The British poet Matthew Byrne moved to Beijing in 2013 and felt that the capital city's poetry scene was lacking. His obsession(痴迷)for starting poetry events led to the foundation of the Spittoon Collective in May 2015." At that time, the literary activity in Beijing was The Bookworm based in Sanlitun," Byrne says.
While some of Beijing's literary institutions would go on to close in the fall of 2019, Spittoon would continue to grow as a community for poets and writers, as well as musicians and others in the creative scene.
Byrne describes the Spittoon Collective as a platform for people to share ideas, from literary works to different forms of art, with projects developing from the creative energy within the community.
Spittoon originally started as a poetry night at the Mado Bar in Dongcheng District's Baochao Hutong. Byrne says," In Beijing, you have these wonderful hutongs, ancient structures where you can walk down and visit cool bars, so I thought it would be good to have a poetry event as it seemed like poetry belonged naturally to this area."
He adds," The objective now is to discover Chinese voices and broadcast them to the rest of the world. We create a kind of theme park-like atmosphere where every Thursday is occupied by a different literary style or art form."
The readings would mainly be in English, but with an international community, a new section called" Poetry-in-Translation" was started, which featured works in Chinese, French, Arabic, Russian, Spanish and other languages.
Joining organized activities like Spittoon can be a major help for those caught up in a boring life. And it's especially important for the people who have moved to China as they need to build new relationships while living in a different country.
