220 chapter five
tion of his art.^29 His poetry’s resistance to interpretation, then, stems
from the primacy of the poem’s actual texture, that is: the materiality,
including the musicality, of its language. Summed up in a reversal of
the conventional expression that the words of a poem serve to capture
images, what happens here may well be described as images attempt-
ing to capture words.
*
The concept of indeterminacy as I have used it, especially in section 2,
denotes a general mood that subverts clarity, certainty and straightfor-
ward direction in most if not all of the text’s dimensions. This largely
overlaps with the scope Marjorie Perloff assigns to it in The Poetics of
Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Notably, Perloff points out that indeter-
minacy is not the same thing as vagueness, or the multiplicity of mean-
ings one may read into a single poem, or an assumption that any poem
can be made to mean anything—and hence, one might add, to mean
nothing at all. Perloff’s employment of the concept hinges on the fact
that while the surface of a particular type of (post)modern poetry—
John Ashbery’s, for example—“endlessly generates the impulse that
makes the reader yearn for completion and understanding” and in-
vites one to probe its depths, doing so will not lead to the ability to
determine any stable deep meaning. Using Roger Cardinal’s imagina-
tive terminology, she shows how the language of such poetry always
seems to be on the point of revealing its secrets but at the same time
re-veils them, in simultaneous disclosure and concealment. According
to Cardinal, “to read such a text is like being given a key only to find
that the locks have been changed.” In a chapter on Gertrude Stein,
Perloff observes that indeterminacy comes about through “repetition
and variation, sameness and difference, a rhetorical pattern of great
intricacy,” and that this pattern is “set up so as to create semantic
gaps.” This analysis very much applies to the aestheticized quality of
Xi Chuan’s writing. Xi Chuan’s particular performance of what Per-
loff summarizes as tension between reference and the compositional
game, or between a pointing system and a self-ordering system, is a
(^29) Xi Chuan 1997c: 5; cf Xi Chuan 2001: 224, entry 19.