36 chapter one
above, covers settings from a handful of people in a private room to the
entire clientele inside a bar with public karaoke facilities, whose joint
spectatorship is to some extent coincidental. But whereas successful
karaoke operations make money, avant-garde poetry is unmarketable
in terms of economic capital, making it the foremost example of what
Bourdieu calls the reversion of the economic world.^47 As such, inside
China, poetry is different from fiction and film and to a lesser extent
from most drama, art and popular music. Paradoxically, as Crespi
argues, it is precisely because its unmarketability can be construed as
the quality of being untainted by the market’s immorality that both
avant-garde and official poetry have recently been able to enter into
intriguing advertising partnerships with real estate development, with
poetry’s symbolic value balancing the image of the business as utterly
corrupted by money and power. One surmises that the unmarketabil-
ity is structural and the partnerships are incidental, even if they are
well-paid.^48 At any rate, while Zhao’s contention is inspirational in
that it offers avenues into complex metatextual issues, poetry is not
karaoke. We will recall the metaphor once more in a discussion of the
visual presentation of poets and their publications, below.
With regard to internationalization, poetry’s economic unmarket-
ability stands out when compared to the successes of Chinese film and
visual arts, whether in public places such as movie theaters, galleries
and museums or in private ones like the homes of wealthy individu-
als. Yet, through translations, international festivals and writerships in
residence, Chinese poetry has made itself heard and seen inside a long
list of foreign poetry scenes—which, in their turn, tend to be equally
unmarketable in economic terms. Crudely speaking, what foreign au-
diences know of Chinese literature is mostly classical poetry and mod-
ern fiction.
In sum, the general public is ignorant of avant-garde poetry, and
some of its (specialist) readers are angry, disappointed or at a loss.
These things reflect only part of what others think—here, I won’t dwell
on poetry’s many optimistic readers—but they are acutely relevant to
what poets think.
(^47) Bourdieu 1993: ch 1. Cf Kong 2005: 189-190 (note 10).
(^48) Crespi 2007b.