Li Shangyu 李商雨

Li Shangyu was born in 1977 in Anhui and graduated from the Chinese Department of Anhui Normal University. He began writing poetry while at university and has published poems and criticism in journals such as Poetry Periodical, Poetry Monthly, People’s Literature, and Yangtze River Review. He has also been active as a poetry editor.

About his practice of writing poetry, Li Shangyu writes:

Lately my mode of writing poetry has shifted from ‘personalised historical imagination’ to what I think of as ‘everyday perception’: focusing on the body’s primal impressions of small, ordinary things, plumbing these perceptions to penetrate beneath the surface of our lives and expressing them in a precise language that mirrors the rhythms of breathing, thereby getting closer to the truth of one’s existence. This way of generating poetry can be traced back to the Book of Songs; in China we’ve called it xing (excitement, inspiration). Its motion, from outer to inner – the opposite of T.S. Eliot’s idea of the ‘objective correlative’ that seeks expression of inner states through external objects – is one of the hallmarks of Chinese poetry. This is what I am seeking in my writing of poetry: a way of writing rooted in sensation, where ‘aesthetics is the mother of ethics’ (Brodsky).