28 chapter one
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58/ Thereupon I turn into my posterity and let the rain test if I am waterproof.
Thereupon I turn into rain, and splash upon the bald head of an intellectual.
Thereupon I turn into the intellectual, detesting the world and its ways, and I
pick up a stone from the ground and hurl it at the oppressor. Thereupon I turn
into stone and oppressor at the same time: when I am hit by me, that sets both
of my brains roaring.
Yu Jian’s poetry could hardly be more different from Xi Chuan’s. Thus
begins Yu’s 71-line «Outside the Poet’s Scope: Observation of the Life
of a Raindrop» (䆫Ҏⱘ㣗ೈҹᇍϔϾ䲼⚍ϔ⫳ⱘ㾖ᆳ, 1998):
right it’s going to rain
the poet on a bar stool in the coffee shop
shoots a glance at the sky quietly mumbles
and his tongue withdraws into the dark
but back in those dark clouds its life its
drop-by-drop tiny story is only just beginning
how to say this this sort of small thing happens every moment
i’m concerned with bigger things says the poet to his female reader
obedient to that invisible straight line coming down
maintaining consistency with surroundings equally perpendicular to the earth
just like the poet’s daughter always maintains consistency with kindergarten
and then in skies twisted by pedagogy
becoming twisted it cannot but become twistedIn his patiently insistent tone of voice, characterized by the absence of
punctuation characters and the use of blank spaces instead, Yu Jian
makes room for the conventionally trivial and the quotidian. The par-
allel stories of poet and raindrop come together when at the end of its
short but eventful life, the raindrop leaves a wet mark on the poet’s
trouser leg. The text exemplifies the phenomenon of objectification in
Yu’s poetry, meaning the presentation of everyday human realities as
dislodged from habitual perception and interpretation, and imagina-
tive attention to (inanimate) objects.
Yu Jian’s dismantling of clichéd, heroic visions echoes domestic de-
bate on notions of poethood, and goes together well with Xi Chuan’s
caricaturing portrayal of the intellectual and the oppressor. One fea-
ture of poetry in China today as compared with earlier times is that it