Spittoon Poetry marks 3 years of literary exchange in Beijing
- By Jennifer Fossenbell
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E-mail China.org.cn, May 30, 2018
Last year, Byrne passed the role of poetry night organizer to 32-year-old Poornima Weerasekara of Sri Lanka. She has lived in Beijing for four years and originally joined the Spittoon group as a translator and later as a regular performer of her own poetry. She said she has found it to be a unique platform that "cuts across different languages and different communities."
Weerasekara was eager to take on the new role. "Spittoon creates a melting pot through poetry," she said. "I stepped into the organizer role to build a bridge between these communities through an art form that I love."
"Beijing is very cosmopolitan, but the foreign community here is also quite transient," she also noted, adding, "It's a feat to keep anything like this going continuously for three years, so I really just want to keep it going!" Her vision for the future of Spittoon Poetry Night includes expanding the translation segment to allow "more voices to be heard." She hopes to bring even more poetry from the world to international Beijing audiences, as well as bring more poetry of other languages into Chinese.
Since the birth of Spittoon, the collective has grown beyond the original poetry night to encompass different events happening each Thursday of the month, such as the Spittoon Book Club, Spittoon Fiction Night and Spittoon Slam (a competitive poetry performance event). The group has also hosted musical-literary fusion events called Spit-tunes, in which poets are paired with musicians to collaborate on original pieces combining the two art forms before performing them in front of a live audience.
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