fringe poetry, but not prose 229is closer to the patterns of everyday speech—so that in prose, literary
usage is at the shortest possible distance from non-literary language—
while poetry derives its generic status from deviation from and, indeed,
disregard for those patterns.
Half a century ago, Simon noted that prose poetry had become hard-
er to define, indeed harder to find, since the times of Baudelaire:^9
When poetry and prose have acquired the flexibility and inclusiveness
they now enjoy—thanks, in part, to the prose poem—the need for a
tertium quid decreases.We have since come through another fin de siècle, characterized by
happy disrespect for boundaries of all kinds in the realm of literature
and elsewhere. Simon’s “flexibility and inclusiveness” for poetry and
prose ring true more than ever for Chinese and other literary tradi-
tions. It may be no exaggeration to say that an exclusive definition of
the genre of prose poetry is less than ever possible—or, desirable. This
doesn’t make reflection on distinctions of poetry and prose obsolete
or meaningless. For one thing, it may help us take a fresh look at lit-
erature and its subsets as functional not ontological categories—in the
words of Terry Eagleton—that we ourselves invest with identity and
meaning.^10
Below, I will examine «Salute» and «File 0» from a series of angles
that are germane to these distinctions, namely their look and sound;
their subject matter, style and interpretation; the reading attitudes they
require; iconicity; and, with reference to a perspicacious essay by Ger-
rit Krol, an opposition of presence and progression in literary texts.
2. «Salute» and «File 0»: Poetry or Prose?
In Chinese literature from the Republican era, two names associated
with prose poetry are those of Liu Bannong, for his groundbreaking
translations of the 1910s, and Lu Xun, as the author of Wild Grass (䞢
㤝, 1926). In the second half of the twentieth century, the genre has
been robustly alive since the early 1960s, with Shang Qin, Su Shaolian
and Liu Kexiang as some of its most important authors.^11 By con-
(^9) Simon 1987: 700.
(^10) Eagleton 1996: 8.
(^11) Hockx 2000, Kaldis 2000, Yeh 2000b.