true to this mission, poetry must locate itself on the coordinates of the
traditional (read: an essential Chineseness emptied of its modern
corruptions) and the native (read: a separated Chinese identity freed
from Western influences) and must find writing material in common
sense, experience, and daily living, which, more than anything else,
constitute the real foundation of literature. In this connection, it is
quite easy to understand that the word “life” e{has become a
banner word for the minjianpoet. Slogans such as “to be close to life”
|}e{and “restore the essence of life”~e{ point to an
experience-centric and naturalistic poetics that advocates a sort of
photorealistic representation of the quotidian and the mundane and
rejects any reference to the transcendental, the metaphysical, and the
sublime.
The minjianpoet’s valorization of life, which calls for a “looking-
at-the-present” attitude, is paradoxically integrated into his desire for
the traditional, which requires the attitude of “looking back.” On the
one hand, he takes life as a happening of the present with its specific
time and place references; on the other hand, life is an ahistorical and
universal concept that unifies and validates a long-standing but
somewhat hidden Chinese tradition. In other words, if life is a cultural
construct, its very culturality must be deemphasized for the minjian
poet to function. The advocacy of colloquial stylewrepresents a
conscientious exploitation of this paradox by the minjianpoet, which
has become an easily identifiable artistic yardstick against which the
intellectual poet’s perceived valorization of the written word面wis
measured. Ideas about “colloquial writing”w写, which are often
more impressionistic than theoretical, diverge among many minjian
poets such as Han Dong, Xu Jiang, and Yi Sha. Yu Jian stands out as
the only one to demonstrate a persistent pursuit of the topic. Even
before the Pan Feng Conference, he published a series of essays offer-
ing something approaching a theorization of colloquial writing, chief
among which was “The Hard and the Soft Tongues of Poetry: On Two
Different Directions in the Languages of Contemporary Poetry.” With
his characteristic interest in binary oppositions, Yu Jian constructs the
contrasting pair of the “hard tongue” and “soft tongue” of poetry’s
language-in-use, with the former equating to modern Mandarin
(Putonghua) and the latter to regional languages Qx. The reason that
Putonghua is a “hard tongue” is because “it is an official language far
removed from lived experience and it makes the poet’s tongue stiff
[hard] in his subconsciousness” (Yu 1999: 462). Regional languages,
on the other hand, are a soft tongue in the sense that they are the
goldmine of life and therefore they help to preserve life’s true,
Poetic Debate in Contemporary China 195