My introduction to the work of Bill Porter/Red Pine was his translation of The Heart Sutra, which I first read back in 2005 when I was living in Illinois. For years, it has had pride of place on the table beside my venerable Eastlake platform rocker chair, where I work. But now, what do you know, I live a short walk up Morgan Hill from his house, here in Port Townsend, Washington.
Porter has had an extraordinary personal life. I’d say it was enviable if it wasn’t so intimidating. His father, Arnold Porter, was a youthful bank robber in the 1920s and an inmate in a federal lockup for six years after that. When he got out, he used his share of the sale of the family cotton farm in Arkansas to take out a lease on a hotel in Texas. Ultimately, he operated a chain of 52 hotels (Continental Hotel System) in all 11 states west of the Mississippi. But the Porter family’s wealth was lost after his parents divorced because, as Porter explains, “The lawyers took it all.”
Porter’s story about how he came to study Chinese and Chinese poetry is nearly as unexpected. Here’s a short description of how that came about from his new collection of translations of Chinese poets, Dancing With The Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations (Copper Canyon Press).
Whenever I think about this, I can’t help but laugh. I never had any interest in Chinese when I was younger, nor in poetry, and certainly not in translation. Then, in the spring of 1970, I applied to Columbia University to study for a PhD in anthropology. Since my only income at the time was the US$175 I received every month courtesy of the G.I. Bill, I checked every financial aid box on the application for which I qualified. One of them was for a fellowship funded by the Department of Defense for American citizens studying rare languages—and in 1970 that included Chinese.
I had just read a book by Alan Watts titled The Way of Zen, and I thought the book made wonderful sense—and it had some Chinese characters in it that I lingered over, wondering how such a writing system was possible. So, I wrote the word “Chinese”and moved on to the next box. Several months later, I received the surprising news that I’d been awarded the fellowship and my life changed.
There is great variety in Porter/Pine’s publications. He has translated the poetry of Cold Mountain, Stonehouse, and many other poets from China’s ancient traditions. He has also, as I mentioned, translated sutras—with truly illuminating commentary—and he has published an impressive series of personal narratives about his travels in China, including Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits (1993), Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China (2009), and most recently Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (2016), a book about his search for the homes and burial sites of China’s greatest poets.
In the conversation that follows, Porter and I sit at my kitchen table and talk about Finding Them Gone, a book that beautifully combines his lifelong engagement with the Dharma, poetry, and the Chinese people.
Curtis White: You begin Finding Them Gone without an introduction. You just begin by beginning, writing, “I checked out of the Beijing Friendship Hotel at 5:30.” So, the reader starts with something that is more like a koan than an explanation.“Why did Red Pine go to the East to look for dead poets?” Can you share something about what led you to write this quixotic book?
Bill Porter: During my time in Taiwan and China, without intending to be, I became a pilgrim. I’ve been honored to become acquainted with all of these great Chinese poets. I thought it was time to thank them. I just came up with this idea.
I applied to the Guggenheim foundation seven times to fund my travels in China, but I was turned down each time. I thought the problem was that I was always applying to do various Buddhist projects. I thought a poetry pilgrimage might do it. I submitted the application with letters of recommendation. W. S. Merwin was one of them. There’s a form they have to fill out and send in. Well, Merwin didn’t bother with that. He just wrote a letter to Ed Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim.
I was so excited and surprised because now I could embark on this trip. They asked me how much I wanted. I asked for US$45,000. A couple days later, I got an email from the vice director of the Guggenheim. He said, “Our normal grant is for $25,000–30,000, can you adjust your request?” And I got so embarrassed, feeling greedy, so I adjusted my request to US$40,000. Two weeks later I got a letter with the money: US$50,000. They upped it.
Anyway, the reason I went on this trip was that it fulfilled this desire to thank these men and women, the ancient poets of China, who just amazed me with what they wrote and how they wrote it.
CW: Who were these poets and how did you learn of them? What made you want to translate them?
BP: Once you start getting into Chinese culture, you run into them. You hear about someone and you go find out about them. One poet leads you to another. I’d heard about these poets over the years, but again I never thought of translating them, except for Cold Mountain and Stonehouse. I thought that was pretty much the end of my poetry translation, but then I started getting better as a translator and more knowledgeable about who the great poets were.
I had a list of 20–25 poets on my itinerary when I applied to Guggenheim. When I got the grant, I expanded that to 40. I went online and started looking at maps, because when I write, I write as a traveler, as a pilgrim. So, I chose my route and thought, well, I’ll begin with Confucius. He put the first anthology of Chinese poetry together. All the poets lived near the two great water sources, the Yellow River and the Yangtze. So I traveled along those waterways.
It was a thrill to be able to visit the grave of someone who lived a thousand years ago and finding it. Because the graves were rarely in town. I was told, “Look, you don’t bury people in town. It’s not propitious.” You want your people buried outside of town on some hillside, not in the town.
CW: The poets Stonehouse and Cold Mountain seem to be favorites. You make a point of ending the book in a place related to Cold Mountain. What is it about his poetry that makes him a favorite for you?
BP: My first girlfriend. I never translated anyone before Cold Mountain. I had no intention of doing it, I just started doing it and we fell in love. He’s the guy who pulled me in. I got a copy of Cold Mountain poems from the abbot at the Zen monastery in Taiwan. Reading his poems and trying to translate them became part of my practice.
I never planned to translate another book of poems, but I had a Qing dynasty woodblock edition of Cold Mountain that had some other poets in it. The one right after Cold Mountain was this guy named Stonehouse. Normally, you read a poem, boom, it’s done. But when you’re a translator, you’re spending hours just working on a line. You get to know the poet. As a translator you keep changing your view of the poet and what the message is and how to say it. What’s the poem underneath the words.
So, anyhow, Cold Mountain and Stonehouse were the first two poets I worked on. I’ve always held them in great esteem in part because they were both Buddhists. They spoke the Dharma. If any Chinese person had taken my pilgrimage, they wouldn’t have included Stonehouse, no way, because nobody knows about him even today. And there’s a good chance they wouldn’t include Cold Mountain either.
This was my pilgrimage. I met these people and I wanted to honor them. It was convenient that they made a beautiful necklace of graves and homesites, where I could come up to them on a thread, a travel thread, and go meet them, pay my respects, bring some of the best whisky in the world. Because they loved to drink. Splash some on the tombstone and on the grass. It’s the best whiskey I’ve ever tasted, so I share.
CW: You don’t have a conventional writer’s background. What led you to writing books?
BP: I learned how to write doing radio. I quit my job at the radio station in Taiwan to write Road to Heaven: Encounters With Chinese Hermits (1993), but then the station boss got hired to go to Hong Kong, and he asked me if I’d go with him to be a feature editor.
A couple of weeks before he asked me that question, I had called up Winston Wong, who operated the world’s largest plastics company, Formosa Plastics. Billionaire, super billionaire. I called him up because he had funded my quest to find hermits in China. I told him that my wife and I had decided to move back to America so the kids could learn English, but there was one last thing I wanted to do, one last trip I’d like to make. “What’s that?” I’d like to explore the origins of Chinese culture. I’d like to travel along the Yellow River where Chinese culture and civilization began. He said, “Well, how much do you need and how long is it going to take?” I said, two maybe three months and I’ll probably need around US$9,000. He said, “You want that in cash or traveler’s checks?”
When I told the radio boss that I couldn’t come to Hong Kong because I was going to make this trip, he said, “Great. Take that trip. And give me a two-minute feature every day.” So, I gave him 240 two-minute pieces. It was a huge success in Hong Kong.
That’s how I became a writer by doing two-minute radio pieces. Grab someone’s attention, hold it, no adjectives, no adverbs, simple declarative sentences. I learned a writing style and also my whole presentation was based on a travel itinerary along the Yellow River, from the mouth of the river to the source. My radio manager said, “Well, keep it up.” So, I did the Silk Road, too, and made 280 programs. It gave me a chance to be a pilgrim. One of the reasons I don’t like traveling and writing in China anymore is that nothing bad ever happens. The buses never break down any more, there’s always hot water in the hotels. It’s boring now. Not good for a writer. Before then it was a writer’s paradise. Shit was always happening.
So I learned this way of writing, and that’s how I got this idea of treating poets, 40 poets, 30 days. I’ll look at a map, I’ll come up with a thread. Thirty chapters, 30 days. Even when I broke my ankle and had to return to America, I went back to where I broke it and resumed the 30-day concept.
CW: The form of Finding Them Gone is not like most non-fiction. It’s more like an epic poem. It’s a quest. It’s operatic. You balance the story of your search with the music of poetry and with photographs. Story, music, and image. How were you thinking about the structure of the book?
BP: I always figure that at any one moment, I have at least four options. I can do travel itinerary, or something that happened here a thousand years ago, or a poem, or a photograph. I like to have fun.
CW: Your prose is digression free. It has a Zen-like matter-of-factness. You write, “The road was lined with farmers selling walnuts and watermelons. It was the end of summer and still hot. It had been a long day, and I fell asleep.” This is not unlike the pure attention of the Chinese poets you translate, as in these lines from Li Ch’ing-chao: “I recall that sunset by the river pavilion / so drunk I forgot the way home / exhilaration fading rowing back late / losing my way in a sea of lotus flowers.” Some of your Western readers might be thinking “get on with it,” but you’re asking them to slow down. You call your poetry translations “dancing with the dead.” Perhaps you could call your prose narratives “dancing with what happens.”
BP: Chinese poetry has a fascination with the moment. To them, there’s a moment like a bud of the flower and the poem becomes the unfolding of the petals of that moment. It’s a beautiful technique. A lot of Chinese poets got this. Not everyone did this, but the poems that attracted my attention were by poets like Li Ch’ing-chao. She takes the moment and then has fun with it. She loses her way in a sea of lotus flowers. She startles a whole sandbar of egrets. That image. All the egrets taking off.
CW: One way in which you hold the impatient reader is through raw wit, as when you write, “I stopped to talk to an old man who was watching his goats eat their way along the river. That was one of the advantages of growing old: you got to watch goats.” As you travel, there is always another unforeseen incident to engage and laugh at.
BP: I love that line. It’s like being on Johnny Carson. You have a stage and suddenly you have this repartee, you live for that bon mot. Periodic wit is like salt and pepper.
CW: And then there is the almost slapstick comedy of Road to Heaven: seeking out hermits who by definition want to be alone. There is a similar comedy in Finding Them Gone. Trying to find the last earthly markers of poets famous for their equipoise, but doing it on a very busy itinerary that often allows only minutes to make the next connection, to find a taxi, or to find the next hotel. It reminds me of the frantic comedy of Steve Martin’s 1987 movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. It is a frenzied search for a poet’s calm.
BP: I crammed a lot into this trip. In a given day I had to visit places associated with at least one poet, sometimes two. Once I get there, I spend five minutes and I’m gone. I read them a poem, here’s your whisky. Gotta go.
CW: One of the reasons I love this book is that I felt like, for the first time, I was being put in touch with the people of China, especially through your taxi drivers. I love the moments when the drivers become so involved in your search for poets that they hike with you on trails up the mountain side or into farmland and once or twice into prohibited military sites. As you write of one cabby, “The driver was intent on enjoying the day as much as I was.” Especially touching are the scenes where you are reading a verse at a gravesite or a stele and the taxi driver or villagers recite with you because they memorized the poem in elementary school!
BP: The great repositories of Chinese culture are the taxi drivers. They know everything and everybody. They take people around. They hear stories. And they’re always looking for somebody on a quest. They get tired of just taking people to the department store.
CW: For Americans, it’s so hard to imagine what it’s like to be a Chinese human being. What we learn is propaganda coming out of international power politics and condensed in the mass media. But this book brings the concerns and the friendliness of the Chinese very close.
BP: The Chinese too are distracted by propaganda about the West. They’re just humans living in a very different culture from ours, but they’re not different. They’re human.
CW: Do the taxi drivers know about Chinese culture as well?
BP: Does a fish know anything about the ocean? They know about their culture and certain aspects of it move them still. And there are stories. Certain cultural events are embedded in their stories. That’s what resonates for the Chinese people.
If I wanted to find something that’s more factual, I’d go to the local museum. They have dioramas and books by local authors that aren’t sold anywhere else but in that town. You also find bored people at museums who say, “What? You want to know something?” So taxi drivers, museums, and then the concierge at the hotel. Those are the three sources for finding out what’s going on in a town.
CW: There are other moments when you’re at a special site and you find yourself alone and the site ignored. As you write, “The whole place was magnificent, and I had it all to myself, which was both precious and a shame.” At Lord Hsieh’s Pavilion you write, “The pavilion used to be here. . . . Now it wasn’t even a memory.” It reminds me of Ch’u Yuan’s lines, “all I see now is wormwood / what other reason could there be / than the death of the love of beauty.”
BP: Such a great line. Some Chinese consider that poem, “Beset By Sorrow,” the greatest poem ever written in the Chinese language.
One of the things that has preserved culture, passed on from school teacher to school teacher, is poetry. The anthology that Copper Canyon published, Poems of the Masters, that was used until the cultural revolution in elementary schools. Even after the cultural revolution, even in the early ‘60s, third-grade, fourth-grade students were hearing poems they couldn’t understand, but they memorized them, and eventually they’d hear them often enough in their lives that they’d still resonate with them.
CW: Red Pine has a new book out with Copper Canyon Press, Choosing To Be Simple: Collected Poems of Tao Yuanming. What’s Bill Porter’s next adventure?
BP: I recently returned from a trip to visit all the places where Su Dongpo served or was exiled in order to write a book about his life for a major Chinese press in English.
CW: Thanks so much, Bill. The oolong tea is on me next time we meet.
Curtis White’s most recent book is Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse (2023). His essay “The Benevolent Unknown” is in the Summer 2025 issue of Tricycle Magazine.
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Book Review: Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women
The Lion Hut of Empty Cloud
Teachings by Master Xu Yun on “Huatou”-style Practice in Chan
