10 chapter one
first also called experimental (ᅲ偠) and explorative (㋶)—has out-
shone orthodoxy in the eyes of audiences in China and elsewhere,^11
and it has tremendously diversified. This has rendered orthodox po-
etics irrelevant as a point of reference. It enables the study of vari-
ous trends in contemporary poetry not as Others of orthodoxy but in
their own right, or with the simple qualification that orthodoxy is not
among them.^12 Carrying this argument further, one might contem-
plate a negative definition of orthodox poetry instead, as unreceptive
to the individual, original and idiosyncratic language usage, imagery
and worldviews that have been associated with literary modernity.
In a clichéd comparison, positive observations are attractive be-
cause defining blue as the color of the sky on a bright day tells us more
than defining blue as not the color of blood. If by now, four decades
into the avant-garde’s history, we can in fact make observations of
this nature, one might be that in present-day China, more so than in
other times and places, an opposition of two broadly defined aesthet-
ics that I call the Elevated and the Earthly is of particular relevance; a
detailed discussion of these notions follows below. This holds for po-
etry but also for images of poethood and explicit poetics, which avant-
garde poets generate in large amounts. Second, on the Elevated side of
things, avant-garde poetry stands out by its rich and idiosyncratic use
of metaphor. Third, the avant-garde has produced many poems that
stand out by their sheer size, albeit in very different styles.
Aesthetic ↔ Institutional, Unofficial ↔ OfficialAs practitioners and students of avant-garde movements the world over
have observed, relations between the aesthetic and the institutional are
complex if not problematic. China is no exception. On the face of it, in
the titles, blurbs and introductions of multiple-author poetry antholo-
gies and historical and critical survey works, the notion of the avant-
garde often appears to operate in the aesthetic dimension rather than
the institutional.^13 Since on closer inspection it works as catchall for
different and indeed divergent poetics, it must at the same time be fun-
damentally institutional. Similarly, unofficial is an ambiguous term in
(^11) Cf He Yuhuai 1992: ch 7, Zhang Xudong 1997: 123 and Lovell 2006: 162.
(^12) Cf Hu Xudong 2005.
(^13) E.g. Li Lizhong et al 1990 and Lü 2001.