MANY people think of poetry as an abstract literary form that flows from the pens of esoteric writers who live in a world apart.

It’s a misguided perception, as the audience at a documentary film screened at East China Normal University was surprised to discover.

Poets, the movie showed, can be anyone — the worker on a building site, the tailor in the corner store or the waiter who serves you in a restaurant.

And perhaps even more surprising to those who watched “The Verse of Us” is the existence of a genre of “migrant poetry,” produced by workers from rural areas with generally poor education.

The film shows audiences that poetry flows from the heart and the human soul knows no social boundaries.

Qin Xiaoyu, a poetry critic and co-director of the film, estimates that some 10,000 of China’s 250 million workers write poetry. The documentary focuses on six of them, including a forklift driver, a mine dynamiter, a garment maker and an assembly worker at Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer.

Some of them have been writing poetry for more than a decade.

Qin says he first encountered what he calls “working-class poetry” when he was judging a literary competition and read some beautiful poetry written by unfamiliar authors.

When he discovered that they were migrant workers, he began doing more research and later edited a book of the poems he collected from them.

“Writing poetry is a cheap form of entertainment for people who have no money,” Qin says. “Poetry requires only pen and paper.”

On paper, these workers pour out their souls, dreams, pains and sorrows.

“Their works shed light on a neglected side behind the miracle of ‘Made in China’,” Qin says.

Jikeayou

One of the poets in the film is Jikeayou, a member of the Yi minority from the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, who works in a down jacket factory in Zhejiang Province. Many of his poems speak of the difficulty in making a living in a big city while retaining the unique culture of his small home village.

In the film, Jikeayou takes his toddler son back to the ancestral home for a festival. He is sad to see the town’s population has been whittled down to old people and children. The able-bodied have migrated to cities to work.

He wrote:

The elders give us wine and my nieces entangle me, dreaming of being a worker in the city;

It’s harder and harder to do rites to lift curses;

It’s easy to spin a piglet’s skull, but not to find a real shaman;

I pretend I’m still a real Yi, pretend that all the youngsters are together;

If only my ancestors were still there, recognizing the old clothes we used to wear.

Chen Nianxi

Chen Nianxi, another poet in the film, expresses a similar feeling of helplessness in his verse. His mother was diagnosed with cancer, and his father has been paralyzed for years. He blasts rocks at a mine to earn money for the family.

He has been a dynamiter for 16 years. He says he watches miners die of black lung disease and suffer injuries from blasting. But he has no choice.

He says he misses his family.

He wrote:

My tiny relatives are far away under at the foot of Mt Shang;

They are sick, their bodies are covered in dust;

Whatever is taken from my middle-aged years

Extends the tunnel of their old age.

My body carries three tons of dynamite;

They are the fuse

And last night,

Like rock, I exploded.

Laojin

Another miner in the film is nicknamed as Laojin, or “old well.” He has been working 800 meters underground for 30 years and has survived five accidents.

He said writing poem was his only hobby. He wrote his verses on mine instruction books because he couldn’t find better paper nearby.

Wu Xia

Wu Xia was the only woman among the six filmed poets.

Born in 1984 in Sichuan Province, she was one of the first generation of “left-behind children,” whose parents quit their hometown to work in cities. She joined her mother to work in a garment factory in Shenzhen when she was only 14. She never got to finish middle school.

The dull factory work bored her and she loathed the supervisors who treated workers badly.

“I hated my life in the factory,” Wu tells Shanghai Daily. “Everything there had strict rules, and there was no freedom. It was not the life I wanted.”

She left the factory when she was 18, taking on any job she could find to sustain herself. Street sweeper. Beautician. Warehouse keeper. She eventually had to return to a factory assembly line because decent-paying jobs were so hard to find.

She grew depressed and even contemplated suicide. She was saved by her mother and then eventually by the escapism of poetry.

She picked up a pen and began to write verse, often staying up into the wee hours of the morning after returning late from the factory.

One of her most famous poems tells of her obsession with suspender skirts.

“I love suspender skirts because they are so beautiful, even if I rarely have the chance to wear one,” she says.

She wrote:

I’m getting off work;

I want to wash my sweaty uniform

And I’ll fold it and pack it up.

The suspender skirt will be shipped from the workshop

To a mall somewhere, to a fashionable store

And some afternoon or evening

It will wait for you alone.

Unknown girl,

I love you.

Wu admits that her interest in writing poetry is not understood by family and friends.

“Many people have mocked me and said I was wasting my time,” Wu says. “So I don’t mention my poetry to acquaintances.”

She has written hundreds of poems. Most of them have never been published. That doesn’t deter her.

She did write to a local newspaper 10 years ago. The story published about her aroused some attention from publishers and the public.

“Someone offered to publish a collection of my poems,” Wu says. “I was excited about that. But the offer was shallow and nothing ever came of it.”

With parents and two daughters to support, she is trying to find an office job, but her lack of education has been a barrier, she says.

Wu Niaoniao

Another poet in the film is Wu Niaoniao from Guangdong Province. Like Wu Xia, he hoped his poetry might be a springboard to a good job. That hasn’t happened.

His poetry tends toward the dark side. He says he is just trying to be thoughtful. Potential employers are put off by it.

Xu Lizhi

One of the poets in the film, Xu Lizhi, is now dead. Xu, a former Foxconn worker, committed suicide in 2014 when he was only 24.

He began working at the factory in 2010 after graduating from high school, with a starting pay of 1,700 yuan (US$250) a month. But the routine of the assembly line bored him. Many of his poems express the frustration he felt, trapped in a job he didn’t like.

He wrote:

At five in the morning on the assembly line I just want to sleep;

I want to close my eyes

And never stay up all night or take extra shifts again.

The end of this journey is the sea, and I am a ship.

Xu did manage to get several of his poems published, but that didn’t lift his depression.

He left the factory at the beginning of 2014, but failing to find a better job. He returned to the assembly line several months later. Not long after, he jumped from a 17-story building, across the street from a bookstore where he had been refused a job.

In his last poem, he wrote:

All people who have heard of me

Don’t feel surprised at my leaving;

Neither sigh nor grieve;

I’m good when I come

So is when I leave.

The film touched the hearts of viewers.

Wang Yimiao, a sophomore at East China Normal University, says she would never have believed that migrant workers could write such beautiful verses. She says it awakened in her a new respect toward migrant labor that most urbanites take for granted.

The film won the Best Documentary award at the Shanghai International Film Festival last year, but has never been screened in mainstream cinemas. The topic is not considered commercially viable.

But more than 50,000 people have viewed the movie via crowd-funding events in 200 cities across China, and the producers say they hope to take the movie to New York and Los Angeles.