24 chapter one
let’s make our way in
let’s sit in it
let’s enjoy it together
and then ponder it
and finally dissolve in
this scrap-metal
modern sculptureThe first text is excerpted from the book-length poem «Manifesto of
Youth» (䴦ᅷ㿔, 2002) by Gui Xinghua, composed at the request of
the Chinese Communist Youth League Shanghai branch. «Manifes-
to» is straightforward Political Lyricism, commissioned by the political
establishment. It is a socio-moral policy document in verse, set against
background photographs signifying dynamic modernization (com-
puters, mobile phones, spaghetti junctions), nationally symbolic sites
( Tiananmen Square, the Jinggangshan Museum) and China’s status
as a major player on the international stage (the 2001 APEC summit,
the 2008 Olympics). The second text is a short poem by Yi Sha, typi-
cal of a style that doesn’t invariably rise above the provocative and the
witty. «Red Flag Limo in Wind and Rain» (亢䲼Ёⱘ㑶᮫䔺, 2000)
is roughly six hundred times shorter than Gui’s poem and as different
as can be from Political Lyricism in all other respects, too. Although
included in an officially registered publication, it qualifies as unofficial
by virtue of its aesthetics, which display irreverence with some con-
descending nostalgia for a socialist past symbolized by the decrepit
Red Flag limo: this is an unabashed send-up of orthodox discourse.
Between these two poems lies the full distance from vintage orthodoxy
to roguish avant-garde. Somewhere toward the orthodox end lies an
oeuvre, less aggressively political than Gui’s, that is perhaps the closest
that contemporary poetry has come to popular culture: the mawk-
ish lessons-in-life of Wang Guozhen, whose fame reached remarkable
heights in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.^32 After this broader po-
sitioning, once we focus on the avant-garde side of things, two textual
trends are apparent amid a jumble of styles since the late 1970s. They
are a trend from Elevated to Earthly and one from what to how.
Avant-garde poetry can be viewed as a spectrum between the outer
limits of two divergent, broadly defined aesthetics. This is manifest in
(^32) Gui 2002: 19, Yi 2003: 155; on Wang Guozhen, see Wang Guozhen 1991 and
Yuan 1992.