avant-garde poetry from china 39by Song with poets Yang Ke and Qi Guo. Likewise, a good dozen
poets are included in Xiao Quan’s This Our Generation (៥Ӏ䖭ϔҷ), a
portrait collection of writers and artists published in various editions
since the 1990s.^52 Especially for younger authors, to whom it would
come naturally, this visualization of the poetry scene is explained in
part by overall cultural trends of other media encroaching upon the
hegemony of the written word, embodied in the changing physical
presentation of books among other things. It is, however, also a stra-
tegic exercise in poet image-building, in order to sustain readership or
indeed spectatorship.
Photographs and other illustrations come in three types. The first
is hip, stylized, sometimes theatrical and provocative portraits, indi-
vidual or collective, typical of Poetry Text and kindred publications: a
loud, visual extension of poetry as performance, vaguely showcasing
rock-n-roll lifestyles. The second is a mix of pictures taken at pub-
lic events such as poetry readings and conferences on the one hand,
and banal snapshots on the other, mostly recent but sometimes in-
cluding family-album-type childhood pictures, facsimiles of the poet’s
handwriting and so on, as in Yi Sha’s and Momo’s recent books. The
third type, frequently encountered in the upsurge of poetry memoirs,
is that of (group) portraits to mark public occasions that belong to liter-
ary history as opposed to the here and now. It will be hard to distin-
guish from the second once both may reasonably be called old.
The transition between what is experienced as past and present is
gradual, and Yi Sha has been around since the early 1990s. Still, a
picture of Yi Sha is not the same thing as one of Bei Dao and Mang
Ke just out of the underground and about to trigger a sea change
in overground literature, pointing to a moment that is definitely in
the past, has left its mark and can claim stable historical significance.
Something similar holds for the facsimile of a letter by Luo Yihe to
Wan Xia in April 1989, describing Haizi’s suicide shortly after the
event—as opposed to that of a manuscript of a 1990 poem by Yi Sha,
advertising the authenticity of his handwriting, that may have been
copied out anew in 2003 for all we know. On that note, many pictures
in Mang Ke’s memoirs aren’t old at all but have been reproduced in
sepia colors and less than perfect focus, conjuring up the image of a
past that is barely retrievable and therefore all the more special.
(^52) Zhong 1998, Liao 1999, Mang Ke 2003, Yang Li 2004, Song Zuifa 2008,
Xiao Quan 2006. For the poetry exhibition, see Van Crevel 2007.