consciousness does not, however, demonstrate alarmist or didactic
inclinations, but rather the seamless reformulations of how the
thriving of the man-made world and the continuance if not flourishing
of the natural world might be less of the zero-sum game that it has
become.
In his chapter, John Crespi explores the role of memory in contem-
porary Chinese poetry, focusing on two series of poems, Yu Jian’s
“Two or Three Things from the Past” and Sun Wenbo’s “1960s
Bicycle.” He asks what characterizes this lyrical turn in the literary
memory of the Cultural Revolution. How does the construction of
past events and emotions in these poems extend, supplement, or sub-
vert existing narrative accounts? What does the presence of these
poems portend for the evolving historical memory of the Cultural
Revolution years? What he finds is that memories of the trauma of the
Cultural Revolution, for example, are encoded in poetry not as past
experiences but as fragments in the present, thus offering an alterna-
tive to the conventional memoirs of this period that tend to dominate
the attention of foreign audiences.
Dian Li’s chapter outlines a now infamous debate that occurred
around 1999–2002 between “intellectual” poets, who tend to gravi-
tate toward major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai and are associ-
ated with major academic centers, on the one hand, and “popular” or
minjian間poets, as Li prefers to call them, who are more at home
in the provinces and have less access to the typical avenues of symbolic
capital in China, on the other. His chapter focuses on several of the
main players in this heated debate, including Xi Chuan, Wang Jiaxin,
Cheng Guangwei, and Zang Di, representing the “intellectuals,” and
Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Yang Ke, and Xu Jiang in the “minjian” camp. In the
conclusion to his chapter, Li interestingly dwells on the actual issue of
naming itself, citing another renowned contemporary Chinese poet,
Wang Xiaoni, who argues that poetry is always “antinaming.” In so
doing, Li throws open the question of whether such debates as the one
he surveys in his article are fruitful ways of attempting to characterize
the contemporary poetry scene in China.
Michael Day does a great service for those of us still not accus-
tomed to getting our poetic fix over the cyber waves. Day derives this
survey of current trends in online poetry from his freshly minted dis-
sertation on the topic. An interesting question one could ask is: Does
the medium of inscription affect the form and content of the poetry
itself? It would seem so to some extent at least, as Day shows through
a broad discussion of a number of Web sites how the grittiness of
contemporary reality and less-than-sublime, if you will, subject matter
6 Christopher Lupke