avant-garde poetry from china 47poethood—whether as representing (traditional) cultural essence, or
(modern) national salvation, or (contemporary) individual identity—
by cherishing it as an abstraction that permits different manifestations
and interpretations to succeed one another and coexist.
Whose Margins?In metatextual matters, avant-garde poetry in China remains part of
a society whose values and styles are changing fast. While any attempt
at marketization would be doomed—in the sense of generating real
money, not just fame and free drinks—the genre has had some success
in the celebrity discourse noted above and in new media.
These things work differently for different generations and person-
alities, as evidenced by the poets whose work we have sampled above.
Yu Jian can be seen to adapt, actively working toward a hip presenta-
tion in his general pursuit of publicity, through sheer noise and noto-
riety if need be. Yin Lichuan and Yan Jun, whose age more naturally
puts them in touch with rapidly expanding youth culture, help constitute
socio-cultural change, and their careers are tied to the Internet. Xi
Chuan is typical of reticence at the Elevated end of the spectrum in
matters like the visual presentation of publications and events.
For Yu, Yin and other poets—and to a lesser degree for Yan—there
is a discrepancy between text and metatext: high art and few readers
on the one hand, and celebrity discourse and the commodification
of poethood on the other. Even if we count not just those who read
poetry on paper and include the many visitors of poetry websites, the
fact remains that beyond the field of restricted production, texts by the
avant-garde are incompatible with overall socio-cultural trends whose
dominance is defined by numbers. While this holds for poets from all
quarters, it is exemplified by the self-proclaimed Popular poets. Yu
Jian’s claim that classical poetry was part of the everyday life of ordi-
nary people in the Tang and Song dynasties and that the right kind
of contemporary poetry operates “among the [ordinary] people” is
unconvincing. When Yin Lichuan says that for all its professed anti-
elitism, Lower Body poetry hardly reaches beyond an elite audience,
that is easier to believe. That Lower Body poetry’s relative accessibil-
ity allows it to count more of Bourdieu’s “non-producers” among its