Whitworth, “The Sound of the Poem,” 71.

2 Raffel, Introduction to Poetry, 43.

3 Zhang, “Poets’ Music Register,” 244–50.

4 Dickinson, “Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church—,” 1226–27.

5 Emerson, “The American Scholar.”

6 Raffel, Introduction to Poetry, 35.

7 Raffel, Introduction to Poetry, 43.

8 Williams, “This Is Just to Say,” 726.

9 Fish, “Introduction,” 12.

10 Hilbert, “Without a Net: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse.”

11 Steele, “Poetry and Precedent: The Modern Movement and Free Verse,” 65.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuemin He

Yuemin He has published on Asian American literature, Buddhist American literature, East Asian literature and visual art, and composition pedagogy. Her writings appear in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, Religion and the Arts, Chinese Translators Journal, Teaching Asian North American Texts (MLA 2022), Oxford Anthology of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2nd ed.), Metamorphoses, Ezra, The Cincinnati Review, Exchanges, 91st Meridian, Rattle, Renditions, Copper Nickel, and many other places. Her fellowships include a NEH summer institute fellowship, a Japan Study Association fellowship, and a Loser-Savkar Fellowship. Currently, she is an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College.