Report on the First Annual Poetry Reading Festival of the College of Foreign Languages of Zhoukou Normal University held on May 15th, 2014

 

 

The first annual Poetry Reading Festival was held on Thursday evening at 7 o'clock in Room 305 of the Computer Science Classroom Building. The event was sponsored by the College of Foreign Languages. Three double-major students as well as eighteen English-majors presented introductions, readings, and translations of poetry in Chinese and English. Some of the poems presented by students now in their third year of study included "Life Is a Gift" (anonymous), "I Will Not Sleep" by William Blake, "O Captain, My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, "Gazing on Mount Tai" by Du Fu, "She Walks in Beauty" by George Lord Byron, "Changsha" by Chairman Mao Tse-Dong, "The Trees" by Philip Larkin, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson, and "Had I Not Seen the Sun", also by Emily Dickinson. A wonderfully, stimulating variety of poetry was read and interpreted by students from Zhoukou Normal University.

 

    Dean Li Bingshen initiated the Festival, making a few remarks about the importance of such events to the development of Zhoukou Normal University and thanking all of the faculty and students who made the Poetry Reading Festival possible.

 

    Well over one hundred and fifty students ... students in their first, second, third and final years of study attended the presentation. A few alumnae were present. The audience was very appreciative of the student readings and translations of a wide range of poetry by Chinese, British, and American writers.

 

    Several of the students revealed how the poetry they read had had personal connections to their daily lives, how poetry served  to inspire them to rise to higher and higher levels of understanding, higher levels of consciousness, conscientiousness.

 

    Awards of Excellence were presented to all of the participants including recognition of the alternates who were ready to take the place of student contestants who might not have been able to participate. Nine third place awards, seven second place awards, and five first place awards were presented by the honorable judges. Each participant received a certificate of merit and a special writer's notebook.

 

    Judges included three graduating English majors(Fu Yunyun, Sun Weiwei, and Zhou Yafen), two foreign teachers(Vivian Richards and Maria Matias-Kurtenbach), and four Chinese English teachers(Huan Yibin, Hou Xia, Gu Huijuan, and Zhang Po). Each judge made remarks at the end of the Festival. Some of the judges were particularly moved by the intellectually and emotionally moving presentations made by the reader/translator students who participated in the Festival. A graduating student said the Festival was one of the highlights of her educational experience at Zhoukou Normal University, while a Chinese English teacher related that the Festival had reawakened his interest in writing poetry when he was a boy, encouraging his ongoing creativity, and a foreign teacher said that, while she had high expectations for the Festival, she was pleasantly surprised by the high levels of presentations of poetry made by the student participants.

 

    It was announced that the next Zhoukou Normal University College of Foreign Languages Poetry Reading Festival was already in the planning stages for the spring of 2015, which would have an all Emily Dickinson theme, recognizing the great American woman poet of the 19th century. The next Poetry Reading Festival promises to be even better than the first one, as wonderful as that first Festival was.