by Gloria Dou


Attente à la fenêtre by Marcel Rieder

Sunlight through the window
pane, through the flora-embroidered
sheer curtain, upon the window
sill, upon the wooden
desk and chair, upon the
roses in the glass vase whose flamboyance
needs to be awakened by fresh
water, upon the sky blue
bedsheet and the visage
that just bids farewell to
nostalgic dreams,
as if the figure
would emerge from
the glaring green outside
the window.

This is a poem I wrote for an introductory poetry writing class during my exchange at Michigan State University in the fall of 2014. For one of the assignments, Professor Marcia Aldrich gave us a few pictures to choose from and then write a poem about. I immediately felt a strong connection with this painting, and the poem was done in one go, as if it was something that had always been waiting to get out of me.

*

“Do you work in the art industry?”, “Are you a literature student?”; from time to time, I get asked these two questions. Those people have got a point there: I am a gallery hopper, an opera goer and – occasionally – a poem writer. I exude a passion for art around people who know me. I am obsessed with René Magritte’s and Arthur Rimbaud’s works. Yet it is also true that one’s passion might not necessarily correspond to one’s greatest area of expertise.

I grew up self-conscious. When I was left on my own, I would indulge myself in literature books, or paint on every piece of blank paper I could find. Nothing engaged me as much as the soft-spoken beauty I found in literature and art. It was ingrained in my mind from an early age that there was no truth except literary truth in this world.

It’s not hard to imagine how my world view had been challenged as I grew older. At certain times, it was even smashed. But I always managed to collect the broken pieces and put them back together, as the pursuit for literary beauty and truth has always been an inalienable part of me.

I, however, came to the realization that doing art or literature might not be for me. No matter what I read or saw, I would always produce the same kind of utopia with my own pen. It neither penetrated the surface of our life in as intelligent a way as Magritte did, nor was it relatable with as raw a passion as Rimbaud’s. I knew that wouldn’t work.

As a result, I chose to shift my attention to linguistics, a discipline of study that requires less of the emotional and more of the logical. I was made to look at the world through new lenses. Attempts of discovering meaning through data made me feel secure. When I was drawing trees or doing my stats, my literary self was dormant. I love social media, and thanks to Professor Rodney Jones, my earliest mentor, I learned that doing discourse analysis would be the perfect way to transform my newly discovered passion into a career. While working for one of his projects back at CityU, I was impressed by how fun it was to collect, code and analyze the comments under YouTube videos, as well as by how much they had to reveal about the society we are living in. To me, the kind of work Professor Jones engaged in was practical, meaningful and, most importantly, compelling. It finally led me to undertake a PhD in sociolinguistics at HKU.

*

I’m reading very little poetry nowadays, and I haven’t written new verses in months. It is not, however, because I no longer believe in the utopia and soft-spoken beauty I used to find in poetry; it is only because I no longer have to search around for it. When I come across beautifully composed lines, I still stop and marvel, and let out gentle sighs. Poetic truth and beauty is ephemeral but also everlasting, just like the prime of youth. Rimbaud has said it well:

Oisive jeunesse
À tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! que le temps vienne
Où les cœurs s’éprennent.

Published on: October 12, 2018 < Back >