clear rupture from the spirit of Misty Poetry even though intellectual
poets as a whole often demonstrate, more than any other poets, a true
deference to Misty Poetry. Although the idea of intellectual writing
was present in various poets around the mid-1980s, the founding of
the poetry journal TendencyG向in 1988 crystallized the concept.
The journal held out the banner of intellectual positioning and the
spirit of idealism and gathered a large number of poets and critics
including Wang Jiaxin, Xi Chuan, Chen Dongdong 陈JJ(b. 1961),
and Cheng Guangwei. In 1993, Ouyang Jianghe published an essay
entitled “Poetry Writing in China after 1989: Native Temperaments,
Characteristics of Middle Age, and Intellectuals’ Identifications” to
offer a most complete and definitive narrative for intellectual writing.
The following words by Ouyang Jianghe are considered by many the
manifesto of intellectual writing:
[Intellectual writing] does not offer either a concrete view of life or
an endorsement of values; it is a quality manifested between rhetoric
and reality... On the one hand, it considers writing as a process that
points to the return of particular and relative knowledge from ultimate
things and the grand truth. On the other hand, it maintains a warm
feeling towards all sorts of truth. In this time of transition, a basic
mission for poets of our generation is to end the dual myths of mass
writing and political writing, for they are a legacy of our youthful past.
In my view, the intellectual poet has two implications: one is that his
writing is career-oriented and professional; the second is that he must
identify himself with the marginal. (Ouyang 1993: 178)In terms of its measured engagement with reality and truth, Ouyang
Jianghe’s view of literature is in lock-step with postmodernism. Yet it
radiates an apparent self-recognition of poetry as a clean, elevated,
and referential writing of significance and purpose where he manages
to evade a mechanical reflection theory of literature and reality and its
utopian pursuit of truth. It speaks both of an immediate past, which
needs to be rethought, and of a present that is yet to embrace poetry as
an acceptable profession. (No doubt Ouyang Jianghe here is looking
at the American model of the institutionalization of creative writing, a
tell-tale sign of a Chinese critic’s negative take on globalization.) Its
postmodernist impulse aside, Ouyang Jianghe’s proposal does open up
new critical possibilities for the operation of intellectual writing, for he
locates it in the aesthetic spaces outside the system, the personal, and
the marginal—three slippery and yet consensual terms that in fact
bridge, rather than enlarge, the gap between intellectual writing and
minjianwriting.
Poetic Debate in Contemporary China 187