Selected Poems

Mai Cheng (a pseudonym for Wang Qiang) was born in 1962 into a military family in the northen Chinese city of Shenyang. He also joined the army, and began to write poetry while still in uniform. In 1985, he met Gu Cheng (1956-1993), the well-known "Misty" poet who was later to commit suicide while in exile in New Zealand. Gu Cheng's work was to have a decisive influence on his poetic development, and Mai Cheng is now one of the core "Third-Generation Poets" who have risen to prominence in the wake of the "Misty" school. He lives in the north-eastern coastal city of Dalian where, faced with a modern, commercialised China, he says he feels himself to be a "spiritual orphan", although one for whom poetry is "the place to which I escape" and "the ultimate meaning of which is to make me a better man".