16 chapter one
the early 1970s. At the end of the decade, together with Mang Ke
and painter Huang Rui, Bei Dao was the driving force behind Today,
fountainhead of the avant-garde and the home of early Obscure Po-
etry (ᳺ㚻䆫) before this made its way into official publications. This
poetry sustains tragic-heroic images of poethood that have traveled
with modern Chinese poetry since its inception, drawing on the Qu
Yuan lore and its modern transformations as well as European high
Romanticism.^22 Early Obscure Poetry is characterized by a defiant,
humanist indictment of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, a high-
flown tone and fanciful, often private metaphors. The metaphors were
certainly obscure to orthodox critics in the PRC, and they are by no
means transparent to all other readers. Obscure Poetry provoked a
protracted controversy which showed that neither poetry nor liter-
ary criticism and scholarship were mere mouthpieces of government
cultural policy any longer. In 1983-1984 Obscure Poetry and sympa-
thetic criticism ended up among the targets of the campaign to Eradi-
cate Spiritual Pollution (⏙䰸㊒干∵ᶧ), an orthodox backlash against
what was perceived as a rising tide of Western “modernism.”^23
When the campaign had fizzled out and it appeared safe to assume
that poetic innovation wouldn’t simply be stamped out by the authori-
ties, it became clear that the avant-garde no longer presented a united
front and that regional actors no longer accepted the hegemony of the
single geographical center in Beijing that had existed around the Today
poets. New poetics were put forward in unofficial journals that mush-
roomed throughout the country from the mid-1980s on, sometimes
explicitly dissociating themselves from their Obscure predecessors—
who had once been hailed for being courageously artistic but were
now coming under fire for naive utopianism and for being ideological-
ly and stylistically dated if not complicit with orthodoxy, in a literary
landscape that was changing by the day. One of the new trends was
that of the Colloquial Poetry (ষ䇁䆫) associated with the Nanjing-
based journal Them (ҪӀ), known for its low-key language usage and
(^22) Yeh 1991: ch 2, Schneider 1980.
(^23) On Today and Obscure Poetry, from a plethora of commentary, see Soong &
Minford 1984, Tian 1987, Yao 1989, He Yuhuai 1992: ch 7, Zhuang 1993, Patton
1994: ch 1, Chen Zhongyi 1996, Van Crevel 1996: ch 2 and 2007, Liao 1999: ch 5-6
and Liu He 2001. On the campaign and on poetry as one of its targets, see Pollard
1985, Larson 1989 and He Yuhuai 1992: ch 6; for some primary material, see Poetry
Monthly 1983-12: 31ff.