avant-garde poetry from china 35More fundamentally, while the rock star status that the best-known
poets enjoyed from the late 1970s well into the 1980s was real, it was
also an anomaly, captured by the aforesaid metaphor of high culture
craze or fever. It resulted from a happy meeting of the public’s hunger
for cultural liberalization and poets’ activism, before other distractions
had begun to compete. There is a popular saying that in the 1980s a
stone thrown over one’s shoulder was sure to hit a poet, but this reflects
the conspicuous presence of a relatively small number of avant-garde
authors, not so much the emergence of truly great numbers of people
writing in a truly great variety of individual styles. The latter image
is in fact a defensible description of the 1990s and beyond. If falling
stones have stopped hitting only poets, that is because the streets have
become crowded with other potential victims, following rapid intensi-
fication and variegation of people’s socio-cultural activity and mobility
at large.
From the rise of Obscure Poetry through the campaign to Eliminate
Spiritual Pollution, poets’ activism was in part a reaction to extreme
repression and monomaniacal prescriptions for literature and art in
the preceding years, the memory of which made the experiment extra
thrilling. The second half of the 1980s was a time of unprecedented
freedoms, with an exuberant life of the mind unfolding in borrowed
time, before mayhem and money made themselves felt. By contrast, in
China as elsewhere, production for producers—as qualified above—is
the normal situation for innovative poetries that claim no social or eco-
nomic significance and are not primarily instruments of propaganda
for government policy. Bob Perelman sums up the matter in an essay
that is also a poem:^46
“The Marginalization of Poetry”—it almost
goes without saying. Jack Spicer wrote,
“No one listens to poetry,” but
the question then becomes, who is
Jack Spicer? Poets for whom he
matters would know...Zhao’s metaphor is defensible in that poetry will normally not draw
large crowds, and neither will karaoke. The term incrowd audience,
(^46) Perelman 1996: 3.