avant-garde poetry from china 33The crisis discourse shows how growing contestation of the nature
of poetry requires that legitimizing and morally evaluative powers of
scholarship and criticism, once self-evident, be rethought. It is no lon-
ger obvious with what kind of authority critics such as the Poetry Month-
ly editorial board, Cai Yi, Wu Xinhua, Zhang Hong, Chen Chao, Wu
Sijing and many others announce that there is a crisis and there are
“problems” or “issues” (䯂乬) in contemporary poetry, often speaking
in an unspecified first-person plural, like that used by Xie Mian in
the above citation. Moralizing and nationalist overtones of the crisis
discourse are out of sync with the texts on which it professes to com-
ment. The same is true for the mobilization of prescriptive notions
such as poetry’s “alignment” (䍄), meaning the speaker’s preferred
direction of poetry’s development, often coupled with multiple oughts
and shoulds, and of “optimism” and “pessimism” as critical positions,
implying dated judgmental perspectives that block out much of what
is going on.
But there is a larger issue here, that is common to modern poet-
ries in various cultural traditions, not just in China. If poetry is no
longer a stable concept but fiercely contested, this need not automati-
cally constitute a crisis. Or the other way around: perhaps embodying
crisis is something modern poetry inherently does. As scholars such as
Derek Attridge and Jonathan Culler point out, modern poetries tend
to challenge assumptions of order and cohesion in the world and in
ourselves, and to be disruptions of culture rather than the repositories
of time-honored, canonized values often found in classical texts. In
China, the massive weight of the classical tradition and its prominent
place in (national) cultural identity produce an especially acute dis-
crepancy with what Yeh sums up as modern poetry’s international,
hybrid, iconoclastic and experimental nature. If this discrepancy is
disturbing to many readers, this is because they set off contemporary
poetry and its position in society at large against expectations that con-
tinue to be shaped by the classical paradigm. A similar mismatch is in
evidence when contemporary poetry’s unmarketability is framed as
a cause for lament and ridicule by unwarranted comparison to flood
waves of commercialization in other spheres of life. We will return to
this below.^41
(^41) ⦄ҷ∝䆫䰙ⷨ䅼Ӯ (生ᓎᏜ㣗ᄺЁ᭛㋏ǃЁ力Ӯ里ᄺ䰶᭛ᄺⷨお᠔
ࡲВ), 26-30 July 1997;lj䆫ߞNJ㓪䕥䚼,LJЁ䆫℠⦄⢊䇗ᶹLj[Investigation into