Eleanor Goodman wraps up our Poetry Night in Beijing series. Stick around for some fiction next month.

Previously: Edward Ragg

Full playlist:

|Poetry Night in Beijing Archives|

Poetry Night in Beijing is coming down the home stretch. Here’s published poet Edward Ragg.

Previously: Yuan Yang

Full playlist:

|Poetry Night in Beijing Archives|

After a short break, we continue our ongoing series, Poetry Night in Beijing. Here we present Yuan Yang, a Sichuan-English-Lancastrian poet whose themes include the immigrant experience and polyamory.

Previously: Emily Stranger

Full playlist:

|Poetry Night in Beijing Archives|

A short one for tonight’s edition in our ongoing series, Poetry Night in Beijing. Here’s Emily Stranger, introduced by Helen Wing.

Previously: Peter Behr

Full playlist:

|Poetry Night in Beijing Archives|

This week’s selection from Poetry Night in Beijing, hosted on March 16 with Pathlight Magazine for Bookworm Literary Festival: Peter Behr, as selected and introduced by Helen Wing.

Previously: Canaan Morse

Full playlist:

|Poetry Night in Beijing Archives|

On March 16, we co-hosted an event called Poetry Night in Beijing with Pathlight Magazine as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. Every Thursday, we’ll post a video from that evening. This week: Canaan Morse, Pathlight poetry editor, reading about a childhood memory from Maine and a tribute to lobsters in reply to William De Witt Snodgrass.

Previously: Stephen Nashef

Full playlist:

|Poetry Night in Beijing Archives|

Beginning today, we’ll be posting, piecemeal, the entirety of our March 16 event Poetry Night in Beijing, co-hosted by Pathlight Magazine for the Bookworm Literary Festival. (A big shout-out to Patrick Lozada for filming.) Up first was physics teacher / poet Stephen Nashef, introduced by Pathlight poetry editor Canaan Morse.

If we had to be technical though, the night began with an introduction by yours truly. I’ve posted the original text of my intro below, which I more or less rushed and muddled through while on stage (nerves, I guess). It begins with a Spencerian sonnet…

Poetry Night in Beijing Intro

1.

Hello and welcome. Glad you all could join.
Why are we here? At Bookworm for poetry,
not binge drinking, Tindering, chasing loins
as if in orbit, mindless of how gravity
is a two-way force? In Beijing one’s free
to act on havoc, frisk at Mix, skiddoo
and drift. Poetry’s no sun, but let’s see
if it lends perspective, maybe acts on you
like water that reflects some face of truth.
It might be yours with its small secrets, hidden
shame and a bit of self-awareness, too.
You could, if you so chose, slip to The Den,
roll with wingnuts and cigarette butts, beer,
bad sex, doughnuts. Maybe this is better.

2.

I won’t go so far as to say
poetry is prayer,
or in the words of Mary Oliver –

Feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with
the fragrance of the fields and the
freshness of the oceans

– but we are all spiritual to the exact point
that we allow ourselves.
Even belief in nothing may cause us to ask
as the blind poet Virginia Hamilton Adair asked:

Did the parturition of nothingness / give birth to all this glory?

One phrase you may have heard is that poetry
defamiliarizes the familiar,

but I prefer it the other way:
it makes us see the familiar,

the way sunlight finds form when it cuts
through a colony of dust
above the mahogany nightstand
on whose corner a pair of underwear,
not yours,
dangles like a modifier,

or the tree rings on the knife-sharpener’s face
as he treadles his cart up a dunghill
called Progress
growing steeper
while his bells toll.

Poetry can be as simple as a rotation of perspective
so that the door it begs you to open

opens into a free-fall.
Poetry’s job is not to catch you,

but those in poems who suffer
suffer for you, because you are
their ideal reader,
so immaculate
as to be transparent –

since happiness
comes with certain burdens.

We know poetry because we know living,
are constantly
engaged in it, pursuing.
Think Wile E. Coyote couriering
a love letter
never received,
addressed to president Xi Jinping
stamped with a five-tipped golden scar.
Poetry is for those too real for labels,
princelings who strive and migrants
down at discos, whether with Zhou Jielun
or t.A.T.u as their soundtrack, well,
that’s really up to you.
Poetry is not disposable in the way
that a neighborhood seems to be,
or a political identity.
When you spend enough time with it
every face you encounter
in the subways is an unspoken hello
and a dispassionate goodbye.
Living ghosts like the Nobel laureate’s wife
begin speaking to you then.

Life is this rush-hour-at-Guomao stream of passersby.
What we occupy, in our present time, is the water’s skip
over a finger that skims the surface.

Eventually we reach the river’s end,
reverse parturition
into nothingness.

Death is antisocial.
This event is not.

It could not have been birthed without the significant effort
of Canaan Morse, who is the poetry editor of Pathlight Magazine,

Helen Wing, the poet-in-residence at Harrow and author of the collection
Archangel, which you can buy just around the corner,

and Eleanor Goodman, poet, translator, and Fulbright Fellow.
You will be hearing from her in the second half of our event.

They read nearly two hundred poems from forty-three writers this past month
and did the wrenching deed of winnowing until we’ve arrived
at the poets with us today. Of course it is not just about them: it’s you, too.
Poetry is a two-way force.

Full playlist:

|Poetry Night in Beijing Archives|

This is it: your final reminder that I’ll be joined by three docents and five poets tonight at the Bookworm to celebrate poetry in Beijing. The event will feature Peter Behr, Stephen Nashef, Edward Ragg, Emily Stranger, and Yuan Yang (and Gower Campbell) reading selected works, as curated by Canaan Morse, Eleanor Goodman, and Helen Wing. (The curators and I will present a little something as well.) The festivities begin at 8 pm. Tickets are available at the door.

Let’s turn it over to the curators for some quick words. (For previous coverage, check out these interviews with Helen Wing and Eleanor Goodman.)

Canaan Morse

I saw things I liked in the poetry of everyone who was eventually invited to read, but I put Stephen [Nashef] forward specifically so he could have a chance to read “Tennis Balls.” That poem possesses a few fresh central images, and articulates them well. It’s good sculpturing done on quality marble.

The incredible number of people who submitted has already given me reason to rejoice. When Anthony and I thought up this thing, I said more than once I didn’t expect more than ten people to submit. I found it very hard to believe that there were more than a small handful of English-language writers in this city who were committed to poetry. But the poems we read numbered in the hundreds.

Care to offer a one-line preview of your own poetry, which you’ll be reading? May it be worthy of burning in a year’s time.

Eleanor Goodman

Helen Wing

I had always suspected that there are far more poets than the world thinks there are but actually even I was surprised by the sheer number of entrants. It was very hard to pick the finalists. I would encourage all of those who entered not to be discouraged and to continue consorting with the daemon!

There were many accomplished poems but in the end I chose the poems whose voice seemed somehow unique and that moved me. I found that when I asked about the more formal elements of image, rhythm and style my initial response was confirmed. I also picked poets who were very different from each other so that tonight the audience can enjoy a range of voice and theme.

One-line preview of your own poetry: “You lie! Stop the blister wind!”

Poetry Night in Beijing begins at 8 pm tonight at the Bookworm. (Top image: Column 1: Eleanor Goodman, Canaan Morse, Anthony Tao, Helen Wing; Column 2: Peter Behr, Stephen Nashef, Edward Ragg, Emily Stranger, Yuan Yang.)

Top: Peter Behr, Stephen Nashef, Edward Ragg; Bottom: Emily Stranger, Yuan Yang

Last month we made an open call for poets to participate in a curated community event at the Bookworm Literary Festival, and the response was exceptional. Please consider this our official thank you to all who answered. The curators of Poetry Night in Beijing — Canaan Morse, Helen Wing and Eleanor Goodman — read nearly 200 poems before finally (painstakingly) choosing five writers whose works resonated with them in style and substance.

Keeping in mind that the process of evaluating art is imperfect and the final decisions are always subjective, we’d like to congratulate our featured poets who will be reading this Sunday at 8 pm at the Bookworm:

Peter Behr ~ Stephen Nashef ~ Edward Ragg ~ Emily Stranger ~ Yuan Yang

We’ve also invited Gower Campbell, who is 14 years old, to read one of his particularly impressive pieces. (Margaret Ross was also chosen, but she will be unable to make Sunday’s event.)

Let’s learn more about our poets, shall we? In their own words, presented in alphabetical order…

Peter Behr

My first poem was probably in elementary school, and I’d bet it tried very hard to rhyme. Now, I write poetry whenever I encounter a crystallized moment or feeling that might want to be recorded in writing. Seamus Heaney, W.S. Merwin, Wislawa Szymborska, Anis Mojgani, Pablo Neruda, even Shel Silverstein; I love the work of many poets. But if I had to pick any single person who inspires me to write, it’s an old friend who lives on the other side of the globe now and taught me most of what I know about what it means to put words together.

In Beijing I spend most of my time as a software engineer and designer. I also ride a bicycle, drink tea, play ultimate frisbee, enjoy drinking games plus good conversation, and perform amateur standup comedy.

Stephen Nashef

It was pretty shortly after I first started realising poetry was really doing something [that I began writing poetry]. Too shortly after. I had noticed something was happening, but hadn’t read enough to really understand what, or how. My first poems were rubbish. I was about twenty-one I think. I get my inspiration from other poems, mainly. Also the things people say. Presumably the rest of my experience has an impact, though how that sneaks in to affect my writing is more difficult for me to monitor. My suspicion is that the latter plays a slightly lesser role — or rather it is of course vital yet, somehow, beside the point. (So, for that matter, is “language” I think; vital, yet not quite it.) The main theme and inspiration behind those poems [that were submitted] is probably a sense of impotence.

John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel all the time. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizabeth Bishop most of the time. Sometimes Charles Tomlinson. The poetry of Eliot and Yeats was what started the ball rolling.

I’m a physics teacher in a high school. I’ve been in Beijing for almost three years.

Edward Ragg

I started writing poetry at school as a teenager. I’d had this inspirational English teacher who’d come over from Deerfield Academy, Mass, to my school in England: a man called Tedman Littwin. We read a lot of poetry, especially from an anthology called The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. At the same time, I began to try to write poems. It’s sometimes hard to know what inspires a poem: sometimes it may be an experience or a response to something. Equally it could just be a phrase or part of a piece of music or anything. It depends on the individual poem. Quite a lot of inspiration comes from reading other poets; but, to be honest, a teeming metropolis like Beijing has a massive effect on my desire to write. As to the purpose of poetry, again I think this depends on the individual case: some people need poetry, others don’t. But poetry is a broad church: if it’s viable, it’s because it speaks to a wide range of people in a wide variety of ways.

George Oppen, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Peter Reading, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Tony Harrison, Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, Philip Sidney (not necessarily in that order).

I moved to Beijing, with my wife Fongyee Walker, in 2007. We both taught at Tsinghua University, where I still teach, in fact. We also set up a wine education and consultancy business called Dragon Phoenix. When I was made an Associate Professor at Tsinghua in 2010, I created a class in wine for Tsinghua University. I’m very lucky because I get to teach both poetry and wine to dynamic Chinese people of various ages and backgrounds.

Emily Stranger

I believe I first wrote poems when I was in middle school, after we learned about poetry in class. The art form really inspired me then. I remember the poem I first read was “Grass” by Carl Sandberg. It gave my chills. I get a lot of inspiration from daily life and how my environment affects the way I feel. China has been a big inspiration because of all of the sounds and colors (or lack of color on a smoggy day). I have a long list of phrases and words I have jotted down as I have made my travels throughout the city. I hope to put this list to use soon.

My untitled poem about God came from a moment I had in a pet store in Columbus, Georgia. Whenever I feel sad or lonely, I like to surround myself with animals, especially puppies. They are the best antidepressants in the world. On this particular day, I was going through a difficult time in my life where I was questioning the existence of a power greater than myself, whom I choose to call “God.” I actually had come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as God. The idea that the world and universe are spinning with no purpose or direction, which meant my life was spinning with no purpose and direction, had me feeling empty inside. After playing with some puppies and petting some bunnies (and feeling a little happier), I walked back to the aquarium department to look at the fish. I was walking from one aquarium to another when I came face to face with a Lion Fish. I had seen these fish before, but for some reason this one really stopped me in my tracks. It was beautiful. It was then that I became convinced that there is a greater power at work in the universe, because I saw design and craft in that fish, not to mention it was living. It was that moment I had a profound sense of some great power at work in the universe. Nothing that beautiful could be made by mistake AND given life. An artist made it.

Yuan Yang

I’ve been trying to write short stories in English since I moved there age 4, and only started writing poetry when I was 15 or 16. I was applying for a creative writing group (the Yorkshire Writing Squad) that required a portfolio of 10 pieces. I thought poems would be quicker to write than short stories, so… To my surprise, when I was accepted into the group, I was introduced to the others as “the poet of the group.” That gave me a kind of identity that I think gave me license to develop my poetry writing.

Part of the purpose of poetry is to get words and rhythms out of your head and onto paper and into other people’s heads. The inspiration for my poems is fairly self-explanatory, I hope! I aim for clarity and not for complication. The poems I’ve chosen here have two main topics: the experience of being an immigrant, and the experience of seeking polyamory.

Philip Larkin, e.e. cummings, Rumi, Ezra Pound, and wow, answering this question makes me realise I haven’t read poetry for a while. I’ve been here since September 2013. I am a Visiting Student at Beijing University, where I mostly study economics, statistics and sociology. I also work part-time researching China’s financial stability for the Institute of New Economic Thinking. I haven’t written any poems about economics yet, but I hope to break down that barrier, and one poem is in the pipeline…

UPDATE, 3/15, 5:33 pm: Here’s Gower Campbell:

I have just turned 15 and I have been writing poetry for as long as I can remember. My experience comes from my travels in England with my mother and in South Africa with my dad. I now go to Harrow International School in Beijing. I have been there for the last two years. Here I have found many friends, wolves and seals who have all helped me with my poetry. Poetry to me is creating and expressing my emotions on the page. Poets perform for audiences, sharing and giving life to their work as they speak. A person’s poems can bring people to tears and make them happy, showing that the pen is truly greater than the sword.

Poetry Night in Beijing is this Sunday at 8 pm at the Bookworm (where tickets are still available). In addition to the poets above, also presenting will be Canaan Morse, Eleanor Goodman, Helen Wing, and myself.

We’re rapidly approaching the March 1 submission deadline for those interested in reading at Poetry Night in Beijing, a curated community event on March 16 that’s part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. If you’re wondering whether you should submit, please heed the advice of Eleanor Goodman, one of our curators: “Submit! There’s nothing lonelier than a poem sitting unread on a laptop or in a notebook.”

Goodman is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in a variety of publications. Her translations of Wang Xiaoni will be published this year (The Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni). She’s currently in Beijing on a Fulbright Fellowship.

We recently had a chat over email about poetry, translating, and our March 16 event (jointly hosted by Pathlight).

Also see: An Interview With Helen Wing, Author Of “Archangel”

We’ll begin with an impossible question: what is poetry?

EG: That is an impossible question. I’d be very hard pressed to define poetry, although like the Supreme Court and pornography, I know it when I see it. The older I get and the more I read and write, the less I feel we should or can dictate to others the confines of a given craft. Having said that, the poetry I gravitate toward has a keen sense of rhythm and music, some sort of emotional content, a fresh use of language and a strong intellectual underpinning. These things can come in many forms and guises. Do you have a definition for poetry?

You covered the basics. I’ll just add that one aspect of poetry I really admire is its range. An able poet is able to traverse the cosmic and quotidian in the thin space of fifty pages, i.e. the length of a collection. Hmm… maybe one could even do it in eleven words? To borrow from the American poet Virginia Hamilton Adair and the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai: Did the parturition of nothingness give rise to all this frost? Also, poetry’s basic function as expression – articulating the inexpressible, de-familiarizing the familiar, helping us see the familiar, etc. – should make it essential.

But is it? Is poetry fulfilling its duties / potential? Can it, in our day and age?

EG: Poetry’s role is a hard one too. I think it can play many roles, or none at all. To some limited extent, poetry is that which can’t be pinned down. So I’m reluctant to say it has “duties.” On the other hand, people who dedicate themselves to writing poetry (and I think that’s a very small group of people) are trying to communicate something. A writer like Han Dong or Ashbery or Yan Li is trying to get at something very serious with absurdism that sometimes seems slight. So perhaps I should say that there is a duty, and an extremely important one, but I wouldn’t want to go about articulating it outside of a poem. As for this day and age, my father always liked to tell a story about archeologists discovering a new tattered scrap of Egyptian papyrus. After struggling to interpret the ancient, faded script, they figured out it said something along the lines of, “Well, the world is going to hell in a handbasket: children don’t respect their elders and the women wear too much makeup.” This is obviously apocryphal, but the point is sound. There’s nothing new under the sun. If poetry has ever had any power in the real world – and it has – it has that same power now.

How or why did you begin translating poems? From Chinese, no less?

EG: The Chinese came before the translation. I first dipped my toes into translation in a class I took with Rosanna Warren when I was getting my Masters in Creative Writing. At that point, I was just back in the States after living in Shanghai for more than a year, and she encouraged me to try translating from Chinese. I was dubious, but took my best shot at translating some Wang Wei, who remains one of my favorite poets. I did a miserable job, but it inspired me to continue to translate as a way of learning/practicing Chinese. Later, my close friend and sometimes-collaborator Wang Ao (poet and translator extraordinaire) introduced me to the world of contemporary Chinese poetry and I was immediately hooked. I like to translate the work of people who are still alive and kicking.

Has translation made you more aware of how you write? Does thinking in two languages help your writing, and if so, in what ways?

EG: Translation has had an enormous influence on my own poetry. Chinese is structurally very different from English, and the norms of Chinese poetry are different too, so I’ve consciously (and surely unconsciously) imported some of that into my own work. In particular, I’ve gotten very interested in the lack of punctuation in a lot of contemporary Chinese poetry. Merwin does that too, but few other American poets write straight-up sentence-based poetry that relies on line break and emphasis instead of punctuation. It opens up a lot of new space, at least for me. It’s cliché now to say this, but I do think that writing, thinking, living in another language brings out a different personality that otherwise doesn’t have a chance to emerge. At least that’s true for me.

The trick is to stay sharp and current in your native language while mastering a second. I don’t have any tips at all in how to do that. Wait, I do. Read poetry.

EG: I couldn’t agree more with the admonition to read poetry. But I also think that for many (if not most) poets, there isn’t a danger of losing touch with their native language despite being in a linguistically foreign environment. I once asked Bei Dao if living in the United States for so long made him feel estranged from Chinese, and he said it made him feel like he had a more intimate relationship with his mother tongue, not less. The same is true for me. Living here in Beijing and operating in Chinese all day long only makes my love affair with the English language stronger. I know its soft contours and rough edges much better than I will ever know Chinese, no matter how many years I spend here.

I wonder: how does Chinese poetry differ from English-language poetry, and how are they similar? Are there any defining characteristics about Chinese poetry?

EG: This question is huge and I’m unqualified to answer it. But I will say this: the varieties of Chinese poetry that exist are as different from each other as Chinese poetry is from English-language poetry, especially when looking across a distance of more than a thousand years.

What’s the current poetry scene like here?

EG: In my experience, the Chinese poetry scene is quite close-knit and self-aware. That isn’t to say it’s not contentious, cliquish, and often catty – it is. But poets tend to know or be aware of each other, and to keep close tabs on what their contemporaries are writing. They also know who’s gotten a divorce, who won an Italian poetry prize, who’s building a house in Yunnan, who slept with whom at what conference, and so on. It’s full of gossip, nepotism, and guanxi-mongering. But the flip side of that is that everyone’s in touch with what’s going on and there’s some sense of common purpose at work. This is in sharp contrast to what I’ve seen in the States, where poets are spread out and nobody’s ever heard of anyone else unless he or she is a star.

Fascinating and worthy of a thousand-word essay. (By the way, that’s due next week, I’ll expect it in my inbox.) How are Chinese poets viewed among the public? Who are some of the leading voices, and do they have more or less influence than their counterparts in, say, the US?

EG: In the 1980s, being a poet was a big deal. In the Tang, you had to write poetry to get a government post. Today, it’s sort of an embarrassment. I’ve met several accomplished poets with day jobs who would never tell their colleagues that they write poetry. Parents tend to discourage their kids from spending too much time on poetry. Poetry and poets are not in the public space the way they once were. Still, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Do you have thoughts about that? I’ve noticed that Beijing Cream rarely if ever mentions poetry – is that a sign of something?

I’d love to incorporate more of it. I wrote a silly villanelle here, and appended Adrienne Rich’s masterful “The Ballad of the Poverties” to a post about nail houses, but more suggestions are always welcome. I’d be happy to run a poetry blog if I thought I was qualified. 

EG: I really admire the way you’ve incorporated Rich’s poem into your post. I think we need a lot more of exactly that: poetry as part of the common conversation. In some ways I think these poetry blogs are a kind of sequestering. They have their place, but let’s have poetry all over the place, preferably where it “doesn’t belong.” Don’t you think?

What do you hope to see at the literary festival event on March 16? Do you have any expectations? 

EG: I’m eagerly expectation-less. Still, I’m very curious what kind of crowd will come out for this event. Are there English-language poets hiding in obscure dark corners of Beijing who only creep out occasionally in the middle of the night to drink at Amilal? Will they come to the Bookworm? As the organizer of this event, what kind of crowd are you hoping for?

Honestly no clue. It’s a curated community event – not a “contest,” as Canaan Morse has rightly pointed out – so I really do hope it can serve as a meeting ground for poetry enthusiasts and anyone interested in writing / THE ARTS / community events / meeting cool people. We will be drinking whisky afterwards, so you Amilal folk have no excuse to not swing by.

EG: Thanks for confirming there will be whisky. And as usual, Canaan is right on the money. I despise contests, but I’m all for curation.

That reminds me: we’re still looking for poets who are willing / able to read their work at the event. The deadline is March 1. Any advice for people out there who may have poems they’ve written but are hesitant about submitting?

EG: Submit! There’s nothing lonelier than a poem sitting unread on a laptop or in a notebook. The worst that can happen is that it’s read by three very savvy readers who love poetry, and that’s not too bad.

Would you like to share any of your own works?

EG: Thanks for the opportunity – here’s a recent poem about the Henan countryside that I hope answers the question of how I define poetry and what I think its duty is.

In This Village (II)

In this village live old men and children

no one else is left to harvest the corn and collect the eggs

feed the three goats and family of rabbits sold for meat

down the central lane where water collects in ribbons of mud

and dogs go busily along their way

I’d like to ask the old man sorting peppers on a stool

if he’s happy

a nil question that points its finger at the asker

I want to ask the dogs as well and the roosters

and the plump rabbits who will soon be slaughtered

all of their dialects are foreign to my ear

I understand only the dark stare of the sockets

of the calf’s head set on the table at lunch

saying there is nothing left to save here

though once there was and someday might be again

Eleanor Goodman is a Fulbright fellow, Harvard Fairbank fellow, poet and translator. She can be reached at eleanor@eleanorgoodman.com

The event is live! Tickets for Poetry Night in Beijing on March 16 at the Bookworm Literary Festival are officially being sold at the Bookworm. Please let this be a reminder that we are still seeking submissions for those interested in participating in the event, i.e. reading in front of an audience. Along with Pathlight, our lovely event partners, we are accepting poems until March 1. Please see here for guidelines.

Submissions will be anonymized and sent to our three readers, Canaan Morse, Eleanor Goodman, and Helen Wing.

We recently caught up with Helen to ask about poetry, including her own. She is the author of the collection Archangel, currently available at the Bookworm and on Kindle via Amazon. The following interview was done via email.

There’s a certain way of looking at poetry that I particularly like. Some people ask poets, “When did you want to be a poet?” But the question should really be posed to everyone else: “When did you stop wanting to be a poet?” Because growing up, aren’t all of our experiences, particularly the new ones, the intense, best experiences, “poetic”? It’s a shame that, as children, we probably lacked the ear, or training, to express our feelings. So let me ask you: when did you not stop wanting to become a poet?

HW: This is simple for me. The short answer is that I was always too scared to be a poet. I had been accused of being too poetic throughout my life as an academic and also later as a prose writer. I had images that were “too tight” imputed to me and was constantly being exhorted to unravel and extrapolate whilst I always felt that the things I wanted to say would be dissipated and become less resonant if I conceded in my style. Then of course there is the money thing… it was obvious to me that one could not make a living as a poet. But then gradually that changed as I got older. I realized also that one cannot make a living as a mother or a lover or a volunteer but that did not stop me from being those things. In the end poetry was an unstoppable urge in me that broke down my fears and prejudices. Now I realize I am only fully alive as a poet. I know that sounds extreme but truly this has been my experience.

What’s your experience in poetry been like?

HW: I finally gave in to poetry when I was living in Dubai. I heard about an underground poetry group and joined it expecting little in what I considered to be a cultural as well as physical desert. What I found was a group of people performing in English and Arabic who hailed from all over the globe and who spoke eloquently and passionately about the heart and politics and who grasped at beauty in language in full vulnerability and trust. It was amazing. I submitted my poems and read them and after the second time I was told I need not submit but could just read each time. At a time of deep personal alienation this group saved me.

What compelled you to write Archangel? How did that process start?

HW: Archangel is unusual for me. The daemon came upon me unbidden and blindingly. For three months poetry came pouring out of me. It forced me to get up in the night and stop cooking or doing what I was supposed to be doing. I wrote in a trance at these times and then edited the poems that came to me. I absolutely believe that I was a vessel for these poems. I wrote them, yes, with a history in the study of angels for my academic poetics and with a great passion for LOVE but I also feel that I was writing about things of which I, even at my age, have little experience. I feel that because I had been holding back on poetry for so long that these poems were bursting out of me, that they were, if you like, a type of bloodletting. Perhaps you will see in my forthcoming Savage Torpor (poems which pre-date Archangel) the extent to which that outpouring was needed!

How would you describe poetry in Beijing? Or China?

HW: Personally, Beijing lends itself to poetry because as a foreigner I am surrounded by the strangeness and commonality of existence in a very intense way. One of the aims of a poet I feel is to be able communicate small and large truths in an arresting and fresh way, to evoke that strangeness and recognition simultaneously and to capture it for the reader.

Chinese poets are incredibly humble, and China is a place which respects poetry and the poet’s task as real work. People say that there is a great divide between the East and the West in poetic stance. I am fascinated by the idea that somehow the different sensibilities might move in opposite directions into and out of the poetic identity if you like. However I have been amazed, truly amazed to discover that the poetic cannon and life-reading history of the Chinese poets I have read are so very similar to my own reading history, except of course for an in0depth knowledge of Chinese poetry itself. I am dependent on translation. Other than this I would say that Chinese poets are very literary and that they still distance themselves from performance poetry… but then in the West we do the same, we separate out spoken word poetry from “writerly” work. I was very gratified to see Kate Tempest win the Ted Hughes prize this year. A young woman and a performance poet who rightly aligns herself with the bard with her name.

Who are your favorite poets?

HW: Tsvetayeva, Ezra Pound, Celan, Christopher Reid, W.B Yeats, Margaret Atwood, William Carlos Williams, Ahkmatova, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Lorca, Cesar Vallejo… at the moment… but that changes!

What do you read for when you’re reading a poem?

HW: I look to be taken somewhere else through language. I am a firm believer in the “right word” in the “right place,” a rendering of the heart that can only be made in the way it is being made. I am very instinctual about this but I find that when I feel moved by a poem, if I then subject it to higher literary analysis, it always survives that more critical gaze. In sum I look for the plangent image and I listen to the distinctiveness of voice.

What’s one bit of advice you can impart on any poet or writer?

HW: Truth. Your writing will only move another if you speak with utter and trenchant truth.

Edit. Refine, refine, refine your words and stay in the rhythm… no fakery will stay if you listen to the rhythm of your words so read out loud to yourself. Often if you abide by the sounds you will find yourself saying new, unexpected things, some of which will be searingly beautiful!

Helen has very graciously allowed us to republish the following two poems from Archangel:

All art is absence

Because all art is absence
I want to watch you
touch yourself,
I want to see your curling
as you come.

This gift
I hope you save for me.

Only then will I feel
I have witnessed you
as you have witnessed me
in the exquisite abjection
of my poem.

Which of these two
most human activities
constitutes
the most lonely,
fruitless
intimacy?

Perhaps they are the same?

When you read my poem
you already watch me
touch myself
as I breach the walls
of my most
shameful
incomplete.

All art is absence.

This gift, then,
in recompense,
the curling of your toes,
I hope, Archangel,
you save for me.

~

Truth

It’s true
I barely know you
and yet
it’s also true
I know you as the lightning bolt
is known
by the stricken tree.

Helen Wing is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Harrow International School Beijing.

Poets! Yes, you. Beijing Cream and Pathlight are excited to present Poetry Night in Beijing at the Bookworm Literary Festival on Sunday, March 16, a curated community event to promote English-language POETRY in this wonderful city of ours. We need your help.

We are seeking four poets enthusiastic about reading their work at the March 16th event for a keen audience of peers and poetry lovers. There are no limits on theme, subject, or style, as long as the pieces are original and in English. Poems written with a strong voice that plumb the depths of honesty and emotion while remaining intellectually compelling will be favored.

Those interested should send three to six poems of reasonable length to poetry@beijingcream.com. Previously unpublished work is preferable, though there is some leeway; please let us know if your submission appears elsewhere, including blogs. The soft deadline is Saturday, March 1. Feel free to nominate friends / acquaintances / enemies who might fit the bill.

All submissions will be anonymously read by Canaan Morse, poetry editor of Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, the Beijing-based literary magazine published by Paper Republic and People’s Literature Magazine; Helen Wing, Artist-in-Residence at the Harrow International School Beijing and author of the poetry collection Archangel; and Eleanor Goodman, Fulbright fellow, Harvard Fairbank fellow, published poet and translator. We will make an effort to contact all who email, but forgive us for being unable to provide editorial feedback on all work.

Again, those chosen will be asked to be physically present at the Bookworm on Sunday, March 16 for Poetry Night in Beijing, part of the Bookworm Literary Festival.

We’ll post more details in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with questions/comments.