402 chapter twelve
I was shocked by the feeling of grief in [Wang’s] poems, and I felt that
it was not just him, but that all this encompassed shocking changes deep
inside the souls of our entire generation. I had a premonition that the
Eighties were over. Or, perhaps, that what used to be knowledge / intel-
lect, truth, experience, no longer constituted “models” to regulate, to
guide, to control what poets write, and at the very least these things no
longer provided any norms for writing.My rendition of ⶹ䆚 ‘knowledge’ as knowledge / intellect is motivated by
its various uses by various parties in the debate, and by its connection
with the Chinese ⶹ䆚ߚᄤ ‘intellectual.’
According to Cheng Guangwei, knowledge / intellect is a good
thing, even if it found itself floundering throughout the 1990s. As not-
ed in chapter Five, following the 1987 edition of the Poetry Monthly
Youth Poetry Conference at Shanhaiguan, several up-and-coming po-
ets had advocated an “intellectual spirit” for poetry and arranged for
their ideas to materialize in the unofficial journal Tendency the follow-
ing year. With reference to this self-assigned label, Cheng Guangwei
calls his favorite poets Intellectuals. Judging from the space he devotes
to them in his introduction to Portrait, in addition to Tendency found-
ers Chen Dongdong, Xi Chuan and Ouyang Jianghe—from the
mid-1980s, Ouyang had played a particularly prominent part in the
theorization of “serious” or “intellectual” poetry^4 —they include Wang
Jiaxin, Zhang Shuguang, Xiao Kaiyu, Sun Wenbo, Bai Hua, Zhai
Yongming and Zang Di. Cheng holds that (p17)
Nineties writing requires the writer first of all to be an intellectual with
independent views and taking an independent position, and only then
to be a poet.Die-hard supporters of Maoist literary policy aside, it would be dif-
ficult to find anyone in post-Cultural-Revolution China who disagrees
with the need for the writer to hold independent views and take an
independent position, but the primacy of intellect over poethood is of
course open to debate.
In principle, many voices on the poetry scene might have concurred
with Cheng’s moralizing (p15-16):
I respect the efforts of those few poets of the Eighties who were seri-
ous about their writing... What we call poetry of the Nineties... is(^4) Day 2005a: ch 8.