Classical Chinese Poetics: A Re-Viewing class @ Asian American Literary Archive
Some recent news—I’m very excited to be teaching a class on classical Chinese poetry and its influence on contemporary American poetry at the Asian American Literary Archive (AALA) in early 2025! The class will run for six weeks online and feature discussions of classical Chinese poetics, aesthetics, philosophy, language, and cosmology, and its influence on contemporary American poetry and Modernism as mediated by Ezra Pound. We’ll also be troubling this idea of “influence,” and consider what aspects of classical Chinese poetry might have been lost in translation, and how they could influence future poetics. Some poets we’ll look at may include Wáng Wéi 王維, Dù Fǔ 杜甫, Lǐ Shāng Yǐn 李商隱, Lǐ Bái 李白, Lǐ Qīng Zhào 李清照, Victoria Chang, Harryette Mullen, Etel Adnan, Jenny Xie, Jake Skeets, Sherwin Bitsui, Bei Dao, Hala Alyan, Aditi Machado, Brian Teare, Yuki Tanaka, and Fady Joudah.
Please join me if you can—the class will run from 23rd January 2025 – 27th February 2025, Thursdays at 7.30pm EST. The class is aimed at poets who already have their own practice and who are looking to further their poetics. Most weeks will feature a writing exercise designed to help students work towards workshopping a poem in the final week.
The AALA was started in 2023 by Yanyi as a place for members of the AAPI community to create, preserve, and contextualise our literary histories. Years ago I was a student at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, an institution I adored for its commitment to learning outside the constraints of academia. The one area they didn’t cover was East Asian studies. I’m therefore profoundly honoured to be part of AALA’s expansion into coursework, and looking forward to the rich literary futures it will foster.
