蔗尾蜂房

A Portrait of a Young Poet--Haoyuan Lo

◎  Lu-Chih Yang


What could be the effect of living in the dorm besides dinning out and doing the laundry all by oneself? Writing poems! Haoyuan Lo, an alumnus of the English Department of N.C.C.U., started his career as a poet in the year 1997 on the school BBS by way of the convenient dorm internet. Since then, Lo keeps a habit of writing and posting poems on the "poem board" with the ID "kama," and has published two collections of his BBS poems up to now.
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Besides the convenience of the dorm internet, the limited space for poems on the print media is another reason that Lo chose to issue his works on the Internet. "Poetry is the poison of box office receipts," Lo expresses jokingly. Thus, in order to be seen, the Internet becomes a right place for young writers to present their works (especially poems, for their size fits the screen well) and to interact with others of the same interest. However, Lo mentions that the so-called "world-wide" Internet is not as free and open as it appears to be. Many of the on-line societies concerning poetry are run in the style of salon. They lie in the lanes of the wide web world, and therefore, without the guidance of an experienced, they are not easily accessible.

Even Lo writes poems on the Internet, he does not like to be titled as an "Internet poet." For him, the Internet is merely a new platform for the long-existing literary form—poetry. Although recently a new term "digital literature," which involves multimedia elements, has risen from the Internet, from Lo's point of view, it has become a brand new genre and thus should not be called as "poetry" any more. Therefore, what is poetry? Lo claims: "Poetry is a premature something. It is not like prose, fiction or play—they all have a clear format, be it introduction, body, conclusion or rising part, conflict, climax etc. One cannot explicitly define 'what is poetry,' but one can use elimination. If a piece of literary work does not belong to any other literary form, it is poetry. Or, even though a piece of work looks like a fiction, if the author insists that it is poetry, it is poetry."

In writing poems, Lo intends to experiment on the possibility of the Chinese language and to push forward the boundary of its limit. When he first tried to write poetry, "It was like one who took up the camera (Chinese) and was ready to shoot, but discovered suddenly the camera lens was obscure, and that the camera needed to be focused again." Being an English major, Lo applies the linguistic knowledge to his writing not only to form the rhythmic harmony but also to stimulate the readers to reflect upon the blunt Chinese language and by which, to sharpen it keener.

"Poetry," Lo states, "is in fact a highly logical form, since it needs to express the idea within very limited space." Consequently, in order to understand poetry more profoundly, he suggests the English majors should take linguistic courses (Social Linguistics especially) together with Poetry course. Besides, he encourages the English majors to memorize famous poems. "It is exceedingly beneficial when you need to 'show off,' further more, it trains you to be accurate at choosing words."

2004