Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry ‘The Nude’ by Yi Lei with Mobile Photographer Mimi Svanberg from Sweden
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘’The Nude’ by Yi Lei. ‘A leading figure in contemporary Chinese poetry, Yi Lei was born Sun Gui-zhen in Tianjin, China, in 1951. She studied creative writing at the Lu Xun Academy and received a BA in Chinese literature from Peking University. Yi Lei published eight poetry collections, and her work has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, and English, notably by U. S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. She also worked as a reporter for the Liberation Army and a staff member of the newspaper The Railway Corps. In 1991, she moved to Moscow, where she lived and wrote for a number of years. Li Yei was a recipient of the Zhuang Zhong Wen Literature Prize. She died on July 14, 2018, while travelling in Iceland’.
I have matched Mimi Svanberg’s image ‘Together Again…’ with this poem. You can view and follow her on Instagram here.
If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
‘The Nude’ ©Yi Lei – Image ‘Together Again…’ ©Mimi Svanberg
translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi
My eye laps at you in lamplight
Like a white hot tongue. Longing
Draws back, then rises, tidal.
The curtain of my hair
Announces my breasts. Your lips:
A languid breeze. Like a miracle
We feast and feast and nothing is spent.
Let flesh attend to flesh, sex to sex.
O, dexterous gold watch of the universe
On which one minute can straddle
A hundred years.
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
