Posters to poem of the week have recently suggested that more Chinese poetry should be featured. Poets of the T'ang Dynasty were a popular choice, and are on hold for the future. In the meantime, this week's poem, chosen by Guardian writer Lindesay Irvine, provides an opportunity to discuss the work of a 21st century, avant garde Chinese poet and literary activist. "Someone in a Riot of Stones" is by Han Dong, one of the writers visiting the London Book Fair this week and taking part in a session on Contemporary Chinese Poetry in the Whitehall Room, EC2, on 18 April.
The poem appears in the current issue of Pathlight and will be included in the collection, A Phone-Call From Dalian: Selected Poems of Han Dong, to be published by Zephyr Press next month. The translator is Maghiel van Crevel.
Born in Nanjing in 1961, Han Dong graduated in philosophy, and taught Marxism-Leninism for some years before resigning to concentrate on poetry. He has compared the poet to a roof-tiler writing not for himself nor for his readers but to construct objectively the house of poetry itself. I thought of this image of roof tiles as I read the closing stanzas of "Someone in a Riot of Stones". For while the word "riot" implies wild disorder, the poem seems increasingly to gather the fragments together: it begins with the imagery of riot, but ends with a picture.
The poet is careful not to be specific, summoning the reader's imagination to complete the analogies: "Someone/ Like that, a riot of stones like that." It's no use asking, "Like what?" You must delve into your own store of memories and associations. One person might think of Tiananmen Square, another of last summer's London riots. We may see anti-capitalist protestors hurling stones at a bank, or law-abiding religious citizens stoning a "sinner". The figures in the poem could be stone-throwers or the victims of a stoning – or both.
Perhaps, though, the stones themselves are riotously tumbled about. They could be stones once deposited by a volcano, natural geological wreckage. They could be the remains of a wall or a great building. The reader brings his or her own vision to the poem at the beginning, and then lets the poem lead, develop, correct the vision. It's almost a collaborative work.
I imagine (primarily) an ancient site, perhaps on film. These stones are magnetically attractive, and the visitors to them engage with them according to personal temperament, cautiously, enthusiastically, riskily. The manner of engagement is varied. There is the "crawler" who moves slowly, and the lizard, which makes no movement, contrasted with the "Athlete leaping among riotous stones" and the inanimate, unintentional "Stone falling down on stones". These figures are behaving in ways that mirror the ways of the stones, sometimes slow moving or stationary, sometimes "riotous". Stones are like that, depending on the way we use them or don't use them. The stones may symbolise forms of perception or processes in meditation. They may represent political power, although that would not be my own interpretation. They could of course be poems, or the words from which the poet makes the poems.
Perhaps the "one at the foot of an enclosure" is the poet – or builder. This figure is not the person in the thick of the riot, literal or metaphysical. It may or may not be the same figure who is "before the neat and orderly brickwork" (and in what sense is he "before" it?). At any rate, the two concepts, "riot" and "enclosure," suggest opposite constructions which may well co-exist in ancient ruins.
The poem gets progressively more difficult. Why does someone stop "when we stare"? Is it the stone's shape that is "six stones overlapping"? The transference of "one stone's warmth to another" is also difficult to interpret. "Another" might mean another person or another stone. In the latter instance it becomes an image of chain reaction, perhaps. It feels benign: it may be the very opposite of benign. The warmth may be the friendly energy of life, and it could be spilt blood.
The crawler reappears, and the image I see is the lizard, with its scaly back (a little like a tiled roof). It crawls not into the scene, as we might expect, but "onto the picture". The picture must be a physical object, and it's the one we least expect. Perhaps it brings to mind Marianne Moore's concept of poems as "real toads in imaginary gardens". Paradoxically, it's the moment when the idea of order is strongest that the form changes: the neat tight couplets give way to the looser tercet.
I've read "Someone In a Riot of Stones" as if most of the stanzas were end-stopped, but of course there is the possibility of complicating it further and, at least sometimes, fusing the syntax over the stanza break. Then we would have such strange suggestive phrases as "a riot of stones like that// Crawler …" and "even an unmoving lizard// Athlete leaping …"
The more you read this intriguing, resistant poem, the more koan-like it becomes.
Someone in a Riot of Stones
Someone in a riot of stones. Someone
Like that, a riot of stones like thatCrawler, one hugging the ground
Slowly moving, even unmoving lizardAthlete leaping among riotous stones, or
Stone falling down on stonesIt's not the one at the foot of an enclosure
The one before the neat and orderly brickworkStops right there when we stare
Transfers one stone's warmth to anotherIts shape is six stones overlapping
Now, as if craving rainwater, crawls
Onto the picture
• This article was corrected on 20 April 2012. In the original, the translation of Han Dong's poem was published with an extra article in the second line of the second couplet: "Slowly moving, even an unmoving lizard". The indefinite article should be omitted: "Slowly moving, even unmoving lizard". Also, the word "philosophy" in paragraph three of Carol Rumen's article was missing the initial "p". These errors have been corrected.