thanatography and the poetic voice 117poetry and poethood, first remarks on contemporary poets’ inclination
for “experiment” (ᅲ偠):
Taken to extremes, they even deny that the material of which poetry is
composed must be that of language. The use of paper and pen, too, is
strictly unnecessary or optional. At this point, poetry can be body art,
or action art. In order to distinguish poetry from daily life, action art-
ists continually seek action that is out of the ordinary, and free from the
mundane. They get drunk, fight, womanize, drift around and cultivate
eccentricities, so as to prove that they are poets. In the end they discover
that not only have they failed to escape from the mundane, but their situ-
ation is in fact getting worse and worse. Now the only thing they haven’t
tried is death.Yeh rephrases Han’s words as follows: “In other words, self-willed
death seems to offer a new way, even the ultimate way, of asserting
one’s identity as a poet.” Notably, however, Han Dong continues by
dissociating Haizi from the “experimenters”:
It goes without saying that Haizi’s death means a lot for the establish-
ment of their self[-image]. But none of this has anything to do with Haizi
himself.In any case, Yeh doesn’t take speculation on the cause of Haizi’s sui-
cide further than the suggestion that it cannot be separated from his
poetry, specifically that the self-imposed pressure of an overly ambi-
tious poetics may have been too much to bear.^38
Han Dong accepts the possible validity of a biographical reading of
Haizi’s poetry, but takes a “death for poetry” to mean something radi-
cally different from its usual interpretation:^39
Haizi’s death only counts as evidence of the misery and internal conflict
in which the poet found himself. We cannot proceed from his death
to establish the origins of his poetry; we can only try to discover in his
poetry the secret of why he went to meet his death. If we say that Haizi
died for poetry, that must mean that his creativity faced an impasse.
Death then becomes a way out, not elevation in any sense... I insist on
believing that Haizi was someone who, when he could no longer write
poetry, would rather die—although it is highly likely that such was not
the concrete cause of this death.(^38) Han 1991: 335, Yeh 1995: 55, 45.
(^39) Han 1991: 335-336.