The first poet to write in his native Taiwanese after the war, Xiang Yang published books of Taiwanese poetry during the period of martial law and took a forceful stand against the surrealism that prevailed in Taiwan's literary circles during the early 1970s. Marching to the beat of his own drummer, he created a unique style of poetry in the form of ten-line poems. For these, he drew from both the rich resources of rural folk culture and the great works of classical Chinese literature. They were like two wheels of a bicycle that brought him to Formosa's seashore and dense forests, leaving their indelible tracks on the realm of modern poetry in Taiwan.

Xiang Yang-or Lin Chi-yang as he was first known-was born in Guangxing Village in Nantou's Lugu Township in 1955. The village sat at a major crossroads, and from the front of his house he could see Mt. Dongding, which is famous for its oolong tea. The family's neighbors and friends all grew tea, and in 1960 his parents opened the first teashop specializing in the tea of Dongding.

Xiang Yang recalls those days fondly: "When Mother was tasting teas, the scent would permeate the shop and rush at the nose. Like blooming flowers, it would fill the nasal passages with a sweet, beautiful and relaxing aroma. The golden brew would pour from the narrow spout into the cup like a golden spring flowing into a valley." Tea leaves need to be sun-dried, so Lugu seemed always bathed in sunlight. Hence the penname Xiang Yang ("toward the sun").

Greatly moved by the "Taiwanese Folk Drawing" column that the Japanese painter and writer Tetsuomi Tateishi had authored during the Japanese era, Xiang Yang began, untutored, to make woodcuts. The Selected Poems of Xiang Yang (1999) features his own "Plains Tribe Mother and Child."

Birth of a poet: "The Lament"

When he was eight, his mother cleared out half of the teashop and turned it into a bookstore that also sold stationery supplies and magazines. An introverted boy, Xiang Yang happily read books amid the aroma of tea. When he was in third grade, he started reading classics that mixed literary and vernacular language, such as The Romance of the Eastern Zhou and Outlaws of the Marsh. He moved on to read Qiong Yao's Outside the Window and Yu Qi-min's Dreams of Basketball and a Lover. He even read Abacus Math, The Three Principles of the People, and The Compendium of Major Laws of the ROC.

As for magazines, he started with Crown, Modern Literary Magazine, and Student Science and went on to read Today's World and Culture Banner. He witnessed the war of words between Li Ao in Literary Star and Hu Qiuyuan in China Magazine. The wide range of reading matter made him sharp and quick-witted, and it would indirectly affect his later observations and reflections about society.

In 1968, when he was at Lugu Junior High School, he brought together some classmates, including Lin Bingcheng, to establish the "Verdant Peaks Literary Society." When he was 13, Giant, a magazine edited by the poet Gu Ding, accepted his first published poem: "To Whom Do I Give These Worries?" But it wasn't until he read the classical lyrical poem "The Lament" in Songs of the South that he really began to dream of becoming a poet.

When he was in eighth grade, his parents applied for a permit to sell stamps and another to sell tobacco and alcohol. By then he had already read all the books his family was selling, so he wrote to bookshops on Chongqing South Road in Taipei, asking for their catalogs. He decided to purchase "The Lament" sight unseen. It turned out that the version he received was a copy of a hand-written Ming-Dynasty edition. It lacked annotations or a guide to pronunciation. When he first opened it, he couldn't make heads or tails of the first sentence of classical Chinese: "A prince am I of ancestry renowned / Illustrious name my royal sire hath found / When Sirius did in spring its light display / A child was born, and Tiger marked the day."

"Back then the money you had to put together to buy a book was no small sum, and I simply wouldn't let myself believe that I lacked the ability to understand it!" Xiang Yang pored over it, and after seven days he had memorized all 2400-plus characters in the poem's 372 verses. With only a hazy understanding of what it meant, he started to copy it down. "I hoped to 'copy' it into the depths of my mind, so that later, when I understood the language, I could go back and ruminate on the poetry."

Apart from giving Xiang Yang the determination to become a poet, "The Lament," an ancient work written some 2300 years ago in "the tongue of the southern barbarians," would also later inspire him to write poetry in Taiwanese.

During his three years at Zhushan Senior High School, Xiang Yang formed a literary society with some kindred spirits. Together they studied Du Fu, Li Bai, Su Dongpo and other classical poets. While practicing writing poetry, he and his fellows also passed around and read works by modern poets, including Zheng Chou-yu, Luo Fu, Bai Qiu, and Ye Shan (Yang Mu). In 1970, they established the Diyun Poetry Society. Serving as the editor of the society's poetry journal, Xiang Yang pushed open a door to modern poetry. On the one hand, the job helped him to shape his own poetic voice as he read and created modern poetry. On the other hand, he collected many rare journals and collections of modern poetry to help him write columns about poetry, and these helped to strengthen his foundation of knowledge about modern poetry and literary theory.

Xiang Yang began to try his hand at 10-line poems in 1974. After honing his technique for 10 years, he published Ten-Line Poems in 1984.(Chiu Ko Publishing)

The theater of Taiwanese poetry

In 1973, Xiang Yang entered the Japanese department at the College of Chinese Culture (now Chinese Culture University), which is located on the slopes of the Yangming Mountains north of Taipei. As a sophomore, he took over leadership of the college's Huagang Poetry Society. At the age of 20, he began to mull over his own creative issues: "What do I want to write? How can I get out from under the shadow of earlier generations of poets and blaze a new trail? Can I create modern poetry in my mother tongue?" His father was seriously ill, and Xiang Yang wondered whether he could write poetry in language that his father would understand when read to him. Xiang Yang adopted "The Lament" as a model, and chose to write 10-line poems. It was a strict form, reminiscent of classical Chinese poetry, but he infused it with the earthy language of contemporary Taiwanese. He thus created a "Taiwanese poetry" that had its own style and special character.

But writing Taiwanese poetry is easier said than done. Through high school, he had acquired no knowledge of Taiwanese history and culture via his formal education. He could manage to get by in everyday conversation in Taiwanese, but taking it to the level of a literary language-let alone the highly refined and concise language of poetry-was a daunting task. Beginning in his freshman year of college, he began to run off to the library to flip through magazines from the Japanese era, including Taiwan Youth and Taiwan, as well as the newspaper Taiwan Minpao. From these, he gained historical and geographical knowledge about that era in Taiwan history. He also encountered Tsai Pei-huo's Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary.

"If there's a model," goes a Taiwanese saying, "copy it. If not, think of one yourself." Lacking books of Taiwanese poetry to model his work on, Xiang Yang recalled the performances of Taiwanese Opera and hand-puppet theater that he had often seen as a youngster at the Guangxing Theater near his home. He also recalled the radio plays he listened to in high school. "Taiwanese poetry is a lot like radio plays," he says. "With both, you hear words but don't see people. You have to rely on sound to convey plot development and express human emotions." Consequently, before finishing his Taiwanese poems, he would revise while reading them out loud. In his view, each poem was a like a play, and he was using his pen to create a stage. In 1976 he wrote his first series of four Taiwanese poems: "Family Tree: Blood Ties."

Captivated by hand-puppet theater and influenced by the theatrical language used in Taiwanese radio plays, Xiang Yang infused his poetry with a strong narrative element. When read aloud, his poems of that era have much the same feeling and intonations of Taiwanese opera. Take, for instance, "My Puppeteering Brother-in-Law." Here are its last two stanzas, as translated by Katherine Lu:

"Seeing us, Brother-in-law ducked his head and walked away. / I cursed him, for he was the Northwest villain of the day. / Sister ducked her head too and wouldn't say a word. / 'The hero of Southeast has little courage.' So I'd heard. / I couldn't believe that they had finally made up when, / Strangely enough, enemies could become friends again. / Mother was so happy, she kept patting me on the head. / 'You are the puppet hero in the show,' she said."

Ballad of Spring, a collection of Mandarin verse for children, was aimed at spurring interest in poetry among the young, and came out in 2002.

Connecting to his life history

"When I was 21," Xiang Yang explains, "I was exploring the expressions, phonology and rhythms of Taiwanese, and I was figuring out how to put its sounds into writing. I was not so much finding the language of poetry as drawing an outline of my life history-so that what had been a silent Taiwan noisily rushed into my young life, enlightening and tempering it."

In that era Taiwanese had been marginalized, and you could even be fined for speaking Taiwanese in school. Xiang Yang had no problems getting his Mandarin poems published in the literary supplements of newspapers, but his Taiwanese poems were accepted only by journals that paid nothing. "There's no future in Taiwanese poetry," warned many friends. Some people even offered their opinion that "Taiwanese poetry is low class." And sometimes there were political insinuations: "You must have ulterior motives for writing this kind of poetry."

For a newcomer to the literary scene who wanted to use "poetry in dialect" to enrich Chinese literature, these criticisms and suspicions weighed heavily on him, but they didn't keep him from continuing to write Taiwanese poetry. "If I didn't try, how could I know if Taiwanese could be turned into literature?" In 1985 he published the collection Songs of the Soil, which contained 36 Taiwanese poems. They were split into three groups: "Family Tree," "Village Record," and "City News."

In his essay "Spring Flowers Don't Dare Hope for Dew," the writer Song Zelai notes that back then there were numerous native Taiwanese poets, but hardly any were trying to write poetry in Taiwanese. When Xiang Yang published collections of poems in Taiwanese, he was breaking new ground.

Xiang Yang's "A Letter to Spring" is included on "Taiwanese Poetry Street," a thoroughfare in Tainan County's Yanshui Township.

Beautiful symmetry

Apart from using Taiwanese to bring new sounds to Taiwan's modern poetry, Xiang Yang would also challenge the free verse and surrealism that dominated the literary scene back then. A great lover of classical poetry, he began in 1974 to try his hand at poems with a fixed meter and fixed number of lines: 10-line poems with two stanzas of five lines each. He chose this form to demonstrate that modern poetry could still employ rhythm without making sacrifices in the areas of artistic expression or content development.

"There is something very beautiful about symmetry," Xiang Yang says. "From right and left, yin and yang, black and white, hot and cold, a poet has a response and finds a way to strike a balance or achieve a sense of harmony-perhaps it's music, perhaps it's an image, perhaps it's rhythm, or perhaps it's form itself. At the same time, the fixed form forces the writer to leave only what's best and to cut out what's inessential." Xiang Yang frankly states that early on his determination to use 10-line poems was rooted partly in a simple desire to do something different. Writing the poems was a bit like "finding a bird to fit a cage.' Later on, his explorations of the form took on a more spiritual aspect.

In 1984 he published Ten-Line Poems, a collection of 72 works. Among them was his 1984 poem "Stand," which in 1999 was included in the high-school textbook that was part of the official national curriculum. John Balcom wrote the following translation:

"You ask where I stand, in silence / I look up at the birds in the sky and refuse / To reply, among the crowd we breathe the same / Air, standing we experience happiness and sadness / But on this same piece of ground we / See things differently, at the same time / We see the crowds passing by / On both sides of the street. If we forget our / Different directions. I will answer you / That all people walk in their homeland."

The Nantou County Writers Information Hall held an exhibition on Xiang Yang's work in February.

A writer's political shackles

Curiously, the "native soil" appeal of Taiwanese poetry seems to be at odds with the classical form of the 10-line poem. How did Xiang Yang manage to combine these elements?

The idea of a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" and other such concepts were planted in Xiang Yang at the tender age of 10, when he read Sun Yat-sen's speeches on the three principles of the people. When he was in junior high school, Xiang Yang and classmates planned a community newspaper. They didn't end up actually publishing it, but they did create their own "Liberal Party." When his high school tried to force him to join the KMT, he refused, saying that he wanted "to get a better understanding of other parties." He wrote the China Democratic Socialist Party and the Chinese Youth Party, asking for their party charters to peruse.

In eighth grade he read "The Lament," which spurred a love of classical Chinese literature and particularly a love of poetry. In high school, he was captivated with the writings of the Taoist sage Zhuangzi, and he memorized passages from The Book of Songs. Under his teacher's instruction, he even practiced writing classical poetry. In his freshman year of college, he tried his hand at siliupian, an ornate style of classical poetry consisting of antithetical or parallel constructions of four and six characters.

These developmental experiences would be the threads from which Xiang Yang's precocious mind and meticulous thought processes would be woven. Although he firmly believed that "all people walk in their homeland," that idealism wouldn't spare him from feeling first-hand the cold winds of the "white terror" during the era of martial law.

After several career twists and turns after college, he was appointed to be editor-in-chief of the literary supplement of The Independence Evening Post in 1982. Back then, before the rise of opposition parties, the supplement served to a large extent to represent the voices of the Taiwanese people. Under his leadership, it would publish images, text and academic research connected to Taiwan. It was a major arena for discussion about native Taiwanese culture.

In March of 1984, the Taiwan Garrison Command charged the supplement with "disseminating Communist propaganda" and banned its publication on a day when it attempted to publish "The Evil Spirits of Politics" by Lin Junyi, chairman of the biology department at Tunghai University. The supplement was pulled from the paper before distribution. Upon hearing the news, Xiang Yang fell ashen-faced into his office chair, unable to imagine what bitter fruits he would taste as the result of such a charge.

Although it was more than 20 years ago, Xiang Yang still clearly remembers the course of events. Helplessly, he left the paper's offices on Jinan Road, holding in his hand the original draft of the "The Evil Spirits of Politics." Step by step, he walked to a terrifying location on Qingdao East Road that had no sign or institutional marker of any kind. After being questioned, he was released, and he continued editing the supplement. But up until he was appointed editor-in-chief of the paper in 1987, two groups of agents would make appointments with him "to have a coffee" every month. Lin Junyi, meanwhile, was effectively exiled to America. During the four years before martial law ended, he was not allowed to return to Taiwan.

Xiang Yang's Chaos won the Taiwan Literature Award for the best poetry collection published in Taiwan in 2007.

After 16 years, Chaos

From 1977's Looking Up at the Gingko Tree (his first book of poems) until 1987's My Cares, Xiang Yang published seven collections of poetry. But after he turned 32, he quickly shifted gears to work in media and then academia. With his jumps between literature, journalism and scholarship, he experienced a certain amount of anxiety.

Xiang Yang's Chaos (2005) made him famous after a long break from publishing poems. It included poems he had written from 1987 to 2003. Not only did the book win an award for Taiwan's best collection of new poems in 2007, but the name struck a chord with the general public. The Chinese character of the title was selected by popular vote as the best word to describe 2008.

"My verdict on 16 springs and falls: chaos. During the period when these poems were written, Taiwanese society moved from martial law to the lifting of martial law, from authoritarianism to democracy. Chaos prevailed and the pace of change quickened." Chaos described social and political change in Taiwan, demonstrating the poet's hopes for a more orderly world via poems of great charm that wove together numerous and varied elements, changes and voices.

"Chaos is in fact a kind of feeling. We exist in the only nation we exist in. Once you begin to feel that your nation is no longer a nation, chaos sets in." Xiang Yang adopts various post-modern techniques of inlay, collage and parody, and boldly questions: Must literature have writing? Can a poem not be left blank?

"A Torn Poem," which was collected in Chaos, was on the February 28 Incident, and it included some unwritten characters represented by little blank boxes. The blanks make the poem even more thought provoking. "Tongue-Biting Poem," on the other hand, mixes Mandarin and Taiwanese:

"What kind of age is this? What kind of age? / What sort of world is this? What sort of world? / Under dusk's dim light don't in boredom pick fleas to fight. / Before dark, your eyes already mistake a bottle gourd for a sponge gourd. / Common folk like us don't know what to do, don't know what to do. / What Loneliness! Born an ox, you pull your plow. Born human, you suffer."

Apart from being active in the political reform movement in Taiwan, Xiang Yang has unceasingly heralded the power of the people: "Whether in theater, film, literature, music or industry, so long as people from every realm believe that they can change Taiwan a little bit, so long as there are leaders in those fields, politicians won't be able to completely direct and change Taiwan by themselves."

Working in media and academia, he has often been required or invited to write columns, which have offered him a greater variety of creative directions. "Editorials are for the public realm. They are like searchlights, and your standpoint is clear. They shine so brightly that they can hurt the eyes. Columns, on the other hand, are private expressions of one's inner spirit. They're like the light from a small kerosene lamp, swaying and flickering, giving you warmth."

The Taiwan Garrison Command charged Xiang Yang with "disseminating Communist propaganda" because of an essay he published when editor-in-chief of the literary supplement of the Independence Evening Post. Consequently, he was regularly asked to come in for questioning.

Literature on line

In 1998, after conquering his middle-aged writer's fears of technology, Xiang Yang read a few books on web design before setting up his own personal website: "Workshop of Xiang Yang." He hoped to use the Internet to break through territorial, ethnic and even ideological barriers, building a new model for disseminating the literature of Taiwan.

"People have turned web-based writing into a whole new form of literature. Today, the spread of blogging has turned everyone into writers, and the trend is toward greater specialization." Xiang Yang believes that since the 1980s, traditional literature in Taiwan has been in gradual retreat along with contemporary mainstream media. Web-based literature, meanwhile, has room for growth and bright prospects.

Although he once thought that putting literature on the Internet was as ridiculous as putting a bookstore on Snake Alley, Xiang Yang now believes that "taking traditional literature from manuscripts and books and moving them online ought to be a new path to disseminate literature. Even if the web is currently a jungle full of commercialism and pornography, I'm afraid that the move is necessary."

The cover of The Selected Poems of Xiang Yang, which was published by Hung-Fan Bookstore, has a woodcut made by Xiang Yang: "Plains Tribe Mother and Son." In 1986 he was flipping through an issue of Minzoku Taiwan, a magazine founded in 1941, when he came across a column written and illustrated by the Japanese painter Tetsuomi Tateishi. Greatly moved by it, he edited and translated it for a series of daily columns in the Independence Evening Post's evening supplement.

In graduate school, Xiang Yang began, untutored, to make a plate for woodcut prints. Once he started, he couldn't put the chisel down. He went for 24 hours without sleeping, unwilling to let himself rest until he had finished the rough cut. He took to it with a resolve much like he took to plowing the fields of modern Taiwanese poetry. Even if the lonely road he has taken has been a rough one, Xiang Yang has courageously pressed on, determined to convey his reflections on Taiwanese history and his hopes and dreams for the future.

Greatly moved by the "Taiwanese Folk Drawing" column that the Japanese painter and writer Tetsuomi Tateishi had authored during the Japanese era, Xiang Yang began, untutored, to make woodcuts. The Selected Poems of Xiang Yang (1999) features his own "Plains Tribe Mother and Child."

The poet Xiang Yang, who has also worked as a scholar and journalist, draws from both the rich folk traditions of native Taiwanese culture and the great cannon of classical Chinese literature. Leaving a deep impression on modern poetry in Taiwan, he has not only turned Taiwanese into a literary language but has also created a new form with the 10-line poem.

Xiang Yang has collected a virtual city of books-more than 5000 all told. In 1998 he also established his own website-the "Workshop of Xiang Yang"-creating a new model for disseminating Taiwanese literature.