Julian's Hong Kong: Truly Taking Over Hong Kong

You will never guess who won second place for their entry in the Hong Kong Baptist University Annual Poetry contest. Well I'm pretty sure you can already guess because you ARE reading MY blog. If you can't, I will ruin the suspense by saying I won.

The two internationally acclaimed judges Nguyen Phan Que Mai and Meena Kandasamy said that this is one of the best poems they've ever read.They also said the complexity of this poem is beyond my own understanding. To my surprise, they spent hours trying to find out whether I plagiarized. They called their colleagues in Spain, Germany and the United States, putting 3 countries in an uproar in an attempt to figure out whether I stole individual lines from other poems. The most they could find was that my opening line was very similar to a poem written by Antonio Machado in 1924, where he starts by saying "verso libre, verso libre/ liberate, mejor del verso" which translates to "free verse, free verse/ liberate, best verse." I can honestly tell you that I didn't plagiarize. Interestingly enough, I wrote this poem in 30 minutes as a result of waiting only an hour before the deadline for the competition to write it.

I guess we never really know the depts of our potential until they are challenged. I always knew I was an okay poet, but this was definitely flattering and a great confidence boost. What I can say is that this poem caused me to take my own poetry seriously and push myself to take intellectual risks.