not at face value 345CHAPTER TENNOT AT FACE VALUE:
XI CHUAN’S EXPLICIT POETICSThe previous case studies have by and large focused on text, with large
metatextual and contextual components in chapters Three and Four.
Starting with the present chapter, the next three shift to metatext. This
Desecrations? Han Dong’s and Yu Jian’s Explicit Poetics Chapter Eleven
poets, meaning their view of literature and specifically of poetry, as
expounded in so many words. Chapter Twelve examines the Popular-
Intellectual Polemic.
Explicit poetics can include creative writing, or “primary” texts, as
well as verse-external, critical discourse, or “secondary” texts, for one
can speak of poetry in poetry as well as in essays, interviews and so on.
One’s verse-external poetics, then, is a subset of one’s explicit poetics.
I have cast my net wider than the verse-external, in order to extend
the analysis to a text by Xi Chuan that is difficult to classify as either
primary ≈ creative or secondary ≈ critical, and that is neither a poem
nor an essay.
Good clean curiosity aside, why would we want to know about po-
ets’ explicit poetics, verse-external or otherwise? As far as I am con-
cerned, with reference to what I have said about authorial intent,
research such as this is not to test practice against theory or to ask
whether poets are reliable readers of their own work, much less to
check whether they keep their promises or realize their professed ide-
als. The answers to such questions may tell us that a given author’s
poetry and their poetics match or that they don’t, but this doesn’t nec-
essarily add much to our appreciation of either. As noted in the previ-
ous chapter, there is no law according to which an individual’s poetry
and their poetics must be consistent in order to be interesting. Con-
versely, if someone’s explicit poetics turns out to be indispensable for
a successful reading of their poetry, it arguably takes on the status of
text rather than metatext—but again, these things can overlap. More
generally, we may wish to view a given author’s explicit poetics in part
or in whole as extensions of their poetry, because there is a difference