414 chapter twelve
Xu’s rhetorical talent is on display when he sums up the relationship
between these undisciplined poets and other, presumably “normal”
people. In a nutshell: in the 1970s people were afraid of poets, in the
1980s they were curious about them and in the 1990s they were an-
noyed by them. That Xu Jiang subsumes murder under annoying be-
havior is persuasive enough, in an oblique reference to Gu Cheng’s
killing of Xie Ye before taking his own life. That suicide should also
count as annoying, rather than give cause for concern, is less self-
evident. Judging by Xu’s other publications, out of several suicides in
avant-garde poetry since the late 1980s we should probably be thinking
of Haizi here. Members of the Popular camp recognized Haizi’s tal-
ent, but they still associated his life and work with the self-aggrandize-
ment and the estrangement from everyday Chinese life for which they
took the Intellectuals to task. Finally, Xu Jiang chides Poetry Monthly’s
editors for including their own names in a list of influential authors, as
an illustration of Chinese poets’ flagrant indulgence in self-promotion.
Then he promptly names one of his own collections, this one in joint
authorship with Hou Ma, among the ten best books of poetry of the
past twenty years.
Xu Jiang’s contributions to the Polemic are notable not so much for
their substance as for their linguistic register. His choice of words and
his overall tone of voice are rude and clownish at the same time. “Play-
ing Chinese Poetry” (⥽ᓘЁ䆫℠, #11), preceding “The Noxious
Poetry Scene” by a month and containing sideways allusions to the
early stages of the Polemic, is a case in point. Here, Xu describes con-
temporary poetry as a sport, laying out the rules and various types of
players to comical effect. The rude and the clownish merge when he
admonishes aspiring critics to (p21)
put forward incessant, long articles on the work of women poets that
nobody has ever heard of.The 1999 issue of Poetry Reference includes Xu Jiang’s “This Is My
Standpoint” (䖭ህᰃ៥ⱘゟഎ, #72). This article makes clear how far
Xu is willing to go in his diatribes against the Intellectuals. He accuses
Wang Jiaxin of plagiarizing Pasternak, and lambastes him for (p87)
his sudden realization that for exile poetry, you don’t need to go
abroad.Xu Jiang obviously feels no need to reflect upon niceties such as the
scope of the notion of exile literature beyond its most “common-