Searching for authenticity

For artist Liu Xiaochuan, 24, who does sculptures and kunqu performances, poetry is another medium of art for her through which she develops her interest in different cultures, explores the beauty of languages and connects to herself and others.

Growing up in Beijing, Liu went to the US to study Studio Art and French in 2017. In her university's poetry course, she started to read and write poems in English. At that time, she was struggling to adapt to the new environment and suffering from memory difficulties after a brain injury, so she put all her painful thoughts into her poems. The poems became more than homework — they were healing.

She dove into the sea of rhymes, forms and images of poems in a non-native language and pursued the authentic flavor of English poetry. She also attended many poetry readings, which are popular activities among poetry lovers in the West. In pubs and bookstores, where the events usually take place, poets recite their pieces in unique styles. Liu once met a poet who energetically rapped his works, as well as one who recited in a melancholy style as if he was singing the blues. As for Liu, her style is natural and sincere. "The events give me a sense of community and intimacy," she said.

From Liu's dedication comes a poetry chapbook of her own. Selected as the winner of the Jubilat Poetry Prize, her works were published by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019, titled The Rye of Pondering.

After her book, Liu has kept on writing. For her, writing is a never-ending path and poetry is never a finished product. "As you live longer and think deeper, you can always make your poems richer and more accurate," she said. "I like to explore the musical characteristics of poetry and its connection with visual arts. Sometimes, images like camera shots pop into my mind first before I put them into poetry lines."

A piece titled Unnamed Poem in Mourning displays how she carefully crafts her phrases. Following her good friend's suicide, she couldn't help but think about death, and dark, cruel images kept coming into her head. So, she wrote, "Death. A piece of bad meat that the butcher threw into the trash. I am a stray dog. I approached it." Liu composed an over-1,000-word poem and called it "her strongest effort in extending into and grasping the cherished beings in her memory".