416 chapter twelve
to Xie, the public has forsaken poetry because a number of poets have
turned it into knowledge / intellect and abstruse learning. He adver-
tises Yang Ke’s yearbook as an attempt to countervail this trend. Fol-
lowing Yu Jian, as he does in most of his contributions to the Polemic,
he sees two prominent types of poetry. Popular Writing is represented
by poets such as Yu Jian, Han Dong and Lü De’an, and expresses the
realities of current Chinese life. Intellectual Writing is represented by
poets such as Xi Chuan, Wang Jiaxin and Ouyang Jianghe, who have
an ardent desire to “connect” with the West—one recalls Yu Jian’s
displeasure at this phenomenon. Again, like Yu Jian before him, Xie
misquotes Cheng Guangwei’s vision of the poet as an Intellectual. Xie
fails, however, to name the author of the mutilated statement, and in-
stead ascribes it to Xi Chuan, Wang and Ouyang, thus saddling them
with Cheng’s sins. He adds that if poetry is to regain vitality it must
be freed from the hegemony of Intellectual discourse. Xie is one of
several voices in the Polemic that blend poststructuralist terminology
with incrowd allusions to texts, people and events on the local poetry
scene that only the initiated reader will pick up. Another feature he
shares with contributors from both camps is that his article ends with a
thunderous finale. The closing words of “The True Inner Face” have
a nationalist ring to them:
Does poetry protect a self-respecting life or does it protect knowledge /
intellect and technique? Is the goal of poetry in the Chinese language to
regain the dignity of the Chinese language or is its goal to connect with
the West? I believe that in their heart of hearts every sensitive person will
swiftly make their choice.Xie Youshun disapproves of undue reliance on the West, visible in
things like the density of foreign names in Zhang Shuguang’s poetry:
not only in Cheng Guangwei’s anthology, but also in journal publica-
tions, as Xie notes in his “Poetry Is Hurting” (䆫℠⮐⮯, #68), in
the October 1999 issue of Grand Master (p72):
[The Intellectuals] cannot hear the voice of Popular poetry, not because
it isn’t there but because they haven’t drawn back their ears from the
bodies of the Western masters.Xie’s plea for indigenous dignity is at odds with his own habitual cita-
tion of Western authors and critics rather than Chinese. In the limited
space of his contributions to the Polemic, he refers to Proust, Kafka,
Borges, Faulkner, Havel, Sontag, Foucault, Adorno, Akhmatova and