tanding in front of the wall created by the Egret Poetry Society, Song Huanjie read the Seeds of Hope passionately, which was the first poem she wrote in her life.

"I used to be an English teacher but I never tried writing poetry; it was only after I joined the Egret Poetry Society that I began to write poetry gradually," she said.

In September of last year, Shanghai selected outstanding and willing city talents to support the less developed villages like Yaojing Village. Song, who used to be a principal of Songjiang Yongfeng Experimental School, was sent to the village as an instructor to help its development.

"When I came, the party secretary said to me earnestly, 'You will be in charge of the poetry society'!" Song said,with a smile.

The Egret Poetry Club, founded in 2016, was the first village-level poetry club in Shanghai. Actively responding to the initiative on revitalization of rural culture, the party secretary at that time, Jiang Qi, decided to take the village mascot egrets as the cultural calling card of the village and named the society after it.

Before Song came, the Egret Poetry Society was just an empty name. The key reason was the lack of leadership. "Village officials and club members used to come and go. And it was almost impossible to hold regular meetings,” Song said.

Therefore,when she first took over the Poetry Society, she didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, some poets in this society had stopped writing poetry for a long time; on the other hand, if she invited her colleagues from the education field to participate in the poetry society, the value of it for the local farmhands would be lost.

In order to rebuild the club, Song made full use of her resources to gather local poets and rural culture lovers to write together and communicate with each other. "I also joined another formal club called Huating, which is supported by Shanghai government,” Song said. “The two clubs can collaborate, providing an opportunity for the folk one in our village to grow.”

Last November, the First Idyllic Art Festival was held in Yaojing Village, which aimed to show and promote the beauty of rural culture. Song invited poets from Huating to experience rural life and versify together with those from the Egret Poetry Society. In the end, they produced 24 pastoral poems for exhibition at the Art Festival.

Zhang Meng, the founder of the Poetry Society, believed that the participation of Huating, the urban poetry club, helped enhance the professionalism of their society. "A dozen members of Huating are from the Shanghai Writers’ Association and even a few from the Chinese Writers’ Association. With their help, the quality of our poetry has improved."

After the poetry club halted publication in 2017, Zhang left the village to start his own cultural and creative company in Songjiang District. Hearing about the revival of the poetry society last year, Zhang returned as a rural poet and was responsible for the editing of their poetry collection. "We have a WeChat official account called Dao Xiang Yao Jing, which has a column for poems. Every week, I will select five high-quality poems and post them at 9 a.m.Friday."

In addition to the Egret Poetry Club, Song also built an Egret Lecture Hall in the village, and regularly held activities every week, such as poetry reading, martial arts, and sinology. To Song’s delight, these activities are welcomed by both the children and the elderly members of the village.