320 chapter nine
respective poetics rather than anyone’s insufficient command of the
Chinese language, including its colloquial or post-colloquial varieties.
More generally, Shen’s low appraisal of Chinese and foreign critical
ability—and of much avant-garde poetry to date—appears to be part
of mechanisms of differentiation and dissociation from what has gone
before which typically come into play when a new trend seeks to estab-
lish itself in the literary field.
Clear-cut distinctions between high and popular culture have been
effectively challenged in the past several decades, and so has the au-
tomatic evaluation of high as good and popular as bad. Still, I wish
to note that the aforesaid one-dimensionality and shallowness are not
value judgments or euphemisms for bad poetry. Successful Lower
Body texts combine a particular flow, colloquial or theatrical or both,
with the effective evocation of an extra-literary, acutely relevant con-
text. This context is an urban jungle, home to insatiable industries
of consumption and entertainment, in a society witnessing the rise of
money, social mobility, inequity and sex as something no longer linked
to wedlock, love or procreation. These things are proportionate to the
collapse of Chinese-socialist ideology and its institutions in all spheres
of life: material austerity, the iron rice bowl, puritanism and so on. In
Lower Body poetry the new New China is experienced through the
senses of hip, free-floating youths who fail to meet society’s conven-
tional expectations but who are smart and well-connected enough to
get by, with a keen eye for both misery and happiness.
A Comparison with GlamlitThe Lower Body is firmly grounded in the turbulent social realities of
contemporary China outlined above. If, as part of the poetry scene,
it emerged in a climate that had been generated by the Polemic, this
is only one of several possible angles from which to approach these
texts. Hence, before we proceed to examine Shen Haobo’s poetry, a
quick comparison with related developments in fiction—much better
researched to date—is in order.
Following the relaxation of government cultural policy in late 1970s
China, Obscure Poetry and, for fiction, Scar Literature (Ӹ⮩᭛ᄺ)
embodied a transition from orthodox Maoist poetics to experimental