Breathing New Life into Literature:Walis Nokan’s Couplets the World Has Left Behind

A hardcover collection, the book has only a single couplet of poetry per page. The remaining space is left blank, giving the printed word ample space around it to breathe—and thus encouraging deep thought on the part of the reader. Poetry returns to its most primal state, where it murmurs, issues deep moans, and explores the realm of fantasy. With extremely refined language, it fashions questions one character at a time, which reverberate amid the empty spaces of the page.

Revolving. Dying out in
Spirit. A new beginning
—“Washing Machine”

The train of thought is still circling. Flip to another page, where the sounds of moving water transform into the echo of a bullet fired through the air—a bullet emerging from the laments of that very same poet:

Please call a halt to hostilities
I used to be such a quiet beast
—“A Bullet Shoots”

In addition to promoting cultural reconstruction and leading tour groups, Walis Nokan has worked diligently to pass along his love of writing poetry to the younger generation. He uses simple couplets to spark an interest in literature among his students.

Born in 1961, Walis began to compose modern poems when just a young man. Inspired by Xiachao Magazine, in 1984 he started using his Atayal name Wa­lis No­kan and became active in the Aboriginal movement in Taiwan.

Gradually gaining an understanding of the unique richness of tribal culture, he began to cultivate a strong sense of Aboriginal identity. At the same time, he began to realize deeply how tribal peoples had suffered from Han Chinese cultural hegemony and domination of resources. Those realizations broadened his cultural horizons and gave his writing style the deep, heroic and ingenuous qualities of the Atayal.

In 1990 he began to lead a publication about Taiwanese Aborigines called Hunter Culture. He and his wife, abandoning a comfortable lifestyle they had built over many years, moved from Hua­lien to his birthplace, the ­Shuangqi tribal village in Tai­chung, where, based on their status as elementary school teachers and literary types, they worked promoting cultural reconstruction. He was at the peak of his creativity and his social activism during this period. His collected poems, essays, criticism and journalism from those years won numerous awards and demonstrate great literary virtuosity.

“Participating in tribal reconstruction demanded a good portion of our energy,” he recalls. “As for collecting my work in books, I always regarded it as a hassle, thinking, ‘Do I really need to publish them in book form?’”

But the spark of literature is perhaps always unanticipated. It turned out that during these years a new literary brew was simmering inside Walis.

“As teachers, my wife and I encountered a lot of problems,” Walis says. “The most obvious was that as soon as you mention the word ‘composition,’ students get anxious.” Walis explains that the response holds for expository writing but also for reading literature, especially his beloved poetry: “Quite a few people believe that poetry is too obscure and hard to understand. They’d always rather choose to read fiction or essays. Consequently, poetry comes to seem more and more distant from everyday life.”

In early 2010, just after elementary schools came back from break, Walis stood at the blackboard, hoping to refocus students’ attention by recalling some of the previous year’s major events. He noted the Copenhagen Summit on climate change, the house arrest of Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, and so forth. And as he listed the events, he provided some relevant background. At that moment, a student who often had ideas asked the teacher: “Could you use poetry to comment on these major world events?”

It was thus that Walis took the content of that day’s lesson and slowly transformed it into poems of the simplest kind: couplets.

On Suu Kyi’s house arrest, he wrote: “Yettaw, please enter my lakeside residence / This request, freely given, is offered in exchange for 18 months of house arrest.” To describe Obama’s victory in the US presidential election, he wrote: “Obama flies toward the world, trying to gain leverage with Muslims / Standing on the fulcrum, he turns the world half black.”

After taking this opportunity to reacquaint himself with the small yet robust poetic form of the couplet, he discovered how well suited it was to teaching poetry. Simple and accessible, requiring only a simple metaphor or one direct idea, it allows everyone to create.

He began to lead students to create, largely on themes drawn from their own lives, using simple language to convey meaning. Take, for instance, the couplet “Key,” which reads, “On love, words offer no proof / Please turn my heart.” The poem describes how hearts must be unlocked. It has a profound meaning that is intimately connected to people’s life experiences.

The volume contains several groupings of poems, including “Sociology Class,” which includes those early couplets prompted by that classroom discussion of current events. Quite a few of the groupings relate to domestic life, but an exception is “Palestine,” which includes the poem “Last Words”: “Dear children, our homes and our nation / All are over there in Israel.”

“If you want poetry to become truly a part of life, then writing poetry must become an ability that everyone has. Poetry can allow us to recover our spiritual nature, and it can raise the quality of language, saving us from the degraded linguistic realm of contemporary politics. Couplets provide a new outlet, and it’s a form of writing suited to invitations and sharing.”

As an accompaniment to his new collection, Walis has established “Walis’s school” on Facebook, which features poems that children have created in recent years under his guidance. These have attracted quite a few readers, who have begun to contribute works themselves.

“Reading and creativity are both kinds of invitations, and they’re also a form of sharing. In this networked age, poems are well suited to be put on the Internet. They can also be text messages. There are limitless possibilities.”

In a poem named “Cicada,” a young poet writes: “When I ask his name / He chirps ci-ca-da.” In another poem—“Wind”—a young author writes: “Incessantly on the move / My body is always following it.” Whether by displaying poems with a youthful exuberance or Zen-like flavor, whether by posting poems or commenting on others’ works on the Internet, Walis, a best-selling author of books, has found in Facebook a way to quickly communicate with his Internet friends. Some of them give him their poems and ask for his opinion. Others send private messages, allowing him to enjoy what is perhaps their first poem.

Demonstrating their authors’ ideas and holding so much meaning within two short lines, these couplets offer invitations, provide a means for sharing, and illuminate a new path for literature.