Under the title, “A Poet From China’s Avant-Garde Looks Back,” the Wall Street Journal has published a brief interview with Nine Leaves 九葉 poet Zheng Min 鄭敏, who “stopped writing along with the other poets in the 1950s after she returned from a sojourn in the U.S. to study literature at Brown University and voice at Juilliard,” but “picked the pen back up in 1979, a period she calls her ‘second childhood,’ when she began to explore poetry as well as philosophy and translation.” She says:

I started to study philosophy to have a better understanding of literature, because I don’t think you can really understand literature without a background of philosophy. I loved both of them. I think philosophy without literature is too hard. Literature without philosophy has no depth. So you have to combine both.

Also, I think I’m influenced by Rilke, because I had that philosophy background. So I’m tied to German poetry more than contemporary American poetry.

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