The journal of
21st Century Chinese Poetry 《廿一世纪中国诗歌》is an independent journal committed to showcasing the best of contemporary Chinese poetry. We exist to discover and celebrate poetry and the Chinese poets who write them with the largest possible Anglophone audience.
In the early twentieth century, The May Fourth Movement (1917-1921) launched an era where vernacular Chinese was for the first time accepted as a legitimate poetic voice. This was followed by an outpouring of verse written in 'plain speech' by people from all walks of life in contrast to the classical, elitist poetic forms of imperial China.
A century has now passed since these 'new' poetic voices emerged. Vernacular poetry has continued to blossom in poetry journals and in cyberspace.
The editor and translators at
21st Century Chinese Poetry are committed to translating poets from across China who would otherwise remain virtually unknown to Western audiences.
Please send all enquiries, suggestions and corrections regarding
21st Century Chinese Poetry to Meifu Wang at:
editor@modernchinesepoetry.com.
Founder and Editor
Meifu Wang
A NEW SEASON OF POETRY
After working in partnership with China's Poetry Journal (诗刊) from 2019 to 2022, the 21st Century Chinese Poetry team is progressing to the next phase: 1) The editor, Meifu Wang, will take a sabbatical from translation to work on her own poetry--a bilingual collection titled New and Old Places; 2) afterwards, we will continue to introduce contemporary Chinese poetry curated by poets outside the Beijing channel; 3) we plan to re-print the first 15 issues of our journal, and introduce new issues.
We hope you will continue to visit and look through the poems we translated over the years,
or read some of Meifu's poems:
Dirt Road
Water Droplets
Mountain Crag
To Melville
To Father
Dirge
Reading Baudelaire Into the Night
Please stay tuned.