what was all the fuss about? 415sensical” interpretation. The poet’s whereabouts aside, Xu also has
clear ideas about the preferred geographical location of their subject
matter, reproaching Wang for writing about Auschwitz rather than
the Nanjing massacre or the Cultural Revolution.
As we have seen in chapter Nine, on the “rivers and lakes” of the
poetry scene Xu Jiang is a close companion of Xi’an-based poet Yi
Sha, who has generated more controversy than anyone else since his
famed collection Starve the Poets, and whose contributions to the Po-
lemic we will address below.^9 Yi Sha’s and Xu Jiang’s willful notoriety
for abusing fellow literati and artists is captured in a March 2000 inter-
view with Shen Haobo, using the name Shen Lang, with the tongue-
in-cheek title “Carry Abuse Through to the End” (ᇚ偖Ҏ䖯㸠ࠄᑩ,
#91). This headline is a typical parody of orthodox political jargon. It
makes Yi’s, Xu’s, Shen’s and others’ penchant for seriously using such
language elsewhere all the more remarkable.
Xie Youshun’s Cheerless Aggression: “The True Face of Poetry”Nevertheless, while Xu Jiang’s and Yi Sha’s diction is regularly remi-
niscent of orthodox discourse, it is also interspersed with other types of
language: humorous, populist, vulgar and so on, and it leaves plenty
of room for creative originality. This doesn’t hold for the critic Xie
Youshun. Xie specializes in fiction, but contributed several articles to
the Polemic. “What Does Poetry Relate to?” (䆫℠ϢҔМⳌ݇, #15),
published in the March 1999 issue of Poetry Exploration, boils down to the
assertion that poetry should be about “real life.” Xie proceeds from a
narrow-minded biographism, and his view of literature is almost anti-
creative when he presupposes a simple, one-on-one relationship be-
tween reality and art. His style, a prime example of the aforesaid echo
of Maoist literary discourse, is cheerless and aggressive throughout.
One piece that elicited a fiery response from Intellectual quarters
is Xie’s “The Inner True Face of Poetry” (ݙⱘ䆫℠ⳳⳌ, #20),
a rave review of Yang Ke’s 1998 Yearbook carried by Southern Weekend
(फᮍ਼). Xie wonders if writing poetry is not a comical thing to do
in an age of materialism, and observes that jokes about poets abound
among ordinary people. He finds this especially lamentable in light of
the proud poetic traditions of the Tang and Song dynasties. According
(^9) Yi 1994.