338 chapter nine
2. A Poetic Lineage
Lower Body poetry didn’t appear out of nowhere. Below, I will briefly
sketch its lineage within the avant-garde, with reference to the Ele-
vated and Earthly aesthetics—again, not as pigeonholes but as coor-
dinates in a multidimensional body of texts and metatexts, to help us
to identify overall trends within the avant-garde and kinship between
individual oeuvres.
For positioning themselves during their heyday in the years
2000-2002, Lower Body poets often referred to the notion of the Pop-
ular as this had been advertised during the Polemic in 1998-2000. For
them, the Polemic derived its status as a frame of reference from the
fact that it had brought the divergence of the Elevated and the Earthly
to a head during their formative years as poets. Incidentally, Shen
Haobo was by no means uncritical of the Popular, but his discontent
in this respect pales in comparison with his vicious attacks on anything
that could be remotely associated with Intellectual Writing.^36 At any
rate, the Lower Body is one of several extreme manifestations of the
Earthly orientation in the early twenty-first century, two others being
the Trash School and the Low Poetry Movement of subsequent years,
studied in recent research by Heather Inwood and Michael Day re-
spectively.^37 Explicit poetics and other comments by Lower Body au-
thors confirm its affinity with the Earthly. For outlining its provenance
we focus on three salient features.
DemystificationWhat I have called the rejective quality of Lower Body poetry is also
visible in Shen Haobo’s manifesto, as one of many deconstructions of
high-blown images of poethood by Shen and others. As such the Low-
er Body partakes in a poetics of demystification and indeed desecra-
tion that is discussed at various points in this study. This poetics goes
back to authors such as Han Dong, Yu Jian and Yi Sha and journals
such as Them and Not-Not. In its early stages, it is to some extent nega-
tively defined as the rejection of Obscure Poetry. Later, it finds itself
in opposition to many of the categories on the Elevated side in the list
(^36) For Shen’s criticism of the Popular, see Shen Haobo 2001b.
(^37) Inwood 2008: ch 2, Day 2007a.