38 chapter one
always been among the tenets of their poetics. Perhaps the need to re-
claim something of the dwindling visibility of the poet was extra press-
ing for the Earthly polemicists in light of their professed ability to stay
in touch with the realities of everyday life (in China) and “ordinary
people”—whose ignorance of their art would hence have been all the
more painful. At any rate, the primacy of bread and circuses in today’s
society has made it hard for poets of varying persuasion to maintain a
prideful self-image. Up to a point, the removal of their art from main-
stream social consumption can be turned into incrowd dignity, but
they cannot indefinitely do without an audience beyond the “inner
circle” (ᄤ). In modern times, in China and elsewhere, for a poet
to be publicly misunderstood and suppressed by Uncool Powers, be
they political dictators, the bourgeoisie or the stock market, can be an
honorable fate. Conversely, in the interaction of artists and whatever
type of audience has the power to suppress and to the extent that ar-
tistic achievement is measured in terms of rebellion and controversy, a
variation on Oscar Wilde suggests itself. There is only one thing worse
than being misunderstood and suppressed, and that is being ignored.
The textual trend from what to how, then, has a metatextual pen-
dant in one from what to who, meaning the promotion of poet-hood.
Since roughly 2000 this has found expression in the visual presenta-
tion of poets and their publications. Young authors such as those in
the Lower Body group and generally the Post-70 Generation and
beyond—meaning those born after 1970—were the first to include all
manner of photographs and spectacular formatting in unofficial jour-
nals like Poetry Text (䆫᭛ᴀ).^50 Older poets and editors soon caught on,
as visible in poetry collections by Yi Sha and Yu Jian, Momo’s book-
like revival issues of the Coquetry Poetry Journal (ᩦ䆫ߞ) and so on.^51
Then there is the popular genre of illustrated memoirs and informal
histories regaling stories of the avant-garde from its underground ori-
gins to the present day, by authors such as Zhong Ming, Liao Yiwu,
Mang Ke and Yang Li. In Song Zuifa’s The Face of Chinese Poetry (Ё
䆫℠ⱘ㜌), portrait photographs of a hundred and fifty poets and
twenty critics constitute the primary material, “illustrated” in turn by
poems and poetical statements; Song’s portraits received high-profile
exposure during a “poetry exhibition” in Guangzhou in 2006, curated
(^50) E.g. Poetry Text 4 (2001).
(^51) Yi 2003, Yu Jian 2003.