As part of the 15th Anniversary celebration of International Poetry Nights Hong Kong, the Department of English collaborated with the Faculty of Arts and IPNHK to bring celebrated German poet Daniela Danz to campus for a conversation with our own Professors Collier Nogues (English) and Ting Guo (Cultural and Religious Studies). The 100-seat lecture theater was packed, and guests enjoyed a tea reception before the event at the lovely koi pond atrium of the Institute for Chinese Studies. As the conversation started, Professor Guo prompted both Danz and Nogues to share how they’d come to be poets. Though the two poets offered very different origin stories, we learned that they had both been shaped by the experience of growing up at the edge of a political boundary marked by an imposing fence: Danz in the German Democratic Republic, and Nogues on a US military base in Okinawa, Japan. Their writing has been marked in turn by those experiences, through multiple projects curious about national identity, political belonging, and the power of language. The audience Q&A yielded a lively back-and-forth about the balance of the political and the personal in poems; the relationship between humans and the non-human wild; and how poems come into being—the poets agreed it takes a lot of crafting and revision, after that initial inspiration. One audience member’s question prompted revelations about how close each writer (and Professor Guo) had come to jumping fences—and not just in their writing! All in all, it was a wonderful event, and the Department hopes to collaborate again in the future with International Poetry Nights Hong Kong and the Faculty to bring internationally renowned poets to meet closely with students and guests from outside the CUHK community.