not at face value 363trends of the early 1980s, especially on the Earthly side of the spec-
trum. On the whole, however, while neither Xi Chuan’s poetry nor
his explicit poetics are unequivocal in this respect, he shows greater
affinity with the Elevated aesthetic, according to which the poet self-
evidently enjoys some sort of extraordinary status, and his comments
on poethood warn against extreme self-aggrandizement rather than
reducing the poet to humble, average proportions. The matter is com-
plicated further by the fact that in practice, champions of the Earthly
who claim to assume no more than such proportions for the poet have
simultaneously produced metatexts that belie this position.
We shall shortly encounter the latter, in chapters Eleven and Twelve.
If Xi Chuan is less loud, prolific, activist and generally “heavy” in his
metatextual production than Han Dong and certainly than Yu Jian,
his original contribution lies in his exploration of the border areas be-
tween creative and critical writing.