Three Poems

Abstract

Born in Guangdong Province on June 20, 1937, Wai-lim Yip moved to Hong Kong, where he began his life as a poet. He soon moved to Taiwan and graduated from National Taiwan University with a BA in 1959, and then earned an MA in 1961 from National Taiwan Normal University. Then in 1963 he traveled to the United States, where he earned an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and later a PhD from Princeton in 1967. He accepted a position at the University of California, San Diego that same year and taught there until his retirement in 2010. Over these many years Yip has published over fifty volumes of critical, scholarly, and poetic work in both English and Chinese; his influence in American poetry circles and abroad is significant and extensive. He has taught or lectured in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and many other universities across China, and he has been instrumental in setting up Comparative Literature programs throughout Taiwan and China. With several recent conferences in China devoted to his work, Yip has become arguably one of the most important East-West scholar-poets of the last quarter-century.