China and the West

Snyder, Gary. To the Chinese comrades [ID D29209].
The armies of China and Russia
Stand facing across a wide plain.
Krushchev on one side and Mao on the other,
Krushchev calls out
"Pay me the money you owe me!"
Mao laughs and laughs, long hair flops.
His face round and smooth.
The armies start marching—they meet—
Without clashing, they march through, each other,
Lines between lines.
All the time Mao Tse-tung laughing.
He takes heaps of money.
He laughs and he gives it to Krushchev.

Chairman Mao's belongings on the March:
"Two cotton and wool mixture blankets,
A sheet, two pants and jackets,
A sweater
A patched umbrella,
An enamel mug for a rice bowl
A gray brief-case with nine pockets.”

Like Han-shan standing there
—a rubbing off some cliff
Hair sticking out smiling
maybe rolling a homegrown
Yenen cigarette
Took a crack at politics.
The world is all one.

Crawling out that hillside cave dirt house
(whatever happened to Wong—
quit Chinese school, slugged his dad
left the laundry, went to sea—
out of the golden gate—did he make A.B. ?—)
black eggshell-thin
pots of Lung-shan
maybe three thousand years B C

You have killed.
I saw the Tibetans just down from the passes
Limping in high felt boots
Sweating in furs
Flatland heat,
and from Almora gazing at Trisul
the new maps from Peking
call it all China
clear down to here, & the Gangetic plain—

From Hongkong N. T, on a pine rise
See the other side: stub fields.
Geese, ducks, and children
far off cries.
Down the river, tiny men
Walk a plank—maybe loading
little river boat.
Is that China
Flat, brown, and wide?

The ancestors
what did they leave us.
Confucius, a few old buildings remain.
—tons of soil gone.
Mountains turn desert.

Stone croppd flood, strippd hills,
The useless wandering river mouths,
Salt swamps
Silt on the floor of the sea.

Wind borne glacial flour Ice age of Europe
Dust storms from Ordos to Finland
The loess of Yenen.
glaciers
"shrink
and vanish like summer clouds..."

CROSS THE SNOWY MOUNTAIN!
WE SHALL SEE CHAIRMAN MAO!

The year the long march started I was four.
How long has this gone on.
Rivers to wade, mountains to cross—
Chas. Leong showed me how to hold my chopsticks
like the brush—
Upstairs a vhinese restaurant catty-corner
from the police
Portland, oregon, nineteen fifty-one,
Yakima Indian horseman, hair black as crows,
shovel shaped incisors,
epicanthic fold.
Misty cliffs and peaks of the Columbia:
Old loggers vanish in the rocks.
They wouldn't tote me rice and soy-sauce
cross the dam
"Snyder you gettin just like
A damned Chinaman."
Gambling with the Wasco and the Wishram
By the river under Hee Hee Butte
& bought a hard round loaf of weird bread
From a bakery in a tent
In a camp of Tibetans

At Bodh-Gaya
Where Gautama used to stay.

On hearing Joan Baez singing "East Virginia"
THOSE were the days,
we strolled under blossoming cherries
ten acres of orchard
holding hands, kissing,
in the evening talked Lenin, and Marx.
YOU had just started out for Peking.
I slipped my hand under her blouse
and undid her brassiere.
I passed my hand over her breasts
her sweet breath, it was too warm for May.
I thought how the whole world
my love, could love like this;
blossoms, the books, revolution
more trees, sweet girls, clear springs.
You took Peking.

Chairman Mao, you should quit smoking,
dont bother those philosophers
Build dams, plant trees,
dont kill flys by hand.
Marx was another westerner,
it's all in the head.
You dont need the Bomb,
stick to farming.
Write some poems. Swim the river,
those blue overalls are great.
Dont shoot me, let's go drinking,
Just
Wait.

Sekundärliteratur
David Rafael Wang : This poem has no Chinese precedent, it achieves a distinct Zen humor. Snyder chides Mao for trying too hard to emulate Marx and all the Westerners. He suggests that progress is only an illusion and that Mao should be content with writing his poems and swimming in the Yangzi river, two activities for which Mao is renowened in China. Snyder further suggests that Mao should 'go drinking' with Snyder himself and not shoot him, since drinking was an activity which united all the leading Tang poets and shooting was an invention of the West. The poem not only warns Mao against progress, but also suggests simple living as an alternative.
Joan Qinglin Tan : In the poem we can certainly take Snyder's view of Mao as heavily romanticized but it would seem to be a mistake to read this poem as naïve. Snyder appears to be quite consciously generating a mythical Mao, a Mao who can stand for the aspects of both ancient and modern Chinese culture that he admires, yet a Mao and a new China that he also has an ambivalent attitude towards. It is the mythical Mao who reveals the continued Han Shanian theme in Snyder's poetry. In the first three stanzas we can see Mao wearing the face and attitudes of the countercultural Chan master. In the final stanza, after a heavily nostalgic passage, Snyder gives direct advice to both the real Mao and the new China pleading with them to return to the simplicity of his Han Shanian, Chan Buddhist and ecological agenda. The criticism and disappointment with the political realities of the Chinese régime in the 1960s is sharply contrasted with a romanticism for the revolutionary Mao that finds its roots in the Beat attitudes of the 1950s.