50 chapter one
Who Cares?Answering the wrong questions would be turning a blind eye to a de-
monstrably thriving if somewhat self-contained cultural scene, and do
little more than reaffirm disparaging comments on the “relevance” of
(modern) poetry that are something of a genre in themselves, across
diverse cultural traditions—as are, conversely, apologies for poetry. If
there is a need for either, there is nothing Chinese about that.
Alternatively, while recognizing changes in the cultural landscape
that surrounds and obviously affects poetry in contemporary China,
we may wish to leave sufficient room for approaching it on its own
terms, gleaned from the niche where it finds itself. This is not a gratu-
itous assertion of the absolute autonomy of art, but an attempt to grasp
what this poetry means, and how it works, and for whom.
- The Case Studies, and What This Book Wants to Do
The twelve chapters after this one are in rough chronological order
of literary impact. I like to think of the ground they cover as a coher-
ent poetic discourse, in Anthony Easthope’s definition.^58 That is, what
happens above the level of the individual line, in individual poems and
then individual oeuvres, but also between these oeuvres and occasion-
ally across several or all of them. As noted, if I have found the catego-
ries of text, context and metatext useful to organize my thinking, I
haven’t drawn strict boundaries between them in the organization of
this book. By and large, however, chapters Two through Nine focus
on text—with large metatextual and contextual components in Three
and Four—and chapters Ten through Twelve on metatext. Context
runs through all. Chapter Thirteen functions as a coda, with a little bit
of everything.
Within the overarching, interwoven notions of the Easthopian dis-
course and text + context + metatext, the majority of the case stud-
ies are delineated by another organizing principle, that of the poetic
voice. By this I mean a distinct, individual presence in both form and
content, that is discernible throughout a poet’s oeuvre and enables one
to recognize previously unfamiliar texts by the author in question. Por-
(^58) Easthope 1983: ch 1.