46 chapter one
of the Maoist discourse he seeks to question. From the mid-1980s on,
when overt political messages have all but disappeared, opposing con-
structions of the poet emerge: elitist high priest of a cult of poetry,
and “ordinary” demystifier-cum-desecrator advertising the realities of
everyday life as the building blocks of art. While the Elevated and
Earthly aesthetics develop and diverge, the 1990s bring the disinte-
gration of groups and Isms, and a shift toward individual efforts inca-
pable of claiming social significance and not necessarily aspiring to do
so anyway. The turn of the century shows efforts at image-building,
partly in reaction to the poet’s removal from center stage in society at
large, and partly reflecting overall cultural trends: visualization, but
also things like the increasing popularity of personal columns in life-
style magazines.
My generalization of masculine nouns and pronouns for the poet
reflects the near-exclusive male dominance of the metatextual arena.
This is all the more remarkable in light of women poets’ important
textual contributions to the avant-garde, made from what Julia Lovell
calls a marginal position within a marginal genre^53 —even if marginal-
ity is a complicated notion, an issue to which we will shortly turn. In
metatext, in spite of attempts by male activists to enlist their female
colleagues for the cause, female poets appear less inclined to leave
their mark on the debate, or less driven by compulsive ambition and
aspirations to priesthood or desecratorship. Zhai Yongming’s refusal
to take sides in the Popular-Intellectual Polemic is but one example.^54
The said reinventions and image-building facilitate a modest, po-
litically disinterested celebrity discourse and commodification of po-
ethood in the contemporary avant-garde, a category that has now
traveled the full breadth from the proud and righteous to the hip and
shameless. Any understanding of its versatility, not to say its frantic
leaps and bounds amid diverse and conflicting stimuli, must take into
account modern Chinese poets’ identity crisis and their problems
of legitimation, beginning early in the twentieth century and evolv-
ing up to the present day, triggered and perpetuated by unceasing
social, political and cultural upheaval and exacerbated by the recent
impact of capitalist market ideology. Poets sustain the importance of
(^53) Lovell 2006: ch 1.
(^54) Cf Yeh 1996a: 75 and Day 2007a.