I don't know how long it took me to do it but when the idea arrived it took seconds. Or perhaps minutes. It does require imagination. More, it requires excavation, an excavation of the word. Your word. An English one.

Poetry, like air, exists everywhere, particularly when it comes to findable material in a plethora of things ranging from books of fiction or nonfiction, memoirs, biographies or autobiographies, history books, books of philosophy, diaries, books of letters, newspaper articles, remarks made by people online, including social media platforms such as FB, Twitter, IG, and WeChat, particular WeChat, and even emails, all, in my opinion, instant trash that contains gold only an appreciative eye could pick.

You have to do it badly. If it is poetry, even more so, because there is no because. If you write like you were the best in the world, you are the worst because you pretend too hard. Too harsh, too. Why do you want to be the best? Is that because you are a lack or there is a lack in you that you feel like filling up all the time? Even when you are named the best, does that mean anything?

To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.

What a writing life is that, one might wonder, having to publish one’s own work by oneself, in the case of Pessoa, or consigning one’s own work to obscurity, in the case of Dickinson? But that is exactly what migration—mental, spiritual and creative—is all about.

There’s a lot of things I don’t care any more Calling me ‘Yu Ouyang’, for example Putting me under ‘Y’ in a bibliography, for another Accusing me of writing in a ‘sloppy’ way

Over the years, for Ouyang to encourage Yu, or vice versa, for Yu to encourage Ouyang to engage in the innovative activities, they (Ouyang and Yu) collected sayings about the use of mistakes wherever they appeared.

In a play, someone living is pretending to be someone dead Someone dead comes alive in another name

Just around the street corner the sky heard The man say to the woman But that’s what this place is like