desecrations? 365CHAPTER ELEVENDESECRATIONS?
HAN DONG’S AND YU JIAN’S EXPLICIT POETICSBefore anything else, I should remind the reader that the previous
chapter’s introductory remarks on the study of explicit poetics in this
book also hold for the present chapter. I have noted as one of my rea-
sons for writing on Xi Chuan’s, Han Dong’s and Yu Jian’s poetics—
from among the many poets who have substantial metatextual writings
to their name—that Xi Chuan is widely seen as representative of the
Elevated aesthetic, and Han and Yu count as Earthly authors; and
that, while these designations make sense, we should be wary of their
essentialization. With regard to the combined presentation of Han’s
and Yu’s metatexts in this chapter, there is an additional point. On the
whole, these two poets have constituted something of a joint presence
on the poetry scene ever since the early 1980s, even if in the late 1990s
their relationship soured and they entered into semi-public conflict.
They count as the two foremost Colloquial poets and contributors to
Them, one of the most enduring and widely read of the unofficial jour-
nals that help shape the face of contemporary poetry in China to this
day; one of their early metatexts is the joint publication of a dialogue
they conducted in Taiyuan in 1986, at the annual Poetry Monthly Youth
Poetry Conference; extensive interviews with both Han and Yu ap-
peared back-to-back in Them in 1994; they were, each in their own
way, important representatives of the Popular camp in the 1998-2000
Popular-Intellectual Polemic, which serves as the backdrop to some
especially fiery passages in their metatextual writings, and so on.
Desecrations? in the title of this chapter points to two things. First,
Han and Yu are well known as desecrators, or demystifiers at the very
least, of the self-aggrandizing tragic heroism of the early Obscure Po-
etry of the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and of similar features in
authors associated with the cult of poetry in later years. At the same
time, while Han’s and Yu’s Earthly desecration of the Elevated dis-
course surrounding poets like Yang Lian and Haizi is successful, if
only rhetorically, they themselves can be seen to construct an Earthly