186 chapter four
from any socio-political message it may or may not bring—or, in the
“other words” that poetry is, even if froth is what I speak.
*
I have tried to clarify conceptualizations of exile: of poets, and in po-
etry. The narrowest variety has been that of the physical exile of Yang
Lian, Wang Jiaxin and Bei Dao, three Chinese avant-garde poets af-
ter June Fourth. The broadest, that of exile as the (modern) poet’s
state of mind or the stuff that (modern) poetry is made of. On a third
level of engagement, I have focused on exile as it is foregrounded in
actual texts written by the said three poets. For Bei Dao, this demon-
strates that a central thematic of alienation that is present in his oeuvre
from the early years facilitates incorporation of the exile factor. For all
three, it shows that in any poetry that will hold its own, independent of
historical contextualization, the order of things is incorporation of the
exile factor in an individual poetics, not the other way around. This is
not a new idea, and one could call it a specification of long-standing
definitions of (modern) literature that grant pride of place to the text’s
aesthetic qualities over effectiveness in conveying a paraphraseable
message. But it bears textually argued reiteration, if only to balance
biography and historiography’s penchant for turning art into docu-
mentation, with literature from China as an easy victim.