preface ixPREFACEOne of my hang-ups is what it means to call something marginal,
or more precisely, what it means to call avant-garde poetry from
China so. I’ll save this issue for a subsection of chapter One and the
occasional relapse later on. Here I will only say that it is to do with
a questionable mechanism that makes numbers the measure of all
things, that this mechanism has sometimes been applied to not just
poetry but also scholarship on poetry, and that on both levels it is
often unwarranted and potentially deceptive. While I am aware that
the poetry crowd in Chinese Studies and Literary Studies is smaller
than the politics crowd or the fiction crowd, I’m not sure that this
makes it marginal in any sense other than the quantitative, or that
quantitative marginality is a bad thing. What’s more, just like poet-
ry’s notorious undefinability and diatribes against its uselessness have
never endangered its acknowledged right to exist—or rather the fact
of its existence as an essential expression of humanity—so the schol-
arly study of poetry somehow always manages to hang on, regardless
of the number of people involved. It appears, quite simply, to be
worth it. On that note, and specifically in light of the dynamic mod-
ern manifestations of a civilization with a massive cultural tradition,
it is good to see that the Chinese poetry crowd continues to attract
new faces in China and elsewhere, and that the object of their fas-
cination continues to generate new research. And it makes perfect
sense, for there are many more things about the Chinese avant-garde
to get hung up on than its marginality, as I hope this book will
show.
The documented history of the avant-garde is roughly a hundred
times shorter than that of Chinese poetry as a whole. Still, the
amount of material that has become available since the late 1970s
can feel overwhelming to the individual researcher—and yet it isn’t
always easy to find, especially if one is based elsewhere in the world.
To facilitate research, teaching and translation, I present this study
in conjunction with three online re search bibliographies published
by the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center:
“Unofficial Poetry Journals from the People’s Republic of China:
A Research Note and an Annotated Bibliography” (2007, see Works