Poet explores how to ‘undress’ language

Video produced by Victoria Fleischer.

Poet Wang Ping writes at the intersection of gender, sexuality and the Chinese immigrant experience. She was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the South China Sea before emigrating to the U.S. in 1985 to earn an M.A. in English from Long Island University. She is the author of poetry collections “The Magic Whip” and “Of Flesh & Spirit.”

Watch Wang read her poem “Syntax” at the 2015 AWP Conference and Bookfair in Minneapolis.

Syntax

She walks to a table
She walk to table

She is walking to a table
She walk table now

What difference does it make
What difference it make

In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought

Language, like woman
Look best when free, undressed

Wang Ping earned a B.A. from Beijing University and a Ph.D. from New York University. Her books include two collections of poetry, the cultural study “Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China,” the novel “Foreign Devil,” two collections of fiction stories entitled “American Visa” and “The Last Communist Virgin,” and a book of Chinese folk lore, “The Dragon Emperor.” Wang is also the editor and co-translator of the anthology “New Generation: Poetry from China Today” and co-translator of “Flames” by Xue Di.