1: Exiled Poets

I start with the first poem of the 300 because, as the song says, the very beginning is a very good place to start. Happily, it turns out that the First Poem of Encountering is a great introduction to a common theme in Chinese poetry: the exiled poet.

Westerners are used to thinking of poets as outsiders, bohemian border-dwellers glancing with skeptical eye at society. Chinese poets were also often outsiders, but many came to this position later in life. In Tang dynasty China, government position and social status were determined by a rigorous exam system, which tested knowledge of traditional religious, philosophical, and poetic texts. Exams were graded for literary merit, so any government official in Tang China was likely to be at least a competent poet, with a memory keyed for literary allusion. This, in turn, meant that whenever political upheavals resulted in officials being deposed or dispatched to distant, pestilent regions of the empire, those officials turned to poetry as a comfort in exile -- hence the number of Chinese poems that deal with distance, loss, and life on the road.

Zhang Jiuling (Wikipedia bio here) was a more than competent official: a standout at the exams, from a family with a long history of official service, he became chancellor (like a cabinet member) to Emperor Xuanzang in the eighth century CE. He was honest and upstanding, an advisor on all matters of government, but rivals conspired against him and he was exiled to Hubei province, far from the imperial capital at Chang'an. He wrote the Poems of Encountering during his exile. In the contrast between the kingfishers, ensconced in high office and thus perfect targets for wandering hunters, and the far-flying crane, I see Zhang embracing his life as an exile, far from the machinations of government power that plague the "great and glorious."

This basic allegorical level opens the doors for discussing deeper Taoist themes, which I'll raise tommorrow. In the meantime, let's think what our political discourse would be like if all our leaders were poets. At the very least, it'd be more interesting to hear!