Poetic innovation beyond the menglong movement began with
China’s Third Generation poets—a term devised to gather
under one label a broad array of mostly younger writers who, starting
in the mid-1980s, began turning against the style of their Second
Generation —that is, menglong—predecessors. The Third
Generation took poetry in many directions, but as a general rule
rejected the menglongpoets’ historical, political, and aesthetic vision
as stylistically artificial and ideologically suspect. Yu Jian and Sun
Wenbo, whose early work is often listed under the Third Generation
rubric, may be viewed as belonging to a subset of writers within that
grouping whose poetry is characterized by an “antilyrical style” (Li
and Hung 1992: 97) employing a prosaic, everyday language focused
on quotidian life (Yeh 1992; Tao 1995/1996). Within this general
typology, however, Yu and Sun’s poetic styles differ unmistakably and,
as must be kept in mind, continue to evolve. Especially since around
1990, Yu Jian has tended to direct his poetic gaze out and away from
the poet’s individual subjectivity to capture the transient configura-
tion, tenor, and immediacy of seemingly ordinary objects and situa-
tions. A beer-bottle top, oil barrels stacked beside a railway, an animal
fleetingly illuminated by headlights on a remote highway, snatches of
conversation overheard in a hotel—any element of the local, unique,
or transient are raw material for poetry that aims to reenchant the
everyday by, as Yu himself asserts, “rooting itself in the soil of
contemporary life, not upon the illusions of the past” (2004: 3). After
emerging as a poet in the late 1980s, Sun Wenbo, too, has consciously
moved beyond the menglongstyle. Sun’s is a manner of writing that—
as he puts it in a self-reflective poem—has gradually left behind
“contrived posing” and “bizarre” phrasing in favor of “learning how /
to find the words I need in the things around me” (2001: 65). Viewed
more broadly, Sun’s poetic output has been characterized by a discursive,
often narrativistic voicing that frequently expands into extended line
lengths and multiple stanzas (Van Crevel 2005). In these loosely struc-
tured, sometimes rather long poems, Sun often uses an inward-looking,
confessional tone to develop monologic, ruminative explorations of self
through descriptions of quotidian situations.
Although the stylistic differences between Yu and Sun still hold in a
comparison of “Two or Three Things from the Past” and “1960s
Bicycle,” the two poets come together in accomplishing an important
task: both use the generic resources of poetry to create configurations
of time and memory grounded in first-person experience of the
Cultural Revolution. Moreover, these configurations stand apart from
the narrated forms of temporality and remembrance constructed by
168 John A. Crespi