what was all the fuss about? 407Yu Jian’s Two Camps in Poetry: “The Light of the Chinese Language”Early in 1999 Guangzhou-based poet and editor Yang Ke put out the
1998 Yearbook of China’s New Poetry (1998 Ёᮄ䆫ᑈ䡈, #12). For its
coverage of one year, the 1998 Yearbook is an ambitious project. In fact,
its selection of poetry by close to a hundred authors and of essays by a
dozen critics includes entries from earlier years. Yang Ke’s anthology
was followed in April by another yearbook, edited by Beijing-based
critic and editor Tang Xiaodu, entitled 1998 Yearbook of Modern Han
Poetry (1998 ᑈ⦄ҷ∝䆫ᑈ䡈, #17). Tang’s book, with a broad vision
but more meticulously organized than Yang’s, contains works by well
over a hundred poets and three appendices of specially recommended
poems, criticism and events in poetry in 1998; as we have seen in earli-
er chapters, the Han in Modern Han Poetry denotes the Chinese language
rather than ethnicity. Tang’s choice of material for the appendices
would likely have reaffirmed the discontent Shen Haobo felt at what
Shen perceived as the occupation of the poetry scene by certain poets
and critics.
The successive appearance of Yang’s and Tang’s yearbooks in
Guangzhou and Beijing, the composition of their editorial committees
and Yang’s postscript (#13) all point toward what would soon be one
of the central issues in the Polemic: a dichotomy of North and South,
and of Beijing and the provinces. Yang Ke’s is arguably a counter-
anthology to Cheng Guangwei’s A Portrait of Years Gone By, and it is
spearheaded by a counter-essay by Kunming poet Yu Jian. Yu’s es-
say, entitled “The Light of Poetry, Cutting through the Chinese Lan-
guage” (#14), amounts to a declaration of war.
“The Light” was written in the fall of 1998. A year earlier, when
Cheng’s Portrait had just come out, important elements in “The Light”
had been foreshadowed in Yu’s “The Hard and the Soft of the Tongue
of Poetry: On Two Different Directions in the Language of Contem-
porary Poetry” (#5), published in Poetry Exploration; we encountered
both essays in chapter Eleven. “The Hard and the Soft” is less trucu-
lent than “The Light,” presumably because it went to press before
Cheng Guangwei’s book claimed the 1990s for the poetics of Cheng’s
preference.
In “The Hard and the Soft,” Yu Jian examines the development
of contemporary poetry through a contrastive comparison of the
Standard Language and regional languages. In Yu’s words, there is