avant-garde poetry from china 25poets’ and critics’ frequent use of dichotomies such as these, in indi-
vidual case studies as well as sweeping descriptions of the entire field:
heroic v quotidian
literary v colloquial
cultural v anti-, pre- or non-cultural
lyrical v anti-lyrical
mythical v anti-mythical
sacred v mundane
utopian v realist
absolute v relative
elitist v ordinary
academic v authentic
Westernized v indigenous
central v local
Northern v Southern
mind v body
intellectual v popular
These dichotomies apply to subject matter and style, and they often
run parallel to one another. Together, the items on the left and those
on the right represent the said two aesthetics, which I have identified
as the Elevated and the Earthly. There is a connection here with pre-
vious research on poetry and other genres by scholars including Leo
Ou-fan Lee, Michelle Yeh, Wang Ban and Tang Xiaobing.^33
In principle, notions like the Elevated and the Earthly can be
applied to literature and art from any time or place, and there is
nothing inherently Chinese or poetic about them. Nor is the current
trend unique to China, with an eye to a deconstruction of “serious”
literature and art in various genres and media that has been going
on for decades in global and local settings. Poetry in contemporary
China, however, brings the Elevated and the Earthly to mind with
particular force. This doesn’t make these notions into tools for reify-
ing an image of the poetry scene as something that can be captured
(^33) E.g. Li Zhen 1995: 91. Lee (Leo Ou-fan) 1973, Yeh 1991c, 1992b and 1996a,
Wang Ban 1997, Tang Xiaobing 2000. My use of Elevated rather than sublime is in
order to steer clear of philosophical and aesthetic connotations of the latter term in
European Enlightenment and Romantic traditions.