the sort that not only identifies multiple layers of textual structure, but
also discerns how such structure can generate specific visions of
historical remembrance.
Below I attempt to disclose significant forms of patternment in and
among poems from “Two or Three Things from the Past” and “1960s
Bicycle.” My approach is informed by the “poetic function,” a term
briefly defined as the manner in which repetitions among various levels
of discourse, from the phonological on through the grammatical and
syntactic, “enter into complex organization in symmetries, gradations,
antitheses, parallelisms, etc., forming together a veritable spatial struc-
ture” (Todorov 1981: 47). Despite its name, the poetic function does
not apply exclusively to poetry. Rather, it represents a method for iden-
tifying the layers of structure that, in a historically and generically
determined manner, differentiate artistic from nonartistic verbal
messages. Even so, the poetic function is, as the term’s inventor Roman
Jakobson maintains, “the indispensable feature in any piece of poetry”
(Jakobson 1987: 71) because “on every level of language the essence of
poetic artifice consists of recurrent returns” (145). Such artifice may be
more apparent in the prosodic conventions of fixed poetic forms but
can apply with similar force to free verse—the form of choice for Yu
and Sun—where it typically appears as “conspicuous repetition of
phrases or syntactical forms” commonly used in conjunction with
“mechanically typographical” devices (Fussell 1979: 79, 77).
In examining these works of poetic memoir, I will consider first
how Yu Jian’s poems configure time and memory through free-verse
application of the poetic function and then move on to how Sun
Wenbo’s poems represent memory through creative violation of this
same aesthetic principle. Yu’s poems can be read as free-verse texts
whose emphasis on internal patternment activates the poetic func-
tion’s effect of “promoting the palpability of signs” and enhancing
“the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (Jakobson 1987: 70).
What results is an autobiographical exploration of the Cultural
Revolution experience, but one whose significance lies in the ability of
poetic patterning to recreate personal historical memory of the
period as discrete, autonomous, yet internally complex and undecid-
able moments. Sun’s poems, on the other hand, forego intensity of
intratextual patterning—and so, it would seem, the poetic function—
in favor of a “real world” reference more typical of realist prose
fiction. Sun’s seemingly counter-poetic acts of reference, however,
construct a patterning of their own that, while running counter to the
principles of the poetic function, make for an imagination of memory
no less distinct than Yu’s.
170 John A. Crespi