what constitutes the colloquial and the written within one language, a
question in which Yu Jian shows hardly any interest. Instead, he relies
on the substitution of the colloquial with dialects to communicate his
worthy pursuit of colloquial writing, a substitution that not only is
contrary to the creative practices of the minjianpoets including his
own^3 but also serves to reduce a very significant poetic question into an
inoperably simple formula.
The charge that the intellectual poet values the written word is true
to some extent, but he does not exclude the spoken word in the same
way that Yu Jian tries to expel the written word from poetry. There are
many intellectual poets who also passionately talk about the desired
goal of colloquial writing. Chen Dongdong believes that “colloquial
language is the real reason for the vivacity and energy of the modern
Chinese language” (Chen 2000: 115). Zhang Shuguang t光
(b. 1956) thinks that the tonality and rhythm of colloquialisms are
indispensable in poetic language, because “this so-called ‘colloquial
rhythm’w节 greatly enables me to encompass experiences of the
present and to dissolve readers’ feelings of distance due to the high-
brow status of poetry” (Zhang 1999: 246). Still other intellectual
poets accept the inclusion of colloquial language into poetry in a qual-
ified manner, among whom Xi Chuan’s view is representative. “Today
as in the past I have always believed that colloquial language is the
only language for writing,” he avers.
It is almost impossible now to use traditional language to create brand
new poems. However, here we must first define colloquial language.
There are two kinds, one being a language on the street, which is close
to regional language and gangster society slang, and the other being
written language, which has something to do with civilization and the
universality of things. My choice is the latter. (Xi 1997: 24)Xi Chuan’s subsuming written language under colloquial speech is
surprising, but his purposeful confusion of familiar concepts reflects a
common position held by most intellectual poets: colloquial speech
must first be processed before it can become poetic speech. This
process, as Xi Du.(b. 1967) puts it, is “extraction”, whose
end product is a purified and rectified colloquial language. Xi Du
further admonishes, “It is quite suspicious to indiscriminately use
colloquial language [in poetry], for doing so is in fact to surrender a
poet’s responsibility towards language. The result would be a reduc-
tion of poetry to language, but not an elevation of language to poetry”
(Xi 2000: 29).
Poetic Debate in Contemporary China 197