Like the lovelorn stars of Chinese legend  who meet one night every July across the Milky Way (银河), lovers of  Chinese poetry are invited, once again, to cross the Peach Blossom  Bridge and meet at the Poetry Pavilion. 

Webmaster and designer Debi Carter has  given us the beautifully designed and accessible Poetry Pavilion  website. For those who are new or returning to the website, we will  briefly navigate through the poems that are on the website and explain  how to record your views, comments and enthusiastic “likes”. Debi will  share guidelines she has drafted on how to comment on the poems and  statistics she has gathered on the number of views the poems have had.  

Curator Ellen Soulliere will review the promise and possibilities of  maintaining such a collection of Chinese poems.  She will talk about the  three new poems that we are posting on the website this year and  discuss the processes, rewards and challenges of curating and growing  the Poetry Pavilion collection, selecting, translating, and annotating  the poems, constructing a bridge that she hopes will carry the poets’  authentic voices and intended meanings across from the times and places  of their origin to the members of the Tiger community today.

Like the painter Ma Lin above, the Mistress  of the Pavilion has lit all the candles, warmed all the wine, brewed  all the tea, and now invites all of us to cross the Peach Blossom Bridge  again and enter into the Poetry Pavilion once more -- a place where we  can retrieve, refine and refresh our memories of learning Chinese.