Three Poems

In Search of Singularity

“…And in "The One Sticking Close to the White Wall as He Leaves" (贴着白色墙壁走掉的人), we see it as it strives to follow a man who hurries on, "caring only for himself" (只顾自己) while the soul lags behind, "twisting and turning to follow close / as though terrified to lose its way / that poor helpless little orphan" (歪歪扭扭跟得紧 / 好像受够了 迷失的痛苦 / 那个孤苦伶仃的弃儿). 66 The soul somehow managed to survive the deluge of civilization-though sacred places where one can nourish one's spirit have long disappeared. The poetic space in Wang's work is not that of a secular temple like in Szymborska, but rather that of an antifeudal palace.…”

“…Along with collective initiatives, there are obviously many individual authors who experiment with all sorts of technologically supported poetry on their own, including, for instance, Piotr Marecki, for whom such experiments constitute an opportunity for sociological observation and a form of social activism; he has published, among other things, a collection titled Google the Independent (Niepodległa Google, 2018) composed of poems made largely from hits displayed by Polish-language Google searches, presenting a problematic image of "patriotic" society, and Poems for 100 Dollars (Wiersze za sto dolarów, 2017), an anthology of poems written by Amazon Mechanical Turks, whom Marecki hired via Amazon servers. Finally, there are many outstanding Polish authors who generally do not write in Polish with ambitions to contribute to the transnational field of electronic literature, for instance Anna Nacher, 53, 97, 122, 375 Johnston, Bill 62, 384 n. 67, 385,[387][388] 401, 404,[490][491][494][495][496] 497 Wang Jiaxin 王家新 27,[58][59] 61,[63][64][65][66][67][68][74][75][76][77][80][81][109][110][111][124][125][126][127][128] 133, 135, 151, 256, 281, 408 Wojaczek, 49, 53, 78,[81][82][136][137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147][149][150][151][152][153][154][155][156][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167][169][170][171][172][173] 175, 177, 209, 215, 224, 232, 234,[251][252] 274, 353, 356 Wojtyła, Karol, See John 西川 58, 61, 135,[147][148] 150, 190, 256, 411 Xi Jinping 习近平 3, 110 Xiao Bing 小冰 60, 486, 553, 569,…”

“…They may feel less vulnerable to existential loneliness when they recognize that their predecessors as poets also faced challenges and difficulties, though of course the challenges varied in scale and cause from those in the modern world. 66 Zheng Xiaoqiong was not among the practitioners of classical verse, but she received some formal training that helped strengthen the (inter)textual tissue of her work. Also, her poems apparently prefer bright places and develop particularly well when more light is cast on them, being here a metaphor for professional literary education which not all migrant worker poets were lucky enough to receive and, on the other hand, there is no telling that it would have had a positive influence on their writing either; again, poems are like plants: some prefer the sun, others the shade.…”