Yang Ke 杨克

Yang Ke published his first poetry collection, Sunbird, in 1985. Since then, he has published fourteen poetry collections in Chinese, including Yang Ke’s Poems and A Bowl of Water Gilded by Sunlight, as well as four essay collections and one collected volume. Ten of his poetry books in translation, including Two Halves of the Earth Apple and A Journey Without End, have appeared in English, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Arabic, Romanian, Mongolian, and Korean through publishers such as the University of Oklahoma Press and the University of Zaragoza Press. He is the editor-in-chief of The Yearbook of Chinese New Poetry (1998–2019 annual volumes). His honors include the Francesco Giampietri International Literary Prize (Italy), the Cambridge Silver Willow Leaf Xu Zhimo Poetry Award (UK), and the Outstanding Poet Award of the Romanian Copyright Office. His poem I Saw My Motherland in a Pomegranate was selected by China Poetry Network as one of the “Ten Must-Read Poems of the Century.”

On his practice of writing poetry, Yang Ke writes:

For more than forty years, my poetry has turned toward both the depths of history and the textures of lived reality, as well as the subtle and complex tremors within the human heart. Rooted in the earth, I have sought to engage the wounds and echoes of historical experience, while also reflecting on how technology, the modern city, consumer culture, the imagination of war, and the evolution of civilization continually reshape human life and the world we inhabit. To me, poetry is both witness and inquiry: an unceasing exploration of our life’s source, of future possibility, of unknown fate.

In my writing, I have consistently valued inner rhythm, linguistic density, and structural tension. Poetry may be global, modern, and postmodern, yet its language must remain grounded in modern Chinese, preserving the musicality, suppleness, and radiance of the Chinese language itself. It should be capable of entering concrete scenes and precise particulars, while also opening up broader mental spaces through leaps of imagery. I have always believed that poetry must have both warmth and edge: it should be able to enter the crowd, and also illuminate solitude. For me, writing is a way of touching the pulse of the age through personal experience, of casting the light of the Chinese language into the hidden subtleties of reality, and, within the limits of a finite life, of reaching toward a higher, farther, and deeper realm of the spirit.