Matthew Byrne | Writer, Founder, Digital Marketer

The Next Stop

I can not sleep without knowing there is a hope, Half the night, I waste in signs. In a wakeful doze I sorrow, For the hand, the lips, the eyes…  Tennyson

The next stop on the Spittoon Tour is Shanghai on Nov. 18. The day will consist of three interactive events featuring a poetry translation masterclass, readings by poets from Shanghai and Beijing, and a literary competition. Get a Tour Pass to get access to all of our events.

Full event schedule, 18 November

Translation Masterclass: 3pm to 4.30pm, uCUBE

Poetry in Shanghai: 5pm to 6.30pm, My Place Ruin Bar

Battle of the Bards: 8pm to 9.30pm, My Place Ruin Bar

Translation Masterclass

With David Perry and Shelly Bryant, 3pm to 4.30pm.

Translating poetry involves two basic steps: a rough translation of the original followed by a transformation of that rough translation into poetry. Work with two professional literary translators to transform a rough English translation of two contemporary Chinese poems into poetry. Advanced Chinese is not required. Intermediate English ability is necessary.

David Perry is the author of two collections of poems, Expat Taxes and Range Finder, as well as two long-poem chapbooks, Knowledge Follows and New Years. He will be publishing a translation of Han Bo’s Chinese Eastern Railway as a limited-edition chapbook in collaboration with the artist Monika Lin. His current digital writing project, 16 Lines (and Changing), emerges from an experiment in “writing the Shanghai Metro to the very end” by using aleatory methods to randomly explore stations, stops, and the streets surrounding them. He teaches in the Writing Program at NYU Shanghai.

Shelly Bryant is the author of nine volumes of poetry and has translated Sheng Keyi’s novels Northern Girls and Fields of White for Penguin Books, and Death Fugue for Giramondo Press, Chew Kok Chang’s short story collection Other Cities, Other Lives and You Jin’s A Life in Words, Mum is Where the Heart is, and In Time, Out of Place for Epigram Books, Fan Wen’s Land of Mercy for Rinchen Books, Li Xinfeng’s China in Africa for HSRC, and Li Na’s memoir My Life for Penguin Books.

Poetry in Shanghai

5pm to 6.30pm, My Place Ruin Bar. This event will bring together some of the best English-language poetry and Chinese poetry with its English translation from Beijing and Shanghai.

Alice Pettway is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, The Time of Hunger, is available from Salmon Poetry; a second book, Moth, is forthcoming in 2019. Currently, she lives and writes in Shanghai.

David Tait’s collection Self-Portrait with The Happiness was shortlisted for The Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and The Polari Prize. It received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. His latest pamphlet “Three Dragon Day” won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition judged by Billy Collins and was shortlisted for The Michael Marks Award. He lives in Nanjing and his second collection, The AQI, is forthcoming from Smith/Doorstop press.

肖水 Xiao Shui, born in Chenzhou, Hunan in 1980, has a degree in law and Chinese Literature from Fudan University. His published collections include Lost and Found, Chinese Class, and Chinese Mugwort: New Jueju Poetry.

Simon Shieh is a poet, Editor in Chief of Spittoon Literary Magazine, and the Director of InkBeat Arts, an organization that empowers young people through artistic expression. Simon’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in CALAMITY, Kartika Review, Grist and the Aztec Literary Review.

Battle of the Bards

8pm to 9.30pm, My Place Ruin Bar.

Spittoon, Shanghai Literary Review, NYU Shanghai, and Literary Shanghai have been engaged for months in a vicious cold war to determine which is the literariest collective of all literary collectives. Gather your own team of bards to vie for literary victory in a series of literary contests that will test your writing, reading, and literary knowledge.

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Originally published 11 November 2017 on the Spittoon WeChat channel. Archive reference #54.