406 chapter twelve
... I mostly want to talk about these people: Cheng Guangwei, so-called
“famous” poetry critic, whom I have always disliked; Hong Zicheng,
professor at Peking University, whom I once respected but whose be-
havior I now find most dubious; Ouyang Jianghe, high school gradu-
ate bragging all day long about being an “intellectual”; Wang Jiaxin,
forever jabbering foreign names like “Pasternak” and “Brodsky,” words
like “exile” and “grief”; Sun Wenbo, who has written a hundred bad
poems, all with the same face, but is still trying hard to establish himself
in Poetry of the Nineties; Chen Dongdong, whose pages are strewn with
exquisite expressions but who can’t string together a single good poem;
Xiao Kaiyu, who is in no way worth mentioning but now affects sudden
fame; and those lower down, like Zhang Shuguang, Zang Di and Xi Du
and their ilk.
Shen Haobo is a skilled polemicist. That is, for all the ostentatious sub-
jectivity of his allegations, they are put forward with enough panache
to leave a lasting impression. He sounds both threatening—toward the
end of the article, when he addresses Cheng Guangwei directly—and
sardonically funny, as in this attack on Wang Jiaxin (p21):
... Granted, Wang Jiaxin’s «Pasternak» is a good piece of work, but
that’s all. In most of his poems, the best lines are always those in quota-
tion marks (and what he quotes is other people’s poetry!). He is always in
London or in Russia, always pouring out his Brodsky, his Pasternak, his
Kafka—he simply doesn’t grow on Chinese soil! All day long, over and
over again, he says “exile” “exile” “exile,” but the problem is: who is it
has exiled you, Wang Jiaxin? You’re not Bei Dao, you’re not Duoduo,
you’re not Brodsky, and you will always be that overcautious Wang
Jiaxin, imitating the Russians with that big scarf ‘round your neck, Wang
Jiaxin!
Shen feels that Cheng Guangwei and poets, critics and editors of simi-
lar inclination have “occupied” important channels for publication
in the 1990s and intentionally “suppressed” worthy poets such as Yu
Jian, Yi Sha, A Jian, Mo Fei, Hou Ma, Xu Jiang, Han Dong and
Wang Xiaoni. His words contain some of the charges against the In-
tellectuals that were to recur throughout the Polemic: Westernization
and the lack of an indigenous spirit, affected, mystifying diction, and
manipulation of opportunities for publication and public relations of
the poetry scene.