avant-garde poetry from china 31poet’s exemplary morality and worldview as well as his (sic) personal
position within a stable conception of social order.
This helps explain why the general public’s overall perception of
the avant-garde is characterized by prejudice and disregard, if not
plain ignorance. To most Chinese, poetry means classical poetry. Few
people know that there is such a thing as modern poetry beyond the
products of 1920s-1930s New Culture Movement (ᮄ᭛࣪䖤ࡼ) and
Communist cultural policy since the 1940s, and perhaps the work of
Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng and Haizi in the 1970s and 1980s.
With the exception of Shu Ting, whose work bridges the gap between
orthodoxy and archetypal Obscure Poetry, the latter four poets are
remembered primarily for their extra-textual impact: Bei Dao’s “dis-
sidence” and legendary success abroad, and Haizi’s and Gu Cheng’s
dramatic suicides, the latter coupled with Gu’s murder of Xie Ye,
his wife. If people do know about contemporary poetry, even if they
haven’t read it, they usually assume that whatever is being written now
cannot possibly compare to the New Culture poets, much less to scores
of premodern greats. The poets’ own relation to premodern predeces-
sors is ambiguous. No contemporary poet will question the beauty of
classical poetry other than in theatrical settings—say, the manifesto
with which the Lower Body burst upon the scene. Simultaneously,
poets experience the classical tradition as near-insurmountable and a
potential source of frustration. This is reinforced by the public’s afore-
said prejudice, disregard and ignorance.
So why was there a full house when in June 2003, with minimal
preparation and publicity, a new Beijing mega-bookstore specialized
in anything but high literature organized a reading called “Open Your
Eyes: Chinese Poetry after SARS,” in which most if not all partici-
pants were avant-garde poets?^38 Cynically put, any standing that the
Poet retains beyond the poetry scene may be a misunder-standing based
on traditional expectations. Doubtless, part of the crowd were disap-
pointed to find that the reading included idiosyncratic texts that failed
to touch on topics of general concern like the SARS breakout and the
infrastructural face-lift of the capital.
Less cynical and more to the point, even if the avant-garde can-
not dream of the number of readers that classical poetry continues
to satisfy, it is in fact a small but tenacious industry in its own right, a
(^38) Haidian Book-Buying Center (⍋⎔䌁кЁᖗ), 6 June 2003.