The International PoetrySync Festival

from Canaan Morse at Paper Republic:

Chuothe international poets sat down one by one with Yang Lian, or Liao Weitang, or Qin Xiaoyu in front of a Skype-connected computer to read their poetry and the Chinese poets’ poetry, and to interact with a faceless, presumably multitudinous online audience. Interpreters and questioners were everywhere; back in a half-lit meeting room in the top floor of a building on the Third Ring Road, a team of ants, armed with laptops, scrambled to turn Chinese into English, English into Chinese, send all of it over QQ to everybody else, then post it to a Tencent microblog stream on which audience members could pose questions to the poets.
Who came? Kwame Dawes, from the Caribbean; James Byrne, British poet and editor of The Wolf; Canadian poet Ken Babstock; Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky; Syrian poet Adonis; and several others whom I would name in full, but the site’s server has stopped responding. They were all well-known, well-published poets and editors, and if the medium of their correspondence, which required stop-and-start maintenance along with as many as three translators (in the case of Adonis, who spoke in French, and therefore had to be translated from French to Dutch, to English, to Chinese), hadn’t been such an obstacle, they might have been able to engage in some truly meaningful discussion. Tang Xiaodu moderated the event on the Beijing side, while Yang Lian moderated most of the event on theirs — and “moderate” may itself be too moderate a description, as a lack of audience questions early on prompted YL to take on the interpreter’s and moderator’s mantles himself, which resulted both in interesting leads and a lot of distracting hand-waving.

for the whole piece, click here.

Chinese Poetry Events at Rotterdam

Chinese poetry events at Poetry International Rotterdam:

WEDNESDAY 12 JUNE 2013
 14:00 – 15:00  CHINESE DICHTERS IN LEESZAAL WEST
Leeszaal Rotterdam West : reading
Liu Waitong, Qin Xiaoyu, Yang Lian
 18:30 – 19:30  POETRY READING
Small Auditorium : reading
Ester Naomi Perquin, Ilya Kaminsky, Liu Waitong, Michèle Métail
FRIDAY 14 JUNE 2013
 18:30 – 19:30  MASTER CLASS: ‘HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY’
Small Auditorium : active poetry
 20:00 – 21:00  CURRENT CHINESE POETRY: ‘I HOPE THE UNIVERSE…
Small Auditorium : special event
 21:30 – 23:00  POETRY READING AND DISCUSSIONS
Small Auditorium : reading  LIVE STREAM
Liu Waitong, Qin Xiaoyu, Yang Lian
SATURDAY 15 JUNE 2013
 14:00 – 16:30  LANGUAGE & ART GALLERY TOUR 2013 – GUIDED TOURS
Foyer : crossovers
Daniel Bănulescu, Ester Naomi Perquin, Qin Xiaoyu
 15:00 – 16:00  TRANSLATION WORKSHOP RESULTS: QIN XIAOYU
Garden Café Floor : translation
 18:30 – 19:30  POETRY READING
Small Auditorium : reading
Daniel Bănulescu, Ken Babstock, Mustafa Stitou, Qin Xiaoyu
 21:30 – 23:00  GATEWAY: FINAL PROGRAM
Main Auditorium : special event  LIVE STREAM
Ilya Kaminsky, James Byrne, Jan Glas, Karinna Alves Gulias, Liu Waitong, Michèle Métail, Qin Xiaoyu, Roland Jooris