avant-garde poetry from china 27there, for instance in Lower Body writings, it tends to be identified
explicitly.
Neither the trend from Elevated to Earthly nor the trend from
what to how is constant, absolute or irreversible, but this is what a
bird’s-eye view of the past several decades shows. We will presently
take a look at four texts from recent years, to get a sense of where
the avant-garde was at around the turn of the century and hopefully
whet the reader’s appetite for the case studies that follow this chap-
ter. The selection of these samples, all from the late 1990s and after,
is informed by the considerations noted above. Xi Chuan and Yu
Jian have been the two most influential poets writing in China since
the 1990s, and they are associated with the Elevated and the Earthly
trends, respectively; Yin Lichuan is a prominent voice in the Lower
Body group that emerged toward the end of the Popular-Intellectual
Polemic; and Yan Jun has made a name for himself by innovative,
audio-visually supported poetry performance. In addition to their
domestic impact, all four have undertaken many invited readings
abroad.
Below are two of the ninety-nine stanzas of a prose poem called
«What the Eagle Says» (呄ⱘ䆱䇁, 1998) that is typical of Xi Chuan’s
writing since the 1990s. One of his enigmatic texts that invite and
yet resist interpretation, this poem contains a wealth of subject matter
and yet remains elusive. Addressing issues such as identity and rela-
tions of self and other in a tone that is solemn and humorous at the
same time, it strikes something of an expository pose, but ultimately
turns out to flout the rules of expository logic and celebrate ambigu-
ity, paradox and contradiction instead. Playful and down to earth,
and generated by its own musicality and sentence-patterning as much
as anything else, it exemplifies what Marjorie Perloff calls the tension
between reference and the compositional game.^36
56/ Thereupon I shun my flesh and turn into a drop of perfume, actually
drowning an ant. Thereupon I turn into an ant drilling my way into an elephant’s
brain, upsetting it so that it stamps all four of its legs. Thereupon I turn into an
elephant, my entire body exuding a great stench. Thereupon I turn into a great
stench, and those who cover their noses when they smell me are men. Thereupon
I turn into a man, and a plaything of fate.(^36) Perloff 1999: 72. Bibliographical detail for the following poetry samples is pro-
vided in chapters Five, Seven, Nine and Thirteen.