Duo Duo

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Duo Duo or Duoduo 多多 (1951 - ) is the pen name of contemporary Chinese poet, Li Shizheng (栗世征), one of the "Misty" or "Obscure" school of modern Chinese poetry (朦胧诗). He was born in Beijing. As a youth in the Cultural Revolution, he was sent down to the countryside in Baiyangding (白洋汀), where he began reading and writing poetry. Several of his school mates would also become famous as members of underground poetry movement, described as Misty by the authorities: Bei Dao, Gu Cheng and Mang Ke. Duo Duo's early poems are short and elliptical, in which some see barbed political references. In his early poems, there are numerous intertextual links to Western poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Sylvia Plath. His style underwent a shift in the mid 1980's to longer, more philosophical poetry. In contrast to the clipped, image-based style of Bei Dao, Duo Duo tended to use longer, more flowing lines, and paid more attention to sound and rhetoric. Some of his poems border on the essayistic, such as the 1984 "Lessons" also translated as "Instruction"(诲教), which spoke for China's "lost generation" as much as Bei Dao's "Answer".

In 1989 Duo Duo was witness to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and as fortune had it was booked on a plane on 4th June to London where he was due to give a poetry reading at the British Museum. He went on to live for many years in the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands. His poetic language went through another shift, taking up the themes of exile and rootlessness. In the absence of a Chinese-speaking community, Duo Duo began to use the Chinese language more self-consciously. Sometimes his poems border on the impenetrable, and yet are highly effective, such as the poem "Watching the Sea"(看海).

In 2004 Duo Duo returned to China where he was honored both by a younger generation of poets and by the literary establishment. He now teaches at Hainan University on the tropical Hainan Island where the Chinese poet Su Dongpo (Su Shi, 1037–1101) was once exiled by the Chinese authorities.