54 chapter one
pily so. Fourth, as noted, this study doesn’t extend to poetry on the In-
ternet, for the simple reason that I have found it hard to keep up with
poetry in print to begin with. Fifth, while the emergence of modern
Chinese poetry has involved close encounters with foreign literatures,
I haven’t attempted anything in the way of influence studies beyond
noting the occasional intertextuality.^62
Chineseness, the West and SinologistsWhat is Chinese about the poetry studied in this book? To borrow Rey
Chow’s pertinent question, isn’t it just poetry, rather than Chinese
poetry?^63 First and foremost, this poetry is written in Chinese, as part
of the larger linguistic environment (䇁๗) of cultural China (᭛࣪Ё
) and specifically contemporary mainland China—which, in exile
poetry, doesn’t stop at the nation’s borders. This raises a question that
is as thrilling as it is difficult. Could this poetry have been written in
another language? I won’t go into this here, but I’m disinclined to as-
sume that the answer is a simple yes. Second, this poetry operates as a
coherent discourse within local socio-historical and literary-historical
contexts. Here, one can think of Communist Party policy or the par-
ticularities of the unofficial poetry scene, but also of the lingering influ-
ence of traditional Chinese views of literature. Many poets will declare
that poetry should be autonomous from mainstream social develop-
ment, but metatextual traffic shows that they have not internalized
this view.
Speaking of Chineseness along these lines is another way of saying
that my data is regionally and linguistically defined, and that certain
aspects of this definition are particular to this data and don’t necessarily
hold for poetries in other regions and languages. I hope my study will
show that calling this poetry Chinese doesn’t mean its readers must be
Chinese in whatever sense, or make it the object of a misguided quest
for essentialized, exoticized types of authenticity. Moreover, the reso-
nance of Chinese contexts doesn’t make the poetry discussed in these
pages exclusively Chinese. On that note, let’s switch perspectives and
recall that since day one, modern poetry in China has regularly been
(^62) Yeh 1991a and 1992a, Wang (David Der-wei) 2000; Van Crevel 2007 and
2003a; Zhang (Jeanne Hong) 2004, Day 2005a.
(^63) Chow 2000: 11.