400 chapter twelve
chapter contains a chronological bibliography of the Polemic, as a
palpable record of its emergence and development and to facilitate
future research. References to items #1-120 are to the Appendix (in an
in-text format to avoid drowning in bibliographical detail during the
analysis); other literature, referred to in the footnotes, is found in the
regular list of works cited for all chapters.
The Polemic was a defining, multi-faceted moment in discourse on
the avant-garde. It was different from earlier tussles with the literary
establishment as regards both the avant-garde’s (self-)image and things
like interpersonal relationships on the poetry scene, publication pat-
terns and so on. There is an abundance of material and for developing
a real sense of what it was all about, nothing less than immersion in the
sources will do. To this end I will dwell on all key texts and make sum-
mary reference to many others. Hence, section 1 is long and dense,
and some readers may wish to skip to section 2 (p441); but I have
wanted to avoid jumping to conclusions on what was a rhetorically
charged affair, and the material is well worth it. The analysis reaffirms
a point that has come up several times in the preceding pages: on the
contemporary Chinese poetry scene, images of poethood are of excep-
tional importance.
1. What Were the Issues?
The Polemic generated a plethora of publicly available material in
multiple-author anthologies of poetry and criticism, scholarly pub-
lications, official and unofficial literary journals and regional dailies
and weeklies. Research for this chapter doesn’t extend to the Internet.
Aside from the general disclaimer made in chapter One, this is be-
cause the explosive growth of Internet use on the poetry scene came
after the Polemic “proper” had come to an end early in 2000.
Cheng Guangwei’s Appropriation of a Decade: “Chinese Poetry from the West”In February 1998 Beijing-based critic Cheng Guangwei published an
anthology entitled A Portrait of Years Gone By: Literature of the Nineties, Po-
etry Volume (ቕ᳜ⱘ䘫✻: бकᑈҷ᭛ᄺк㋏, 䆫℠ो, #1). Literature of
the Nineties (#3) editor Hong Zicheng rightly calls attention to a change
of mood in the 1990s as compared to the 1980s in a foreword (#4)