Inside Velter's world

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In 1988, Velter traveled from Pakistan to China. Talking about the time, he says he bought small notebooks to write a poem each night that he waited for the Beijing traffic to move. "I saw and experienced so many things that I couldn't stop writing." On his latest trip, Velter revisited some of those roads. "They're almost all highway now."

Velter notices a similar upward mobility in contemporary Chinese poetry. French publishing house Gallimard will soon publish Luo Ying's collection of poems titled Le Gene du Garde Rouge de Luo Ying, from the poet's experience during the "culture revolution" (1966-76), as their first Asian poet featured.

"His poems are like mine. Both are written in colloquial modern language and show the spirit of motion," Velter says of Luo.

Poets in both France and China face the challenge of writing in modern times, he says, citing the example of Charles Baudelaire, a 19th-century French modernist poet.

Velter believes sound and musical rhythms are important to poetry. And poets create poems of their time and they create poetry based on the sounds and voices of their time. "Baudelaire never heard the sound of a jet plane or jazz music. So we have the chance to evolve contemporary poetry with the sound and voices of our time."

According to Xu Shuang, a professor and translator with Paris' Diderot University, Velter's unique vernacular poems shed a light on French poets and on poets from other countries.

"Poetry is what the poets sing in a room full of echoes, with the echoes coming back from all over the world," Velter says.

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