explore the elasticity of minjianas a signifier so as to establish a range
of its signifieds approximating a new poetics separated from the
aesthetical orientations of the “intellectual poetics.” Like almost all
participants of the debate, Yu Jian is not immune to distasteful senti-
ments of factionalism and occasional emotional discharges, which
harm his case more than they help. But Yu Jian has a great deal of
capital to spend: he is one of the most influential post-Misty poets
whose diligent cultivation of a distinguishable colloquial and readable
poetry has won him much critical acclaim and popular fame. Such
credibility plus a productive contribution to the debate has rendered
him a consensual leading voice for the school of minjianpoetry.
It is widely acknowledged that Yu Jian is the one who first brought
the word “minjian” into the circulation of poetic criticism. That
happened in 1998 when he wrote a preface for the controversial
anthology 1998 Yearbook of New Chinese Poetry(Yu 1999: 1–17),
which was a show of force for poems that demonstrated minjian
aesthetics as defined by Yu Jian and the book’s editor Yang Ke. Yu Jian’s
utterances on the topic since then have been numerous, including
frequent speeches and newspaper columns, but he reserved his best
commentary for after the Pan Feng Conference in an essay entitled “The
MinjianTradition in Contemporary Poetry”ij
的,-Ml(Yu
2004a). The essay represents Yu Jian’s summary thoughts on the
conception of minjianand serves perhaps as a final rejoinder to the
shouting match that occurred at and after the conference. In the essay,
Yu Jian first attributes the beginning of contemporary Chinese poetry to
the underground literature 地E文 and unofficial publications
,-m物of the 1970s. Even though minjianas a literary space was
most potently described by its distance from official literature and state
power in this particular era, minjianalways served as the only true
source for poetry writing whether that distance was real or imagined.
That is to say, minjianshould not be understood as a mere gesture of
opposition; rather, it is an attitude and a position from which the best
part of the Chinese poetic tradition from antiquity to the present has
employed for its own benefit. Thus Yu Jian has no qualms about recruit-
ingThe Books of Songs, Li Bo, Du Fu, or any other of his favorites into
the minjiancamp. Clearly unaware of the logical problems for support-
ing his theory of minjianas a poetic position, Yu Jian then makes the
following generalization:
Minjianis such that it always only pretends to kowtow to any
mainstream cultures. Outside the leftist faction and the rightist faction
of the ruling ideology, minjianinsists upon common senseo) andPoetic Debate in Contemporary China 191