"[2] In 1963 he went to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, whose director, Paul Engle, went to Taipei to negotiate permission for Yip's wife Tzu-mei and their daughter to leave Taiwan;[3] he received an MFA in 1964.
He then did graduate work at Princeton University, receiving a PhD in comparative literature in 1967.
In 1980 he joined the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a visiting professor.
Yip's poetic theory, relating modernist poetry to Taoist aesthetics, has been very influential in Taiwan.
[4] In recent years he has been the object of considerable attention in China, with exhibitions of his archives and conferences devoted to his poetry, as well as publication of his Complete Works in nine volumes.