Hot News: Chen-ou Liu, Poet of the Month at Triveni

My Dear Friends and Readers:

I'm happy to share with you this exciting news: I am deeply honored and humbled to have been selected to be the Poet of  the Month at Triveni.

You can read the full interview with Triveni editors here and the following is the Q&A about how I became a tanka poet: 

2. TTH: How did you get started as a poet? What was it about tanka that inspired you to embrace this ancient form of poetry? In short, why do you keep writing tanka?

After more than ten years of struggling towards a new life vision and preparing for a major change in my field of study (computer science to cultural studies), in the summer of 2002, I emigrated to Canada to pursue a PhD and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. After arriving in Canada, I was frustrated by the lack of in-depth and wide-ranging classroom discussions, and most importantly, I was stressed by the financial burden. I quit my studies and started to write essays in an adopted language, English. 

After two years of striving, I published three essays but got little attention from scholars in those fields. Furthermore, I was disappointed by my inability to master English quickly. My pent-up emotions began spilling over onto pieces of scrap paper in the form of short poetry. The more I wrote, the more I thought about becoming a poet. 

After a year of striving to write free verse poetry without much success, I came across three books of tanka poetry by Takuboku: Poems to Eat, A Handful of Sand, and Romaji Diary and Sad Toys. The emotional strength, socio-political sensibilities, and colloquial language of Takuboku’s tanka, a kind of poetry in the moment, appealed to me. 

For Takuboku, writing tanka was more like the emotional outburst of a mind agonized by the inner struggle and external events that shaped his life and identity. Since encountering Takuboku’s heartfelt and poignant work, I came to view tanka as a poetic diary that could be employed to record the changes in my immigrant life, a newly-racialized life of struggle with transition and translation.

Three of my tanka are selected for your reading pleasure:

I look away

from his intense gaze …

this homeless man

speaks English

with an accent like mine

Honorable Mention, Tanka Section, 2017 British Haiku Society Awards

              the dervish

              of first snowflakes …

              a Syrian

              child refugee talking

              to the foreign sky

              Runner-Up, 2019 British Haiku Society Awards

mid-autumn night …

the wind whispers to me

Chinese words

that offer me a home

in the shape of a moon

Tanka First Place, 2011 San Francisco International Competition Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay.

And you can read my 34 award-winning tanka here (including one tanka sequence, Without the Middle)

Happy Reading

Chen-ou

Note: For more about my tanka journey, please read my "Poet and Tanka" essay, which was first published in Ribbons, 12:2, Spring/Summer 2016.