The difference between the minjianpoet and the intellectual poet
regarding language resources, however, goes far beyond what constitutes
colloquial language. It is the latter’s Western-looking posture—from
open acknowledgment of foreign poets and frequent allusions to non-
Chinese cultural sources to borrowed complex writing techniques and
Europeanized syntax—that has raised the ire of the former. As Yu Jian
puts it, life is always elsewhere for the intellectual poet (Yu 2004a:
553). Another minjianpoet is even more blunt:
Intellectual writing is a backward movement among the camp of pure
poetry. It not only has lost the spirit of Misty Poetry but also falls into
the old traps of language elitism and word play. In the present paucity
of spiritual and language resources, it worships Western poetry and
creates unaccountable poetic texts that pay tribute to Western masters.
(Xie 2004: 454)Most intellectual poets acknowledge that Western poetry serves as an
important inspirational source for their work, but few would agree
that they write merely to “pay tribute to Western masters.” They
describe whatever Western traces that occur in their writing as evidence
of complex intertextuality, a concept to which Wang Jiaxin gives full
explanation in its Chinese context:
It is worth pointing out that an acknowledgement of intertextuality in
contemporary writing is not tantamount to the poets’ abandoning of
“Chinese identity” or “Chineseness.” From a careful look at the devel-
opment of poetry in the 1990s, one would find that poetry has under-
gone a transformation vis-à-vis the West, i.e., “influence and being
influenced” has changed into a relationship of dialogue and intertext. In
other words, poets have stopped receiving influences passively and have
begun to self-consciously, effectively, and creatively construct an
intertextual relation with the West. This intertextual relation creates
both a link and a distance between the poet and the Western text at the
same time. (Wang 2002: 120)That the theory of intertextuality is itself a Western invention is worth
noting, and Wang’s application of it in a cross-cultural context is
certainly not without problems. Nevertheless, the realization that
“Chinese identity,” “Chineseness,” and the West are not exclusionary
terms contends directly with the minjianpoet’s stale and unsubstanti-
ated nativism. In this sense, intertextuality as a self-willed act rather
than as a forced act has the potential theoretical energy with which
new writing space can be greatly expanded for the Chinese poet, for,
198 Dian Li