true disbelief 65Larson, and Julia Lovell touch on Han’s poetry in comparisons of Ob-
scure Poetry and categories such as Post-Obscure, New Period (ᮄᯊ
ҷ) and Third Generation Poetry, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas and Huang
Fan give it pride of place in an essay on the Nanjing scene, and Simon
Patton offers a sensitive introduction to his translations of Han’s work
for the Poetry International Web.^2
All avant-garde poetry since the groundbreaking unofficial journal
Today continues to stand more or less in opposition to orthodoxy, in-
cluding Han’s, but to say so has become flogging a dead horse since
the avant-garde began to outshine the establishment in the mid-1980s.
What matters is that within the avant-garde, Han Dong’s poetry has
often been negatively defined by its rejection of Obscure Poetry. This
is because some of his early, best-known work writes back to famous
Obscure poets and poems, as do some of his poetical statements.
Section 1 of this chapter recognizes the significance of Han Dong’s
initial, anti-Obscure stand and of his work’s function as a commentary
on what was a major poetic trend at the time. This is, however, not
the whole story. Section 2 shows that negative definition captures only
a fraction of Han’s art as a primary text and that it does no justice to
his oeuvre in the full breadth of its development. Han’s rejection of
Obscure Poetry is but one manifestation of a multi-faceted, original
poetics that transcends its local literary-historical context.
- The Rejection of Obscure Poetry
Today was closed down by the police in 1980, less than two years after
the publication of its first issue in December 1978. Short-lived as the
journal was, it had a huge impact among young urban intellectuals, es-
pecially those studying at university. Many of them contributed to the
upsurge of Campus Poetry (᷵ು䆫℠), a collective name for poetry
by university students that circulated throughout China through unof-
(^2) Han 1992b and 2002. On the Epoch series, see Van Crevel 2003b. It was pre-
maturely terminated after a policy change at the Hebei Education Press. Yeh 1992,
Su & Larson 1995, Lovell 2002, Twitchell-Waas & Huang 1997, Patton 2006. Eng-
lish translations of Han’s poetry are found in Tang Chao & Robinson 1992, Zhao
(Henry) & Cayley 1996, Twitchell-Waas & Huang 1997, Zhao (Henry) et al 2000,
Renditions 57 (2002), the DACHS poetry chapter (→ China’s Second World of Poetry →
related material → translations), The Drunken Boat 6-I/II (2006, online), Full Tilt 1
(2006, online), Patton 2006, Tao & Prince 2006 and Zhang Er & Chen 2007.