avant-garde poetry from china 17down-to-earth semantics, with Han Dong as its driving force and con-
tributors from all over the country. Another was that of the Macho
Men (㦑∝) in Chengdu, with authors such as Wan Xia and Li Ya-
wei enthusiastically offending against social and educational taboos. A
third, that of Women’s Poetry (ཇᗻ䆫℠) and an accompanying criti-
cal discourse, with Zhai Yongming, also from Chengdu, as its foremost
representative. A fourth, yet again based in Chengdu, Root-Seeking
(ᇏḍ) trends toward reviving cultural origins, such as those found in
the Wholism (ᭈԧЏН) championed in the pages of Han Poetry (∝
䆫) by poets including the brothers Song Qu and Song Wei and Shi
Guanghua. A fifth, also out of Sichuan province, that of the rambunc-
tious Not-Not (䴲䴲) project, deadly serious and flippant at the same
time, involving Zhou Lunyou and Yang Li among others. A sixth, the
self-mocking Coquetry School (ᩦ⌒) in Shanghai, with Momo and
Jingbute as central contributors. A seventh, poetry of Intellectual (ⶹ
ᄤߚ䆚) inclination by poets including Xi Chuan and Haizi in Beijing
and Chen Dongdong in Shanghai, with Tendency (ؒ) as their jour-
nal. These examples are from 1984-1988, and there are many more
in those and later years. And while Beijing, the greater Shanghai ar-
ea—including Nanjing and Hangzhou—and especially Sichuan were
centers of activity and activism, they certainly weren’t the only places
where the avant-garde was developing and diversifying.^24
Perhaps because of the immense, initial impact of Obscure Poetry
and the convenience of thinking in neatly successive generations, lit-
erary historiography has tended to lump together divergent and in-
deed incompatible trends of the mid- and late 1980s and the early
1990s such as those listed above, under denominators like the Third
Generation (ϝҷ, pre-Cultural-Revolution poets being a First,
and Obscure Poetry a Second Generation), the Newborn Genera-
tion (ᮄ⫳ҷ) and Post-Obscure Poetry (ৢᳺ㚻䆫). These labels have
occasionally been made to encompass so much that they border on
the meaningless, apart from representing slices in time of the avant-
garde’s history. Something similar is true for later examples such as
the Fourth Generation (ಯҷ), the Middle Generation (Ё䯈ҷ), the
Post-70 Generation (70ৢϔҷ) and the Post-80 Generation (80ৢϔ
(^24) On Colloquial Poetry, see Chen Zhongyi 2000: ch 10 and Hong & Liu 2005:
216-221; on Macho Men Poetry, Day 2005a: ch 4; on Women’s Poetry, Zhang
(Jeanne Hong) 2004; on Wholism, Day 2005a: ch 9; on Not-Not, Day 2005a: ch 10;
on the Coquetry School, Jingbute 1998; on Tendency, Chen Dongdong 1995.