About Vanishing Poems

Three Grade 11 students from the international class at Beijing National Day School，in their endless quest of knowledge，stumbled upon an amazing word game．This game involved using translation software to randomly input the letters of a language they did not know at all，and to create sentences by using the intelligence of the software．After a period of accumulating experience with this method，a number of excellent poems were successfully created.

This involved different poetic styles and different length，and the original texts of them from across the world were written in more than a dozen languages．On this basis，they decided to write an explanatory note for each poem，in which some representative images were used as clues to string together several stories．So the three students also faked an author and composed the book in his name.

Gong Ziming，the creators of this work，explains：“The process of building a literary work in the past was to first produce its ‘soul’，i.e．its internal meaning or theme，and then build a text，i.e．the body，around it．But our work deviates from the norm by first building the body of a poem and then creating the soul．What really gives these poems meaning beyond themselves is in fact the annotations，which were created after the poems．I think our attempt is，in a sense，a literary experiment，to see how we can give meaning to texts when we write them without knowing the background meaning at all.”

They call their method “anti-literature”.

Gong Ziming：writing enthusiast，winner of the first prize of the Peiwen Cup Competition held by Peking University in 2019; the youngest author to have published an article in the magazine eople’s Literature; author of many articles in Meng Ya，Literature and Art Newspaper and other periodicals，as well as a collection of works entitled On the Way to Salai.

Zhao Wenrui：middle school student，independent filmmaker，whose work An Outdated Writer has been nominated for the Best Middle School Student Production Award at the Beijing（International）College Student Video Exhibition.

Li Tianyi：student，with an ardent love for natural sciences，especially geology.