This episode you are listening to is the soundtrack of the Grand Finale of How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast. Click the link to watch the video and subscribe to our channel: https://youtu.be/y-ng5CkofkM. 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....

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...

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

This episode discusses how the genre begins to broaden thematically in the work of somewhat later literati poets who continued to write in the short xiaoling form. Poems by the Last Emperor of the Southern Tang, Li Yu, and by Northern Song statesman Yan Shu demonstrate how the genre begins to take on themes like nostalgia and friendship. Guest Host: Dr. Maija Samei

This episode discusses early efforts of literati poets in the song lyric, showing how their works reflect the genre’s origins in the entertainment quarters and remained largely tied to feminine themes, while they bore evidence of poetic craft. Examples show how Wei Zhuang’s more direct and lyrical expression contrasts with Wen Tingyun’s more implicit presentation. Guest Host: Dr. Maija Samei

This episode introduces us to the genre of the song lyric using two anonymous poems that present a male and female speaker in dialog. The episode discusses the origins of the genre during the Tang dynasty, its formal characteristics, and its connection to female voice and feminine themes. Guest Host: Dr. Maija Samei

This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the 9th episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. John Thompson, the best-known performer of early music for the Chinese guqin zither, has since 1976 reconstructed over 200 melodies from 15th to 17th century sources and given numerous solo performances worldwide. His website, www.silkqin.com, the most comprehensive source of information on this subject, receives thousands of hits daily. In 2019 a two-hour documentary about his guqin...

This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the 8th episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. Andrew Merritt writes new songs inspired by Tang poems, adopting the style of American country and folk music.  In this episode, the songwriter shares his love for the poems, opens a window to his songwriting process, and plays three songs from his album of "Twang Dynasty" songs.  Click the link to watch the video and subscribe to our channel: https://youtu.be/u8Kr5nCZSzE. More How...

This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the 7th episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. In Professor Stalling’s second episode, we return to the Tang and Song “rhyme studies” tradition, but this time he invites our listeners to become “zhiyin” (those who study and understand sound) themselves by taking us step by step through the process of not only composing a regulated jueju in English, but also how all of the tonal prosody, semantic rhythm, and parallelism rules...

This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the 6th episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. In the last few episodes, we have learned about the tonal patterns of regulated verse and some of their cosmological underpinnings. In the next two episodes Professor Jonathan Stalling will delve further into the cultural systems that both gave rise to and later sustained these regulated verse practices for over 1500 years.  In the first of these two episodes he will explore the...

Dear Listeners, This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the 5th episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. Going beyond the technical issues of tonal patterning, this episode discusses how the regulated poetic forms of Shakespearean sonnets and Chinese regulated verse embody the Western dualistic and Chinese yin-yang worldviews, respectively. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 and Du Fu’s "Spring Scene" are compared, in both form and content, to illustrate the fundamental differences...

Dear Listeners, This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the 4th episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. This episode shows how easily viewers can construct the heptasyllabic regulated verse tonal patterns—simply by doubling the quatrain tonal patterns.  The episode ends by inviting viewers to write out regulated verse tonal patterns on their own. Click the link to watch the video and subscribe to our channel: https://youtu.be/ipeCVtad9pI. AIGCS

Dear Listeners, This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the third episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. This episode shows how easily viewers can construct the regulated verse tonal patterns—simply by doubling the quatrain tonal patterns.  The episode ends by inviting viewers to write out regulated verse tonal patterns on their own. Click the link to watch the video and subscribe to our channel: https://youtu.be/iWXosSaZFpU. AIGCS

Dear Listeners, This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the second episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS. Taking advantage of ppt charts and animation, this episode shows viewers how to follow the three basic rules of tonal patterning to construct tonally regulated lines, then couplets, and finally quatrains.  The episode ends by inviting viewers to write out quatrain tonal patterns on their own. Click the link to watch the video and subscribe to our...

Dear Listeners, Please accept our apologies for being late to upload this new episode of How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast. AIGCS is pleased to launch the HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS (HTRCPV), a companion program of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY PODCAST.  As a matter of fact, its first episodes are cross-listed as special video episodes (eps. 37-39) of the Podcast.  Unlike the Podcast, HTRCPV does not track Chinese poetry’s historical development but presents episodes in thematic...

This episode tells the stories of two Daoist nuns, Li Ye, who became a palace woman, and Yu Xuanji, who became a courtesan. Both left behind highly regarded poems but lost their lives to execution. The episode explores the perception of literary talent as it intersects with femininity. Guest Host: Dr. Maija Bell Samei Notice: Dear listeners, we would like to announce that the next nine HTRCP episodes are special video episodes to be watched on YouTube at this link:...

This episode discusses the interactions between courtesans and the literati during the Tang and how this is related to the formation of early ci poetry, and then introduces a few works by the well-known courtesan-poetess Xue Tao. Guest Host: Dr. Maija Bell Samei