Poems, place and digital space: online poetry in Australia, China and Hong Kong

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Over the past three decades, digital platforms have become a significant global player in the development and dissemination of poetry.

Variously referred to as e-poetry, electronic or cyber poetry, digital poetry, social media or Instapoetry and more, Australian digital poet and Professor of Electronic Literature Jason Nelson defines the artform as ‘the combination of technology and poetry, with writers using all multi- media elements as critical texts. Sounds, images, movement, video, interface/interactivity and words are combined to create new poetic forms and experiences’.

Like other online art forms, the creation and consumption of digital poetry has grown further and faster since the COVID-19 pandemic—as more people turned to poetry to make sense of the changing world and shared that poetry through one of the only platforms available to them during that time. ‘Poems are ideally suited to social media,’ New York journalist Michelle Dean writes, ‘because they pack so much meaning into so little language.’

However, this coming together of digital and poetic culture is different for poets in different countries, depending not just on geographic and internet access but language use and platform preferences, as well as the degree to which online activity is monitored, censored or controlled.

As a writer working primarily within the digital space, I first turned to social media as a tool to keep myself writing (and accountable for that writing). In the decade that followed, social media became integral to my practice and my development as a poet in Australia and beyond. A ten- year practice of writing and posting a daily poem on social media not only resulted in a very large body of very small work, but grew my audience and profile and created opportunities for paid poetry work all over the world. This included digital writing residencies in Beijing and Hong Kong, where the social media platforms I was most familiar with were either banned or difficult to access, and local alternatives like WeChat and Weibo were more closely monitored.

In residence at the Hong Kong Arts Centre at the end of 2018, I noticed a nearby park signposted as a ‘Public Open Space’. Like many other ‘public’ or ‘open’ spaces across the city, however, the sign was quickly contradicted by others: ‘Authorised persons only.’ ‘Please keep off the grassed area.’ ‘Park will be closed between X and Y.’ These tiny, contested plots of land were neither as public nor as open as they seemed.

What’s public? What’s private?
What’s open? What’s closed?
What’s vanished?
What’s silenced?
What’s lost?

It was this real-world metaphor that led me to question how different digital poetry careers could be for poets in Hong Kong or mainland China, given Hong Kong currently sits halfway between the more open online engagement in Australia and more closely controlled ‘Chinternet’—a loophole in the censorship spectrum, with more restrictions than one and more freedoms than the other.

This resulting essay [originally published in Westerly 68.2] is an attempt to explore the relative freedoms of digital poetry practice through the lens of my own Australian experience: how geographical jurisdictions continue to influence the internet’s (seemingly) borderless realms, and how the monitoring or restriction of social media or other digital platforms (or even the threat of doing so) in places like Hong Kong and China can affect the creation of contemporary digital poetry and how it gets into the world.

<a disclaimer>

I am a non-Indigenous Aussie Brit of European heritage, a non-Chinese speaker and a temporary visitor to China and Hong Kong—with all the limitations that implies in terms of access and comprehension of language and literature (both online and offline). As such, I don’t pretend to be an authority on Hong Kong or Chinese poetry culture. If Hong Kong really is a loophole, I am officially out of the loop.

As I wrote in the collection inspired by my residency, Public. Open. Space. (Fremantle Press, 2023), I have no appetite to write yet another white author’s colonial (mis)interpretation, or to insert myself into a story that isn’t mine to tell. Instead, I navigate this essay from the perspective of an independent researcher, through the lens of fandom and curiosity, and with an ongoing problematisation of positionality and privileged space. The work here draws on an online bilingual survey of eighteen social media poets, which I conducted during my residency. Approximately equal responses came from poets based in Australia, China and Hong Kong. The names and online profiles of surveyed poets have been deliberately excluded for reasons of personal safety, privacy and freedom (see ‘motivations and affects’ below).

<physical space>

Canadian expat Christopher DeWolf writes about life between the cracks of modern Hong Kong, and suggests that is it ‘a city in extremis’. He writes, ‘There are many competing demands for a very limited amount of space, the government’s response is to exert increasingly tight control over how that space is used, so there is constant tension between public behaviour and the restrictions to which it is subjected’.

During my residency, there was a sense that the city was changing incredibly fast. In 2018, the city was in a tense lull between 2014’s Umbrella Movement and the coming rebellion of 2019–20 against new extradition and national security laws. The People’s Bookshop, the final Hong Kong bookstore selling titles banned in China, had just shut down, and the city rescinded the visa of a Hong Kong-based international journalist for the first time. Hong Kong Free Expression Week cancelled an exhibition by dissident artist Badiucao over safety concerns, and the new government-funded Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts reneged on hosting exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian during the Hong Kong International Literary Festival (though it later reneged on that reneging). Hong Kong Free Press called the loophole starting to close ‘the death knell for freedom of speech in Hong Kong’.

<digital space>

With one of the world’s highest population densities and its most expensive real estate, Hong Kong’s physical spaces are as precious as they are rare. But unofficial (and increasingly creative) ways of using these contested public spaces still occur—such as the cardboard and bedsheet villages constructed in foyers and overpasses by the city’s domestic helpers every Sunday, seeking community and privacy on their only day off. This sort of rule-bending and creativity is mirrored in the digital space, which can be similarly public and private, anonymous or authored, open or closed or controlled.

Like any art form, poetry is constantly evolving, so it makes sense it’s found a dynamic new home in a digital world that is changing just as fast. The shared, interactive spaces found on social media, blogs, chats and other platforms are not merely sites for digital publication, but also community gathering places, places for reciprocal reading, conversations and exchange and tools for writers to develop their craft. This online activity exists alongside the physical experience of books and in-real- life (IRL) poetry scenes rather than replacing them, creating a sort of augmented poetry experience that exists within both the physical and digital spheres.

Engagement with these digital poetry communities not only differs from country to country, but also from poet to poet. Many still use the internet as a straight digital distribution tool for analogue poetry (by which I mean, poetry intended primarily for the printed page), others make use of this connected, digital space as an active and intrinsic element for the creation of their work (identifying primarily as digital or social media poets) and some alternate between the two.

This distinction is highlighted by Chinese Studies academic and author Dr Heather Inwood as one that contrasts the ‘frozen, one-dimensional’ nature of poetry written for the page with the ‘dynamic, multi-dimensional’ poetry found online.

Regardless of where poets fall on that spectrum, commonalities exist in the way they make use of a digital poetry space that stretches beyond national, cultural and geographic borders and traditional poetry audiences, and access a community that far exceeds the cohort of those making and consuming poetry solely in print.

Theoretically, this digital space also has the potential to be more open, democratic and far-reaching than print publications. Mainland China has more online users than the IRL populations of Australia and Hong Kong combined. While digital restrictions mean they actually make up a smaller proportion of its population overall, the accessibility of digital platforms still mean more people have the opportunity to get more of their voices heard.

In Australia, young writers turning to TikTok or Instagram for part or all of their poetry practice is now completely normal—even expected. This has not only released new generations of poets from the need to get through or around literary gatekeepers (which they may not even know exist), but also from outdated stigmas around the validity or reputation of self-publishing.

Digital space still is, however, privileged. Having fewer gatekeepers also doesn’t mean that digital space is free from all forms of control. The internet is global but not all-inclusive, with barriers found in the form of literacy, language translation, the availability and accessibility of technology and the ability to pay for that technology and access it without restraints.

<language space>

Digital poetry practice also encompasses a complex language space that means poems can reveal different levels of meaning according to the respective fluency of its audiences. Translation and comprehension aside, this language space is just as contested and controlled as the online and IRL places in which it exists, showcasing the richness of its diverse linguistic communities but also the politics and privilege of different language groups.

Specific controls exist over the contexts in which different languages can be used, and a sort of unquestioned privilege that prioritises one language over another, such as the way in which Hong Kong seems to divide its city-based literary activities into either Chinese or English, rarely both.

The increasing popularity of ‘Kongish’ and ‘reci’ hot words also creates a tension between the excitement and creativity of language expansion and the loss of language integrity.

Primarily comprising English and Cantonese, the pidgin Kongish dialect originally emerged ‘as a language of protest’ and now provides a working example of Hong Kong’s contentious and political language space, as well as providing evidence of the creativity that comes from such linguistic repurposing, hybridisation and evolution.

‘Reci’ hot words are the Chinese internet’s equivalent. These are ‘slang terms that young Chinese are creating and using online to communicate how they really feel about current affairs and trends’. Here again we see the impact of creativity on situations in which language is controlled, resulting in the emergence of reci words like: ‘“antizen” (蚁民)’. Allan and Lau describe this as ‘a play on the words ant and citizen to describe the general public’s helplessness’. Another coinage is ‘“innernet” (中国互联网)’ [sic], which Allan and Lau suggest is ‘in reference to China’s inward looking approach to internet controls’.

These linguistic innovations, along with increasing use of visual communication like emoticons and gifs, continue to grow the online language space, with social media the perfect platform to explore this multilingual creative exchange.

<digital poets and poetry>

Inwood credits the development of the internet as having ‘the single biggest impact on Chinese poetry activity in the first decade of the twenty-first century’. ‘By the early 2000s,’ she notes, ‘blogging and microblogging had usurped poetry forums to become the primary means by which contemporary Chinese poets keep their fingers on the pulse of poetry scenes’.

Chinese language and literature academic Maghiel van Crevel agrees with Inwood’s observation that ‘China is still a “nation of poetry” (诗国)’, even if the ways in which that manifests have changed. He says, ‘In contemporary China, with the last two decades adding on the all-important dimensions of the web and social media, it is not just possible for wildly divergent texts and poetics to operate in the same public, almost transcendental discursive space called ‘poetry’; rather, they are expected to do so’.

For example, a 2012 online poetry prize launched by acclaimed Chinese writer Yang Lian’s ‘artsbj’ website received more than 80,000 entries. This not only demonstrates a phenomenal interest in writing poetry, but an expectation that poets will engage with the artform online. It also mapped a matching interest from poetry audiences, with each entry being followed by thirty or forty pages of comments from the general public. ‘Poetry is still extremely important in Chinese culture as well as in Chinese social life’ Yang observed.

That value does not, however, extend to the content of that poetry, with Yang Lian himself a poet in ‘spiritual exile’ who has spent more than half his life outside China. While his autobiographical book-length poem The Narrative Poem had an original print-run of 3,000 copies in China in 2011 (a scale unheard of in Australia’s smaller poetry market), its mention of the taboo Tiananmen Square massacre meant it only lasted one day in Chinese bookshops before the publisher received a warning from the government and all copies of the book were destroyed.

The importance of poetry as an artform is more diluted in Hong Kong. While itself a rich literary microcosm, Hong Kong’s reading and writing sector appears smaller and less prioritised than either Australia or mainland China, with only ten per cent of Hong Kongers reported as reading for three or more hours each week. As a result, there are simply fewer working Hong Kong poets, and fewer poets again working within the digital space. Chris Song, a local poet, editor and translator observed, in a 2018 email exchange, that ‘Social media platforms have been used as venues for publishing, posting and disseminating poems in Hong Kong.’ This is quite common, he notes. ‘However, [poets] generally don’t consider social media as an integral part of their creative-poetic activities.’

Poetry as an artform is also not typically as revered within Australian society, with only 9.2 per cent of respondents to a 2015 survey identifying as readers of poetry (this included people who read poetry to children). This has an impact on the ability of poets to make a living from their writing, with the survey team reporting that nearly three-quarters of Australian poets had to change the way they publish, distribute or promote their work. ‘Poets are particularly innovative in finding new avenues for paid work and are also experimenting with self- publishing,’ they said. In spite of this, the ‘very modest’ income that Australian poets earn from their creative practice only rose from $4,680 in FY2013/14 to $5,700 per year in FY2020/21—the lowest average across all the different types of authors.

There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and as many differences in types of online writing as there are platforms on which they are published. As well, this challenging economic situation doesn’t preclude a handful of social media poets making a living from the poetry they release online.

According to the survey undertaken for this essay, text-only poems are still most poets’ preferred medium, followed by image/meme-based poetry, then audio and video—though video content is growing in line with the popularity of TikTok. However, in spite of the availability of such interactive and multimedia elements, the textual component of digital poems seems to remain the focus, with most respondents saying that images have equal or lesser importance to their words.

Poets in Australia and Hong Kong said they were more likely to use open social media options (like Twitter, Weibo or public Instagram profiles), while poets from China were more likely to use closed platforms (like Facebook, WeChat or private Instagram profiles) to reduce the risk of oversight.

The new kid on the digital block is artificial intelligence (AI) poetry bots, which introduce a new level of complexity about authorship and accountability. Is the person who enters the parameters of a poem into an AI program its author, the AI’s programmer, or the AI itself? In a space where free speech is controlled, who will be held responsible for the content of that speech? And in spaces that exist entirely online, when and how, and which, country’s jurisdiction could prosecute?

‘The person who enters the parameters of a poem into an AI program may be considered the creator of the parameters, but the AI itself is responsible for generating the text of the poem,’ at least according to the open AI program ChatGPT, which responded thus when I entered the above paragraph into its generation field. ‘Therefore, it becomes difficult to determine who is the author of the poem, as the creative input is shared between the human and the machine.’

<motivations and affects>

The survey identified a range of different motivations and implications for poets using social media and other digital platforms as part of their creative practice. Access to audiences was the most common reason for engaging with social media: both in terms of reaching poetry readers from further away (72%) and reaching larger audiences in general (63%).

‘Make more readers see’ (令更多读者看到) one survey respondent said. This sense of potential scale is particularly relevant when it comes to poetry audiences (especially in contemporary poetry), which have traditionally been smaller and more niche than other literary styles. While print poetry books can make bestseller lists in Australia with as few as 200 sales, poets choosing digital platforms can reach audiences in their thousands or even millions.

Furthermore, this enhanced distribution, circulation and reach is greatly dependent on non-traditional poetry audiences—members of the general digital public unlikely to ever purchase a print poetry book but who opt into or accidentally consume poetry through their social media feeds. Hong Kong poet Tammy Ho Lai-ming noted, in an interview on how social media has made poetry more accessible, that ‘In the past, if you wanted to read and appreciate poetry, there was a lot you had to know before you’d even understand the context of a poem. With newer critical modes [of looking at a poem], you can enjoy a poem [for what it is]’.

Managing an online profile, portfolio and brand can also allow poets to receive national and international recognition for their work. Inwood writes, ‘For poets who stick to one web-name and use it to establish a reputation for themselves through participation on poetry forums and other online poetry activities, the reward can be fame or notoriety capable of rivalling that of established print-culture poets’. For example, Cambodian-Australian poet Lang Leav began her digital poetry career on Tumblr before moving to Instagram, where she shot to fame in 2014 after Khloé Kardashian reposted one of Leav’s poems to 14,000,000 Instagram followers. Now living in New Zealand, Leav has since become a best-selling print-published poet and novelist, who reportedly travels with guards in some parts of Asia, where thousands of people attend her poetry readings.

Similar examples of ‘wang hóng’ (internet famous (网红)) poetry from China (a term that literally means ‘net read’ in Chinese) include: Yi Sha’s (伊沙) ‘New Poetry Classics’ project, which recommended a different Chinese poet every day to a massive online community on Weibo; a smog poem by surgeon Zhao Xiaogang that went viral in 2016; and WeChat poetry by Yu Xiuhua whose two books published in 2015 sold 15,000 copies overnight.

Pushing poetry’s reach even further afield, WeChat’s Space Poets project sent 50,000 audio poems into orbit in October 2018 in a rocket from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China’s Shanxi province.

‘Hey aliens,’ WeChat’s message read. ‘Learn some Chinese and feel the beauty of Chinese poetry’. But online success is not just about audiences—whether earthbound or extraterrestrial. Digital poets can also leverage their online reach or profile into book deals, paid sponsorships, IRL events or tattoo followings. Inwood notes, ‘Poems that are first posted online are later sorted through and selected for inclusion in poetry journals, single-author collections, and anthologies’. And several survey respondents made note of the opportunities for interviews or publication that had arisen because their work had been available online. My own #TinyLittlePoem posts were, amongst other things, included on an Oklahoma high school curriculum for several years thanks entirely to my digital poetry practice and online networks.

Connection to a community of fellow poets was an equally popular motivation for seventy-two per cent of survey respondents across all locations. ‘Weibo have enabled Chinese poets to stay in contact with each other to an unprecedented extent, regardless of geographic distance, group affiliation, or poetic preference’ Inwood writes. This holds true for social media platforms in other regions as well. Social media assists poets in ‘overcoming distance’, survey respondents said, or helps them to ‘quickly respond to others’ work in the same medium.’ Australian writer Ahmed Yussuf noted, in a 2018 Digital Writers’ Festival podcast, that ‘The internet shattered the gatekeeper system that stopped a lot of people entering creative spaces and scenes, and it’s allowed communities to be created organically and collectively’.

According to Inwood, the ability to avoid traditional literary sector gatekeepers like agents, editors and publishers has also made social media a more democratic and immediate publishing pathway for contemporary poetry. Writer and filmmaker Alina Simone, commenting specifically on the new ‘golden age’ of Chinese poetry, suggests that this democratising force has levelled ‘the playing field for migrant workers and millionaires alike’. Avoiding the wait for a publication big break also means digital poetry can be more topical, responsive and political than poetry on the page, and can amplify the voices of those who have traditionally gone unheard.

The impact of such gatekeeper-free platforms has been particularly important for diasporic, under-served and under-represented communities, as demonstrated by the popularity of the #OwnVoices campaign and social media hashtag. Australian digital artist Hien Pham said, at the 2018 Digital Writers Festival, that ‘The internet is slowly, slowly, slowly giving disenfranchised persons platforms, and giving people who want to hear those voices ways to support them. Marginalised creators are taking control over their own narratives, taking control of their own stories. The internet is giving them a platform to tell those stories’. In Hong Kong, this trend can be seen in 2016’s Wishing Well, an online-only publication featuring voices and stories from the city’s Foreign Domestic Workers. In China, WeChat poet Yu Xiuhua’s rise to fame was all the more poignant because she was a disabled farmer from a rural village who wrote for years offline before being discovered through her poetry blog. ‘It’s hard not to feel good about social networks like WeChat if they can launch a woman like Yu Xiuhua into literary celebrity,’ Simone said.

Such fame is not limited to those who choose to disclose their identities, however, with many digital poets often choosing to remain anonymous. TikTok poet Kalliope Kay says they decided to post anonymously because it allowed them to be more open and vulnerable. ‘I could write whatever I wanted without fear of negative backlash in my personal life,’ they explain. Similarly, when asked how their motivations and implications may change where access to social media is monitored or restricted, poets in Hong Kong and China said in their survey responses that they were more likely to write under a pseudonym and less likely to write about political topics for reasons of personal safety, privacy and freedom. One wrote that, ‘I try to modulate my political and/or protest poems to avoid possible censorship (even just by the editors of online works).’ Another noted that they simply ‘won’t write poems making fun of the governments/polices anymore.’

While keen to avoid association with the anonymous and unaccountable trolls that are the most common users of pseudonyms online, alternate or pen-names can also be useful tools in helping protect individuals and their work. Another survey respondent said, ‘I use a pen-name as I speak about sensitive topics such as race, sexual assault and other personal matters that I would not be comfortable publishing as my own name.’ Another respondent added, ‘I’m sure there is a degree of self-censorship in most poets and a fear of retribution if people write something less than favourable about political leaders.’ Inwood notes that ‘Poets walk the same tightrope as most cultural producers in China, using their art as a means of self-expression and a tool for social commentary at the same time as they attempt to survive in the “grey” spaces between government approval and censorship and avant-garde and popular tastes’.

Contested digital spaces can be extraordinary sites for creativity, with the threat and/or impact of online monitoring and censorship providing positive as well as a negative potential for poetry creation and distribution. Hong Kong respondents acknowledged that they experienced more freedom of speech than poets in China. But the option to be anonymous on social media still ‘means greater freedom in content’. Rather than silence poets altogether, for some the spectre of censorship ‘only makes the need for poetry more evident and makes me turn to poetry more’.

Chinese new media artist Ying Miao wrote about her Chinternet mash- ups at Art Basel Hong Kong, suggesting that ‘When people think of the Chinternet they think of censorship, but a part of my work is showing how creative people can actually go around it and create new things’. And for an exhibition at the New Museum in New York, she wrote: ‘From one side of the [fire]wall, the Chinese internet appears to be a barren wasteland, yet despite its limitations, it has been evolving and growing—even faster than the net outside the wall. […] ‘If you know something will be censored, you can go around it, using homophones, making up new words, etc., which all involve a sense of humour and intelligence. You will be shocked by how creative netizens are. The limit of the Chinese internet is what sets it free.’

As far back as the Qing dynasty, historian Zhao Yi wrote that ‘the misery of the state leads to the emergence of great poets’. More literally, Inwood tells us this translates to: ‘When the state is unfortunate, poets are fortunate’. One survey respondent suggested that ‘My poems will tend to be less direct and more 朦胧 (obscure). But this is also the beauty of poetry.’

<nation-less-ness>

Miao lives but doesn’t live in China. ‘I am based on the Internet and the Chinternet and my smartphone,’ she says. Similarly, my nationality is not the primary defining characteristic of my poetry. I don’t think of myself as quintessentially Australian or British, but as a writer working primarily within the digital space. As such, I increasingly identify as a ‘post-passport artist’, a term coined by US critic Barbara Pollack ‘which applies not just to Chinese artists, but probably artists around the world, who are increasingly conscious of working in this manner and incorporating a post-passport philosophy into their practice’.

Less than this:
Australian-ness or more?

Less-ness?
Or ness-less-ness?

My X-ness
un-defined.

More netizens than citizens, digital poets now have access to what US literature and media arts professor Mark Hansen says is an ‘unprecedented freedom’ for authors to reinvent themselves ‘subject only to the constraints of the online medium’) We are global and local, no place and every place, evolving the art form of poetry and evolving ourselves in turn.

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While the creation and dissemination of digital poetry differs for poets writing from Australia, Hong Kong and China, the nature of this creative online community is also a collective experience. ‘From the very start, [poetry] sniffed out the limitless potential of the Internet with open arms,’ Hong Zhu writes about how the internet has changed Chinese poetry. And the digital r/evolution continues to gain pace. More than three decades since digital publishing began to put pressure on traditional print options, the reputation and production values of online platforms have finally caught up with the ambitions of the people who use them.

For me, social media was the natural home for a decade of short-form and meme-based work. Seeing some of this move into print is a way of bringing my digital and physical practice back together, of celebrating the hybridity of the two, and of looking forward to evolutions still to come. As more digital poets achieve critical and financial success (both on- and offline), we will continue to see a cultural shift in the way the literary sector and audiences accept non-traditional, hybrid and digital poetry.

Notes

This essay was originally published in Westerly 68.2.

It was inspired and informed by a six-week digital poetry residency at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2018, part of the Asialink Arts Creative Exchange program supported by the South Australian government through Arts South Australia.

The survey was titled ‘Social Media Poetry 社交媒體 詩歌’ was hosted at forms. gle/Boa2NUeJUFZGFdvL9 in 2018.

Thanks to: Asialink Arts, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Arts South Australia, Creative Writing Online in Asia, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Chris Song, Suyin Chiu, Guildhouse, City of Adelaide, Bundandon, Fremantle Press and survey participants.

Works cited

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Author: katelarsenkeys

Writer. Rabble-rouser. Arts, Cultural and Non-Profit Consultant.

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