Poem About How Would Do Anything to Have Something Again Poem About Mistakes

On the morning time of my lx-fifth altogether, someone added me on Instagram. Every bit usual, I accepted information technology. Normally, things end there. But this person started warming up towards me, enquiring about my health and all that. Politely, I said 'thanks'. But I was careful enough not to say 'and you?', hoping things would end at that place.

They didn't, for this person went on with more greetings, suggesting something important that I should know. I went into a prolonged silence until he or she sent a '?' That's when I decided to block them. Afterward, I wrote a poem containing the line in the title. I had meant to write 'I don't believe in instant friendship' but because of a slip of my pen, the line became 'I don't believe in instant friendshop.'

Ah, I heard myself say, 'I dear information technology.' There and then, I kept the line and it started this commodity off.

What are creative mistakes?

Creative mistakes are ones made by blow or deliberately. In poesy, this comes from misreading, a powerful tool of creativity oft ignored or dismissed by the literarily correct. Years ago, when I started reading Dana Gioia on the recommendation of a US-based poet, I found I was decumbent to making mistakes whenever the poetry bored. Unremarkably, I would chuckle to myself and went on. But information technology was around that fourth dimension that I started recording my mistakes wherever they appeared on the pages, because – I'm at present on the bespeak of sharing my near secret underground with you – I plant my mistakes inducive to verse. Many of the lovely mistakes later on concluded upwardly finding their way into my poesy, the following 1 bearing a living proof.

Reading Dana Gioia, wrongly that is (1)

I thought I saw
Pare pain
But I was disappointed
To see
"feel pain"
when I read it again

Honestly, I similar my mistake improve than the timid 'feel pain' because mine was more creative. Who wants grammar if information technology is only meant to hamper creativity and innovation?

As mistakes came thick and fast, particularly when attention slacked and involvement weakened because of the reading stuff getting tedious, I began recording them on the margins and keeping track of them wherever and whenever they appeared, turning them into poetry or fiction when the occasion suited.

Terminally Poetic is a collection of poetry I had had fix for submission past 2000. After numerous rejections worldwide, I put information technology bated and had completely forgotten information technology until tardily 2019, when I came across information technology by accident in search of other files in my computer and idea: Why non? Blindly, I found the starting time publisher online that I bumped into and sent the MS by email. Overnight, I received acceptance for publication by return electronic mail, the fastest acceptance in my writing life. There are quite a number of poems in it that contain deliberate mistakes, such as 'Bad Writing' below (2):

yous reject me because I write badly
you lot reject me because I write ugly
you reject me because I write unintelligibly
you reject me because I write ungrammatically even ungraciously
you reject me considering you are scared shit of my bad writing
because it turns your stomach
it stinks yes its stench right under your nose
I tend to agree with you
yous are too good for me as well fucking good for me
too bloody good for me
you and your bloody fucking good thing that yous call arts literature or poetry
that y'all write as well practiced in english
I accept been writing desperately all these two hundred years don't you know that
I take been using your fucking english to write badly don't you lot know that
your english that is easy to fuck with but hard to utilize
your english that wins you prises but gives me shit
your english language that excludes and extrudes us baddies
the "bad chinese" remember the message said a 100 years ago?
the bad chinglish that'south me and my bad writing
written on your wall
and in your face

1 recalls words similar 'caused taste', 'angry' and 'his work needs editing' from editors who refuse to publish me over the years, words that I've somehow heard on the grapevine. But how tin ane be totally correct if not born into the language and why tin can't one claim it as one's own if one works hard enough to acquire and has the intelligence to achieve the ownership in one'south ain way? Do they expect a artistic person to be tamed past their grammar that one time produced ungrammatical and wrong lines like 'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne', by Geoffrey Chaucer?

Early signs

In the early on 1980s, when the author was a university student majoring in English at a Wuhan academy, what he disliked most of all was countless examinations as that kept him constantly decorated reviewing his homework and trying to cram all the data into his encephalon. Amidst many an English poem he wrote expressing his frustrations and discontent, at that place is this one that captures the mood of the poet'south fourth dimension,

'Everything for examinations' (3)

Everything for examinations
Whether Shakespeare or Milton
Go for examinations, Swift!
And you lot, too Byron!
Nothing is left for thought
Nor for creation and imagination
But let us sing praises to God
And savour being bored

Far from perfect, this verse form – written long before the poet went overseas to an English-speaking country – contains all sorts of blemishes of a thought burst although it conspicuously demonstrates his desire to break off the shackles put on him by the educational system in early on 1980s China. And, in another poem, written about the same fourth dimension, the tip of an iceberg of mistakes begins to sally, with all its fresh ungrammarly – annotation that 'grammer' is the to the lowest degree favourite word with almost of the states English majors at the fourth dimension, and with the poet in item despite the imposition of it upon all of them. The poem goes thus:

'I dearest that naked tree, it's thee' (4)

I beloved that naked tree, it'south thee
I beloved to lean against her nakedness

I dear that whispering tree, it'south thee
I love to hear her whispering lips

I dear that secret tree, I's thee
that has seen us both be

I idea of correcting that 'I's tree' and found it impossible. Correcting it as 'mine thee', 'my thee', 'It'south thee', 'Its thee' – hang on: Why correct if the mistake makes more poetic sense? And why endeavor to correct something written thirty-7 years ago as if something done now is more correct than something done more three decades ago? Going by that logic, this would exist obsolete in some other thirty-seven years, wouldn't information technology? What does being correct mean anyway? Correct by whose standards? By poesy'south standards? If then, that is right because, in this poet's view, mistakes are what makes poetry.

Mistakes make poetry

Twenty-two years after I wrote the poems, I returned to the same university, Wuhan Academy, where I did my major in English (1979-1983) and started educational activity creative writing equally a professor, and an Australian citizen, to Chinese students. While it was a pleasure to see students grow in linguistic strength, it was a pure hurting to correct their work total of grammatical infelicities that never seemed to go abroad even so hard one tried to work on improving them. Frustrated to a helpless degree, the poet plant himself inspired rather than daunted past their mistakes and wrote a poem to express his perverse enjoyment in 'Bad English':

Bad English (5)

Teaching English in Prc
The old professor can't assistance
The fact that his pilus is turning grey

An email letter of the alphabet leaves him
Upset for days without knowing why
That begins with this: 'Dearest Mr professor Richard'

Pupil papers are written in such a fashion
That how much endeavor goes into fixing them
He invariably sees a new English cropping up postgraduateswise:

'I felt slow when days afterwards days were spent meaninglessly'
'He doted him and he doted her'
'Grandma cared me so much she does something out of expectation'

The professor decides that it's probably but equally well
His grasshopper artillery powerless confronting the onslaught
Of an English in spite of itself

So, in his last grade, he institute time to speak
Their language: I felt heady at the thought
Of returning to Oz as living here I often feel boring

I objected myself speaking such bad English
Although I practise care yous and I admire you

For things like this: 'On that twenty-four hour period'due south noon'
And your brilliant slips of pen, similar this:
'We must all uphold human being tights'

In locating this verse form in a sea of poems in my own calculator, something else was brought to my attention, a drove of poetry that I had published in the late 1990s, the one titled Songs of the Terminal Chinese Poet. I spent a yr (1994-1995) writing this book while working on my PhD thesis on the literary representations of the Chinese in Australian fiction. It was published in 1997, two years after my PhD thesis was successfully passed. To the best of my memory, it'due south in that book that I deliberately created mistakes for the purpose of ridicule and criticism, which, in retrospect, could be termed 'creative and critical mistakes'. It took me no time to find the one and include it, 'Canto 2', here, equally follows,

2 (6)

thinking of destroying everything
thinking of destroying a civilization
a civilisation as long as the footwrappings of a feet-bound woman
we are a dying race
no longer tin we live on our own
but must we metamorphose by losing our natural language
our beautiful sexy body
into something we would take been ashamed to see
something hairy something and then self-centred
that only a T. 5. set can match

but our women are lovely
with their milk white skin pearly pearly pearly
their eyes dark and deep sparking desires of ancient races
who mixed mixed and mixed indiscriminately
in profuse promiscuity
which is the reason why everybody tin can die a death of dearest
in those dangerous pools of pure sexual activity
and come up out alive
with more than energy and a lifelong longing for the mix of bloods
that creates the purest of pure things

now the ancient want is upon us
wherever we are
in south africa or america in republic of austria or australia
in canada or canaan in paraguay or paradise
amongst british or brutish
high german or germ
french or frenzy
wherever we go nosotros stay
built-in exiles willing to dice in lands non their own
traitors capable of translating the falsest messages into truth
liars used to revolutionizing the system of invention
every once in a while
hopeless slaves selling our brains like bodies
to the masters of a mad civilization

In 2012, when I attended the NT Writers Festival, someone from Scotland interviewed me and later on produced a podcast titled 'Ouyang Yu: Creative Mistakes'. I recall talking at length virtually the mistakes and how to use them. But I don't desire to mind to myself talking over the cyberspace. If you are interested in that, why don't you do that yourself?

Mistakes brand poetry that is bilingual

If the 1990s were a fourth dimension in which the poet was struggling with his voice, yet wrong and erroneous it was found to be, to flare-up upon the scene of Australian poetry, the 2010s saw the poet making more conscious efforts with artistic mistakes along the lines of bilingual verse and prose poetry. This coincided with his pedagogy creative writing in a less literary university in Shanghai where the students had a background in areas other than literature. Hence more mistakes homework-wise that allowable more of his attending and resulted in more mistake-oriented poems, such as this one below,

Miss Takes Taken (vii)

Don't be 累zy
Or 雷zy

番人ners never learn
they really are 烦人ner

Some like to play skytrue
Which is, of course, not my菲vourites

Shakespeare sai: Chinese students doo two much
ho me work bcaus they want2 bcom confucious

If you 做 that
My y'all live in intriguing time

Merely I know 瓦特 that is:
Rather be a 太平 dog，不做乱世 woman

Yellow long gone
Memory nevertheless a 赖夫

Because my students were all Chinese, they had no difficulty recognizing the Chinese give-and-take in the poem that audio like English, 瓦特 for 'what', 赖夫 for 'life' and 累 for 'tiring', all in audio, and also because I had initiated a teaching component known equally 'Bilingual Writing' that encouraged them to write more bilingually because, after all, it is a space, a third or fourth infinite creative enough to keep them going without having to constantly carp with the wonderment of whether or not the native English-speakers empathise them, my communication being: if they exercise non understand, it'southward their problem, not yours, and it means they have to work difficult to take hold of upwardly, not the other way circular.

This was based on a concrete experience I had while a young man majoring in English language in Wuhan. Whenever I wrote an English language poem and had difficulty finding the right word, I'd replace it with a Chinese word, as shown in the following lines from a poem, written on 23 September 1982:

Just practice you know that beneath it
Is burn down blazing, wild and cherry
That resembles the岩浆moving under a
However, haggard, sorry and pale
volcano?

The Chinese words, 岩浆, which means 'lava', that got me stuck in the eye of writing the poem remains in that location for skilful, turning into a living fossil of bilinguality (eight), i of the earliest impulses driving towards the product of bilingual poems across the decade of the 2010s, culminating in the Flag of Permanent Defeat collection in 2019, published past Puncher & Wattmann.

Re laxed and comfortable, with diversions

When I got my PhD, in early on 1995, and became permanently unemployed and unemployable in Australia, shortlisted by a dozen universities and ever rejected at the last minute, I thought what an irony that was. Despite my record of piles of publication and my impeccable English language, no panels of white Australian universities plant me usable for their purposes. I recall it's their mistake. A boringly uncreative mistake, besides, as much as a mistake as mine in even pursuing the wrong caste.

Commencement from 1996, after I was rejected by the dozen universities and by more than universities that didn't shortlist me, I decided to travel downward the path of decolonisation and de-theorisation. By now y'all'll probably take already noticed that I have not quoted one theorist. I didn't because I didn't desire to, every bit theories shackle the mind and hinder inventiveness and innovation; I have non come across one single theory book that inspired me to write error-ridden poesy and prose that are also bilingual. Unfortunately, few of the Western theorists know anything about the Chinese language, the verbal reason why I refrain from quoting a unmarried Chinese poem here with creative mistakes.

Over the years, for Ouyang to encourage Yu, or vice versa, for Yu to encourage Ouyang to engage in the innovative activities, they (Ouyang and Yu) collected sayings most the apply of mistakes wherever they appeared.

In early 2010, when Leslie Zhao, now Zhao Chuan, a playwright based in Shanghai, came to Melbourne to visit us, he brought u.s.a. a bag of 2 soaps, the shopping handbag containing these words that I institute interesting enough and recorded them and so and there:

We believe in long candlelit baths, sharing showers, massage, filling the world with perfume and the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again.

I don't know who the author of these words is simply I don't care because I like them. Then, on 19/viii/2012, and on FB, I found a remark past Corita Kent to this outcome: 'Goose egg is a mistake. At that place'south no win and no fail, there's merely make.'

If you don't stop me, I shall go on and quote ii more considering they gave me spiritual support in my darkest days when no ane gave a fuck about my experiments and there's no 1 in Australia who knew how to experiment my fashion, dorsum then and not even now. One by Ovid – I'll talk about him shortly come Covid-19 – who says: 'I don't right these poems; let them read as written' (9). I like this because he seems to talk most my poesy as I have been included in All-time Australian Verse more 10 times but I can unashamedly say I accept never revised ane single word of the included poems. And this, by Laurence Durrell: 'Heavy with sponges and the common mistake' (x).

In late 2004, I had a poetry reading organized for me by David Gilby at Charles Sturt University. From memory, it was on a bleak Sunday morning, around ix am. In that location was an audition of ane. Later, I wrote a suite of poems to commemorate the event, 1 of which is however findable online:

In Wagga Wagga

With the arrival of a poet
Everything seems to go wrong

A breakfast becomes plastic
A workshop with minimal omnipresence

Because rain, over the Murrunbidge River, supposedly stopped
Whatever interested, even as slightly as the rain

And three nights
No visits by a single possum

I know, the right spelling for the river is Murrumbidgee
And nosotros thus accept come total circumvolve

The wrong poem, or the wrongly written verse form, that got knocked back, is findable in my own computer folder and presented below as an example of the loneliness sustained back then:

Wonga Wonga (eleven)

about wagga wagga writer writes
I meet peppercorns with a david in them
I see karrajong with a zhang in them
I see plum-cherry trees with flowers in them
and I see Robert Timms with two Asian looking, Australian looking
women in it
and I remember, not too tardily, at Blue Mountains
I saw currawongs with a wong in
Them

ah, Wonga Wonga
Asian Asians

In Living After Death, my latest collection, published by MPU, and the first ane, of prose poetry, I have something about the mistakes, as follows,

7.43pm

Went to requite a talk at the schoolhouse where Human being Chen is instruction. Had a haircut later on dinner. Otherwise, daily details are not worth recording. One lives from day to twenty-four hour period. One writes. But how much of his writing lasts? Very niggling. If it does, he won't know. One simply fills in, hoping to win. Why win? Doesn't one win from twenty-four hours to solar day if he doesn't die, doesn't fall sick? He already wins. Why win more than mere living? Mere living from day to day? What is the obsession? Why the obsession? Youth is a wood of mistakes. Old age is a forest of corrections. Two forests, standing adjacent. Looking across a barren field of lived landscape. A to-alive landscape. Love is nothing but a sob. An orgasmic sob. Absorb? Abhor? Abhsorb? Love is nothing but an abhsorb.

Did you notice something that is ungrammatical or ungrammarly? What do you think if I telephone call my next collection of creative mistakes Ungrammarly?

Writing in the Covid-nineteen times budgeted the postal service-Covid-xix

Please don't go jealous of me if I tell you what happened to me in August 2020, the worst time in Victoria, Australia, every bit it entered and stayed in lockdown with nightly curfew imposed. I didn't test positive, and so in that sense there is no jealousy due. But I wrote 330 Chinese poems and 84 English language poems, a total of 414 poems in 31 days. What a number, for 414 rhymes in Chinese with death wanting death!

And out of the hundreds of poems I wrote per month, I'll choose one to end this piece with.

No

There is a no in now
A no in know
A no in stone, oh, no, a no in kowtow
Oh, no, a no in snow
A no in fnow, or flow is it
A no in carcinoma
A no in monolingual
A no in binocular
A no in olfactory organ
A no in immunology
A no in denote
A no in technology
A no in genocide
A no in sinology
A no in aberrant
A no in iconoclast
A no in monolithic
A no in homogenous
A no in Abo
A no in canon
A no in nostalgia
A no in ignorance
A no in due north
A no in nowadays
A no in ignoramus
A no in minority
A no in melanoma
A no in denounce
A no in enormity
A no in snobbish
A no in novel
A no in doornob
A no in nominee
A no in xenopus
A no in topknot
A no in normal
A no in albino
A no in monopoly
A no in shnook
A no in dissonance
A no in tenor
A no in window, oh, no, in noon
A no in Cnovid-19
And a no in nom de plus:

Nouyang Nyu

Y'all call up I'm going to provide you with a footnote detailing where and when I wrote this poem?

Other relevances

The other day, when I went in search of sites in relation to submission of my piece of work, I found a volume titled, fifty Mistakes Beginner Writers Make, and thought: Why didn't the guy write something like Thousands of Mistakes that You lot can Plow into Great Poetry?

And whenever you lot check submissions guidelines out, y'all run across things like you demand to 'ensure an error-free submission', y'all demand to make certain 'there are no mistakes' in your submissions and baby-like exhortations. Why don't they abound upward and know that mistakes are the goldmine of inventiveness? Will they never have enough of their newly built grammatical prisons that they are going to enforce on all artistic minds?

Allow me tell them this, in one case again: I don't believe in instant friendshop.

P.Southward.

I recall I've found the Ovid poem, as follows:

Excuses

Due to Covid-19
We can't help yous. Please visit us at www.y'all'llfindeverythinghereifyoutryhard.com

Due to Covid-19
Nosotros have all entered into hibernation known equally social isolation and cocky-distancing. Goodbye

Due to Covid-19
We are having virtual parties, separate merely together, all in information technology together

Due to David-nineteen
Nosotros can't do anything but just wait till restrictions are eased

Due to Ovid-xix
The world is overrun with poetry like never before when capitalism collapses

Due to Vivid-19
Nosotros are afraid we'll accept to wait till the 2nd wave

Due to Fervid-19
We are kind of cool at the moment, not wanting to meet, non wanting to talk, not wanting

Due to Livid-19
Nosotros don't encourage you to act like the protesters surging for a return to work

Due to Gorging-19
We have tons of toilet rolls, paired with mouth masks, for the taking

And tin can I pretend to exist an all-correct editor and tell Ouyang and Yu off past proverb: I'm lamentable that I have to say no because information technology'southward and then full of errors?

Footnotes:

(i) Published in Cordite and originally written on 19/3/2004; rev. 20/three/2004. Please refer to Daily Horoscope by Dana Gioia, p 63.

(2) Written in Kingsbury on 25/08/2000 and published in Terminally Poetic, by Ginninderra Press in 2020, p. twenty.

(3) Hand-written on 23/3/1983, from an as yet unpublished drove, No Title Whatever.

(4) Hand-written on 24/3/1983.

(5) Written, Sunday, 14/1/2007, at Room 402, Wuhan University, and afterward published in Voice & Verse, based in Hong Kong, Issue 39-40, March 2018, p. ix.

(6) Ouyang Yu, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet. Wild Peony Press, 1997, pp. ii-4.

(7) Written at viii.32am, Sunday eleven/6/2017, at room 308, hbl, suibe, based on my ain deliberate mistakes made on Blast Poetry Group two days agone, and published in Ouyang Yu, Flag of Permanent Defeat. Puncher & Wattmann, 2019, pp. 190-one.

(eight) Readers are referred to my collection of Chinese and bilingual Chinese-English language poems written in the 1980s, titled, Breathedings (《呼的吸》), published by Otherland Publishing in 2019 and bachelor with Otherland Publishing.

(ix) In his The Poems of Exile, p. 86.

(10) In his Selected Poems, p. 28.

(11) Written in Wagga on 12/9/2004, 'karrajong' meant for 'Kurrajong' and 'Karajan'.

Image past: Anna Gru

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Source: https://overland.org.au/2020/11/mistakes-make-poetry/

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