avant-garde poetry from china 53concerns can be subsumed under topics similar to those explored by
Xi Chuan. The work of all three poets brings out the relative nature
of the Elevated and Earthly as textual and metatextual labels, without
detracting from their usefulness as discursive coordinates. This is fur-
ther illustrated by the Popular-Intellectual Polemic (Twelve). Around
the turn of the century, poetry treads new ground through Yan Jun’s
multimedial performances (Thirteen). While their textual component
exceeds the realm of the written, as writing they belong inside the po-
etic discourse of the avant-garde. Yet, in other ways, as part of larger
cultural trends summed up as technologization and remediation, Yan
Jun’s work is sufficiently different from most avant-garde poetry to
prompt reflection on the nature and the scope of this discourse to date
and in future.
At this point a few disclaimers are in order. First of all, poetry from
Taiwan and Hong Kong, two sinophone communities with extremely
rich literatures, lies outside the scope of this study. When I say China
or Chinese, unless otherwise indicated, I refer to the People’s Republic
as defined by its borders prior to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong,
and within the PRC my research does not extend to poetries written
in other languages than Chinese. This reflects two things: the limita-
tions of my work and the observation that the historical circumstances
which hold for Chinese-language poetry in the People’s Republic add
to the coherence of the avant-garde as an Easthopian discourse. In
recognition of the work of scholars such David Der-wei Wang and
Michelle Yeh, the latter point isn’t intended to reify geopolitical divid-
ing lines as having literary significance per se. Second, of the ten poets
whose work I examine closely, only one is a woman. I have guessti-
mated elsewhere that the proportion of male-authored poems in the
avant-garde lies around ninety percent, but I seek no justification in
these numbers. My original outline for this project included a chapter
on Women’s Poetry and I had published a preliminary essay on Zhai
Yongming; but subsequently I had the privilege of acting as advisor
to Jeanne Hong Zhang, whose work on Women’s Poetry made any-
thing I could have done in this respect pale in comparison. Third, I
had planned a chapter on the 1980s Sichuan scene with its singular
activism and aesthetics, but then I had the privilege of acting as advi-
sor to Michael Day, whose work on the Sichuan avant-garde.... etc.
Of course, that others have written on a given topic is anything but a
reason not to do so oneself. In these two cases, however, I found my
energies redirected into talking back to Jeanne and Michael, and hap-