Poem by Yan Li

wanlixing 2026-06-30

摘要： Yan Li , Poet, painter, fiction writer, born in 1954 in Beijing, China. He is a member of a vanguard artist group "The Stars" founded in 1979 and an underground literary group "Today" in Beijing. As a poet, he is regarded as one of the members of the Misty Poets. He came to US in 1985 and founded quarterly journal Yi-Hang in New York in 1987. His poems have been translated into French, Italian, English, Swedish, Korean and German. He has held many exhibitions and published a number of books.

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Poem by Yan Li

Bio of the Author

Yan Li , Poet, painter, fiction writer, born in 1954 in Beijing, China. He is a member of a vanguard artist group "The Stars" founded in 1979 and an underground literary group "Today" in Beijing. As a poet, he is regarded as one of the members of the Misty Poets. He came to US in 1985 and founded quarterly journal Yi-Hang in New York in 1987. His poems have been translated into French, Italian, English, Swedish, Korean and German. He has held many exhibitions and published a number of books.

Beautiful Word

Actually there is beauty

In the word "lost"

Suppose I bet my poverty and lost it

Or bet my pain and lost it

Or bet my illness and lost it

The problem is whom will I lose to?

What kind of casino, what government

Or even what God

Possesses the tolerance to it all in?

The problem that follows from this

Is that my tolerance is even greater