New Poetry from China 1917-2017 edited by Ming Di

New Poetry is a literary movement that started in China in 1917 and still continues today. 

In China, where writing poetry can be dangerous, and a number of the poets have been jailed for their writing, this anthology reminds us why poetry continues to be a necessary and urgent form, a challenge to rigis ways of thinking and oppressive governments. 

Ming Di's second anthology, New Poetry from China 1917-2017, has been eagerly anticipated. Beginning with Hu Shi's remarkable freeverse poems of 1916, Ming Di presents us with an extraordinarily rich panoply of Chinese poems, written over the past hundred years by an extremely diverse group of poets of the last hundred years, ranging from Tibetan and Mongolian poets to those from Ming Di's own native Wuhan. As John Yau reminds us in his fine Introduction, in China, poetry is held in very high regard, and its exponents understand that poetic language, however much it may simulate ordinary speech, is carefully constructed and designed to Make It New. This anthology should have very broad appeal in the US of the twenty-first century.  

New Poetry from China isn't just an anthology, but an exciting history of modern Chinese poetics, and it showcases a huge diversity of aesthetic approaches, including spoken word and scholarly poets, poets famous for lack of Western influence and poets who chair Shakespeare Societies, poets living in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. There are lyrics, prose poems, a variation on haiku, sonnets. What you hold in your hand is a kind of hundred-year-long Cambrian explosion that has given rise to the vitality of contemporary Chinese poetry.