Encountering Sorrow

We will spend this evening in ancient and classical China, with Buddhist transformations, stones, rivers, amulets, caves, monkeys, and mountains. And, as we approach the many-headed bodies of time-being, we will return to the question of human suffering, and the tip of life, the laughing spring wind blowing madly between night and day.

Born in Shanghai, Lynn Xu is a poet and Assistant Professor of Writing at the School of the Arts. She is the author of Debts & Lessons (2013) and And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight (2022), selected for the Poetry Center Book Award, and co-translator of Pee Poems by Yang Licai (aka Lao Yang). She has performed multidisciplinary works at 300 South Kelly Street, the Guggenheim Museum, the Renaissance Society, and Rising Tide Projects, and her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. She coedits Canarium Books. At the Institute, Xu will be working on a book of poems about the many journeys to Fusang—the mythical place in Classical Chinese literature that then became, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a figure of fascination for the Western imagination.

The Rendez-Vous de l’Institut Series is generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. You will find a full calendar of the Fellows’ Talk.

Host or Publisher Institute for Ideas and Imagination