Duo Duo

Duo Duo 多多
Born	Li Shizheng 1951 (age 65–66)  People's Republic of China Beijing
Occupation	poet
Subject	poetry
Notable works	Looking Out From Death, The Boy Who Catches Wasps
Notable awards	Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Duo Duo or Duoduo (Chinese: 多多, 1951 - ) is the pen name of contemporary Chinese poet, Li Shizheng (栗世征), a prominent exponent of the Chinese Misty Poets (朦胧诗). Duo Duo was awarded the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Duo Duo was born in Beijing, China. As a youth in the Cultural Revolution, he was sent down to the countryside in Baiyangdian (白洋淀), where he began reading and writing poetry. Several of his schoolmates would also become famous as members of the 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-1980s 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 having been witness to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, as fortune had it was booked on a plane on 4 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 yet are highly effective, such as the poem Watching the Sea (看海).

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