246 chapter six
poetic prose. John Simon pronounced the prose poem dead in the
1950s—even though later, he conceded that it might still be “the occa-
sional ‘aside’ of writers whose essential utterances take other forms”—
and in the Chinese world of letters, Lin Yiliang urged young writers
to stay away from prose poetry, which he considered to be neither fish
nor fowl. Research by Marjorie Perloff and others shows that Simon’s
claim has proven untenable for Western literatures in later years.^24 As
for Lin’s worries, they didn’t prevent the emergence of successful prose
poetry in Chinese, starting in the 1960s in Taiwan. That the prose
poem is alive in Chinese, just as in other languages, is reaffirmed by
literary practice in mainland China since the 1980s, with the work of
Xi Chuan and Yu Jian as powerful examples.
(^24) Simon 1987: 700 and 1965: 665, Lin Yiliang 1976: 44, Perloff 1996: ch 6.