Hong: Poetry, Mentorship, and the Emergence of the Lige School of Poetry

Abstract

This column documents and critically examines the emergence of the Lige School of Poetry (离格学派), a contemporary Chinese bilingual scholar–poet community formed under the long-term mentorship of Professor Ou Hong (区鉷). Combining a collaboratively composed poem, "Hong", written on the occasion of Ou Hong’s eightieth birthday, with a stage-based evaluative report, the column explores how poetic creation, theoretical innovation, bilingual practice, and international publishing intersect within a living intellectual formation. The poetic section foregrounds the semantic and symbolic significance of the Chinese character 鉷 (Hong)—the trigger mechanism of a crossbow—as a metaphor for mentorship, restraint, and calibrated release and deviation from norms of traditional poetry. The evaluative section employs AI-assisted analytical tools in a limited and transparent manner to synthesize structural features and nomenclature, resulting in the designation “Lige School of Poetry.” Rather than replacing human judgment, AI functions as a methodological aid to reduce internal bias in assessing an active poetic community. By situating the Lige School within both domestic academic structures and global poetic discourse, this column offers a rare real-time case study of how contemporary Chinese poet-scholars negotiate local cultural consciousness and international literary engagement. The significance of the Lige School lies not only in its poetic and scholarly output, but in the intellectual model it provides for sustaining bilingual, theory-informed poetic practice in a globalized literary environment.