At the back of the Waldorf Astoria, Shanghai
Introduction
A swarm of scooters speeds along Suzhou Road South
past an old man, oblivious in his roadside shack.
He is lost in thought, deep inside his old mobile phone
amongst old chairs, boxes, the detritus of the city.
Underneath ‘The Outline of Shanghai Tobacco Sales Network’
and ‘The Great Northern Telegraph Corporation, 1922’ signs
which advertise the Shanghai heritage architectural trail.
We’re one block west of the Bund, of 21st century China
with its lights, power overload, the neon cityscape of Pudong,
the Saturday night revellers from across the world and
the fashion gurus at Nougatine at Jean Georges, Three on the Bund.
I watch him enter unconsciousness, and then sleep,
wrapt in the glow of the China Telecom interface, locked into
sub-Cupertino, the backstreets, the vapour trail of civilization.
– Richard Andrews
Content
This unpublished sonnet was written while I was on a promotional trip for a previous University in 2015. We were hosting a dinner for alumni and guests at a top restaurant in Shanghai, Nougatine at Jean Georges, Three on the Bund.
During a fifteen-minute break, I wandered to the back of the hotel. The contrast with the glamour, neon and internationalization of the front of the hotel was marked, suggesting to me the huge social difference between the wealth of contemporary China and poverty of the backstreets. Similarly, ‘sub-Cupertino’ refers to the dominance of Apple, Inc, the headquarters of which are in Cupertino, California. His mobile was a very early model of the iPhone.
What research does it take to compose a poem like this? Knowledge of the city; some local and global economic awareness; gathering detail from the immediate context; an understanding of human inequity and nature. Research in a case like this is research for the making of the artwork rather than ex post facto research about the experience. Instead of a smoke or taking a photograph, I scribbled a few notes then worked them up into a poem over the following days.
The poem will be published in a forthcoming collection on China and Scotland.
About Richard
Richard Andrews is Professor in Education and Head of Moray House School of Education and Sport. He has published two books of poems: A Sense of Place (2009) and Falling Uphill (2021). He was winner of the Philip Larkin Prize at the East Riding Literary Festival in 2013.
Most of his recent academic publications have been about poetry and poetics: A Prosody of Free Verse (Routledge 2016), Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics (Routledge 2018) and Polyrhythmicity (Springer 2021).
Faculty profile | Personal Academic Website
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