106 chapter three
Yi Sha has long taken a different view. Here is a passage from «Starve
the Poets» (1990):
the poets have eaten their fill
their bellies are filled with the fragrance
of wheatfields as far as the eye can see
grand idlers from the city
become glorious peasants in poetry
wheat in the name of sun and rain
I call on you: starve them
those fucking poetsWriting on the tenth anniversary of Haizi’s death and living up to his
notoriety as a polemicist, Yi Sha calls all Haizi’s writings other than his
short poems garbage. He says that the propagation by others of Haizi’s
poetics has thrown back the development of Chinese poetry by ten
years, taking an entire generation of fledgling poets born in the 1970s
into the poet’s grave, as sacrificial funerary objects.^20
Also writing in 1999, Qin Bazi asserts that no one dares speak the
truth about Haizi’s long poems. He calls exaggerated praise for Haizi
“cheap” and concurs with Yi Sha’s opinion that Haizi’s influence has
made Chinese poetry regress: no less than two hundred years, accord-
ing to Qin, who cites Haizi’s admiration of European Romanticism.
Like Yi Sha, Qin expresses dismay at how the poet’s death has meant
the birth of a myth and how this myth has been abused in the 1990s by
poets and critics whom he calls “countryside intellectuals”—as Haizi
once called himself—and “spiritual aristocrats” in their efforts to mo-
nopolize the Chinese poetry scene. Qin’s essay, entitled “Criticizing
Haizi: Shattering the Myth of the Epic,” is part of an edited volume
called Criticizing Ten Poets (क䆫Ҏᡍ߸к), with an outspoken, anti-
canonical agenda that also attacks other established reputations such
as Guo Moruo, Xu Zhimo, Ai Qing, Shu Ting, Yu Guangzhong, Bei
Dao and Wang Jiaxin. Around the same time, Xu Jiang takes aim at
Haizi by comparing him to Wang Guozhen, whom we briefly encoun-
tered in chapter One, in what is a horrible insult to an avant-garde
poet: Wang is so popular and well-behaved that his poetry can’t be
any good. An understanding of these attacks on Haizi’s legacy and
(^20) Yi 1994: 3-4, Yi et al 2000: 115-116.