Otherland原乡砸诗群 (Otherland Smashing Poetry Group)

By Ouyang Yu

This is a group site on WeChat that I created, for the single purpose of smashing poetry.

We have people on duty three days a week, posting poems anonymously and getting other poets to smash them.

At the end of each smashing session, sometimes lasting the whole day, the poet on duty will reveal the names of the poets smashed, with their self-comments.

Then, irregularly, we get each and every member to make a selection of the best poems in his or her opinion and put them together in what is known as The Official Account.

We have so far covered more than 120 issues.

The highest compliment in this group is not good or excellent, all those tired, meaningless, overused, fake terms. The best compliment is Unsmashable!

And we won't be kind towards poems that are pretentious, fake, sleek, or pretending to be too difficult.

One of the hardest and harshest comment came in the early days from a woman poet who commented on an anonymous poem, saying, 'Don't ever post such awful stuff here again!'

Guess what?

The poet, a friend of mine, a veteran poet, too, got so angry he left the group instantly and demanded to me in private: Who's that person? How dared she say that!

Well, if you want honesty, not fake praises, come here and you get loads of it. Otherwise, keep off until you get used to criticism.

(4.50pm, Sunday 4/9/2022, in K)



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