224 chapter six
were republished in Taiwan in Modern Poetry (⦄ҷ䆫); it is included in
The Poetry of Yu Jian (Ѣമⱘ䆫, 2000), and so on. That «File 0» was
adapted for the theater by Mou Sen’s Beijing Theater Workshop (៣
䔺䯈࠻) in 1995, and as such acquired the additional status of a script
and performance that interact with the original publication, doesn’t
alter its continuing existence as a poem.^1
This chapter is concerned with distinctions of poetry and prose, but
it doesn’t aim to categorize «Salute» and «File 0» as unambiguously
being one or the other. Rather than essentializing either the genres or
these particular texts, I note that although both texts have counted as
poetry from the start, they highlight and problematize the said distinc-
tions. «Salute» has poetic, formal regularities in parallelism, rhyme
and rhythm on the level of sentences and stanzas, but its lines cover the
full width of the page. Conversely, lineation and line-internal division
into short strings separated by blanks make «File 0» look typographi-
cally poetic, but its prosody is less than spectacular and its division into
sections is modeled on extremely prosaic examples. «Salute» makes a
poetic appeal to the imagination and abounds with ambiguity, contra-
diction and paradox, encouraging interpretation, even if we have seen
that the actual process of interpretation is difficult. «File 0» seemingly
claims to have but one semantic level, that of objective observation
with some respect for the logic of everyday life, but it generates poetic
tension by thoroughly defamiliarizing and contrasting language and
“reality.” Both texts foreground an uneasy relationship between sheer
length and the phenomenon of poetry, but in other aspects of the liter-
ary experience they are so unalike that one might ask whether calling
the one poetry means calling the other prose. My answer to that ques-
tion is no. Both are indeed poetry, albeit of an unusual kind—but each
for different reasons.
Section 1 looks at some issues surrounding the definition of poetry.
Section 2 presents a text-based analysis to clarify the poetic status of
«Salute» and «File 0». Section 3 considers the evident viability of long
poems in contemporary Chinese literature.
(^1) Yu Jian 1994, 1995a, 2000: ch 4, He Yi 1994. Yu Jian & Zhu 1994, Yu Jian
1998b: 4. On the Theater Workshop adaptation (Yu Jian 1995b), see Lin Kehuan
1995, Yeh 1998a, Zhang Ning 1999 and Huot 2000: 80-82.