Hot News: 唱不完的詩歌, Chinese Mirror Website Launched

On the 5th day of Chinese New Year Festival, it’s believed that the gods of prosperity come down from the heavens. Therefore, it’s the best day of the year to open new businesses.

Today, as promised, I launched a Chinese mirror website, 唱不完的詩歌: 中英雙語短詩網誌, putting NeverEnding Story on the literary map of “Cultural China,” which has been promoted by Tu Weiming, Research Professor and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard University, who authored "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center," Daedalus, Vol. 134, No. 4, Fall, 2005, pp. 145-167.

And one more piece of good news. Poetry Daily, which is edited by TheJoyOTL, just became the fifth member in the list of e-papers that reprint the haiku and tanka published on NeverEnding Story. For more information, see Hot News: Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in Four E-Papers.

These two pieces of good news are my Valentine gifts to all poetry lovers.


New Year's sunlight
on 唱不完的詩歌
the scent of roses 
  
(note: 唱不完的詩歌 literally means reciting endless lines of poetry)

Hot News: Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in Four E-Papers

Since its inception on Jan.1, 2013, NeverEnding Story has been well-received in the poetry communities it serves, and its haiku and tanka have been regularly reprinted in the following four e-papers:

1 Poetry and Poetry Lovers, edited by Sweepy (A D Joyce)

2 The Poetry Daily, edited by Govind Joshi

3 The Poetry Daily, edited by My Blogworld

4 The Poetry and Me Daily, edited by Poetry and Me

Below is a relevant excerpt from my Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold:

L: What do you feel we as haiku or tanka writers need to do to get these forms more accepted by the mainstream poetry world?

CL: In terms of defining what poetry is, there is an asymmetric power relationship between the mainstream poetry world and the haiku/tanka community. It’s difficult to change their perception of haiku/tanka in a top-down manner. In my view, the most effective way of reversing this unbalanced relationship is to adopt a bottom-up approach; that is to consolidate and expand our readership base through online publishing and social networking sites. If there are more people who love reading/writing haiku and tanka, the mainstream poetry world will eventually open their main gate to haiku and tanka poets. This approach to reversing the asymmetric power relationship has been demonstrated in the case of the power transfer from traditional media, such as news papers, TV, and books, to online and social media.

Most importantly, living in a hectic society, most people now only have a short attention span. If they are interested in reading something meaningful, I think short verse forms, such as haiku and tanka, will become more and more popular. I’ve been tweeting my published work for two years, and found more and more Twitter users use hashtags such as #poetry, #micropoetry, #haiku, #tanka, #gogyohka, #gpoem, #5lines,..etc, to indicate their tweets are short poems (For further information, see M. Kei, “The Topsy Turvy World of Micropoetry on Twitter,” Atlas Poetica, 9, Summer 2011)