[Stephen McCarty, Time, August 9th 2010]:
If you want to subvert the Chinese government these days, try writing a poem.
Given the hypervigilance of China’s censors, you’d have thought that dissenting poets would be frog-marched to the nearest labor reform camp in the time that it takes to declaim a heptasyllabic pentameter. But the apparatchiks have apparently taken their eye off the ball.
“Poetry is one of the freest media in China, but the West doesn’t know it,” says Ouyang Yu, the Chinese-Australian poet, author, translator and editor. “The authorities have turned a blind eye because Chinese society is increasingly focused on the economy. This is the best time for Chinese poets to flourish.” Although Ouyang’s verse is preoccupied with questions of identity and the migrant experience, it too is salted with the language of freedom and struggle. “Your reality is iron bars/ The shadows of the sun ten thousand miles away,” he writes in “The Wanderer.” In another poem, “Listening to the 80-year-old telling me a story,” he writes in the voice of a survivor of communist purges: “I had to be extremely careful in all those political campaigns …/ So many of my friends had died …’