“WeChat Poetry Fever,” A Case Study: The Poetry Collective “City Flâneuses’ Poems”

In recent years, WeChat (Weixin 微信), probably the most used social networking platform in China, has turned into the stage for a unique poetic phenomenon: the rising of a huge number of official and private accounts, and large WeChat groups dedicated to the sharing, or “posting,” writing, reading, and commenting of poems, defined as “WeChat poetry fever” (Luo 2019, 60). This study intends to provide a better understanding of this super-app’s (Sandel et al. 2018, 1) overcrowded poetryscape (Stalling 2019, 116) through the analysis of the official WeChat account of Chengshi manyouzhe zhi shi 城市漫游者之诗 (“City flâneuses’ poems”) poetry collective. The group, formed in Shanghai in 2016, consists of seven women poets born in the 1990s. This study will consider the strategies implied by the collective members to structure and enrich their virtual poetry collection, ever open and constantly in progress, i.e. their official account. The selected case study perfectly shows how “WeChat poetry” works in terms of multimodality, aesthetic experience (Li 2017, 91), engagement, and user/ reader interaction (Bronwen 2020, 10). Through interviews conducted with the poets themselves, we will try to grasp to what extent “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan stated, and how is WeChat affecting reading and writing habits in the Chinese literary scene.