48 chapter one
readers than Xi Chuan or a typical poet’s poet like Che Qianzi doesn’t
change this.^55
Questions of the type Whither Poetry? occur frequently in main-
land-Chinese critical discourse, and trigger discussions in which the
value of poetry’s development to date and the desirability of this or
that one among its possible futures are linked to the said socio-cultural
trends. This happens through lament—or jubilation—over poetry’s
in-compatibility with these trends, but also through the confident as-
sertion of its ability to avoid falling behind the times. But what’s the
point of appraising the suitability of various poetics to their physical
surroundings, and deploring or celebrating the fact that there are more
people who watch TV than poetry readers, or that poetry’s contribu-
tion to the Gross National Product is hard to quantify? Instead, we may
wish to observe that starting in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s
and beyond, a large number of authors have written a wide variety
of avant-garde poetry that continues to appear through channels that
range from reputable publishing houses to privately run websites and
sustains a dedicated, well-positioned audience. Equations of the 1980s
with the rise of contemporary poetry and of the 1990s and beyond
with its decline say something about context, not text or metatext, and
are not substantiated by evidence.
Let’s return to the two red flags for a moment. The publication of
Gui Xinghua’s poetry is the product of government policy; that of Yi
Sha’s, the product of a publisher’s decision. The latter is informed by
considerations of prestige at a time when automatic government sub-
sidies have long been a thing of the past and any expectation to make
money from poetry is as unrealistic as ever under normal circum-
stances, as opposed to the anomaly of the 1980s or people’s fascina-
tion for self-killing poets. Many rank-and-file avant-garde publications
wouldn’t appear without external sponsors, but publishers will in fact
make an effort to publish the work of prominent poets as so-called
“original editions” (ᴀ⠜к), meaning books for which the author gets
paid. At any rate, to make numbers—money, print runs, readership—
the measure of all things, in this case of the “relevance” of a poetry
whose objectives do not include traditional and orthodox ideals of
broad recognition and dissemination as an instrument of social moral-
(^55) Yu Jian 1999b: 12; Yin & That’s Beijing 2004 and Q & A session, Gent: De
Centrale, May 2004.