当年的诗歌热，捧红了汪国真，也使他成为一代青年的偶像。然而，随着诗歌的低落，汪国真的名字也渐渐淡出了人们的视线，几乎已经被人遗忘。
(Words: 360; Time: 6 minutes)
In China today, when you mention the word “poet”, most people think of something far-away, distant from their own lives.
Nowadays, relatively few people enjoy reading poetry and so there are few people writing poetry.
If recent media reports are to be believed, Wang Guozhen, 48, appears to be a classic example of a poet suffering from what might be termed the current slack season. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was a different story.
Wang is one of the few poets of the past 50 years still remembered by a large number of people.
After graduating from Guangzhou-based Jinan University as a literature major, Wang started writing poetry in 1985. His poems were often published in magazines and newspapers.
All of Wang’s poems are very simple to understand and embody profound truths. They generally embody an optimistic attitude to life and praise the beauty of love. As a result, Wang’s fans were mainly students in colleges and middle schools.
Looking back, Wang said, “Around 1990, my poems were enjoyed by students thanks to the simple but thoughtful content. Many students chose one of my poems as their motto.”
With the help of friends, Wang published his first collection of poetry, Tide of the Youth, in April 1990. It was one of the top 10 bestsellers in 1990.
Indeed 1990 was dubbed the “year of Wang Guozhen” in publishing circles.
The following year, Wang’s collections Wind of Youth, and Thoughts of Youth were published.
In just two years, his collections sold more than 1 million copies. That led to Wang being dubbed the “Prince of Poetry.”
Indeed Wang now seems to accept that people now do not enjoy modern poems as they once did. But he also insists that modern Chinese poets should also bear some responsibility for the current downturn.
“It is very difficult to understand the meaning of many poems,” Wang said. “Today’s poets seem to agree that the more obscure, the better their poems are. They even think that only those poems which can be understood by people in 100 years, are the real poems.”
Help:
current adj. of the present time; happening now
slack adj. (of business) not having many customers,
etc; not busy
embody v. to be a very good example of an idea
or quality
optimistic adj. expecting the best, confident
dub v. to give something or someone a particular
name, especially describing what you think of them
obscure adj. difficult to understand 山西 李太泉
