thanatography and the poetic voice 125etry, with Wang Yichuan making an especially strong case.^48 Form
and content are in agreement in that both are often unconstrained.
This is frequently a weakness and rarely a strength, and directly re-
flected in the sheer amount of poetry Haizi has to his name.
Piet Gerbrandy proposes a matrix for the classification of poetry
with the attributes “open” and “closed” on one axis, and “accessible”
and “inaccessible” on the other. For an open text, he writes, “how-
ever compelling its language, one still feels that it could just as well
have contained more of fewer lines.” Through association with Ger-
brandy’s approach, in which most of Haizi’s poetry would be open
and accessible, we may call his poetics extremely receptive. It wants to
accommodate a range of things of great magnitude, from the heritage
of ancient civilizations and mythologies to the pinnacles of “world lit-
erature” and art and to profound, individual emotion, and it displays
constant exaltation in the process. In the modern Chinese context,
obvious precursors are Walt Whitman and Guo Moruo, in addition
to orthodox Political Lyricism. On the spectrum from Elevated to
Earthly, Haizi sits squarely at the Elevated end. His work confirms the
connection between the sublime (ዛ催) on the one hand and ethno-
cultural identity and ambitions on the other, noted by Wang Ban.^49
Those among Haizi’s short poems that strike me as the strongest—
four of the five considered here—are not at all megalomaniacal or
bombastic, but individual, private and introspective instead. In con-
trast to the unconstrained parts of Haizi’s oeuvre, they employ struc-
turing devices such as repetition and rhyme, to appreciable effect. The
1986 poem «Clasps a White Tiger and Crosses the Ocean» (ᢅⴔⱑ
㰢䍄䖛⍋⋟) is an example of Haizi’s rare attempts to impose formal
limitations on his writing. An earlier version in an unofficial collec-
tion of poetry, published jointly with Xi Chuan, reveals that Haizi
must have consciously moved toward the poem’s eventual strict form
at some later stage.^50
(^48) Wang Yichuan 1999b. Cf Gao Bo 2003: 169-178 and Luo Zhenya 2005:
134-137.
(^49) Gerbrandy 1995: 15, Xi Chuan 1991a: 9, Abrams 1971: 3-29, Wang Ban
1997: 69-70. For a more elaborate English-language introduction to Gerbrandy’s
criteria for the classification of poetry and their relevance to contemporary Chinese
texts, see Van Crevel 2004: 105-107.
(^50) Haizi 1997: 123, Haizi & Xi Chuan 1986: 11-12.