what was all the fuss about? 435fectively puts his finger on the flaws in Yu Jian’s allegations. He argues
that a linkage of poetry and the zeitgeist is by no means the exclusive
prerogative of the Popular. As regards the opposition of things foreign
and Chinese, language resources and other, he diagnoses Popular xe-
nophobia as an expression of insecurity. With frequent reference to
Shao Jian’s “So What Is It You Want from Poetry?” (Դࠄᑩ㽕∖䆫
ᑆҔМ?, #9), an article commissioned for Yang Ke’s first yearbook
that turned out to be highly critical of Popular discourse, Xi Du rejects
Yu Jian’s usage of popular. He notes that as recently as the 1980s, Popu-
lar authors who now affiliate themselves with Tang and Song poetry
still claimed to reject Chinese cultural tradition in its entirety.
After the frenzied polemicizing in the summer of 1999, Cheng
Guangwei responded to his various critics in the October 1999 issue
of Grand Master. His “New Poetry Runs through History’s Veins: In
Response to A Polemic” (ᮄ䆫ग़㛝㒰ПЁ: ᇍϔഎ䆎ѝⱘಲㄨ,
#66) is balanced and level-headed. If the article fails to enervate the
charge of Cheng’s partiality, it does put Popular discourse in a useful
historical perspective. Cheng says that important parts of the debate
can be subsumed under recurrent issues in the history of China’s New
Poetry. He associates the present Popular activism with certain aspects
of “leftist” zealotry from the 1920s through to the 1970s. In a nutshell
(p191):
Problems that occurred earlier in history but have never been solved very
well have now been refined, on the suitable occasion that was constituted
by the 1990s. [The Popular camp] uses a separation of the poet and
the people to derive an opposition of a so-called “Popular standpoint”
and “Intellectual Writing”; it makes the development of New Poetry and
foreign influence, a well-known issue in the history of New Poetry from
the start, sound like the shifting of allegiances to “Western language re-
sources”; it attempts to move poetical problems into the realm of politics
and nationalism. In truth, all this leads to the pitfall of cultural funda-
mentalism, of turning criticism into personal vendettas and something
quite out of proportion.Cheng also dwells on matters such as the complexity of literary influ-
ence, the interaction of modernity and ethnicity in twentieth-century
poetry and the perpetual debate on the “difficulty” or “incomprehen-
sibility” of certain types of poetry. He sees Popular discourse as an
instance of the cultural radicalism that has manifested itself at various
times and places in modern China.