unlike the minjianpoet who is infatuated with regional languages and
ill-defined colloquial language, the intellectual poet locates his
language resources in all possible existing human utterances from
speech to text and intertext, with intertextuality as his thread and as
his guiding aesthetic principle.
The renowned Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni0 (b. 1955) says
that if naming is a way to monopolize truth, then poetry is always
antinaming. Indeed, contemporary Chinese poetry beginning with
Misty Poetry has been a battleground for naming and antinaming.
While Misty Poetry focused its fight on external political forces and
earned its name along the way, Chinese poetry since then has engaged
in a battle of its own making—the battle of how to name itself in the
changing cultural and social landscape of China. “Pass Bei Dao!”
北or北 was the first shot by a younger generation of
poets who were determined to be rebels more than the rebel Bei Dao
had been. If this was an expression of the anxiety of influences, it rel-
ished rupture and rejected the immediate past for the sake of main-
taining a continuous fighting spirit. I think it was this fighting spirit
that stood behind the proliferation of poetic schools in the mid-1980s.
The over one hundred named poetry groups displayed on the
Shenzhen Youth Daily offered an unforgettable literary spectacle, but
few of them contributed distinctive and meaningful theories about
poetry and therefore had hardly any lasting impact. Still, a culture of
factionalism and infighting among Chinese poets has survived.
The 1990s saw poetry undergoing major adjustments—some
would argue that it experienced a decline or even a crisis, judging by
its dwindling readership and social influence. Many established poets
went abroad for reasons of exile or temporary residence, and young
poets had not yet earned their place. Curiously, the lack of major
poetic works in the fashion of Misty poetry in the earlier decade was
compensated by an industrious production of writings about poetry.
Most of these writings had become explicitly polemical, and neolo-
gism was frequently invented to describe one kind of poetry to the
exclusion of others. Poetic debates broke out one after another among
poets and critics over aesthetic positions and writing strategies such as
narrativity W性, lyricism抒性, middle-age writing
写,
personalization 化, nativism化, woman’s poetry女性
,
and other such categories. It is in this context that the debate between
the intellectual poet and the minjianpoet happened to dominate the
poetic scene at the turn of the century. Doubtless, this was a continua-
tion of the now familiar culture of debate and was also a realignment
of Chinese poets’ desire for naming and association. Even though
Poetic Debate in Contemporary China 199