Playful storytelling will feature in a multilingual poetry workshop this Saturday.

Poet Yueke Li will present the session as part of the New Zealand Young Writers Festival opening tomorrow.

Li spent her childhood on the outskirts of a Chinese chemical factory town in the 2000s, where toxic chemicals used in the plant polluted the area.

During her youth she was filled with confusion about why her hometown was contaminated, why some neighbours argued and why some people could access education while others could not.

“I was filled with this confusions and at that time, I don’t have the words to name them,” Li said.

Her grandmother Yuru Zhou helped raise her.

“I have a really close relationship with my grandma, she raised me during my whole childhood,” she said.

Although Zhou could barely write due to the Cultural Revolution, she maintained a huge enthusiasm for literature.

“She will look up to the dictionary and ask me, what is this word’s name,” Li said.

Li spent four years recording her grandmother’s words and compiled them into a bilingual memoir titled The Oral Poems of Yuru Zhou.

She will share the journey of writing the book during her presentation, highlighting how everyday conversations can become art.

Sometimes memoirs were arranged in a linear way, but speaking to her grandmother, she noted it was a less smooth experience.

“I feel like my grandma, she has so many ruptures and cracks among her life,” she said.

Instead of a chronological narrative of her entire life, Li recorded conversations with her grandmother and captured what she saw daily.

The collection included “playful parts” but also clashes such as when she and Zhou had disagreements over her personal life.

By recording the experiences and shaping them into poetry, Li felt she could understand the emotion behind her grandmother’s words.

“I could more like, see there’s a humour comes out.

“I could not only notice what she said at that time, but also the way she said it,” she said.

At the festival Li aimed to show how ordinary talk and connection could be framed into a poem where everyone added to the final piece.

“It is like a game. I love to bring into the workshop.

“Poetry is not a fancy thing,” Li said.

“It’s just ordinary things to engage with people and languages.”
sam.henderson@thestar.co.nz

Poetry as Community Care: Multilingual Collaborative Poetry

Presented by Yueke Li

Saturday, October 3

1.30-3pm

Te Whare o Rukutia