Kang Cheng (1972- ) is one of the independent and active Chinese poets born in the 1970s. Like many poets who narrowly escaped the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Cheng was able to approach a broader world of poetry in university and absorb varied modernist styles from the West. He started writing poems under influence of the contemporary Chinese poems of the 1950s and 1960s. But he was also attracted to Western poetry, particularly works by Octavio Paz, Dylan Thomas and Gary Snyder. Since the 1990s, he has become more productive; and he has now published about 400 poems in different poetry magazines and anthologies. His main publications are The Speed of Kang Cheng and White Water Pipe. [Read]