Yu Xiuhua, she is first of all a good poet
Originally, it is an indisputable fact that poets are marginalized. Poets have also recognized this. Basically, everyone writes for their hearts, as a companion in life, and for their own entertainment.
So, it is not a big deal if one poet writes dozens of poems, or if a thousand poets write tens of millions of poems. Most of them are related to poetry as a hobby and a means of understanding themselves. However, in recent years, the names of poets have always appeared in the public sphere, and that is in the form of entertainment and consumption. What is consumed is basically related to his identity or characteristics of the person. Starting with Zhao Lihua, the leader of Lihua, then the migrant poet Zheng Xiaoqiong, the Wu Qing poet Wu Qing, and Xu Lizhi, a migrant poet born in the 1990s who has committed suicide since last year. At the end of the year, Yu Xiuhua, a poet with cerebral palsy, was published by "Poetry Magazine", which caused thousands of waves. In the past half month, it has caused a stir among the media and the public. Yu Xiuhua’s home was also surrounded by the media. For a farmer or a disabled person to be watched and fully consumed, this is a bit overwhelming for anyone. Even several of her dozen rabbits died because of reporters.
So, for Yu Xiuhua, whether her poetry is praised or criticized, it makes her passively famous. But the acceleration of this name is her identity as a disabled person - she was dubbed as a poet with cerebral palsy. People sighed that a cerebral palsy patient actually wrote a poem like "I traveled across half of China to sleep with you"? This is the nature of human beings to seek novelty. If it weren't for her cerebral palsy, her identity as a farmer, and her writing poems like "I traveled across half of China to sleep with you" as a farmer with cerebral palsy, it would be difficult for the public to pay attention to Yu Xiuhua.
However, the public always only pays attention to those strange titles, just like Zhao Lihua's "Tennessee Pie" or Wu Qing's poem "White Cloud", completely ignoring that they also have many excellent works. What about poetry? As long as they feel that poetry is not what they think, and they cannot understand contemporary poetry, they will make a fuss, ridicule, and completely deny contemporary Chinese poetry. So much so that poets have become a negative label of an era. Even if they commit suicide or have mental problems, they are the exclusive domain of poets. This creates the impression that only poets are so abnormal and that the common people are all good and healthy. At this time, as a poet, I should say a few more words.
First of all, poets are still alive in this world and are still working hard to create an empire of poetry. Whether they are poor or rich, they have not given up on the Kingdom of Muse. They have been writing, expressing, and looking for the light of the narrow door. In the palace of language, while absorbing the essence of Western modernity, it inherits the excellent qualities of the Chinese poetic country, finds the light corresponding to the soul in the language of poetry, and realizes the purpose of using poetry to gain enlightenment and understand life. If everyone can be patient, truly understand and penetrate the subtle expressions deep in the language of poetry, and feel the tremors and shouts brought by modern poetry, that will be a blessing for poetry. If not, please put aside your criticism and do your homework.
Secondly, Yu Xiuhua’s poems are fortunate to be promoted and discovered by the poetry community. This should be her luck. Because she is indeed an excellent poet. The few poems that everyone laughed at were already amazing to the poets. The bold title of the poem "Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You" is not just unconventional. Rather, it serves as a bold expression of lyrical poetry. The whole poem is a free and flying journey of imagination and a collective explosion of language. Sleeping with you here can mean loving you or looking for you, but she gives up the common words, but directly and boldly enters the target imagination to let thoughts and emotions run.
The rhythm of expression is bursting, the passion is clear and full, the language expression is coherent but the semantics are changeable, and the extension of radiation is so broad and stretched - in fact, sleeping with you and being slept by you are almost the same, they are nothing more than the collision of two bodies. Power is nothing more than the flowers that force blooms/It’s nothing more than the virtual spring created by these flowers that makes us mistakenly think that life has been reopened... In most of China, everything is happening: volcanoes are erupting, rivers are drying/Some things are not cared about political prisoners and refugees/elks and red-crowned cranes at gunpoint/I go through the hail of bullets to sleep with you/I press countless nights into a dawn to sleep with you/I am countless and I run into one and I go to sleep with you. / Of course I will also be led astray by some butterflies / Treat some praise as spring / Treat a village similar to Hengdian as my hometown? /And they/are all indispensable reasons for me to sleep with you
There are also many poems, such as "Passing through the Cemetery", "Well Terrace", "Dream of Snow", "To Lei Pingyang", "Those Secrets Suddenly" "Dignity", "Wheat on the Threshing Floor", "Our whereabouts are unknown in this night" and many poems about rural life, I will not go into detail one by one. I think her poetry can join the ranks of first-class female poets. Both its width and depth have their unintentional or intentional height. Although a lot of writing contains unconscious expression and imitation, its current results cannot be treated as a label.
Finally, I hope that society can accept the poet's identity normally. Like everyone else, they do not rely on poetry to support themselves. They all have their own careers and ways of living. They just choose poetry in their hearts and need it to be managed and played as part of their lives. These are behaviors in the personal world and do not bring any impact to society and others. Harmful, why should we deliberately interpret and criticize poets? If you can, please carefully understand a good poem. If not, go around. The world is flat and everyone has their own path. That's it.