34 chapter one
Writing in 2003 on a Nanjing-based group of novelists, Henry Zhao dis-
misses poetry in China today as self-indulgent and inconse quential:^42
they were all formerly poets who made their name in the late 1980s...
In the 1990s they turned to fiction, knowing that writing poetry is now
very much a narcissistic ‘karaoke’ art.Although Bourdieu may not have had karaoke in mind, it certainly
comes under “production for producers,” exemplified by the avant-
garde.^43 As such, Zhao’s metaphor makes sense. Inasmuch as karaoke
means performing other people’s words and music, it does not. Pro-
duction for producers is a useful notion but also a hyperbole,^44 and
only valid if we take into account that proportionally, in poetry there
are many more readers = consumers who are also writers = produc-
ers than in other genres and media of literature and art, virtually all
of them amateurs, unknown outside a small number of more or less
private readers. But this qualification is not enough. Measured by indi-
vidual and multiple-author collections, unofficial and official journals
and websites, the avant-garde scene has quite simply displayed vitality
and resilience all along, albeit with notable changes from the 1980s to
the 1990s and beyond.
As for poetry’s high visibility in the 1980s—beyond a cultural elite,
or the incrowd audience for karaoke, so to speak—aside from hard-
core readers who came mostly from artistic and academic circles, it is
doubtful that others forayed beyond the best-known specimens of Ob-
scure Poetry: Bei Dao’s «Answer», Shu Ting’s «Motherland, My Be-
loved Motherland» (尢ଞ, ៥҆⠅ⱘ尢, 1979), Gu Cheng’s «A
Generation», Liang Xiaobin’s «China, I’ve Lost My Key» (Ё, ៥ⱘ
䩹࣭϶њ, 1980), Mang Ke’s «The Vineyard» (㨵㧘ು, 1978), Jiang
He’s «Monument» (㑾ᗉ, 1979), Yang Lian’s «We, from Our Own
Footsteps....» (៥ӀҢ㞾Ꮕⱘ㛮ॄϞ...., 1980) and a few other quickly
canonized texts, most inviting socio-historical, allegorical readings to
do with the Cultural Revolution.^45
the Current State of Chinese Poetry],lj䆫ߞNJ1998-9: 4-8; Cai 1999: 178-202, Xiao
Ying 1999: 231, Wu Xinhua 2004, Zhang Hong 2003: 149-151, Chen Chao 2005,
Wu Sijing 2005, Attridge 1981: 243, Culler 1997: ch 5, Yeh 2007b.
(^42) Zhao (Henry) 2003: 203.
(^43) Bourdieu 1993: 39 et passim in parts I-II.
(^44) E.g. Lovell 2006: 149.
(^45) Yan Yuejun et al 1985: 1, 42-43, 122, 148, 190-192, 247-248.