avant-garde poetry from china 61the most influential high literary form of our day at one end,^73 and the
clichéd, hostile image of medical dissection for the scholarly discus-
sion of poetry, at the other. The dissection metaphor is an extreme
case of the rejection of paraphraseability: a poem is a poem precisely
because it is unalterably made of the exact words of which it is made,
and as the other verbalizations that they are, words about the poem are
useless at best and a fatal violation of the poem’s integrity at worst.
But there are other possible answers. Tonnus Oosterhoff presents an
image as powerful as that of dissection, but infinitely more engaging
and productive:^74
Does secondary, interpretive literature have to be hard science? Isn’t the
genre more comparable to singing the second voice? Around the main
melody, that of the work of art, a second melody plays its way, lending
perspective and depth. The writing reader must be precise, but what
s/he is after is meaningful polyphony, rather than the impersonal, con-
text-immanent meticulousness of science.To the second voice.
(^73) Cited in Yu (Pauline) et al 2000: 6.
(^74) Oosterhoff 2006.