作爲1980年代「城市詩」的主力作者，宋琳于1990年代初去國後的詩歌寫作少爲人知。在異域處境中，宋琳借助自我對話的訓練和對寫作本身的專注，在其詩歌中將流亡轉變爲一種漫遊，並伴隨「漫遊」而衍生了一種「看」的詩學，以此探索域外詩歌寫作的可能性；他還提出「韻府是記憶的舊花園」，讓記憶的千姿百態在語詞構築的音韻中得到勾畫與定型，爲「看」的詩學溶入了「聽」的元素；爲了實現自己的詩學構想，宋琳呼籲「朝向詞根挖掘」，將目光投向了華夏文明的源頭。

As the representative author of the「City Poetry」in 1980s, Song Lin's poems are poorly known since he went abroad in the early 1990s. In the exotic situation, with the training of internal dialogue and the concentration on writing, he has transferred the situation of exile into roaming in his poems, and consequently came into the poetics of vision, in order to explore the possibility of poetry writing in abroad. He also suggests that「the rhyme is the old garden of memory」, so that the various forms of memory could be set and sketched in the rhyme built by words and he integrates the audio elements into the poetics of vision. In order to achieve his poetic idea, Song Lin calls for 「digging」toward the root of words, and focuses his attention on the source of Chinese civilization.