Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money Sinica Leidensia Edited by Barend J. ter Haar In co-operation with P.K. Bol, W.L. Idema, D.R. Knechtges, E.S. Rawski, E. Zürcher†, H.T. Zurndorfer VOLUME 86 Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money By Maghiel van Crevel LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008 Cover illustration: calligraphy by Che Qianzi (photograph by Jeroen Wiedenhof) This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crevel, Maghiel van. Chinese poetry in times of mind, mayhem and money / By Maghiel van Crevel. p. cm. — (Sinica leidensia ; 86) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16382-9 (alk. paper) 1. Chinese poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Experimental poetry, Chinese—History and criticism. 3. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—China. I. Title. II. Series. PL2333.C87 2008 895.1’15209—dc22 2008031294 ISSN: 0169-9563 ISBN: 978 90 04 16382 9 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. 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Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands contents v CONTENTS Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Chapter One Avant-Garde Poetry from China: Text, Context and Metatext 1 1. What Went Before . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. The Unofficial Poetry Scene and the Avant-Garde . . . . 5 3. Context: Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money . . . . . . . 13 4. Text: From Elevated to Earthly and from What to How 23 5. Metatext: Images of Poetry and Poethood . . . . . . . . . . . 30 6. The Case Studies, and What This Book Wants to Do 50 Chapter Two True Disbelief: Han Dong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 1. The Rejection of Obscure Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 2. An Original Poetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Chapter Three Thanatography and the Poetic Voice: Haizi . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 1. Thanatography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 2. The Poetic Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Chapter Four Exile: Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin and Bei Dao . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 1. Poets in Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 2. Exile in Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Chapter Five Mind over Matter, Matter over Mind: Xi Chuan . . . . . . . . 187 1. Spirituality versus Materialism and the Barbarians . . . 189 2. A Different Voice: Poetry Rising, Poets Falling . . . . . . 194 3. Words Capturing Images, Images Capturing Words . . . 215 vi contents Chapter Six Fringe Poetry, But Not Prose: Xi Chuan and Yu Jian . . . . . 223 1. A Wonderful Inadequacy of Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 2. «Salute» and «File 0»: Poetry or Prose? . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 3. Fringe Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Chapter Seven Objectification and the Long-Short Line: Yu Jian . . . . . . . . 247 1. Objectification and Subjectification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 2. Long Lines and Blanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 Chapter Eight Narrative Rhythm, Sound and Sense: Sun Wenbo . . . . . . . . 281 1. Content Bias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 2. «The Program»: Content and Plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 3. «The Program»: Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 4. Narrativity and Its Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Chapter Nine The Lower Body: Yin Lichuan and Shen Haobo . . . . . . . . . 305 1. Lower Body Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 2. A Poetic Lineage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 Chapter Ten Not at Face Value: Xi Chuan’s Explicit Poetics . . . . . . . . . . 345 1. Explanations, Issues and Alchemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 2. A Bigger Picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360 Chapter Eleven Desecrations? Han Dong’s and Yu Jian’s Explicit Poetics . . . 365 1. Poethood According to Han Dong and Yu Jian . . . . . . 366 2. Metatextual Styles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392 Chapter Twelve What Was All the Fuss About? The Popular-Intellectual Polemic 399 1. What Were the Issues? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400 2. What Was at Stake? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441 Appendix: A Chronological Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 contents vii Chapter Thirteen More Than Writing, As We Speak: Yan Jun . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 1. Three-Dimensional Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 2. Writing, Event Culture and Poetry Opening Up . . . . . 471 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 Index and Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505 viii contents preface ix PREFACE One of my hang-ups is what it means to call something marginal, or more precisely, what it means to call avant-garde poetry from China so. I’ll save this issue for a subsection of chapter One and the occasional relapse later on. Here I will only say that it is to do with a questionable mechanism that makes numbers the measure of all things, that this mechanism has sometimes been applied to not just poetry but also scholarship on poetry, and that on both levels it is often unwarranted and potentially deceptive. While I am aware that the poetry crowd in Chinese Studies and Literary Studies is smaller than the politics crowd or the fiction crowd, I’m not sure that this makes it marginal in any sense other than the quantitative, or that quantitative marginality is a bad thing. What’s more, just like poet- ry’s notorious undefinability and diatribes against its uselessness have never endangered its acknowledged right to exist—or rather the fact of its existence as an essential expression of humanity—so the schol- arly study of poetry somehow always manages to hang on, regardless of the number of people involved. It appears, quite simply, to be worth it. On that note, and specifically in light of the dynamic mod- ern manifestations of a civilization with a massive cultural tradition, it is good to see that the Chinese poetry crowd continues to attract new faces in China and elsewhere, and that the object of their fas- cination continues to generate new research. And it makes perfect sense, for there are many more things about the Chinese avant-garde to get hung up on than its marginality, as I hope this book will show. The documented history of the avant-garde is roughly a hundred times shorter than that of Chinese poetry as a whole. Still, the amount of material that has become available since the late 1970s can feel overwhelming to the individual researcher—and yet it isn’t always easy to find, especially if one is based elsewhere in the world. To facilitate research, teaching and translation, I present this study in conjunction with three online re search bibliographies published by the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center: “Unofficial Poetry Journals from the People’s Republic of China: A Research Note and an Annotated Bibliography” (2007, see Works