subjects (in particular female anger and sexuality), and the ways in
which each employs familiar elements of traditional thought and cos-
mology and shapes them to her own ends, ultimately creating a world
that she can inhabit.
Zhai Yongming was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 1955 and began
publishing poetry in 1981. She spent time in the countryside as a sent-
down youth during the 1970s, a formative experience that is both a
powerful presence in her early work as well as a touchstone that,
decades later, has lost little of its immediacy for her. Although a con-
temporary of the Misty Poets 朦
, who came of age during the
Cultural Revolution, she is considered a member the Newborn
Generation (xinsheng dai
), the Misty Poets’ successors. Zhai
Yongming has been categorized as a “stream of consciousness” poet^3
(Yeh 1992: 394–395), and, like others in this group, she has drawn
inspiration from the American confessional poets, especially Sylvia
Plath, whose influence is palpable, particularly in the poem sequence
“Woman.”^4
Xia Yu was born in Taiwan in 1956 and began publishing poetry
there in the 1970s. Xia Yu’s educational background is in drama and
film, which may account for some of her eclecticism. In addition to
writing poetry, she writes essays, song lyrics, stage scripts, and even
radio advertisement copy. Xia Yu puts the number of her prose pieces
and plays as rather low and describes the bulk of her writing as being
private journals and reading notes, saying that these give her the most
pleasure, in large part because they afford her complete freedom (Xia
1991: 121). This desire not to be beholden to her readers characterizes
Xia Yu’s feelings about her poetry as well. When questioned as to
whether it concerns her that other people might not fully comprehend
her work, she has replied that as long as she herself is satisfied that a
passage or poem is successful, what other people think is unimportant:
“... I really don’t care whether or not other people understand [my
work], nor whether their way of understanding [the work] is different
[from my own]” (Xia 1991: 108). Like many experimental writers
before her, she invites readers to make out of her writing what they
can. Although I have written elsewhere on the experimental poems
that have come increasingly to define her work, my discussion of Xia
Yu here will focus mainly on poems from the early 1980s, a period
when her works most clearly reflected a concern with women’s
experience and articulated an unambiguously female point of view.
Although Xia Yu and Zhai Yongming were raised in societies that
were determined to be as different from one another as possible, their
early works have some similarities in tone and subject matter, and
106 Andrea Lingenfelter