Four Poems

Abstract

Among the four poems, “Untitled” was written thirty-four years ago, in the summer of 1989. That is when the poet was still a teenager, burned with creative fire. Song stopped creative writing in the early 1990s and only recently did he resume writing short stories and poems. He is currently writing a series of short stories and novellas about the end of the 1980s. The other three poems published here, including “China,” were all drafted in 2018. Song’s friend Taiwanese novelist Lo Yi-chin, encouraged him to keep the creative fire burning. Song and Lo co-authored a poetry collection, which was published by Ryefield in 2022, under the title White Horse and Black Camel.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mingwei Song

Mingwei Song is a professor of modern Chinese literature at Wellesley College. He is the author of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 (Harvard) and Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia). He is the coeditor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-first-century Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia). He published a coauthored poetry collection (with Lo Yi-chin): White Horse and Black Camel (Ryefield, Taiwan).

Kelly Song

Kelly Song is currently an undergraduate student majoring in comparative literary studies at Wellesley College. Her translation of Mingwei Song’s long poem “Outro” won the first prize at a writing contest hosted by Wellesley’s English Department.