Words on the streets

At a night market in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, a subway station in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, or a beach in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, you may find a stall set up by a twenty-something woman with a signboard that reads, "Improvised poems. Pay as you wish".

The woman goes by the nickname Gehuaren, who has made a name for herself on social media as a "street-stall poet". Back in 2020, when Gehuaren resigned from her job at an advertising agency in Shanghai, she decided to do something fun. Having an interest in literature, she was struck by the idea of offering people a unique service of quickly writing poems based on themes of the customers' choice.

Her improvised poems are usually short, with just several lines. Once the poem has been completed, she refuses to make any edits, saying, "Poetry captures the fleeting moments in our lives and gives substance to our floating imagination."

Starting from Xishuangbanna, Gehuaren has been to several cities vending her poems, already selling several hundred of them. "Most of my customers are young people. I'm surprised that they are more than happy to walk up to me and ask about the 'strange goods' I'm selling. This shows poetry is quite accepted among the youth," she said.

"The feedback I often received about my poems are encouraging words like 'cute' and 'fulfilling'. For me, writing poems is entertainment rather than a job," she added.

To make the entertainment even more entertaining, Gehuaren then started two other poetry "experiments".

She is now cooperating with musicians to create poems that can be made into songs. She writes the lyrics while the bands compose the melodies and perform the songs. "I plan to work with 33 bands to bring in 33 works, each of which may be about an emotion, a social issue or maybe nothing at all," she said.

The other experiment is titled "Taking Poetry to the Streets", in which Gehuaren turns walls, windows, trash cans, delivery cars and almost everything in daily life into showcases of poetry. Of course, she doesn't write the poems directly on them. Instead, she took pictures and added her poems onto the images with her phone, making ordinary scenes poetic.

"I believe that there is always a corner in the world that contains poetry. I write wherever I go, and I compose whatever comes to my mind," she said.