Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Sinica Leidensia, 86)

avant-garde poetry from china 37

What Poets Think

As do many other Chinese poets, Xi Chuan and Yu Jian have exten-
sive explicit poetics to their name.^49 Xi Chuan’s poetics contains sol-
emn, sometimes grandiloquent claims. In 1986 he writes: “The poet
is both god and devil,” and in 1999: “When the strong poet touches
iron, it turns to gold.” By contrast, Yu Jian, writing in 1997, holds
that the poet is no more than a processor of language, a craftsman
anchored in everyday reality who uses language to “retreat from meta-
phor,” indeed as “a method to eliminate the imagination”—nothing
like a tragic genius who writes by moonlight or an alchemist, as in Xi
Chuan’s book.
Still, neither author’s poetics are unequivocal in this respect. In
1995 Xi Chuan writes: “There are indeed those who announce that
although they do not write poetry, they are poets.” In their turn, Yu
Jian’s exercises in demystification and indeed desecration are invali-
dated by pompous statements that bespeak the romanticism they claim
to oppose. In 1999, Yu calls poetry

a movement of language that cuts through forgetting and returns to the

home of being... an original truth of the world, the light emitted by

wisdom and the soul.

These remarks show the usefulness of the Elevated and the Earthly as
coordinates in not just text but also metatext. Poetics of the Elevated
are powerfully present in the cult of poetry, with its origins in the late
1970s and the 1980s, elevating the poet to superhuman if not divine
status and as such very much a cult of poet-hood. Its impact in the 1990s
and beyond is manifest in the continuing worship and mythification of
Haizi, whose apotheosis was occasioned by his suicide, and of Hei Da-
chun on account of his bohemian lifestyle. Recent years have shown
aggressive explicit-poetical efforts at the Earthly end of the spectrum,
with Yu Jian as the most prolific contributor, especially during the
Popular-Intellectual Polemic of 1998-2000.
One thing the Polemic showed was that for all their self-proclaimed
ordinariness, members of the Earthly camp still view poethood as a
superior quality of extraordinary importance and social relevance. As
for authors of Elevated persuasion, the special status of the poet has

(^49) Bibliographical detail for the following citations is provided in chapters Ten
and Eleven.