fringe poetry, but not prose 235As regards their sound, then, «Salute» and «File 0» are no less dif-
ferent than in the way they look. By itself, neither criterion warrants
confident classification of either text as poetry or prose.
Subject Matter, Style and InterpretationWhether they are poems or prose poems or something else, both «Sa-
lute» and «File 0» are big texts, and neither author appears to have
tried to limit their subject matter. «Salute» contains scenes and images
from the natural and the human world, which are regularly presented
as being in opposition or at least at cross-purposes; it has room for
loose ends, for scattered, fragmentary ideas and situations which are
not brought to conclusion, albeit less so in «The Monster» than in
other parts of the series; and while it appears to posit a romantic im-
age of transcendent, immortal poetry in opposition to the vulgar do-
main of everyday reality, this clichéd dichotomy is undermined by the
real, physical death of the mortal poet. These things are presented in
a highly literary style, occasionally interrupted by other linguistic and
discursive registers, with shifts in language accompanying shifts in sub-
ject matter. Arguably, then, «Salute» is a text that positively demands
interpretation—not just because it calls the protagonist of «The Mon-
ster» “this metaphor of a monster,” but also because the reader may
take recourse to interpretation in order to reconcile the text’s imagina-
tive aspects with instances of verisimilitude. That the actual process of
interpretation turns out to be a complicated, potentially inconclusive
affair doesn’t change this.
In «File 0», the most extreme instance of its author’s unwillingness
to limit his subject matter is found in the second half of «Forms», en-
titled «Inventory of Objects» (⠽ક⏙ऩ). Yu Jian has said that this
sequence goes back to a text called «A Poet’s Inventory of Objects» (ϔ
Ͼ䆫Ҏⱘ⠽ક⏙ऩ), which he wrote in the 1980s.^13 The «Inventory»
in «File 0» lists the contents of the protagonist’s room in considerable
detail. I will but quote five of the 48 lines:
(^13) Yu Jian & Tao 1999: 77-78.