thanatography and the poetic voice 135paradoxically, both in the fields and in the granaries, and the speaker
claims to see the eyes of Yama, the Chinese-Buddhist King of Hell,
inside it. Throughout the poem, the speaker undergoes an ever stron-
ger, yet ambiguous identification with the rural and the natural world,
beautifully captured in the penultimate stanza through more patient
variations on dark night. The original of the first two lines of the final
stanza shows Haizi’s ability to fit powerful plain words (ⱑ䆱) to po-
etic, song-like form. Like «Ancestral Land», «In Dedication» is made
of big words on big themes. Here, however, they derive powerful effect
from the poem’s musicality and from the thoughtful, repeated negotia-
tion of central imagery. Rather than announcing this or that type of
“greatness,” «In Dedication» evokes an intensely personal vision that
is at once vulnerable and detached, and hence capable of generating
profound emotion. Just like in «Spring», a question without a question
mark suggests that the speaker doesn’t expect any answers: there’s noth-
ing at all in the dark night / why does that comfort me.
*
Inasmuch as Haizi’s writing can be characterized as a poetry of exalta-
tion located at the Elevated end of the spectrum, his work is akin to
Obscure Poetry, and specifically to its ethno-cultural streak in Jiang
He and the early Yang Lian. Also, Haizi took part in a late 1980s
discursive move by Xi Chuan, Chen Dongdong and others, embodied
by the journal Tendency, which aimed to counterbalance colloquial-
izing and vulgarizing trends that had challenged the Obscure poets’
primacy within the avant-garde.^64 Yet, Haizi’s work is fundamentally
different from Obscure Poetry in that it moves away from socio-polit-
ical ideology and toward the establishment of a truly individual lyri-
cal subject—that is, when it doesn’t indulge in clichéd megalomania.
Also, it contains much less “difficult” imagery, quite aside from the
question to what extent such imagery ever functioned as camouflage
for a political message in Obscure Poetry.
Haizi’s significance in Chinese poetry is easy to deduce from his
publication and publicity record, meaning both what he wrote himself
and how well it has sold, and what others have written about him.
(^64) Van Crevel 2007.