336 chapter nine
fleeting ideas and impressions written up with line breaks: provocative,
perhaps even shocking or absurd, worth reading but not rereading.
This would make their texts little more than zeitgeist commentaries
that could just as well have availed themselves of genres other than
poetry, such as political pamphlets, newspaper editorials and social
science reports.
Or could they? For the Lower Body’s best poems it is precisely the
fact that their authors did not write pamphlets, editorials and reports
that leads one to reflection on the genre of poetry and reaffirms that
the Lower Body is more than a succès de scandale, in spite of censorial
reflexes such as Ma Ce’s. These have always befallen lawless literature,
and they always will.
Why poetry? Contrary to Shen Haobo’s manifesto, the Lower Body
has all sorts of things to do with knowledge, culture and tradition, and
even with poetic sentiment, albeit in a new time and a new style; and
maybe with lyricism and philosophy as well, for even a minimalist po-
etics makes poetry the precipitation of such things, conscious or un-
Figure 9.4. “Cool sister” Yin Lichuan (Poetry Text 4 [2001]: 10)