Selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Weijia Pan’s poetry collection Motherlands melds the personal with the cultural into a devastatingly intimate book.
Kevin Prufer wrote of the book:
“In Motherlands, Weijia Pan recalls the China of the past and the United States of his present—and the vast connections between them, connections that exist as much in deep history as they do in immediate consciousness. In poems at once intricate and expansive, Pan considers the fact of displacement and the vagaries of translation, as re-creation, transformation, betrayal. Here, he finds opportunity in portraiture and music to consider both global injustice and the most delicate nuances of feeling. ‘Time’s time’s timestamp,’ he writes, ‘which means that time keeps its own records.’ And what records these are—imagined in brilliant poems by an essential young poet.”
In his own words, here is Weijia Pan’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Motherlands:
Piano music, more than anything, has influenced my writing. So this list consists mostly of piano pieces, with a few exceptions. While I don’t listen to music when I write, music enters my mind when I’m not writing, when I’m out there to reimagine the world:
Music from Haruki Murakami’s novels (playlists available on YouTube)
This guy has more than 10000 records in his library. Trust him.
Aram Khachaturian, Album for Children
Easy enough for me to play. Notice how different (or similar) this is from Schumann’s Kinderszenen.
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2
Imagine yourself on a train to Siberia/when the exile next you recites Pushkin, crying.
Wang Lisan, Suite: Impressions of Paintings by Higashiyama Kaii
Composed shortly after Deng Xiaoping began his economic reforms. A post-Maoist take on Debussy.
Frederic Chopin, Mazurkas
Better than most symphonies.
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of Fugue
Someday I’ll write a book-length poem with no endings.
Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain
How to properly imagine Spain.
YMO, Yellow Magic Orchestra
How to improperly imagine post-war Japan.
Kino, Gruppa krovi
Soviet rock.
Omnipotent Youth Society, Inside the Cable Temple
My favorite Chinese alternative rock band.
Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is a third-year MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.