How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

This episode you are listening to is the soundtrack of the Grand Finale of How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast.

The grand finale of The How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast Program was successfully held at Boston Time 8:00 PM on February 25 / Hong Kong Time 9:00 AM on February 26, 2023. Thirteen guest hosts from USA, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong attended this online meeting hosted by Prof. Zong-qi Cai, host and producer of this podcast program.

Prof. Cai began this event by showing a slide that presents a brief bio of each topic host, along with the topic poster. Next, the guest hosts took turns to talk about fun and memorable things about how they fell in love with Chinese poetry, the gratification and pleasures they derive from learning and teaching poetry, and/or from making the podcast. After everyone had spoken, Prof. Cai played an 8-minute demo of the “video-fication” of a podcast episode and discussed the approach to turning these podcast talks into video episodes. This video-fication project arouse great interests of the guest hosts and audiences.

The How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast and Videos presents the highlights of the acclaimed book How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology by Columbia University Press. The podcast/videos consist of 55 episodes, where a team of leading experts guides listeners to explore the rich heritage of Chinese poetry, poem by poem, genre by genre, and dynasty by dynasty. The last episode was released on February 28, 2023.

The primary audience of this podcast/videos is general public in the English-speaking world. As of 12:30 PM on Feb. 28, 2023, the 54 podcast episodes have scored a total of 121708 plays. The audiences come from 81 countries and regions.

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In this final episode, we will first listen to the “Song of Suffering Calamity” by the woman poet and scholar Wang Duanshu (1621-ca. 1680), narrating her flight from the invading Qing army during the Ming-Qing transition. We will conclude with two examples by women among the many poems in the Ming and Qing that record quotidian pleasures and reflections on daily life. Whether pain and loss or pleasure and joy, men and women in late imperial China inscribed their emotions and thoughts in poetry.

Guest Host: Prof. Grace Fong

An outstanding development in this period is the practice of writing poetry as autobiography, as the record of a life story. We will discuss the life-long collection of over 1000 poems by an eighteenth-century woman poet to illustrate her poetic self-construction. 

Guest Host: Prof. Grace Fong

The Ming, and especially the Qing, witnessed the unprecedented spread of writing poetry among literate men and women in the history of imperial China. This episode introduces the influential theories of poets, such as Yuan Mei’s “native sensibility” (xingling), which promoted naturalness and personal expression over formal learning and ethical concerns, thus encouraging the common practice of poetry.     

Guest Host: Prof. Grace Fong

The carefree playfulness presented in Wang Heqing’s poem “On the Big Butterfly” tells us much about the cultural milieu of the time when the sanqu flourished, and reminds us of the genre’s origins in streets, marketplaces, and entertainment quarters.

Guest Host: Prof. Lian Xinda

The two love songs—authored by Guan Hanqing and Bai Pu respectively—present humorous dramatic moments in a lively language of everyday speech.

Guest Host: Prof. Lian Xinda

Using a cluster of carefully chosen images, Ma Zhiyuan’s “Autumn Thoughts” invites readers to identify themselves with a weary traveler, a “heartbroken man at the end of the earth.”

Guest Host: Prof. Lian Xinda

A master of tune and sense, Li Qingzhao knows how to bring out her almost unspeakable inner feeling through her skillful employment of the ci form, the music of words.

Guest Host: Prof. Lian Xinda

Su Shi does not only expand the subject matter of the ci poetry, but also gives his song lyrics a genuine personal voice, an unambiguous autobiographical tone as that found in the shi poetry.

Guest Host: Prof. Lian Xinda

Thanks to his innovative use of leading words (lingzi), Liu Yong creates a multilayered structure for his poetic description and narration, which allows him to explore time and space, to involve things both far and near, to relate the parts to the whole, and to weave what is outside with what is inside.  

Guest Host: Prof. Lian Xinda