An Ordinary Day
Xue Di
Translated by Keith Waldrop with Wang Ping, Iona Crook, Hil Anderson and Janet Tan
2001 Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award
Permeated with the loneliness of exile, these sensual lyric poems straddle the gap between Chinese and American sensibilities, politics, and culture. Aptly, the speaker is fascinated with bridges: between spirit and flesh, good and evil, past and present, between one human being and another, and finally—with that bridge we may not refuse—between birth and death. In that often lonely crossing, the human body is both weapon—to attack and destroy other bodies—and heal-all. For this poet, writing is not just a way of life, but the way to live, making art from "ordinary days." The poems contain both autobiography and a kind of universal biography—in a profound way, they weep, and sing, for us all. “These poems insist upon their right to be heard, shoulder aside any number of slender books of poetry that cross the reviewer’s desk, and raise the possibility that we are in the presence of a poet who will give his generation a sense of purpose . . . An Ordinary Day is a revelation of the possibilities of contemporary poetry.” "Xue Di's poems are like snowflakes that dissolve, yet burn, on the tongue. Poems
of solitude, poems of exile, poems of longing—you hear the cry of things irrevocably
twisted." "'Crack the world to its core, you'll find a poem.' The ordinary world Xue Di
refracts is a landscape across which we are forced from end to another, moved by an
exquisite and soulful acknowledgement of human evil and the urgency of living counter to
evil. The extraordinary poems he fashions startle, and they insist themselves into us
through masterful imagery and a voice we trust and come to revere. 'Will my perplexities
be resolved?', he asks in one poem, and it becomes clear that any answer comes from
journeys like his that take us as far into human possibility as they do." "Xue Di writes about personal loneliness and the loneliness of what he elsewhere calls 'this pestilential century' in poems that proceed, often without transition, through startling sequences of juxtaposed images. An Ordinary Day is both carnal—the body is always involved in his thinking and feeling—and audacious in its insistence on sentiment as the marker of memories, the essential medium for human relationships. These poems are, themselves, 'Fields of flowers opened by light.'" Author photo by John Forasté
—The Journal
—Arthur Sze
—Forrest Hamer.
—Forrest Gander
about the author
Born in Beijing, Xue Di has since shortly after the Tienanmen Square
Massacre, been a Visiting Fellow in Brown University's Freedom to Write Program. His
poetry books include three translations in English: Circumstances, Heart Into
Soil, and Flames; and three in Chinese: Hui Yi (Remembering),
Chan Li (Trembling), and Meng Yi (Dream Talk). Also in Chinese, he published
a criticism of modern Chinese poetry, and has edited several Chinese poetry anthologies.
He is the two-time recipient of the Hellman/Hammett Award.
