A Cha Special Feature
On Richard Berengarten’s
CHANGING
In this special feature, Cha presents a compendium of eight essays on a major contemporary poetic work that crosses the boundaries of time and place. This is Richard Berengarten’s Changing (Shearsman Books, UK, 2016), a work of vast symphonic scope, whose main inspiration is the ancient Chinese book of divination and philosophical wisdom, the I Ching, or Classic of Changes.
Among the signal achievements of Berengarten’s Changing is the radical and innovative connectivity that it sparks – and maintains – between the I Ching, foremost of the ancient Confucian classics, and the preoccupations of our own age. We at Cha draw particular attention to Changing for precisely this reason. All the more so because this is a time when the precious commonality between human cultures needs to be recognised, celebrated, treasured, and held in trust for future generations.
Richard J. Smith, a major historian of the I Ching, has written a preface especially for Cha. All the other eight essays in the feature are extracts from Under the Sign of the I Ching: Essays on Richard Berengarten’s Changing, edited by Paschalis Nikolaou and Richard J. Smith (Shearsman Books, UK, 2023). An illuminating set of as-yet-unpublished working notes by Richard Berengarten, made during the composition of Changing, is also included.
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho / Editor-in-Chief
Cha
December 2022
Published: Wednesday 21 December 2022[RETURN TO CHANGING]
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a Hong Kong-born editor, poet, translator, and scholar. She is the editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (asiancha.com | chajournal.blog | hkprotesting.com), the English-language editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and an editor of the academic journal Hong Kong Studies. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes of poetry, fiction and essays, including Desde Hong Kong: Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz (2014), Quixotica: Poems East of La Mancha, (2016), We, Now, Here, There, Together (2017), and Twin Cities (2017). Tammy’s translations have been published in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Drunken Boat, and Pathlight, and by the Chinese University Press. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping (2015), for which she was awarded a Young Artist Award in Literary Arts by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her other books are Too Too Too Too (2018), Her Name Upon the Strand (2018), An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong (2018), and Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (2019).