An artist and poet, Yan Li, founded the Beijing Mid-Autumn Poetry Festival in China and lived between America and China. My first visit to An artist and poet, Yan Li, founded the Beijing Mid-Autumn Poetry Festival in China and lived between America and China. My first visit to China was because of him. I had been longing to go to China for a long time, and I received his invitation. Unfortunately, before traveling, I broke my wrist and had to travel with an injured hand. But he and hisChina was because of him. I had been longing to go to China for a long time, and I received his invitation. Unfortunately, before traveling, I broke my wrist and had to travel with an injured hand. But he and his team took such good care of me. His poetry festival was one of the best festivals I had attended. He was a great artist, too. He left this world, which was painted by him with colors and woven with poetic words.

We remember him through his poems, translated by Denis Mair

FIVE POEMS BY YAN LI

                               Tr. by Denis Mair

ADDICTED TO EACH OTHER

A

If only love could be refined into a drug

To get people hooked on each other

And give them even greater contempt for hatred

I often remind myself when going out in the morning

To cancel out all dreams

That can cancel each other out

To save me from spinning circles in this world

I have been looking for the route

That goes by way of myself to reach others

Just as I’ve maintained all these years

I may take off umpteen times

But I can only land on mankind’s runway

B

Nobody can take away my freedom to fly toward you

Though I can only fly by inventing

A posture that disdains tradition

But I have set forth on the path

That goes by way of you to reach myself

So now that I’ve run into you

I won’t go off to catch rays in some darker place

I have no doubts we two are getting addicted

The Lord’s prescription may have come a few seasons late

But for us it is only the onset

…………………………………….

 I’M ACHING FOR YOUR PAIN

I’ve never set foot in medical school

Don’t ask what I’d look like in a white lab coat

You could call me an underground practitioner

But only the ‘underground’ part would really fit

There were years back then

When poems scorched by the one mighty sun

Kept cool with me in subterranean shade

But be that as it may

What I want you to know is

I am aching for your pain

Life is on its own as the century turns

To scenes of business spreading worldwide

But I flip to the page for reading each other

Where similar wounds

Join forces in ideal forms of pain

How I wish for devices of cinema

To unreel our diagnosis on the screen

Not presuming we will walk out cured

But joining in the pain with different body parts

And so I say

To the human race

Only your wound is huge enough

For the pain I ache to express

…………………………….

A DOG POEM FOR TOMORROW

Tomorrow

A dog that only goes wild after death

Clamps the world in its jaws and won‘t let go

Poems of tomorrow have no answer either

Clamping their own crimes in their jaws

Tomorrow

Those dogs who lived long enough in the city

Taking along apartment buildings softened by furniture

Will charge into the pregnancy of an orchard

And clamp jaws on an unborn infant‘s original face

Tomorrow

Dog teeth will have become piano keys

Only bone-crunching music will rate popularity in this world

Tomorrow

Suffering will still be re-published sheet music

So machines in printing plants will still be best at singing

Ah, tomorrow

The home-guarding talents of tomorrow‘s dogs will be snipped out at the hospital

A homeless world with dogs vacationing everywhere

Puffs of clouds like dogs will often float by in the sky

Some airplaine flying artists

Will paint young women clouds in the sky

Tomorrow‘s dogs tracking June mornings and December afternoons

Will still expose their bored tongues

But swallow even dirtier things to cut down reproduction

Tomorrow‘s dogs make a science of freakishly prolonged life

Tomorrow‘s doghouses can be hung any old place like a shirt

But tomorrow‘s dogskins will be shed by dogs

Tomorrow a dog of an orbital satellite

Having shaken off its tail wagged to cinders

Will go off into space to be human

Ah, tomorrow

I too will have such a tomorrow

So take advantage of today

Before the sky, as wide as the solar system, is chained

by a pack of dogs

Holding my shadow in my mouth

From where sunlight is

From out of lamplight

And even from enchanting moonlight

I have come out

I have come out forever.

……………………………………………

THE PRISON IN MY HEART

In the prison of my heart

There are no inmates escaping through my pharnyx

Or soiling their pride through repulsive sewer pipes.

They were voluntary inmates since the dawn of civilization

Who outfitted my heart to be their prison,

And even after I die,

Will continue their incarceration in my coffin.

They have not come along for a free ride;

They produce a commodity called reflection.

Money has not devised a route for such transactions,

But I have a knack for promoting my goods,

Because my heart-prison has plenty of poets.

They strew hours over the road, like a handful of sand,

For free people to bend over and pick up on Sunday.

This is candy without a boss putting you in his wrapper;

By whim of your natural clock, you savor your own sweetness.

Inmates in this prison have no long-suffering relatives outside,

Their bloodlines are broad, long and unimpeded,

And when they make a prison break, they go further inside.

I’ve often wondered if this is a river,

Because I like being a fish in the current of my own blood.

I too, countless times, being urged by expediency,

And drunk on the air of peace, for which I’ve paid a pretty cork-popping fee,

Have wished to tear down my heart’s prison, and bulldoze it into a city square,

But the inmates didn’t want to be doves with wings stuck on their backs

Or balloons adding hoopla to a certain session of government.

What can I do?

In my heart are a bunch of convicts who don’t want to join the crowd.

They have commandeered jealousy for themselves,

Beauty is the sole transgressive fire they are left with.

Gradually, on my aging legs, but with youth’s velocity,

They walk toward the heart of the world.

In passionate expectation they peer through the grate.

Setting out for the universe’s prison, there is an even grander statement:

When I find myself within so many monologues

At the heart of skin colors that all have their own worlds,

It makes me wonder:

Perhaps the prison in my heart shares a mother with the churches outside?

Ah. This is the scene of some sort of violence,

And God appears when I bully myself,

And the Church is where mistakes are dumped

When God recycles his creation of Mankind.

Even this vile and unrealized inspiration,

Is carted off together with me, by God in his church.

I rejoice to find my heart’s prison is a church within a church!

Before it becomes trash to be buzzed over by flies,

It gets locked away to revel in profundity of its own moans.

Such a good hearted prisoner!

You deserve inner nourishment that nurses you to Godliness.

Who else is among the inmates?

The grammar locked up here lacks writing to protest for it.

So who else would you have it be ?

None other than the farmer who clears fields inside this prison,

A butterfly paintbrush dancing along the outline of plants,

Introducing drift into the clouds of a canvas.

Anyway,

Whatever the skill of its conception,

This hand has reached a certain place,

Not to be belittled or envied in terms of height.

I take a new approach to possibilities of travel

and walk barefooted from a well-stocked shoestore.

I have seen plenty of spermatozoa

Bought and paid for, taking places in the human lineage,

Plenty of ova with price tags, doing their part for human reproduction.

Although literary passion, now and then, may have its bastard forms of birth,

The prison in my heart can leave no legacy.

In the eyes of the Buddha and the Gods, I realize

In the eyes of the Lord in Heaven or E.T.

I am simply a piece of meat,

But inside of this meat, I have my blessed prison.

…………………………………

BEDS 

Restless trains of thought sprawl this way and that

Tossing every single bed of mine awake

Bedsprings squeak and grind

At all the contortions I get into

Practicing this dance of lost love clutching at lost sleep for whom?

The more I think the harder it is to sleep

Restlessness has penetrated deeply in all directions

Throwing off the down quilt of heavy snow

My January frenzy rouses the earth into a semblance of April

The sun in my rough embrace strikes at ice with flailing fists

The lake splits its casing and stretches with watery sounds

And those legs of sunlight are making sure to trip up my winter

Trains of thought bound for the hospital are turned away by nervous germs

Germs start propagating at a lightning rate on my body

A lawn on which only love can roll playfully

As if in a mist, I long already for the marvel of sleep

But I have fallen

I’ve fallen to springtime that came all too early

This tree that in reality will offer no more flowers

Is no one’s idea of a good rendezvous

My restless thought-trains go on fuzzily weaving non-winter scenery

At such times how I worship dreams

Dreams are ten times more sober than I

Restless trains of thought make manic circles on the scenic route of emotion

Till I have to stop asking stones where lies the desert remote from all color

I know my eyes have opened large enough to be mistaken for a face

They have swallowed a nose and mouth that also hankered for mirages

See the beer-halls lined up along the avenues of thought

Flitting drinkers are out to enjoy the tolerance for wine

that came barging through the door over the holidays

They won’t stop until they drink up all of last year’s dewdrops

Ah

Rows of empty bottles with caps removed stand in the graveyard for whom?

Remaining in silence that can no longer shed a sad drop for whom?

But do not worry

I will tell them

Beloved grapes of the past

In the bed of my coffin I will continue my insomnia

……………………………………………

Yan Li (1954.8– 2026.6) was a poet and painter who was active in the avant-garde Star Star Painting Group and a contributor to the original TODAY (an underground journal edited 1978-1982 by Bei Dao). As a Star-Star painter, he took part in independent exhibitions which were suppressed by the authorities. Yan Li was a friend of the artist Ai Wei and they were roommates for a time in New York City during the mid-Eighties. Yan Li founded FIRST LINE, a non-permitted poetry journal which he published in New York and mailed to his liaison network in Mainland China. He later turned FIRST LINE into a website, which still Web-publishes poetry today. In the 2020s he re-inaugurated NEW YORK FIRST LINE, which still publishes as a quarterly. In the 2010s, Yan Li founded and organized the biannual Mid-Autumn Poetry Festival five times. He also founded and organized the Flushing Chinese Poetry Fest four times in NYC. He will be sorely missed by the community of poets that he did so much to foster.

Denis Mair, American poet and translator, is a co-translator of Frontier Taiwan, an anthology of new poetry from Taiwan. His versions of works by Chinese poets have appeared in Literary Review, Chicago Review, Trafika, Kritya, Melic Review, Poetry Sky, Point No Point, The Temple, and other journals. His book of poems, Man Cut in Wood, was published by Valley Contemporary Press.