avant-garde poetry from china 45One reading of the snapshot-type pictures takes its cue from Zhao’s
karaoke metaphor inasmuch as it portrays poets as addressing an au-
dience of friends and colleagues, even if their performance is photo-
graphically and historically insignificant. Another reading, that fits
squarely with strategic image-building vis-à-vis an audience beyond
the incrowd, draws on the continuing currency of poethood as a thing
of extraordinary importance, especially in Earthly circles: if the picture
is of a poet, that should automatically make it interesting, even if all
the poet does is eat a bowl of noodles. Notably, while the professional
quality of author portraits on book covers has improved across the
board, proponents of Elevated poetics appear much less frequently in
this process of visualization.
(Self-)images of contemporary poethood, then, have seen multiple
reinventions. In early Obscure Poetry there is the humanist spokesman
for the emancipation of art, akin to political activists of the 1978-1979
Democracy Movement and to some extent still operating on the terms
Figure 1.8. If the picture is of a poet, that should automatically make it interesting,
even if all the poet does is eat a bowl of noodles: Han Dong (Yang Li 2004: 295).