Su Shi was born in Meishan, Sichuan Province in the year 1037 and died in 1101 (from Harefoot to Henry I in Anglo-Saxon terms). As poet-painter-calligrapher he is recognized as the singular figure of the Song Dynasty. He excelled at many different literary styles and wrote at least twenty-four hundred poems. At age twenty-two he passed the highest imperial examinations and for the rest of his life moved from post to post as a rootless, wandering government magistrate. Twice he was exiled. He wrote East Slope—a cycle of eight poems with a preface—during the first of these periods in 1081, while farming a plot of land on East Slope. It was here he named himself Su Dongpo (Su of East Slope). His life-practice of writing can be summed up by this description he once gave of Wu Daozi’s paintings: “New ideas follow the inner pattern; subtle mysteries arise outside bold unrestraint.”

Jeffrey Yang works as the poetry editor for New Directions Publishing. He has published a limited-edition translation of Tang-Song Dynasty poems called Rhythm 226. His collection of poems, An Aquarium, was published by Graywolf Press in the Fall of 2008.