Tag: China

Inside-out or outside-in?

SoutherlyBlog

by David Musgrave In May I had the good fortune to be invited to the 4th China-Australia Literary Forum in Guangzhou. There I met four Chinese poets: Yang Ke, whose work I was already familiar with through Simon Patton’s translations, Xi Chuan, Professor at Beijing Normal University, Huang Lihai, a Guangzhou-based poet published by Kit Kelen’s Flying Islands Books (feed birds rainbows, 2014) and Zheng Xiaoqiong, who I’ll talk about first[1]. The poetry panel, which was chaired by Xi Chuan, and also featured Yang Ke, Kate Fagan, and Zheng Xiaoqiong, consisted of each poet reading a brief paper about their…

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On Smokeflowers and Hawaiian Pizza

SoutherlyBlog

by David Musgrave   A little while ago I returned from three months living in Beijing and found my world subtly changed. I’d gone there with the intention of continuing my study of Mandarin, but in a more intensive fashion than hitherto, and succeeded in that aim to the extent that maybe for one whole month I didn’t have a conversation in English with anyone at all, apart from writing emails. This of course does not mean that interesting conversations in English were replaced with interesting conversations in Mandarin: on the contrary, most of the time I felt like a…

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Eileen Chong interviews Eileen Chong

SoutherlyBlog

By Eileen Chong Tell me a little about yourself. My name is Eileen Chong and I’m a poet. I’m a bit of an accidental poet – I took Judith Beveridge’s poetry class when I was at Sydney University doing an M. Litt mostly because I was trying to avoid any modules in which I would have to write essays. How long have you been writing poetry? I first started to think that I might be a poet in 2009. Now I realise my relationship with poetry goes much further back than that, to when I was studying poetry in school.…

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A Fine Balance

SoutherlyBlog

by Aashish Kaul Some months ago, while in India, I went up into the mountains. On a late afternoon, following a walk in the forest, with the day clear and the sun still strong, I came to a café and sat in the open. All around the pines were dark, and there was snow in them, you could see how light tussled to touch the snow that shone very white in the checkered shade. In front, at some distance, stretched from far north down into the east the glacial arc of the Himalayas separating me from Tibet, while to the…

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