{"id":21,"count":4,"description":"Through 2000-2001, I became obsessed with the Taiping Rebellion. Like many who have been fascinated by it, I found the collision of East and West in this historical moment fascinating, and began to work on a series of poems telling the story from a number of points of view, both from within the Taiping Army and without -- including the point of view of an opium-addicted Scotsman who ends up in China, caught in the middle of the war.\r\n\r\nI worked on these poems until around 2004, at which point I became convinced that a book telling the story of Taiping! would likely be too long to see publication, but also that it would be difficult for me to finish composing such a poem whilst living abroad and speaking very simplified English all day long.\r\n\r\nThat said, I do not consider the project completely abandoned, and would like to get back to it someday. It was over halfway finished when I stopped working on it, and would likely take a serious outlay of time to finish... but maybe someday that will be possible.","link":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/collections\/poems-from-taiping\/","name":"Excerpts from Taiping!","slug":"poems-from-taiping","taxonomy":"category","parent":0,"meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}