#poets.

Summer is over.. so are we..

[As] purportedly overheard very late one evening by Su Guo 蘇過 (1072-1123), Su Shi’s 蘇軾 (1037-1101) third son, his father (then in exile and sitting in Snowy Hall 雪堂) became so overwhelmed by his repeated re-reading of Du Mu’s rhapsody on one occasion that he continued poring over it until after the fourth watch of the night, sighing mournfully as he did so, to the immense irritation of his attendants. In a thick “Western” Shaanxi accent, one of them turned to the other to say: “Do you have any idea what is so good about the poem, keeping him out of bed so late on a bitterly cold night like this, moaning away with bitter resentment?”, to which his interlocutor replied: “It does contain a good line or two.” At this, the first attendant retorted angrily: “And what the hell do you know about it?”. “I love that line in it that goes: “Angered were the people of All-under-Heaven, but none there were who dared speak up” was the reply.

The Tang dynasty author Meng Qi relates that when Du Mu was a censor in Loyang, he was not invited to a banquet attended by the luminaries of Loyang society at which Ziyun was to perform. Because Du Mu's duty as a censor was to discipline other officials, the host had been afraid that his presence might dampen the party. Attending anyway, Du Mu did hinder the conviviality of the gathering, but not so much because he imposed restraint on others as because he imposed none upon himself. Already drunk when he arrived, Du Mu alienated guests by simply staring at them, and enraged the other courtesans by paying attention only to Ziyun. Having offended everyone present, Du Mu got up and composed a poem commemorating his own discourteousness (Meng 1998, 18-19).

So I just finished the first week of the new semester, and as always the grad students are talking about our classes and how our students seem like they’ll be, and I keep hearing that one of the poets brought an egg into her class as an exercise, and I don’t know much about poetry so I’m thinking she just placed the egg on the table.