conception, both sets of texts can be called “poetic memoir”: brief,
almost entirely autobiographical poems that use the generic resources
of poetry to configure personal remembrance of childhood, during the
1960s and 1970s in China.
Yu’s and Sun’s poems are by no means the first to engage actively
the Cultural Revolution period. In the immediate post–Cultural
Revolution years a loose confederation of young poets created a
literary sensation with work now known collectively as menglong朦
or “Obscure” poetry. Menglongpoems have been described as “poetry
of retrospection” deeply influenced by “the poets’ memory of a
particular historical period” (Li and Hung 1992: 94). More precisely,
observes Tao Naikan in the same vein, menglong poetry arose from
“the poets’ personal experience of disillusionment and suppression
during the Cultural Revolution” and “was shaped in part as a
pragmatic device to voice their personal responses to a dehumanizing
history” (Tao 1995/1996: 147). These responses typically—but not
exclusively—took the form of poems that departed from the dogmatic
collectivist-realist extremes of Mao-era art and literature by employing
dense symbolism, an individualized point of view, and intentional
ambiguity.
Although memory certainly inspired many menglong poems, it is
important to note that no small number of them were written during
the Cultural Revolution period itself (Van Crevel 1996: 42–59), and
thus reflect immediacy more than memory. Also, where memory did
come into play, it functioned more as impetus than object; that is, the
experience of terror, injustice, and suffering impelled the poets to
write and to do so in a manner “unified by its open, though often sym-
bolically expressed rebellion against the Cultural Revolution” (Li and
Hung 1992: 94). At some risk of generalization, one can thus describe
menglongpoems as primarily rejecting the past rather than attempting
to rework elements of memory.
Given menglong poetry’s status as the product of a groundbreaking
literary movement, its significance cannot be denied. Nonetheless, in
terms of time of production and inherent conceptual assumptions, and
despite the poets’ efforts to transcend the times, menglong poems were
to a large degree oftheir era, and thus not the place to seek a poetic
perspective on memory, much less a perspective informed by a signifi-
cant historical distance. Such poems, concludes Michelle Yeh, were
“transitional” in that they cleared a space for a more independent
discourse of poetry but, due to built-in limitations, failed to move fully
beyond the literary and political “other” they defined themselves
against (Yeh 2003).
Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo 167