At the 44th World Poets Congress in Monterrey, Mexico, in September 2025, I met Chen Liansong, a poet from San Francisco.
We attended meetings, recited and visited together with nine delegates in North America. We didn’t know each other when we first arrived in Mexico, but in just a few days, he made a deep impression on me.
He doesn’t talk much, but he’s always enthusiastic about taking pictures for his friends; our team takes a lot of clear pictures from his hand-held shots. And he himself is always standing outside the camera.
"Poetic temperament" in a carriage
The one that reminds me the most of him is that episode of Horseback Falls.
On the way down the hill, a carriage was quietly parked on the side of the road, and the driver looked tired and seemed to be out of business for a long time. People instinctively chose to walk – to exercise and to save a few dollars.
He took a few of his friends into the car with a slight word. Along the way down the slope, we shook against the wind and waved our greetings to the walking friends, like a team of happy children who suddenly broke into the mountain forest. At the foot of the mountain, he also insisted on giving the driver a higher tip than expected, and taking a picture with the carriage and the horseman.
It was at that moment that I saw for the first time "him" outside the poet--
The pity of a doctor, the temperature of a poet.
At such an international event, everyone has some expectations in their hearts: who wouldn’t want to hear their own name at the World Congress of Poets?
We all submitted poems in advance, and even prepared to recite the soundtrack. At the award ceremony that day, we dressed up, thinking that if we could get on stage, it would be a decent ceremony.
As a result, I didn’t hear a name.
Even if there are famous poets among us.
When everyone was slightly lost, the host read out: "Chen Liansong - the third prize."
We were surprised.
And he was wearing a T-shirt, jeans and football shoes, unprepared to take the podium.
Invisible – this phrase was silently repeated several times on the scene.
When he returned to his seat, we surrounded him:
“Which poem won?”
"How did you do that?"
He smiled softly: "I don't know which one. They let me vote, and I cast a few. I didn't think so, why didn't I tell you in advance?"
An undisputed peace, unforgettable.
I started interviewing him.
I said, "I want to write about you."
He nodded.
When I arrived at the Mexican airport on my way back, I sent him a message asking him to send me his resume, his work, his presentation, and his award-winning speech when he returned to San Francisco.
He promised very quickly.
It was only then that I really understood how the poet in front of me took a unique path between medicine and literature.
Interview: The Past Life of a Cross-Border Poet
Doctor and Poet: Two Rivers Flowing in the Body at the Same Time
Chen Liansong University began writing poetry and was one of the founding members of the “Little Grass Poetry Society” (1984).
In 1985, his poem was first published in China Youth.
Later life drifted – he resigned from Beijing’s China Concord Medical University in 1989, moved to Los Angeles in 1990, and then moved to North Bay. In 2017, he suffered the worst forest fire in California’s history, lost his home, and his early poetry was largely lost. But he did not stop writing.
For nearly a decade, he has published and published a collection of poems in the New Continental Poetry magazine in Los Angeles, distributed by Amazon worldwide.
Poetry: Meet Me
Poetry Therapy: Meeting Heaven and Earth
Poetry Therapy: Meet Chinese Characters
Poetry and medicine were never a contradiction in him, but two ways of looking at the world.
“Whatever I write, I try to be sincere and honest. I oppose that kind of gentleness and sickness-free moaning. Poetry should be another self that lives in the way of words.”
Medical Background: The Stunning "Another Heavy Identity"
Many people do not know that in front of this gentle poet, is actually a senior pathologist.
He graduated from Xiangya Medical School, went to the U.S. to study cell biology at the University of Southern California Dental School for 90 years, and completed resident physician and cell pathology fellowship training at Keck Medical School / Los Angeles General Hospital in Southern California.
He holds three U.S. Pathology Specialty Certificates (Surgical Pathology, Clinical Pathology, and Cell Pathology), is a senior member of the American College of Pathologists and the American Society of Clinical Pathologists, and has long served as medical director of several medical institutions in California.
He is also a member of several professional organizations, including the American Cancer Research Association, AMA, and the Digital Pathology Association. He is also a member of the Academy of American Poets and the Photographic Society of America.
When I finished reading his resume, I was shocked:
How is this a man who lives in the soul of science and poetry at the same time?
As a full-time pathologist, poet, photographer, editor, publisher complex, I wonder how he balances such multiple identities. He says:
"Medicine gives me a relatively special perspective on life, and words and photography give me a different way of expressing life."
Thinking back to this trip to Mexico, we traveled together for several days, but it was as if only that carriage was enough to understand the background of a person.
Simple, sincere, generous, undisputed.
A doctor who writes poetry, a photographer who studies cancer, a man who stands at the intersection of multiple identities and still keeps his eyes clear.
This interview is just a record of my first encounter with him.
But I believe that everyone who reads his work will feel that they have been “met” once.
Dr. Chen Liansong, M.D., is a contemporary Chinese poet, amateur photographer, editor and publisher. His poetry and photographic works are published in various media including various electronic media, medical magazines, newspapers, various poetry magazines and national poetry collections. His poetic language is cohesive, distinctive and emotional, traveling between philosophy and everyday life, with a delicate humanistic care for individual situations in the changing era of writing.
Editor-in-Chief of New Poetry "Tsurutsu Literature" by the North American University Union
Deputy Editor of Overseas Fine
Honorary Editorial Committee of New Continent Poetry.
(Photo by Yu Xu, Chen Liansong, author)
