avant-garde poetry from china 21At around the same time, roughly in 1999-2000, the poetry scene ac-
quired a new dimension as it began to explore the possibilities of the
Internet. What happens on the web lies outside the scope of this study,
but some brief observations are in order here, drawing on scholarship
by Michael Day, Heather Inwood and Michel Hockx. First of all, the
web is a natural habitat for the unofficial scene and the avant-garde
in that it provides endless possibilities for publication in the broad-
est sense, as defined above. The amount of text uploaded in the past
decade or so is frankly astonishing. The open-the-floodgates feeling
of it all confronts the online reader with what Day calls an anarchic
state of poetry. This includes digital versions of recent and older print
publications as well as texts whose first publication happens online.
There are currently about a hundred dedicated websites for avant-
garde poetry alone, and, after a recent upsurge, several hundreds of
blogs maintained by individual authors, with women poets as notably
successful bloggers. The other side to the coin is that, just like else-
where in the world, web text quality is uneven and cannot keep up
with its quantity.
Second, as regards medium-specific features of poetry on the web,
Chinese poets near-exclusively employ the Internet to facilitate publi-
cation of linear text that could technically appear in print just as well,
as opposed to poetry that enables multimedial and interactive reading
and writing. But there are other medium-specific features to online po-
etry than the strictly technological. Poets avidly use the web to commu-
nicate directly with other poets, critics and general readers. As Inwood
notes, if not so much on text, the medium does have striking effects
on metatext—and on the relationship between text and metatext, il-
lustrating what I have called positively fuzzy boundaries—and on
the overall sociology of the poetry scene. This appears to remain true
when the Chinese scene is considered in international comparison. In
China the web has sped up intracommunal and intercommunal traf-
fic to a breathless pace, with remarkably frequent and fiery polemical
components.
Aside from China’s rich tradition in discourse on poetry, an expla-
nation of this metatextual hyperactivity should take into account the
web’s annihilation of vast domestic distances and its cautious appro-
Rubbish Poetry. For Yi Sha’s proposal, made in a poem of the same name, see Yi
1994: 3-4.