avant-garde poetry from china 15in high and popular culture and consumables of every kind, and has
had to reposition itself in a radically commercializing environment.
Poetry’s relation to foreign literatures, most of all an ineradicable gen-
eralization known as “the West” (㽓ᮍ), has moved from the uncritical
celebration of cultural imports in the early 1980s to the problemati-
zation of source and target cultures and to reassessment of Chinese
cultural identity in an age of globalization, in criticism as much as in
poetry itself.
It is against this backdrop that the development of avant-garde po-
etry takes place. This book doesn’t offer anything like a comprehensive
history of the avant-garde, if only because we are up against a difficult
side of studying something from our own time, namely its closeness
and its ongoing transformations. Still, it may be useful at this point to
recall some salient moments in what is by now forty years of avant-
garde history, if we start from its earliest inspirations in the Cultural
Revolution underground.^20
The avant-garde had two precursors in the late 1960s, Huang
Xiang and Guo Lusheng, who has also been known as Shizhi since
the mid-1970s. The work of neither can be called avant-garde in the
aesthetic sense, but they returned to poetry the ability—and, in a tra-
ditional Chinese poetics, the right—to defy political authority rather
than function as an artistically shaped extension of its ideology, and to
speak with the voice of something like an individual self. Huang’s work
centrally featured in the unofficial journal Enlightenment (ਃ㩭). The
inaugural issue appeared two months before that of Today, but Enlight-
enment was much more political and short-lived, and has had nothing
like Today’s literary impact. Especially Guo’s poetry, circulated among
rusticated Intellectual Youths throughout the country at the time, has
been cited as an inspiration by early avant-garde poets.^21
One example is that of Bei Dao, China’s best-known contemporary
poet, who has recalled how Guo’s poetry made him start writing in
(^20) These are some examples of the many books and journal articles that offer
historical and critical surveys of the avant-garde and its underground history: Xu
Jingya 1989, Wu Kaijin 1991, Yeh 1992b and 2007a, Wang Guangming 1993, Yang
Jian 1993, Van Crevel 1996: ch 2-3, Liao 1999, Chen Zhongyi 2000, Li Xinyu 2000,
Hong 2001: 142-205, Lü 2001, Chang & Lu 2002, Lovell 2002, Xiang 2002, Cheng
Guangwei 2003, Wang Jiaping 2004, Hong & Liu 2005, Tao 2006, Li Runxia
- 21
On Huang Xiang, see Emerson 2001 and 2004 and Li Runxia 2004; on Guo
Lusheng / Shizhi, Van Crevel 1996: ch 2 and Liao 1999: ch 2.