Biography of bei dao

Bei Dao began writing poetry in the early s. In , Bei Dao was accused of helping to incite the student revolt in Tiananmen Square, and forced into exile. He now lives in the United States. In , when he tried to revisit Beijing, he was refused access to his native country and language. Since then he has continued to write his slender, self-assured poems, about love and death, of course, and the characteristic, enigmatic scenes he encounters — but also about exile, a theme that seamlessly links up with his earlier work.

Even though Bei Dao does not adhere to strict metre, rhyme patterns or tonal contrasts, his recent work is at times classical Chinese in style: lapidary, with direct juxtaposition of images and very little noise in between. This minimalism in form corresponds to a minimalism in content. The poems are strongly associative — owing, in considerable measure, to the flexibility of Chinese grammar, which offers ample scope for ambiguity — and sometimes succeed in staying afloat as wholes made up of more or less separate components, without settling.

All bei dao

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