Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, ’Now on: On Writing Political Poems

Date: 10 October 2015 (Sat)

Time: 12:00nn - 14:00pm

Organizer: Ragged Claws

Organizer: Ragged Claws

Join us at Art & Culture Outreach in Wan Chai for an afternoon with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming. About the talk, Tammy says: "Political poems, I find, are very difficult to write well and they can be equally difficult to appreciate; they tend to be too straightforward, didactic, righteous, devoid of aesthetic. Or worse, self-serving. In this talk, I intend to discuss some of the political poems that I have written over the past decade or so and the backgrounds to their composition. I want to look hard at them and consider, with a sense of detachment, their effectiveness, vanity, and morality. What can a poet do to be politically engaged without drawing too much attention to themselves? Is it dangerous or pretentious to ⋯⋯

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1039013982790151/immerse the personal in the political? Do these considerations undermine the power of the digging pen?" Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is the founding co-editor of Cha and an assistant professor of literature at HK Baptist University. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and for the Forward Prize and her translations can be found in World Literature Today, China Literature Today, Drunken Boat, Pathlight, and elsewhere. She co-edited Desde Hong Kong: Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz (Chameleon) in 2014, while her first poetry collection, Hula Hooping (Chameleon), was published in April this year. Her collection of short stories, Her Name Upon the Strand (Delere), is forthcoming in 2016. More at www.sighming.com.