How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

This episode you are listening to is the soundtrack of the Grand Finale of How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast.

This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the 9th episode of HOW TO READ CHINESE POETRY VIDEOS.

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. 

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 discussed in previous episodes come together to inform distinctive ways of reciting and chanting regulated verse both in modern Chinese and English.

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 emergence of the 知音 “zhiyin,” a community drawn together by their devotion to create and refine what came to be called 韵学 “yunxue” or “the study of rhymes” leading to the creation of rhyme books and later rhyme tables that allowed poets from across distinct dialects and regional accents the ability to compose regulated according to shared standards.  Stalling will take us deep into the phonological rules of Classical Chinese rhyme studies through a unique approach because he has reorganized 8000 monosyllabic English words into "rhyme tables" by following all of the essential phonological rules present in Classical Chinese “yunxue.” This episode will be followed next week by another that build upon our knowledge of the rhyme table tradition so that we can compose and properly recite regulated verse in modern Chinese and English.

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 in the Elizabethan and traditional Chinese thinking about nature and humanity.

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.

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.

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.

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 clusters.  Due to the much greater technical challenges in producing videos, we will not be able to release episodes at regular intervals. We ask for kind patience from our viewers.

This podcast you are listening to is the soundtrack of the first 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.

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:

This episode discusses the differences in tonal patterns between wujue and qijue, which had a clear impact on poetic practice. After the Tang, wujue became increasingly rare; we can conclude that poets no longer saw creative potential in the form—the great Tang writers had exhausted it. Qijue, on the contrary, remained one of the most popular and expressive poetic forms throughout the classical period.

Guest Host: Prof. Charles Egan, San Fransico State University

Although a small number of Six Dynasties heptasyllabic quatrains are extant, and Early Tang poets experimented with the form, stylistically mature qijue poetry was an invention of the High Tang poets, most notably Wang Changling and Li Bai. Qijue developed along with Tang popular music, for which it was the major song form. Thus initially the thematic scope was narrow: qijue lyrics were generally limited to popular yuefu themes and those describing parting from friends and loved ones. Only gradually did the scope of qijue themes expand, until by the Middle and Late Tang, the form had become a flexible tool for personal expression.

Guest Host: Prof. Charles Egan, San Fransico State University

Although Tang poets all used wujue to record concentrated poetic experience, and pursued the same fundamental aesthetic goals for the form, differing styles of poems can be discerned. Using representative poems by Wang Wei, Wang Zhihuan, and Li Bai, this episode presents two basic styles of Tang wujue, differentiated primarily by the choice of themes and the type of language employed.

Guest Host: Prof. Charles Egan, San Fransico State University

The Chinese equivalent term of quatrain, i.e., jueju, literally means “cut-off lines.” It was erroneously believed by many critics that this meant the wujue and qijue forms had originated as quatrain segments cut from the eight-line lüshi forms. This episode begins with close readings of representative poems to provide readers a sense of the thematic and formal origins of jueju. A detailed examination of common jueju features then follows.

Guest Host: Prof. Charles Egan, San Fransico State University

This episode examines how Wang Wei embodies moments of heightened perception or rather Buddhist enlightenment through his painterly depiction of a mountain climbing trip. His masterful blending of illusive images, perceptual illusion, and Buddhist worldview exemplifies his towering achievement as the poet-Buddha.

Host: Zong-qi Cai, Lingnan University of Hong Kong; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This episode examines Li Bai’s self-fashioning as a free spirit or rather the creator of the universe in a poetic form seemingly ill suited for making glamorous claims. The poem discussed is not among the best known of his works but well attests to his reputation as the poet-immortal.

Host: Zong-qi Cai, Lingnan University of Hong Kong; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This episode provides a close reading of Du Fu’s “Jiang and Han Rivers” and shows how the poet makes a masterful use of topic+comment construction to project his Confucian vision of the universe and the self and earns himself the title of poet-sage.

Host: Zong-qi Cai, Lingnan University of Hong Kong; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This episode concludes our exploration of Six Dynasties landscape poetry by considering the verse of Xie Tiao (464–499). By Xie Tiao's time, landscape was becoming an increasingly common topic within the world of courtly verse. Partly for this reason, Xie's poetry begins to efface the previously definitive distinction between the human world and the natural landscape, and moreover imbues that landscape with the passions of the courtier—in Xie's case, both his yearning for the court and capital and his well-justified fear of the dangers of court politics.

Guest Host: Lucas Rambo Bender, Yale University

Xie Lingyun (385–433) is generally recognized as the progenitor and paradigm of poetry on "mountains and waters" (shanshui 山水). Where Tao Qian had written predominantly of the only-partly wild landscapes near his cottage, Xie made his theme the dramatic wildernesses of the southlands. Much of his poetry concerns the scenery of his massive estate, which he staffed with a small army of servants and retainers. His most powerful verse, however, was written in the rugged, unforgiving landscapes he passed through on journeys into exile.

Guest Host: Lucas Rambo Bender, Yale University

Tao Qian (365–427) is premodern China's most famous recluse. After relinquishing his official career at around age 40, Tao returned to his rustic hometown to hide away from what he often suggested was a corrupt court and society. In the hermitage he made for himself at the foot of Mt. Lu, Tao wrote poetry that, on the one hand, extolls his enjoyment of life on the rural margin between the human world and the wilderness and, on the other, narrates the difficulties he had making a living there. For the first time in Chinese history, this is a poetry that grapples in a realistic way with both the beauty and the recalcitrance of the natural landscape.

Guest Host: Lucas Rambo Bender, Yale University

This episode discusses the prehistory of Chinese landscape poetry. In the centuries before poets began to write consistently of their concrete, personal experiences out in nature, landscape appeared in poetry primarily as a foil for the city and the court, where most poets were writing. In this role, the natural landscape could be terrifyingly inhospitable or wondrous and pure. Either way, it was for the most part imagined rather than experienced, a site more often for mental roaming than for extended in-person exploration.

Guest Host: Lucas Rambo Bender, Yale University