This chapter contributes to the study of international poetics by offering a series of theoretical and personal reflections on the conjunctions and disjunctions that occur in the literature classroom when foreign works are read in strange, new contexts. Focusing on the poetry of Charles Bernstein, and the poet’s reception among Chinese scholars and poets, the chapter examine a variety of techniques according to which works of an alien language and culture can and should be translated, and what is lost and gained from efforts which prioritize sound over sense and vice versa—the two key axes of poetic writing. The essay further develops the concepts of “inspirational” and “transplantational” learning to explain the ways in which foreign works of poetry are taken up and circulate in their new contexts: the former, another name for the contingent, idiosyncratic associations that these circumstances generate; the latter, the name the authors give to the absorption of a work within the codes and conscience of the new culture in which it has begun to move about.