fringe poetry, but not prose 239If a poetry-reading attitude is sensitive to things like ambiguity, contra-
diction, paradox and (unresolved) tension, both «Salute» and «File 0»
qualify as poetry again—and once more, unsurprisingly, in different
ways. As we have seen in chapter Five, «Salute» has plenty of room
for these things, subsumed under the overarching notion of indetermi-
nacy on every level of the text. In «File 0», on the other hand, the real
tension is between the text and its subtext, generated by its defamiliar-
ization of language and reality. For a time- and place-bound historical
interpretation, the reader will benefit from extra-textual knowledge
of life in contemporary China, something that is much less true for
«Salute».
What about the act of reading itself? What does a poetry reader do?
Obviously, there is no single, accurate answer to this question, and if
texts as different as, say, Li Ji’s «Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang» and
Bei Dao’s «Borrowing Direction» can both count as poetry, general-
izing is unwise. Yet, inasmuch as modern poetry in various cultural
traditions and social settings—media, education—has generally elic-
ited slower, more thorough and more interpretive reading strategies,
it is legitimate to ask whether «Salute» and «File 0» lend themselves to
any degree of close reading, bearing in mind the specific description of
this notion put forward in chapter One.
Is this the type of reading that «Salute» and «File 0» require? For
«Salute», I would say that it is, for reasons outlined in the above dis-
cussion of subject matter, style and interpretation. But this creates a
problem, for it is difficult to close-read a text of over 3200 words with
the intensity, constancy and purposefulness of the immediate encoun-
ter with the full text that is enabled by short poems—even if the effort
can be worthwhile, as I hope to have shown in chapter Five. «File 0»
doesn’t demand a microscopic reading, one striking aspect of the text
being that large parts consist of mechanical enumeration. In fact, a
hurried, diagonal reading of «File 0» might well be reasonably gratify-
ing, something that is unthinkable for «Salute». In this sense, «File 0»
is less poetic than «Salute», and that is just as well in view of the fact
that «File 0» is an even longer text. From this reader’s point of view,
the very size of the two texts makes them not prose, but poetry with a
problem.