fringe poetry, but not prose 245have adopted above to examine both texts, from their look and sound
to their position on the scale of presence and progression.
Length has often counted as incompatible with good poetry. Goethe
famously held that restraint shows the master’s hand, and Poe called
a long poem a contradiction in terms, for “a poem is such, only inas-
much as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense ex-
citements are, through a physical necessity, brief.”^23 Length, however,
linewise and pagewise, is a conspicuous feature of much poetry from
China, from extreme cases such as Luo Gaolin’s 278-page «Deng
Xiao ping» to poems the size of «Salute» or «File 0», and many others
of two or three pages that cannot be viewed at a glance.
What lies at the root of the sheer size of many poems from China
is not the focus of this chapter. Yet, at this point we may recall how
much needed to be said in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, right
after the Cultural Revolution, as noted in chapter One. Also, while
the avant-garde’s modes of presentation, readership and social posi-
tion differ vastly from those of Maoist orthodoxy and its legacy, the
tradition of big poems as practiced by avant-garde authors shows a
lingering influence of the Maoist discourse that held sway from the
1940s until the 1970s, also remarked upon in chapter Three. A third
source of the remarkable length of many contemporary Chinese po-
ems might be the 1980s Root-Seeking tradition, the historical and
mythological components of which made for generously sized texts as
well. These lines of thought need not exclude each other or any further
explications. Additionally, we could look into reading attitudes within
the avant-garde—and writing attitudes, and their interactions—and
in doing so perhaps pay special attention to the negotiation of imag-
ery, specifically to strategies of interpretation. While recognizing the
dangers of generalization, I contend that close reading hasn’t been
the dominant trend in criticism and scholarship in China—or close
writing, the dominant trend in literary production. If this is so, it helps
explain the acceptability, or indeed the desirability, of long poems.
*
«Salute» and «File 0» are poems with prosaic qualities, not the oth-
er way around. They should be considered prose poems rather than
(^23) Poe 1973: 552, discussed in Perloff 1996: 158.