Month: September 2021

Beginner’s Wall, Shek O

~ oxfordbrookesuni ~ Leave a comment

Big waves lick boulders above the sea level.
            A typhoon brought salt, now dusty,
over volcanic cliffs, where we sit.
            We pick up small pieces of graphite,
trailing our spot to prove their colouration.
            I lie like seaweed drying for consumption,
arms stretched next to my ears, and stare
            at the sky wide open, seamless with the sea,
a gradient of indigo and turquoise where
            ribbons of sand and foam intersperse.
If you look hard enough, waves from afar
            carry incessant gouges like woodcut. 

A challenge I can’t take without liquid courage:
            rock-climbers set ropes, fix harnesses
and check helmets for each other, trusting
            their weight with muscle strength and grip.
Giving in to gravity, too, is sometimes crucial.
            Let hips sink onto an invisible chair mid-air
for rest. The hard part is to know you won’t fall.
            Tension! Tension! Climbers’ partners
on the ground look up for commands. The language
            one must learn facing speechless crags.
The wind growls, uncritical to recent histories
            of survival out of besieged brick walls.

by Cheng Tim Tim

This week we feature the second of three poems by poets appearing in the exciting new online festival Poetics of Home – a Chinese Diaspora Poetry Festival that is currently underway and continues until 5 October. The festival is co-ordinated by our Brookes colleague Dr Jennifer Wong, and is designed to connect and showcase the diverse works by established and emerging Anglophone poets writing across the Chinese diaspora. It features a wonderfully rich line-up of speakers from all over the world, such as Marilyn Chin, Mary Jean Chan, Susheila Nasta, Hannah Lowe, and Will Harris, who will be taking part in poetry readings and discussions on a range of urgent themes. The festival is presented in collaboration with Wasafiri and the Institute of English Studies, with the support of the Lottery Fund from Arts Council England. For more details about the festival and to sign up for the events, visit the festival website.

‘Beginner’s Wall, Shek O’ is copyright © Cheng Tim Tim, 2021. The poem will soon be appearing in Berfrois, and we’re grateful to the editors there for allowing it to be reproduced here.

Cheng Tim Tim is a poet, teacher and music enthusiast from Hong Kong, currently reading for an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her poems have found homes in Berfrois, diode, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, among others. She was nominated for Best Small Fiction by SAND Journal in 2020. She is one of the co-founding editors of EDGE: HKBU Creative Journal. She is working on chapbooks which explore Hong Kong’s natural, urban and emotional landscapes, as well as desire and rituals through the lens of tattooing. She loves artworks that heal and provoke. Follow Cheng Tim Tim on Twitter.

Cheng Tim Tim will be reading at the Poetry and Society event today (Tuesday 28 September) at 1pm, and you can join via Zoom at this link. The event also features Laura Jane Lee, Natalie Linh Bolderston, and Sarah Howe.

Later today at 6pm, Poetics of Home presents Cultural Hybridity: Will Harris, Jay G Ying, and Helen Bowell in conversation with Lucienne Loh (co-hosted with the British Chinese Studies Network). Find more details on the Eventbrite page.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Work song of Foxconn

~ oxfordbrookesuni ~ Leave a comment

by Jinhao Xie

This week we feature the first of three poems by poets appearing in the exciting new online festival Poetics of Home – a Chinese Diaspora Poetry Festival. Poetics of Home begins tomorrow (Wednesday 22 September) and continues until 6 October. The festival is co-ordinated by our Brookes colleague Dr Jennifer Wong, and is designed to connect and showcase the diverse works by established and emerging Anglophone poets writing across the Chinese diaspora. It features a wonderfully rich line-up of speakers from all over the world, such as Marilyn Chin, Mary Jean Chan, Susheila Nasta, Hannah Lowe, and Will Harris, who will be taking part in poetry readings and discussions on a range of urgent themes. The festival is presented in collaboration with Wasafiri and the Institute of English Studies, with the generous support of the Lottery Fund from Arts Council England. For more details about the festival and to sign up for the events, visit the festival website.

‘Work song of Foxconn’ is copyright © Jinhao Xie, 2021 and reproduced by permission of the author.Jinhao Xie is a poet born in Chengdu. Their poetry touches on themes of culture, self-hood and the everyday. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Gutter Magazine, harana poetry, bath magg, Spilled Milk Magazine, and their poems anthologised in Slam! You’re Gonna Wanna Hear This, edited by Nikita Gill, and their visual poems are included in Instagram Poems for Every Day by the National Poetry Library.You can follow Jinhao Xie on Twitter and Instagram.Jinhao will be reading at the ‘Mapping of Desire’ event moderated by Annie Fan in the Poetics of Home festival on Sunday 3 October at 12 noon (UK time), along with Nicholas Wong and Lady Red Ego. For details and to sign up to attend, visit the Eventbrite page.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

two perspectives on a landscape

~ oxfordbrookesuni

i

Now you find yourself in the country,
in the same country where you were born.

Tooth-first, you, a knobbled branch, your hand.
You want reasons for the engine. There are none.

But how it rusts, thinking, listless in the grass,
while you have a mouth of blood and wind.

Spit out the trees, each one you’ve planted,
with nobody else around. Now they stand

on hillsides that always meant a window,
though it slanted slightly in its frame.

Though now you wonder of the window’s
high, neglected corners, you cannot run to –

now you realise you have found yourself
in a landscape you no longer understand.


ii

There are new things you can understand
             in the old way. 

There are old things you can understand
             in a new way.

You sometimes think of you as the où
             without location,

carrying yourself, your own bouquet, to bed-
rooms and searching
             for a place to put it down.

You sometimes think about the old,
frittering away, unread
             books lining their shelves:

an apartment, a bedroom like your own
             palm, fingering the curtains.

You sometimes think about the old ways,
             the old things –

in the garage
             of what you think,
             the new things are all
             hopeless.

by Joshua Calladine-Jones

Our annual competition is closing soon! The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, judged by Will Harris, closes for entries this Monday (20 September) at 23.00 BST/22.00 GMT. There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. This year, thanks to the generosity of poet Isy Mead, we also have a limited number of free entries available for BAME poets who have been state-educated in the UK. You can find out more about the competition on our website. 

‘two perspectives on a landscape’ is copyright © Joshua Calladine-Jones, 2021. It is reprinted from Constructions [Konstrukce] (tall-lighthouse, 2021) by permission of tall-lighthouse. You can read more about the pamphlet on the tall-lighthouse website.

The poems in this sometimes surreal and experimental pamphlet were influenced by the conditions of the pandemic, with its renewed focus on video-conferencing and other forms of digital technology. Konstrukce is a Czech word, meaning construction and the poetry is assembled from fragments, sentences noted down during online conversations with speakers who use English as a second-hand language, replete with faults, slips, and narratives both intentional and accidental. There are distortions, too, in the sequences, where the poet uses a technique of retranslation to revise literary form, using his own poetic discipline to create a justly memorable pamphlet.

You can find out more about the pamphlet and listen to Joshua read poems from it on the tall-lighthouse website, where you can also buy a copy.

tall-lighthouse has a reputation for publishing exciting new poetry, being the first to publish Sarah Howe, Helen Mort, Liz Berry, Jay Bernard, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Emily Berry and many others. Learn more about the press on the tall-lighthouse website and follow tall-lighthouse on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.