30 chapter one
Organized Deception» (ডᇍϔߛ᳝㒘㒛ⱘℎ偫, 2000) also brings to
mind the work of Xi Chuan, by its prosaic form and its use of imagery.
Here’s one stanza:
against advertisements, against forgetfulness. against tearing up anyone’s ID and
ugly face. against coming through meteoric showers clad in a golden cape but
forgetting your daughter’s name. against carnivores dancing. against computers
dying. against living like a sickle. against night fragrance dying at night. against
faddish magazines and dotcoms. against day-dreaming, see-through garments,
the heart exploding like goose feathers.... drink killing a man from ten steps
away.... dumb shits ruling the world.... porn magazines for exam papers....
against fear.Yan Jun’s multi-media performance tallies well with contemporary
cultural trends. As such, it is slightly closer to popular culture than the
work of most if not all of his fellow poets. Xi Chuan’s, Yu Jian’s, Yin
Lichuan’s and most other avant-garde poetry is definitely high art.
This is reflected on the metatextual level.
- Metatext: Images of Poetry and Poethood
Metatext, or discourse on poetry, includes everything from one person’s
inability to name even a single author—“Are there still people who
write poetry today?”—and the identification in 2006 by the People’s
Daily online edition (Ҏ⇥㔥) of poet (䆫Ҏ) as one of “forty-nine old
words that have disappeared from people’s lips in the last ten years”
to someone else’s scholarly genealogy of the avant-garde ever since its
underground beginnings, and from theories of writing to ad hominem
polemics on poethood.^37
What Others ThinkThe textual trends from Elevated to Earthly and from what to how
decrease readership in light of a traditional Chinese poetics, which
continues to enjoy considerable influence: poetry as the epitome of se-
rious, high art and inherently incapable of aspiring to any other status,
literature to convey the Way, and the poem as offering insight into the
(^37) Renminwang 2006, Xiang 2002.