Staying Connected: Border-Crossing Experimentation and Transmission

in Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

By

Jia Shi, M.A.

Graduate Program in East Asian Languages and Literatures

The Ohio State University

2020

Dissertation Committee:

Kirk A. Denton, Advisor

Mark Bender

Meow Hui Goh

Robyn Warhol

Copyright by

Jia Shi

2020

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Abstract

This dissertation addresses contemporary Chinese poetry’s socio-cultural relevance

through an investigation of a “crossover” (shige kuajie 诗歌跨界) trend that has loomed large in

the past two decades, against poetry’s paradoxical condition of being at once revered but barely

read by the general public. This trend, in which practitioners simultaneously experiment with

aesthetics and expand poetry readership by innovatively fusing poetry with other arts and forms

of entertainment and communication, engages an extensive body of established and emerging

poets, poetry texts and artworks, and various technologies. As the first systematic research into

this long-existing, far-reaching, interdisciplinary trend, this dissertation not only offers insights

into individual cases, but also challenges the theoretical and methodological limits to our vision

of poetry’s standing in contemporary Chinese life.

This dissertation analyzes the following: the conversation between poetry and new

folksong in a concert called In Ancient Times; the transference of poetry into paintings in the We

Poetize itinerant exhibition and songs in the Sing a Poem for You television show; the integration

of poetry into the documentary film The Verse of Us and the experimental theatre piece

Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the Fuchun Mountains; and the interaction between

poetry and social media in Li Cheng’en’s personal poetry blog. Instead of viewing poetry as texts

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to be read in isolation, these cases call out for a reading of poetry as a multifaceted medium in

constant interaction with other forms and media. Through the perspective of intermediality

studies, which sees medial characteristics as both materially conditioned and historically

conventionalized, all media as intersecting with and relying on each other, and medial borders as

real but fluctuating, I illustrate common features of the crossover cases, chart out major ways in

which medial borders are elicited and crossed, and demonstrate how poetry produces synergies

with other media.

I argue that poetry crossovers recontextualize poetry texts with excessive sensory

stimulations and culturally agreed-upon connotations induced by the co-presence of multiple

media, which urge the audience to understand the poems based on the here and now of the

crossover events and their personal knowledge and experiences. This rich context, as well as the

fact that the presented poems are often self-reflexive, provokes the audience to resonate

emotionally with the poets, who become flesh-and-blood humans rather than hollow voices, and

to assess poets’ competence of mediating postsocialist realities. Poetry crossovers refashion the

styles, structures, and spectatorship of the involved media, with poetry’s emotional intensity,

technical complexity, or sociality as the driving force. Besides developing an aesthetics of

“glances” in-between medial spaces, they draw middle-strata audiences with different

entertainment interests and artistic tastes, enlist them as poetry performers, sponsors, organizers,

and gate-keepers, etc. in their everyday consumption and production of media products, and

encourage them to socialize with poets and peers respectfully. Therefore, far from being

disconnected from contemporary Chinese life, marginalized in the cultural scene, and replaced

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by other more entertainment-oriented media, these crossover events show that contemporary

poetry survives and thrives in China today.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my advisor, Kirk Denton, for his continuous intellectual support,

encouragement, and patience from the initial material collection to the final honing of the

dissertation. His familiarity with recent happenings in the Chinese mediasphere and historical

narratives of literary and cultural phenomena helped the contextualization of my research and

constantly inspired the development of my arguments; his persistent training in close readings of

the literary texts and socio-political milieus, as well as his emphasis on the emic perspectives of

my research subjects, enhanced my critical thinking; he carefully read every draft of my chapters

and his scrupulousness of research kept my writing focused and my language concise.

My gratitude also goes to Mark Bender and Meow Hui Goh. Their respective expertise

on the performance approach to verbal art and attention to the embodiment and material carriers

of literary texts greatly influenced my choice of methodology and key notions. I sincerely thank

Robyn Warhol for broadening my knowledge of feminist theories and criticisms, giving

constructive feedback on the chapter on Li Cheng’en’s personal poetry blog, and encouraging me

to seek publication opportunities. I am also deeply indebted to Heather Inwood, my former

advisor, who guided the choice of my research topic, drew my attention to the social aspect of

poetry, introduced me to the field of intermediality studies, and nurtured my passion for the work

with her own enthusiasm for contemporary Chinese poetry.

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I thank Sheng Qu for bringing the Sing a Poem for You show to my attention and Wang

Sijia for collecting materials from the We Poetize itinerant exhibition. I would also like to

express my gratitude to Zhou Zan and Peng Xun for providing invaluable insider views of the

experimental theatre production Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the Fuchun

Mountains. My acknowledgment goes to Nicholas Kaldis for his comments and suggestions on

the chapter on Li Cheng’en’s personal poetry blog. I am very grateful to Wenyuan Shao and

Dora Farkas for their suggestions on forming a healthy habit of writing daily. I would also like to

thank my fellow students at the Ohio State University for both academic inspirations and

friendship, and Debbie Knicely for helping with my graduation process.

Last but not least, all the members of my supportive family, without whom much of this

work could not have been completed, deserve my deep appreciation. I thank God for providing

everything I need and my friends for spiritual nourishment.

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Vita

August 31, 1987 ...................................................Born – Jinhua, Zhejiang, China 2009......................................................................B.A. Teaching Chinese as a Second Language Zhejiang University, China 2009-2011 ............................................................Graduate Teaching Assistant Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Iowa 2009-2011 ............................................................Graduate Assistant The Confucius Institute, University of Iowa 2011......................................................................M.A. Asian Civilizations Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Iowa 2011-2012 ............................................................University Fellow The Ohio State University 2012-2015 ............................................................Teaching Associate Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University 2015-2017 ............................................................Editorial Assistant Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Foreign Language Publications, The Ohio State University 2018-2019 ............................................................Adjunct Instructor of Chinese World Languages and Cultures Wittenberg University 2020-present .........................................................Adjunct Instructor of Chinese Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Kenyon College

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Publications

Book Review

Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes, by Heather Inwood. Chinese Literature Today vol. 5, no. 1 (2015): 104–106.

Translation

“Turban” 包头巾, by Mo Du莫独. Chinese Literature Today vol. 4, no. 1 (2014): 83.

Fields of Study

Major Field: East Asian Languages and Literatures

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Table of Contents

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................v

Vita ................................................................................................................................................ vii

List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................x

Introduction: An Old Practice Picking Up New Momentum ...........................................................1

Chapter 1: The Dialogic Mode of Poetry Crossover .....................................................................56

Chapter 2: The Transferential Mode of Poetry Crossover ...........................................................121

Chapter 3: The Integrational Mode of Poetry Crossover .............................................................183

Chapter 4: Poetry Crossover as a Critical Lens ...........................................................................260

Conclusion: Toward New Ways of Connection ..........................................................................331

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................347

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List of Figures

Figure 1: “To an Unknown Bird” by Bai Hua, 50×56.5 cm, ink-wash painting on paper, one of

five. ..................................................................................................................................138 Figure 2: “To Another World” by Yu Xiang, 153.5×107 cm ×2, drawings on paper. .............141 Figure 3: A visitor’s imitated painting at the We Poetize exhibition. ..........................................150 Figure 4: A visitor’s original painting at the We Poetize exhibition. ...........................................152 Figure 5: “To a Sunny Day” by Zhong Dangxuan, 30×22 cm × 4, mixed media on wood board.

..........................................................................................................................................158 Figure 6: Poetry text superimposed onto a scenery shot. .............................................................191 Figure 7: Chen Nianxi drilling in the tunnel with his coworker. .................................................197 Figure 8: Wu Xia’s smile gradually freezes. ...............................................................................206 Figure 9: The scene of the tunnel light dissolving into the scene of the skyline. ........................211 Figure 10: Chen Nianxi writing in his hut. ..................................................................................213 Figure 11: Male dancer dancing energetically between two crisscrossed cloth scrolls. ..............231 Figure 12: Dancers interacting with each other across the translucent rear screen. ....................232 Figure 13: Top part of Li Cheng’en’s Sina blog homepage. .......................................................288 Figure 14: A pair of photos of Li Cheng’en weaving outside a black tent in Tibetan costumes,

with Li appearing focused on her work in photo one (top) and squinting at the photographer in photo two (bottom). ...............................................................................298

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Figure 15: Li Cheng’en’s poems and personal photos published in a poetry journal in print. ....301 Figure 16: A news photo of the earthquake disaster scene that Li Cheng’en reposted. ..............323

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Introduction: An Old Practice Picking Up New Momentum

A Popular Song Calling for Attention to Poetry

Life is more than compromising for the moment there is still poetry and distant fields You were born into this world with bare hands and fists to find that stretch of sea at all costs 生活不止眼前的苟且 还有诗和远方的田野 你赤手空拳来到人世间 为找到那片海不顾一切 —Gao Xiaosong 高晓松, “Life Is More Than Compromising for the Moment” (Shenghuo buzhi yanqian de gouqie 生活不止眼前的苟且)1 Over the weekend of March 18, 2016, the Chinese song producer and talk show host Gao

Xiaosong’s new single “Life Is More Than Compromising for the Moment” with the above-

quoted chorus, became an instant hit after its official release on Xiami.com, and then quickly met

with a strong backlash (Gao 2016a; Gao 2016b; Gao 2016c). Those who loved the song shared it

so frequently on social media that it “flooded the screen” (shuaping 刷屏). With great emotion,

they alleged tear-shedding and repeat listening, lamented their wasted pasts, and echoed Gao’s

call for attention to poetry and faraway places. Those who disapproved of the song mostly

accused it of being disappointingly simple, overly idealistic, or of selling “lofty emotions”

———————————— 1 All translations in this dissertation are my own unless otherwise noted.

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(qinghuai 情怀). Still others felt the urge to jump into the discussion by offering multiple

interpretations of the meaning of “poetry and distant fields,” yet without taking sides. Apart from

these comments, the majority of online responses to the song simply copied and pasted part of

the lyric to show their agreement and support. However, the more creative ones recounted

personal experiences with line breaks in imitation of the verse form, or made parodies such as

“Life is more than the compromises before your eyes, there are still compromises in the

distance” 生活不止眼前的苟且，还有远方的苟且, “Your parents are still making

compromises, and now you are thinking of poetry and faraway places” 父母尚在苟且，而你却

在想着诗和远方, and “Life is more than compromising for the moment, there are still

incomprehensible poems and unreachable distances” 生活不止眼前的苟且，还有看不懂的诗

和去不了的远方 (Gao 2016a). The controversy surrounding the song soon spread to more

traditional mass media, such as newspapers and television news.

The discourse generated by these participants makes Gao’s case a perfect entry point into

the poetry scene in the People’s Republic of China today. First, it shows that poetry, especially

modern poetry, has a paradoxical existence of being regarded as irrelevant to everyday life by the

greater proportion of educated Chinese, on the one hand, and being cherished as the ultimate

goal and value of life, on the other. 2 Second, the explicit and even didactic reference to poetry in

———————————— 2 The word that Gao originally used is shi 诗, which refers to poetry in general, and online commenters alternately used shici 诗词 and shige 诗歌, with the former referring to classical Chinese poetry with its own language, tonal pattern, rhyme scheme, and conventions, and the latter focusing on modern Chinese poetry (xiandai shi 现代诗), or new poetry (xinshi 新诗), written in vernacular language and mostly in free verse, as well as poems in other languages and translated poems. However, the “incomprehensible poems” 看不懂的诗 unequivocally targets modern Chinese poetry, because obscurity is the most common complaint against it. For the distinction between classical and modern Chinese poetry, see Yeh 1991; Doleželová-Velingerová 1977. While people continue writing

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the song, poetry’s place in the online music sharing community, and poetry as the subject of

heated discussion and an accepted form of communication among community members, directs

attention to the trend for poetry to cross borders and interact with other media—a trend that has

loomed large arguably since the turn of the twenty-first century in mainland China and that

offers potential to reflect on and reshape contemporary Chinese poetry’s paradoxical existence of

being trampled and treasured. It is this crossover trend in contemporary Chinese poetry that this

dissertation focuses on.

Poetry Crossing Borders

It might not be surprising to spot an individual’s or institution’s “Stay Connected” sign at

a general social event, with logos of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. What is

less expected, however, is to stay connected with poetry through a music sharing website like

Xiami.com, or to connect with others in the online music sharing community through discussing

poetry and life, as is in the case of Gao Xiaosong’s song. Nevertheless, such links between

poetry and other media are not uncommon. Creative collaborations between poetry and various

other media,3 though as old as poetry itself, have picked up new momentum in mainland China

in recent decades under the umbrella term shige kuajie 诗歌跨界 (poetry crossing borders, or

poetry crossover). Also referred to as shige kuajie shiyan 诗歌跨界实验 (poetry border-crossing

———————————— classical poems today, my use of “contemporary Chinese poetry” in this research primarily refers to modern poetry written after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

3 I use the term “media” in a broad sense, which refers to arts, entertainments, and communication forms, plus their supporting technologies and institutions. This is a concept that I will discuss in more details in later sections.

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experimentation), or shige kuajie chuanbo 诗歌跨界传播 (poetry border-crossing transmission),

these crossover products, practices, and partnerships are both artistically experimental and

oriented toward the general public. They usually feature: (1) the emergence of new experiences

and meanings through the interaction between poetry texts and artworks or entertainments; (2)

innovative appropriations of materials, technologies, and conventions involved in the production,

circulation, and reception of poetry and the other arts; and (3) active participation of people from

diverse backgrounds, a redistribution of social power among them, and the transformation of

social realities. Although wide acceptance of “poetry crossing borders” among practitioners,

journalists, and critics has been gradual, the term has generally been thought to cover a vast array

of arts, platforms, participants, patterns, scales, regularities, popularities, sponsorships, regions,

and places.

This dissertation aims to illustrate how the trend of poetry border-crossing

experimentation and transmission in twenty-first century China keeps modern Chinese poetry

socio-culturally relevant. I start from charting out major patterns of crossover amid the

apparently messy array of practices, and move on to address the following questions: (1) How

does the crossover enhance or highlight poetry’s representation and reproduction of social

realities? (2) What new tropes of creativity are demonstrated in the intermedial interactions? (3)

How does this crossover trend contribute to the construction of a poetry readership and the

restructuring of social relations?

This study is the first systematic investigation into the trend of poetry crossover in

mainland China, a trend that has been on the rise for almost two decades but continues to be

neglected by both English and Chinese language scholarship. Although scholars like Maghiel

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van Crevel (2011) and Heather Inwood (2014) have acutely grasped the importance of this trend

in their works, they address it only briefly as asides. Chinese critics, such as Zhou Zan 周瓒

(2013), Huo Junming 霍俊明 (2013), and Chen Wei 陈卫 (2015), also take notice of the trend,

but they do not undertake in-depth analysis, preferring instead to wait and see if this trend would

mature, show problems, or perhaps fail. The few scholars that do focus on poetry crossover tend

to treat a work or event as a stand-alone case (e.g., Ferrari 2016) and often narrow their analyses

to formal aspects (e.g., Luo L. 2017).

In this study, I give critical attention to this understudied trend through an intermedial

perspective. Rather than treating poetry as a corpus of individual poems, I treat it as a medium—

a network that mediates between the individual self and the world. This network, with poetry

texts at its core, is further constituted by people (e.g., poets, readers, and critics), institutions

(e.g., publishing houses, schools, media companies, and governments), material and

technological supports (e.g., paper, human bodies, the Internet, and smartphones), and discursive

and performative practices. Its mediation process is conditioned by generic conventions,

historical conjunctures, individual agencies, and contingencies. This network of poetry is always

imbedded in a larger network of all media, in which poetry, music, painting, film, and theatre,

etc. reproduce, revolutionize, and compete with each other.

My investigation of the crossover trend through an intermedial perspective reveals the

vitality of contemporary Chinese poetry by analyzing the creative and transformative

collaboration between poetry and other media (i.e., external cooperation), which is generally

overshadowed by contentions in poetics and poetry citizenship within the poetry scene (i.e.,

internal fights). By demonstrating characteristics and mechanisms of the poetry crossover cases,

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I not only attempt to expand the scholarly vision of how poetry engages with contemporary

Chinese life, but also shed lights on the specific postsocialist reality of present-day China that it

mediates and it is a part of. Poetry has always been intertwined with other media, but that

connection is made all the more conspicuous with the worldwide development of new

communication technologies. Therefore, this is the appropriate time to turn to the intermedial

interactions in contemporary Chinese poetry’s crossover trend, and bring them into conversation

with the vibrant scene of intermediality studies elsewhere in the world, especially in Europe and

North America.

Seen from the perspectives of intermediality studies, the postsocialist condition of

contemporary China, and the conflicts-laden history of post-Mao poetry, I argue in this

dissertation that far from being out of touch with contemporary Chinese social life, poetry, with

all its aesthetic sophistication, still plays an important role in the representation and reshaping of

social realities. Poetry border-crossing experimentation and transmission in contemporary China

urges us scholars and the general public to stop treating poetry as a self-contained world but to

envision with an open mind its potential for socio-cultural engagement. With different patterns

and various depths of crossover, these practices demonstrate that contemporary Chinese poems

are never created, read, or perceived in a vacuum. Poetry’s specific vitality lies in: (1) its

susceptibility to new meanings and experiences in its circulation, interpretation, and reproduction

in the process of intermedial interactions; (2) its capacity to revolutionize the media that

remediate it because of poetry’s difficult language and expressions of raw emotions; and (3) its

raising of consciousness and refinement of sensibility that enhance the communication of its

partnering media.

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The close scrutiny of distinctive cases in this dissertation shows that poetry crossover

practices share some common features, the most outstanding of which is their excessive sensory

experiences and information that simultaneously immerse the participants and dislodge them

from the atmosphere of the crossover products or events. Such a characteristic carves out an

ample space for artistic experimentation and the restructuring of social relations. On the one

hand, practitioners of poetry border-crossing experimentation and transmission make poetry and

the other involved media correspond to, transfer, and accommodate each other’s features. This

intermedial interaction simultaneously draws the audience to the detail-rich mise-en-scène of the

crossover product and leads them out of it to notice media borders and techniques used to cross

the borders. These dual visions of poetry render it both as textual representations of real-life

experiences and real events that one actually experiences. On the other hand, the conjoining of

poetry and other media not only brings together people from different backgrounds, seeps into

more facets of their lives, and thus strategically expands poetry’s readership; it also elicits

emotional resonances among the poets, artists, and the audience, while allowing them to reflect

on their own roles in the crossover events and negotiate their own opinions and interests. These

acts of self-reflection and position-taking reshape the relationship among those participating in

the poetry crossover events. In the poetry crossover cases I scrutinize in this dissertation, this

dynamic process often gives rise to intersecting stances that blend various pursuits, including

entertainment, individual expression and self-cultivation, responsibility for the collective, and

social justice and equality. These rhizomatically connected stances strengthen the bonds among

the middle-strata audience members of the crossover events. Therefore, through deliberate

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intermedial interactions, contemporary Chinese poetry not only stays connected with authentic

life experiences in China today, but also stimulates new relationships among Chinese citizens.

Postsocialist China and the Chinese Middle Strata

Scholars of Chinese studies have increasingly used the term “postsocialism” as a

conceptual frame and a description of the historical situation of the past three decades in China.

Since Arif Dirlik first used it to discuss “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Zhongguo tese

shehuizhuyi 中国特色社会主义) in 1989,4 the definition of postsocialism has been further

developed and debated. However, one thing certain is that when it is applied to China, it revolves

around the course of China’s accelerated adoption of capitalist elements to serve and revise its

socialist agendas and its efforts to be admitted into the global capitalist order as a socialist

country.

The term “postsocialism” is useful because it points to the actual hybridity of socialism

and capitalism in contemporary China. Though the CCP official discourse since Deng

Xiaoping’s 邓小平 leadership makes great efforts to distinguish between ideology and economic

means, principles and practices, to justify the implementation of a market economy in a socialist

country,5 capitalism still comes into realization through its modes of production and relations

———————————— 4 Arif Dirlik (1989) coined the term “postsocialism” from the situation of China prior to the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the emergence of Eastern Europe-centered postsocialist studies in the 1990s. Later China scholars both further developed Dirlik’s concept and adapted the Eastern European postsocialist studies to the Chinese situation. More details of the development of the postsocialist discourse in China studies could also be seen in Hockx 2015: 12-18.

5 For example, it is reported that Deng said in 1979 that “market economy cannot be said to be capitalist. … Socialism can also develop market economy” (Yang M. 2011) and in 1992 during his southern tour that “to have more plan or market is not the fundamental difference between socialism and capitalism. Planned economy does not

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embedded in local and global market mechanisms. Such an effective hybrid of socialism and

capitalism involves more than ideologies, institutions, economic policies and practices, but also

produces profound socio-cultural repercussions impacting party leadership, intellectual elites,

entrepreneurs, the middle strata, and the grassroots. In this sense, Sheldon Lu (2007: 208) is

quite right in calling postsocialism a “totality.” As a result of the mixture of socialism and

capitalism, confusions and divergences abound within both state and society, while cross-strata

alliances are to be seen everywhere. I agree with Xudong Zhang’s (2008) suggestion that we

need to see beyond the old tension between state and society. We also need to see beyond the

model of contention and seek new ways to understand how people relate to each other.

In the realm of ideologies, institutions, economic policies, and practices, there are plenty

of tensions and negotiations between right-leaning and left-leaning positions. Although its

pragmatic approach to economic development generally evades the question of capitalist

actualization, the party keeps reiterating and developing socialist theory and harnessing capitalist

values to socialist ones. Some telling examples include the continued propagation of the old

notion that the party is the vanguard of Chinese society and the recent promotion of individual

struggle for the good of the collective (Fumian 2016). While few want to return to Mao-era

socialist egalitarianism, the admission of capitalist entrepreneurs into the party and the entry into

global market organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) have caused plenty of

concerns within some sectors of the party. Although the economic reform led to the dismantling

of the People’s Communes and the implementation of the household responsibility system, to the

———————————— equal to socialism; capitalism has plan, too. Market economy does not equal to capitalism; socialism has market, too. Plan and market are both economic means” (Wu J. 2017).

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emergence of township and village enterprises and special economic zones, and to some state-

owned industries’ subjection to market forces, privatization, or foreign investment, the state is

still in effective control. For example, privately-owned companies still rely heavily on links with

local governments in the acquisition of land, labor, and capital necessary for production

(Chen/Goodman 2013).

Accompanying notable economic achievements and dramatic improvements of people’s

material life during China’s four decades of Reform and Opening Up (gaige kaifang 改革开放)

is a growing inequality of wealth distribution, manifested in a complicity between state power

and capital that fosters corruption and in the disenfranchisement of the diceng 底层 (those at the

social bottom, or subalterns) classes, such as factory workers, migrant workers, and peasants.

Housing problems, healthcare, and the unequal distribution of educational resources are some of

the main areas of contestation. A series of other problems of social injustice have also followed,

including the rampant exaltation of money-making and entertainment-seeking in society, the

exploitation of ethnic minority people, prostitution, and environmental pollution, among others.

In reaction, intellectual debates emerged between the Neoliberals (Xin ziyouzhuyi 新自由

主义) and the New Leftists (Xin zuopai 新左派) from the mid-1990s to the first years of the new

century. While both agree that economic development is the way out, they diverge on whether

the market is the culprit or the answer. In contrast to the Neoliberals’ advocacy of radical

privatization, deregulation of the market, and western-style democracy, which appears moral and

just in a global capitalist context that values freedom and rights, the New Leftists favor the

state’s active role in social welfare, economic regulation, and redistribution of wealth to counter

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market-induced capital accumulation in the hands of a few and create a system fair to the many

as an alternative to the global capitalist order (Xudong Zhang 2008: 54; Lu/Wang 2012).

The contentions within the party and among intellectuals also reach the general public in

the realm of media production and everyday practices. This is also the space where alliances are

formed across social strata. As observed by Bingchun Meng (2018: 35), reformists within the

party, the Neoliberals, entrepreneurs, and media elites—beneficiaries of marketization—are

increasingly working together to further push forward policies and discourses that favor

economic liberalization. Writers and visual artists promote the restoration of individual

subjectivity; trendy television dramas showcase the affluent life with designer clothes and

advanced technologies; themed spaces and programs engineer self-reliant and responsible

consumers; and individuals consciously assert agency through contingencies (Ren 2012), etc. On

the other hand, the New Leftists are a heterogeneous body of people ranging from intellectuals to

common people, but they are bound together by the common cause of economic equality and

social justice. Online activism is employed against employment discrimination and local

environmental degradation (e.g., Yang G. 2009); documentary films and subaltern literature

reveal the cost the social bottom has paid for the country’s capitalist transformation and give

them a venue for self-empowerment (e.g., Lu/Wang 2012); and different collectives are formed

around engagement with specific social issues, etc.

Obvious as the alliances on both sides may appear, they are often not stable and may

change because of circumstance. For example, a calculated consumer may also be an opponent

of employment discrimination. Even so, this does not suggest that alliances are not a productive

way to understand the complexities of contemporary China; alliances are always in formation

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and the dynamic process can offer us insights into what is really going on. Unlike what many

scholars see from the perspective of the divide between top-down management and bottom-up

resistance—namely, the state’s carefully treading the line between the pro-market and pro-

socialism appeals simply to stay “in power with sufficient legitimacy” (Meng 2018: 33; H. Wang

2009) or to develop state capitalism by degrading socialism to nationalism—I find different

hands joining, with spontaneity, sincerity, and creativity (though not without manipulation), to be

“more open to the construction of a social world which transcends the dogmas of capitalism or

socialism to get in touch with the productive forces of a world of life with all its social and

cultural specificities and complexities” (Xudong Zhang 2008: 17). It is in the context of dynamic

alliances that I set my research on poetry border-crossing experimentation and transmission. It is

true that the perspective of negotiation and contention can offer insight into how poetry is related

to Chinese social life today, but focusing on conversations and alliances allows us to see the

other side of the coin.

A hotbed of relation formation is the “middle strata” (zhongchan jieceng 中产阶层), a

highly diverse group of people that the state is trying to enlarge, that businesses target, and that

many emulate or aspire to join (Cheng Li 2010; Chen/Goodman 2013). Most border-crossing

practices target the middle strata. Objectively defined by scholars according to common income,

occupation, consumption, and education, or subjectively self-identified (e.g., Cheng Li 2010;

Miao 2016), the people who make up this class differ fundamentally because of the inherent

heterogeneity of being in the middle, between the political and economic top and the masses.

This makes them the perfect group to observe and experiment with new forms of interpersonal

and social relations. The universal acknowledgement that this group in general prefers social

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stability to political democracy (e.g., Cheng Li 2010; Chen/Goodman 2013; Miao 2016; Fumian

2016) suggests that different parties work together to request moderate changes on a day-to-day

basis rather than engage in radical oppositional struggles. Although some scholars tend to regard

any collaboration with the state as being passively co-opted and others blame those who take a

dissident posture for the pursuit of personal gain (e.g., Barmé 1999), I see a full transformative

potential here toward fairer social interactions and relations. Knee-jerk associations of the party-

state with control and malevolence are biased; instead, people in the middle strata actively

pursue constructive forms of identification and alliances rather than rivalries. Being

economically secured with a cultured lifestyle, the middle class is a perfect site where poetry gets

to relate to people in their everyday lives and fulfill its age-old function of connecting people

with each other.

The Relevance Issue and Post-Mao Poetry

The issue of contemporary Chinese poetry’s relevance to everyday life has no easy

solution, especially when it is seen in light of classical Chinese poetry and world poetry. The

debate on poetry for poetry’s sake versus poetry for life’s sake can be dated back to the

inauguration of modern Chinese poetry in the late Qing and May Fourth periods (Inwood 2011).

Critics and scholars tend to use a model of disintegration to depict the transition from classical to

modern Chinese poetry, which is concomitant with China’s transition from a relatively self-

contained dynastic empire to a modern nation on the world stage.

This model of disintegration, simply put, represents premodern Chinese poetry as a multi-

faceted configuration of emotions and thoughts, a pattern of perception and expression, and an

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institutional apparatus. It was tightly interwoven with state politics, morality, education,

patronage, as well as with everyday communication, socializing, and entertainment among the

elites. Poetry was not only a vehicle for personal political advancement or diplomatic

negotiations, but also a must for everyday social occasions, ranging from drinking banquets, to

group excursions, and to death lamentations.6 Such a multifunctionality is rooted in the

traditional correlative cosmology, in which the human realm and the cosmos were believed to be

connected through the mediation of poetry and ultimately unified. Poetry, in short, was an

integral part of Chinese literati’s daily lives (e.g., Yeh 1991; Stalling 2011; Van Crevel 2011).

When it came to modern China, however, the correlative cosmology and everything

associated with it—be it the court and the emperor as the representatives of order, or the

psychology and practice of following familial and social prescriptions—were thrown away by

intellectuals who endeavored to revive the country from its internal decline and foreign military

humiliations. Poetry, along with other classic texts, lost its grip in the shaping of a cultural

identity, and gave way to “notions of domestic wealth and power” (Denton 1996: 7). As the civil

service exam (in which poetry writing was tested) was terminated during the final years of the

Qing, as society became more specialized and professionalized and poetry reading and writing

was relegated to the school curriculum and largely confined to small tight-knitted intellectual

circles, and as world literatures and criticism that treat poetry more as an artifact than a creative

process (Denton 1996: 15) were read and appropriated by Chinese intellectuals, the strong

alliance among poetry, politics, and economics fell apart and the intuitive empathy between

———————————— 6 Some examples can be seen in Watson 1962: 202-230; Shih-Hisang Chen 1974; Owen 1992: 37-56; Goh 2010; Chennault 2003; Owen 2011.

15

poets and readers mediated through the text disappeared. Poetry became irrelevant to, or even in

conflict with, state ideology and the economic system, and in the process lost an appreciative

readership. Good modern Chinese poems came to be seen as aesthetic-oriented and only seeking

their own self-realization, a process that is regarded as modern poetry’s alienation or autonomy,

depending on how negative or positive one views this breakup (e.g., Yeh 1991; Stalling 2011;

Van Crevel 2011).

Nonetheless, this model of the disintegrating relationship among poetry, politics,

morality, and the economy is not unchallenged. Scholars who refuse to see poetry merely as a

conglomeration of texts and thus reject the use of aesthetics as the sole criterion to appraise

modern and contemporary Chinese poetry contend that this poetry continues to be socially

relevant. In spite of the loss of the traditional correlative cosmology and the increasing

importance of national wealth and power, poetry is still given the role of shaping a worldview

and a national identity, however much the ideal shifts over time and diverges across

demographics. Underlying the creative appropriation of western ideologies and literary criticism

is a strong cultural continuity (e.g., Crespi 2009; Denton 1996). On the one hand, their research

painstakingly points out how over the twentieth century modern poetry has been employed as

state propaganda full of artistic and ideological complexity (e.g., Crespi 2009); on the other

hand, they demonstrate that the state ideology is not always a monolithic whole, and spontaneous

poetry production, circulation, and evaluation does not have to be aligned with the state to be

socially relevant—the stance of distancing, defiance, or resistance is itself a political, economic,

and moral statement (e.g., Crespi 2009; Inwood 2014; Hockx 2015). Most important, nothing can

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absolutely replace poetry in touching hearts, stirring souls, and transferring normative emotions

(e.g., Crespi 2009; Inwood 2014).

I side with those scholars who believe in contemporary Chinese poetry’s continuing

social relevance. Taking into consideration Chinese poets’ long history of social engagement,

native literary critics’ views that appear westernized but are still firmly grounded in the tradition

where literature is expected to connect text, individuals, humanity, and the world, and the

Chinese public’s enduring emotional attachment to poetry manifested in the fact that “poetry is

more capable of grabbing the headlines in China than in many other countries” (Inwood 2015:

45), I believe that contemporary Chinese poetry cannot be comfortably placed in its own world,

as avant-garde poetry is sometimes in other countries.

I would also like to further push the idea of the multiple ways poetry intervenes into

present-day Chinese social life. More than being purely aesthetic-oriented or life-oriented, more

than cooperating with the official discourse or defying state authority, contemporary Chinese

poetry creates various mixtures of artistic experimentation and public appeal as well as

intersecting points of state ideology, economic concerns, universal morals, and emotions. As a

result, poetry embraces ever more ways to shape worldviews, to form alliances among people,

and to be socio-culturally relevant. This relevancy is further strengthened in the poetry crossover

trend, where poetry’s interaction with other media offer it even more possible mixtures and

intersections of attitudes.

Zooming into Chinese poetry of the period since the Reform and Opening Up, we can see

alternating and overlapping inclinations toward cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and toward

populism, on the other. The former is characterized by pursuits compatible with pro-market,

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capitalist, Neoliberal values, such as free individual expression, aesthetic experimentation based

on both Western poetics and Chinese literary traditions, and personal financial gains. The latter is

characterized by pursuits compatible with pro-regulation, socialist, New Left values, such as

collectivism, engagement with local social realities, responsibility for economic equality and

social justice. While scholars tend to see poetry of this era through the lens of contentions—

contentions between state and society, among different poetry schools and communities, between

poets and the general public (e.g., Van Crevel 2011; Inwood 2014)—I also find that the

extensive formation of alliances is an important way for poetry to develop, connect people, and

deal with the harsh realities of postsocialist China.

After the death of Mao, underground poetry, which had been gaining popularity among

the educated youths sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution finally came to

the foreground through unofficial poetry journals. The most important representative was the

Beijing-based Today (Jintian 今天) launched by Bei Dao 北岛, Mang Ke 芒克, and painter

Huang Rui 黄锐. In their advocacy of individual expression over abstract political lyricism, their

promotion of artistic sophistication over the Maoist subjugation of literature to revolutionary

propaganda, and their extensive employment of idiosyncratic imagery and metaphors in

reference to the traumatic experiences of the Cultural Revolution, the Today poets are often

regarded as aesthetically self-conscious (e.g., Yeh 1991) or defiant of the political authority (e.g.,

Crespi 2009: 164-166).

My take is that they were aligned both with the post-Mao state and mainstream society.

On the one hand, their idiosyncratic use of imagery and metaphors made their poems so difficult

to read that they were labeled “Obscure Poetry” or “Misty Poetry” (menglong shi 朦胧诗) by

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hostile critics and orthodox poets (Zhang M. 1980), though they soon won international

recognition. This exaltation of individual subjectivity and elements of Western modernist poetics

(Yeh 1991: 56-88) was in tune with the state and society’s wish to “liberate the thought” (jiefang

sixiang 解放思想). On the other hand, Obscure Poetry was so fervently welcomed by the public

that some poems were quickly canonized and the Obscure Poets, such as Bei Dao, Mang Ke,

Jiang He 江河, Gu Cheng 顾城, and Shu Ting 舒婷, rose to stardom and were pursued by fans.

Poetry reading and sharing also became part of daily life. Such a massive response demonstrates

that poetry was entrusted with a collective power to recover human nature after the class

struggles and socialist institutions of the Mao era, but the collectivism itself was a product of the

socialist sensibility.

The party’s attitude toward Obscure Poetry reflects this ideological ambiguity. Warnings,

bans, and arrests that accompanied unofficial poetry journals culminated in a series of short-lived

political campaigns around 1983, driven by conservatives in the party and aimed at eradicating

“spiritual pollution” (jingshen wuran 精神污染) and eliminating skepticism toward the CCP

leadership (Day 2005a; Xu J. 2011a; Xu J. 2011b; van Crevel 2011; Inwood 2014). However,

the rest of the 1980s witnessed a strong comeback of a cosmopolitan tendency in poetry with the

ambition to surpass the style of Obscure Poetry. The emergence of a large number of poets and

numerous poetry schools gathered around various unofficial journals based in different regions

substantiated the diversification of the poetry scene.

Poet and critic Xu Jingya’s 徐敬亚 “The 1986 Grand Exhibition of Modern Poetry

Groups on China’s Poetry Scene” (Zhongguo shitan 1986 xiandaishi qunti dazhan 中国诗坛

1986’现代诗群体大展), which showcased sixty-four poetry schools and 125 poets’ works and

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manifestos (Xu J. 2012; Day 2005b), exemplifies the variety of themes, styles, and authors of the

time, and the collusion between cosmopolitan poetry and the economic reforms. Some of the

larger and more important poetry groups include: the Nanjing-based Them (Tamen 他们) that

promoted colloquial poetry; the Beijing-based one-man group Xi Chuan form 西川体 that

creatively grafted western and classical poetry onto contemporary Chinese reality; the Chengdu-

based Macho Men (Mang han 莽汉) that challenged elaborate symbolism and learning with

simple masculine expression; the Xichang-Chengdu-based Not-Not (Feifei 非非) that advocated

a return to a precultural state by opposing the rational and the sublime; the Shanghai-based On

the Sea poetry group (haishang shiqun 海上诗群); the Coquetry School (sajiao pai 撒娇派); and

the Wholism (zhengtizhuyi 整体主义) Group, etc. (Day 2005a; van Crevel 2011: 16-17; Liu F.

2013: 1192-1193).

Amid the liberal trend pervasive on the avant-garde poetry scene of the time was a

countercurrent of political commitment lying beneath what Michelle Yeh (1996) calls “the cult

of poetry” (shige chongbai 诗歌崇拜) and clearly manifested in the colloquialization and

quotidianization of poetry. Whereas “the cult of poetry” was characterized by the worship of

poetry with semi-religious devotion and Christian vocabulary and imagery, as well as the

exaltation of poets as high priests who suffer for their sacred calling (Yeh 1996), the

colloquialization and quotidianization of poetry featured the use of everyday language and

writing about mundane, trivial, or even provocative aspects of life. Although the two trends

appear at odds with each other and suggest a contention in poetics and poetry politics between

what Maghiel van Crevel (2011) calls “the Elevated” and “the Earthly,” they can both be seen as

a reaction against the imminent arrival of full-scale marketization and commercialization. The

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difference is that the former expressed the anxiety of poetry and poets’ marginalization, whereas

the latter sought to resume poetry’s and poets’ responsibility for caring about the world, even if

the world was turning toward the materialistic. Passively or actively, they both showed the deep-

seated, socially-engaged tendency of the Chinese avant-garde poetry that sought to resist global

capitalism.

The late 1980s and early1990s witnessed accelerated privatization, marketization, and

commercialization, with occasional but forceful political crackdowns, such as the 1987 campaign

aimed at curbing “bourgeois liberalism” (zichanjieji ziyouhua 资产阶级自由化) and the 1989

crackdown of the pro-democracy student protests. The pursuits of money, consumption, and

entertainment, the casualties of political crackdowns, and the tragic suicides of important poets

such as Haizi 海子, Ge Mai 戈麦, and Gu Cheng, all suggested the difficult nature of poets and

intellectuals’ alliances with the party and society in the process of tailoring capitalism to the

needs of the socialist country. How much capitalism and what aspects of capitalism was

desirable were not always clear. For the moment, western-style liberalism and democracy were

out of the question; individualism was tolerable and useful, and consumerism was the way to go.

Into the 1990s, the symbiotic existence of cosmopolitan and populist tendencies in the

Chinese poetry scene took yet another form. Poets who did not stop writing altogether or had just

started writing gave up their adherence to “-isms” and the collective efforts that dominated the

scene in the 1980s. Instead, they pushed their writings even further to the individualist end of the

spectrum, by experimenting with techniques and developing personal styles—the so-called

“individualized writing” (gerenhua xiezuo 个人化写作). Often critiqued by later literary critics

for a “prioritizing of technique” (jishu zhishang 技术至上) and for a lack of “historical

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consciousness” (lishi yishi 历史意识) (Yu Y. 2016), these poets actually engaged with historical

moments and social realities through situated, embodied, personal experiences and perspectives.

This may best be summarized in the idea “the personal is the public” (e.g., Zhai 2010a; Zang D.

2019). Although it differed from the old guard’s nostalgia for Maoist mass mobilization, and did

not always mesh with the New Leftist concern for social justice and the lower classes, it did

make a commitment to life.

This being said, whether oriented toward poetic technique or toward life, poetry’s link

with the state or society was relatively tenuous during this period. It was during the 1990s that

the problem of marginalization, which has haunted modern Chinese poetry since its inception,

could really be felt. Although its individualism accorded with the market spirit the reformists

within the party wanted to see, the flourishing consumerism dramatically reduced poetry’s

readership and its presence on the cultural scene. To make things worse, Chinese literary critics

brooded over this loss of faith in poetry, raising doubts among poets about critics’ capacity to

really understand and sympathize with their poetics. Consequently, poets started to embrace

more self-reflexive elements in their works and add meta-narrative elements to their poetics (Yeh

2007; van Crevel 2011; Inwood 2014)—a manifestation of literary consciousness and a

willingness to seek understanding and allies.

The turn of the new century witnessed a polemic between provincial poets representing

the “Popular Standpoint” (minjian lichang 民间立场) and academic poets in the capital leaning

toward “Intellectual Writing” (zhishifenzi xiezuo 知识分子写作). This Popular versus

Intellectual debate, as Maghiel van Crevel (2011: Ch. 12) meticulously delineates, was anything

but a manifestation of clear-cut dichotomy in poetics, or a struggle over geographical, cultural,

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and institutional affiliations. For example, though the Popular poets attacked the Intellectual

poets for their heavy use of allusions to foreign poetry and western culture and for their heroic

and sacred poses, these very same features can also be found in works and manifestos by the

Popular poets. Meanwhile, what the Popular poets promoted, such as a turn to local everyday life

and the use of plain language, also appeared in poems and poetic views from the Intellectual

side. Seen as a continuation of the dual trends of the Elevated in “the cult of poetry” and the

Earthly in the colloquialization and quotidianization of poetry in the latter half of the 1980s, the

prioritization of technique and the commitment to the everyday in the individualized writings of

the 1990s, the Intellectual and the Popular sides both represent poetic attempts to assert social

responsibilities within a consumerist society. One reason why the boundaries between them were

blurring, from my point of view, was that they both were addressing the same postsocialist

realities, though they might assume different entry points.

However, as many scholars have acknowledged, what lay at the core of the contentions in

the Chinese poetry scene at the turn of this century and onward was poetry politics—the struggle

over claims of poethood and securing status in the Chinese and global poetry scene (Yeh 2007;

Van Crevel 2011; Inwood 2014). Such contentiousness continued in the emergence of poetry

groups and movements, such as the Lower Body (xiabanshen 下半身) group, the Rubbish

School (laji pai 垃圾派), the Third Way (disantiao daolu 第三条道路) poetry group, and the

Low Poetry Movement (di shige yundong 低诗歌运动), etc. From a Bourdieu (1993)

sociological view of literature, by making ruptures with existing poetry schools, the various

groups were asserting their own positions and redistributing the discursive power of the poetry

scene that is entangled with larger realms of power relations. In the case of contemporary

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Chinese poetry, the contentions are further intensified both by the sense of crisis caused by

poetry’s marginalization and poets’ desire to be the legitimate standard bearer of poetry and by

new social media technologies. Poetry politics is thus usually not detached from, or the inverse

of, the politico-economic realm; rather, it is intertwined in complex ways with ideological

positions, economic practices, and social groups.

Although the contentions among different poetry groups and movements appear to

replicate the situation of the latter half of the 1980s, poets’ collective initiatives after the

individualized writings of the 1990s and advocacy for equality in publishing opportunities

constitutes a conspicuous return to a socialist mentality.7 While some cultural brokers use their

personal connections with statesmen and media professionals to boost their own status in the

poetry scene, and most poets participate in poetry events sponsored by local governments and

entrepreneurs that exchange poetry’s symbolic value for political and economic capital, poets

also work with forces that seek to keep poetry “pure” or at least morally pure, such as

conservatives in the party, pro-liberty techno-savvies that oppose corruption, and the

“grassroots” (caogen 草根) who are calling out for equality and justice. Again, the postsocialist

condition of contemporary China is useful in reminding us that socialist and capitalist ideologies,

institutions, and practices are not clearly divided in poetry politics. Individuals and groups are

not cast neatly into opposing camps but seek multiple forms of alliance.

My brief overview of the history of post-Mao poetry here illustrates that the contention-

filled poetry scene has been full of collaborations and overlaps. One reason scholars have shed so

———————————— 7 Whereas poetry societies and coteries in literary circles existed long before the introduction of socialism into China, the introduction of socialism and poets’ political sensibility tinted this age-old practice, especially when it recurred after a period of cessation.

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much light on the contentions is that they either focus on the aesthetic aspect of poetry out of

their own liberal views of literature and art and caution against being co-opted into the official

discourse, or focus, from a Bourdieu perspective, on poetry as part of “literary field” of agents

engaged in a struggle for symbolic capital. Because for Bourdieu (1993: 34) conflicts are the

organizing principle of the literary field, it was the contentions among simultaneously

convergent and divergent positions that brought the poetry scene into being and brought poets,

critics, and readers together. Therefore, contentions are felt strongly in the contemporary Chinese

poetry scene. Although scholars often find commonalities and associations between the two sides

of a contention when they investigate more deeply, a fuller picture of these connections and

collaborations needs to be presented in the scholarship.

The current study uses poetry border-crossing experimentation and transmission in

twenty-first century China as a starting point to unravel the alliances formed with and through

poetry. Being artistically experimental and public facing at the same time, this crossover trend

not only (1) demonstrates poetry’s connection to the postsocialist realities of contemporary

China with its mixture of art and life, individual and collective, liberty and liability, but also (2)

fosters collaborations and fusions between poetry and other arts, technologies, and institutions,

and (3) expands readership and facilitates conversations and associations among poets, artists,

and audiences across social strata. This is not to say that conflicts on aesthetic views,

competition for status or profits, and other forms of power struggle should be overlooked; the

point is that a focus on collaboration from an intermedial perspective can generate insights that

have been left out by the contention model.

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One salient example is the discourse of “women’s poetry” (nüxing shige 女性诗歌).

Originating in the mid 1980s during the proliferation of poetry groups after Obscure Poetry, the

discourse started strong with female consciousness-raising poems by Zhai Yongming 翟永明, Yi

Lei 伊蕾, and Hai Nan 海男, etc., diversified during the years of individualized writings, and has

kept its metatextual activity through criticisms by poet-scholars such as Zhou Zan 周瓒, who

launched the Wing (Yi 翼) women’s poetry journal with Zhai Yongming to promote poems by

emerging Chinese women poets and introduce western women’s poetry in translation and

feminist thought. Seen from the perspective of contentions, the Chinese poetry scene since the

turn of this century is still dominated by men. Though individual women poets were occasionally

involved, women poets are generally absent from the literary polemics of the day. Their absence

in the Intellectual versus Popular polemic is especially glaring.

By contrast, seen from the perspective of collaboration, women poets are ultra-active on

the poetry scene, especially in poetry border-crossing experimentation and transmission, as

individual participants, organizers, and groups. At some events, the high ratio of women poets

present is itself a “border-crossing”; at others, women poets of different generations and

occupations, accomplished in multiple artistic areas, adept with old and new media, work

together to address the new possibilities for both liberation and oppression that women

experience in life and writing in postsocialist China. From this one but extremely important

example, I wish to illustrate that looking at the alliances surrounding contemporary Chinese

poetry and analyzing its border-crossing trend allows us to see the unseen.

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Poetry Border-Crossing Trend

The word kuajie 跨界 (crossing the borders) originally meant crossing provincial or

national borders; since around 2000, however, it started to be used in cases where artistic genres

were merged, artists from different areas worked together, or artists established in one art

ventured into another (e.g., Yi 2000; Ding X. 2004). This new use of the term coincided with the

popularization of “crossover marketing” (kuajie yingxiao 跨界营销) of luxury brands, a concept

first borrowed from western companies and then put to local practice (e.g., Anon. 2004; Huang

M. 2006). It also coincided with the beginning of the CCP’s adoption of a positive view toward

the middle strata in 2000 and its strategy to enlarge the group in 2002 (Cheng Li 2010: 10-11).

Last but not least, it was in the year 2000 that Internet services became available on mobile

phones, a couple of years after China’s major Internet technology companies, such as Tencent 腾

讯, Sina 新浪 and NetEase 网易, were founded, and the Ministry of Information Industry was

established.8

It is difficult to pin down the exact point where “crossing the borders” started to be

applied to poetry. Although the poet and dramatist Cong Rong 从容 (2014) claims that her 1999

poetry theatre At the Window of the Republic (Zai Gongheguo de chuangkou 在共和国的窗口)

is the earliest case of poetry border-crossing in mainland China, this is not to say that she led the

trend.9 Considering the concurrence among the promotion of “crossing the borders” in artistic

———————————— 8 The Ministry of Information Industry was replaced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2008.

9 This is based on a few facts: (1) Cong Rong retrospectively made the claim in 2014 after other scholars had already defined the term. (2) Her 1999 theatre production slightly predated the popularization of the concept “crossing the borders” in China, but when her second major poetry theatre production debuted in 2009, other poets and critics had already started to use the term. (3) In her 2014 claim, she tends to use terms such as shige de kuajie

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and marketing realms, the cooperation between the marketing of poetry and brands among the

urban middle strata, as well as the development of digital media and information technology in

China, I believe that the spread of poetry border-crossing practices has been the result of the joint

influence of individuals, institutions, and technologies, and is not an initiative launched by a

single person. One of the earliest events to attach the term “crossover” to poetry was the second

Big Square Poetry Festival (Da chang shige jie 大场诗歌节) held in Beijing in 2006 with the

theme “We are together” (Women zai yiqi 我们在一起), organized by UNESCO and sponsored

by Pan Shiyi 潘石屹 and his wife Zhang Xin 张欣, chair and CEO of SOHO China. Poetry’s

“crossover” appeared in both advertisements for and reviews of the event and referred to the

collaboration between poetry and the arts, the mixture of old and new communication

technologies, and the involved power dynamic among participants (Jing 2006; Hu X. 2006;

Inwood 2014: 124). Such border-crossing poetry events mushroomed in the following years. In

2013, the poet and critic Zhou Zan (2013)—herself a practitioner of poetry border-crossing

experimentation—started to notice poetry crossover as a phenomenon in poetry’s development in

the new century. This trend continues to ferment today, and the discourse of “poetry crossing the

borders” often tries to incorporate recent creative collaborations between poetry and other media,

even if the idea of crossover may not have been emphasized initially.10

———————————— chuanbo 诗歌的跨界传播 (poetry border-crossing transmission) and kuajie yishu xiangmu 跨界艺术项目 (crossover art project) rather than the term “poetry crossing the borders” where poetry and crossover are more tightly bound.

10 Understandably, the term “crossing the borders” is also applied retrospectively to previous crossover practices in dynastic China and to similar practices in the world. This tendency is most obvious in the discussion of Bob Dylan’s poetry and folk songs in the Chinese-speaking world after he won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. While these cases are sometimes used to validate the current experimentation on poetry crossover, they are beyond the scope of this research.

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The poetry crossover trend involves a plethora of media. Because poetry has a long

interrelationship with music in China, practitioners of border-crossing experimentation and

transmission seek to produce old and new synergies between the two arts through recitations

accompanied by music, the recasting of poems into new folk songs (xin minyao 民谣), rock and

popular songs, and the joint presentation of poems and songs. For example, singer Cheng Bi 程

璧 recast Li Yuansheng’s 李元胜 poem “I Want to While away Time with You” (Wo xiang he ni

xudu shiguang 我想和你虚度时光), Zhang Dinghao’s 张定浩 “I Love Everything Halfway”

(Wo xi’ai yiqie buchedi de shiwu 我喜爱一切不彻底的事物), and Bei Dao’s “A Bunch” (Yi

shu 一束) into new folk songs in 2015. Yan Jun’s 颜峻 experimental combination of poetry

recitation, computer-generated soundscape, projected visual collage, and poetry texts (Crevel

2011: 459-474), which started before the wide acceptance of the term “border-crossing” but was

gradually incorporated into the discourse, should not be overlooked.

Border-crossing practitioners often venture into theatre, making poetry and poets’ lives

into themes of theatrical productions, or transforming poems, whether in terms of content, form,

or aesthetics, into staged presentations. Some examples are: Meng Jinghui’s 孟京辉 2006

experimental multimedia theatre Flowers in the Mirror, Moon on the Water (Jing hua shui yue

镜花水月) based on two series of poems by Xi Chuan; Cao Kefei’s 曹克非 2010 poetry theatre

production The Women Attempting to Break the Ritual (Qitu pohuai yishi de nüren 企图破坏仪

式的女人), based on poems by women poets such as Lü Yue 吕约, Zhai Yongming, Zhou Zan,

and Yu Xiang 宇向, among others; and Qu Yi’s 屈轶 poetry theatre production Dream as Horse

(Yi meng wei ma 以梦为马) performed in Beijing in 2015.

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Apart from music and theatre, we can also find poetry border-crossing collaborations

with film, painting, photography, installation, dance, and performance art. For instance, the poet

Zhu Zhu 朱朱 organized the Poetry & Film 2018: Light of Everyday Life (Shige yingxiang 2018:

richang zhi guang 诗歌影像 2018: 日常之光) in Nanjing—an event that featured the

visualization of poetry in films, such as Poetry Factory (Shige gongchang 诗歌工厂, a.k.a.

Clown’s Revolution) directed by Sun Xun 孙逊; documentary films about poets and poetry

events, such as The Past in White Night (Baiye wangshi白夜往事) directed by Cheng

Qiangqiang 程强强. Ding Deng 丁灯 has adapted three of her poems into microfilms. The

experimental film director Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 24 City (24 cheng ji 24 城记), which was

cowritten by Zhai Yongming, incorporates Wan Xia’s 万夏 poem “Essence” (Benzhi 本质) and

a line from a poem by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河. Art exhibitions, such as Emotion of Poetry,

Aura of Paintings (Shi qing hua yun 诗情画韵), showcase ekphrastic poems; Ha Lei 哈雷 and Li

Hui 李辉 curated an art exhibition and poetry recitation in Fuzhou in 2019. Poet Su Feishu 苏非

舒 created a series of poetry controversies by reading poems naked in 2006, selling poems by

weight, opening a poetry factory in 2007, and disseminating slips of poems in Beijing’s shopping

malls in 2008.

These practices often take advantage of both old and new materials and technologies.

Using the Internet, web services, and mobile applications, poetry merges with personal journals

in numerous poetry blogs, allies with songs and images of paintings on WeChat, and imitates and

modifies the form of radio broadcast through podcasts. One good example is the brand Poems for

You (Wei ni du shi 为你读诗), established by the media tycoons Pan Jieke 潘杰客 and Zhang

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Xuan 张炫, which invites big names in Chinese industries to read poems. It is widely available

on WeChat, Weibo, Ximalaya FM, and other platforms. In print media, such as poetry journals,

border crossing also makes a presence. For example, the poetry quarterly Poetry Construction

(Shi jianshe 诗建设), inaugurated in 2011, offers a column named “Crossing the Borders”

(Kuajie 跨界), which publishes articles by scholars and artists that address concerns shared by

poetry and the arts. While poetry makes its way into television and film, face-to-face events also

allow poetry to enter the mediated spaces of theatres, museums, bookstores, bars, shopping

malls, and plazas in urban centers and tourist towns, and even in the space of public

transportations. For instance, the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum (Minsheng xiandai

meishuguan 民生现代美术馆) has been running the Poetry Comes to the Museum (Shige laidao

meishuguan 诗歌来到美术馆) program since 2012, holding poetry readings and exchange

sessions in the art space. During the first Shanghai Poetry and Arts Festival (Shanghai shige

yishu jie 上海诗歌艺术节), with the theme “The Magic Cube of Poetry” (Shige de mofang 诗歌

的魔方), it also launched the “poetry bus,” where poetry readings were embedded in a bus tour

through the bustling commercial district of Huaihai Road.

Participants in these border-crossing practices range from established poets belonging to

different camps or schools, such as Xi Chuan (representative of the Intellectual Writing), Yu Jian

于坚 (representative of the Popular Stand), and Zhai Yongming (leading figure of women’s

poetry), to emerging poets, such as Shishiran 施施然, Dai Weina 戴潍娜, Gu Yesheng 顾野生,

and Chen Nianxi 陈年喜. Artist, entrepreneurs, and media professionals are involved, but so too

are celebrities, migrant workers, ordinary poetry lovers, and those who do not usually read or

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care about poetry. Cultural products and events organized by cultural brokers, (co-)sponsored by

local governments, institutions, and businesses, or crowdfunded, tend to be serialized and can

reach out to millions, as in the case of Cong Rong’s The First Reader (Di yi langduzhe 第一朗读

者). As a border-crossing poetry brand funded by the Shenzhen Publicity and Cultural

Development Special Fund (Shenzhen shi xuanchuan wenhua shiye fazhan zhuanxiang jijin 深圳

市宣传文化事业发展专项基金), since 2012, it has held ten themed events annually and attracts

tens of thousands every year (Luo X. 2015: 32). On the other end of the spectrum, events

spontaneously launched by poets, artists, amateurs, or readers with unstable funding sources tend

to be one-offs and attract far fewer, though these events are great in number. Between these two

poles lie a range of types and scales of events. Because the partnership can be highly fluid—for

example, a poet can attend all sorts of events despite the different restrictions and affordance of

each occasion—the quality or depth of experimentation of particular cultural products and events

are not determined by scale.

Poetry Crossing Borders as Intermedial Practices

As mentioned earlier, poetry as a medium that is comprised of a network of texts, human

agents, technological supports, and practices shapes the ways we view the world and act in it. Its

mediation process is conditioned by generic conventions, historical conjunctures, individual

agencies, and contingencies.11 As shown in the previous section, border-crossing

———————————— 11 Medium as something in-between is a basic definition widely acknowledged by dictionaries and scholars. For example, Gabriele Rippl (2015: 6) points out that the English word “medium” originates from the Latin word “medius,” which means “middle” and “intermediate”; Bernd Herzogenrath (2012: 2) accepts medium as “between”; Lars Elleström (2010: 13) lists “interspace” as one of the rudimentary meanings of media. The concept of medium as something that expands has also gained recognition. For example, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000:

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experimentation in contemporary Chinese poetry features interactions between poetry and other

media, such as song, painting, television, film, and theatre. These interactions complicate

poetry’s mediation process, but also offer abundant opportunities for new insights into it. In these

border-crossing practices, the message that poetry relates the world to us through its relationship

with other media cannot be clearer. This revelation revolutionizes our understanding and

imagination of what poetry can offer and how its unique strengths can be demonstrated.

Such acts of crossing the medial borders can best be scrutinized from the perspective of

intermediality studies, which investigates the interconnectivity of all media. Despite the many

controversies in this new area of research, consensus has been reached that there exist a primary

and a secondary sense of intermediality. At the core of the primary sense of intermediality is that,

because a medium is a mixture of material, sensory, semiotic, aesthetic, and social modes of

communication, all media share characteristics with each other and are rhizomatically

interrelated (Deleuze/Guattari 1987). For example, a poetry text overlaps with a photograph or

an oil painting in that they all have a visual dimension; it is like a song or a theatre production in

that they all use words; artistic movements often affect multiple media and different media can

play similar social functions. The specificity of a medium does not lie in its being completely

unique, but in its particular combination (or what W. J. T. Mitchell [2005] calls “ratio”) of modes

and the particular way it historically interacts with (e.g., refers to, competes with, reproduces, or

reforms) other media and appropriates other media’s aesthetic and social significance. Here,

———————————— 56-59) claim that nothing is outside mediation, considering the inseparability of media, subject, and object; Marshall McLuhan (1964) understands media as extensions of man, highlighting how media affect social reality and relations.

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medial borders are not seen as natural givens, but conventions formed on the basis of material

conditions and human conceptualizations and actual praxis.

Based on this view of medial borders as conventions, the secondary sense of

intermediality is the interaction between conventionally differentiated media. It consists of the

performance of both the eliciting and breaking of these conventions and thus reforming the

reality associated with the conventions. If the primary sense of intermediality confirms the

feasibility for poetry to cross medial borders, the secondary sense announces the necessary

innovations and transformative potential in so doing.12 While the primary sense indicates that

any poetry product or event can be read through an intermedial lens, the primary and secondary

senses of intermediality are both at work in contemporary Chinese poetry border-crossing

experimentation and transmission, where conventionalized medial borders are highlighted and

transgressed based on the rhizomatic interrelation and interaction among media.

In early-twenty-first-century mainland China, while the term “intermedia”(kuameijie 跨

媒介 or kuameiti 跨媒体) is often used in the academic setting, the term most widely used by

participants in contemporary Chinese poetry is “border-crossing” (kuajie 跨界). This is largely

due to the controversy surrounding the definition of media in and beyond academia. Whereas the

definition most intermediality studies scholars and I adopt is one that integrates multiple modes

of communication, the concept of media that poets, critics, and journalists employ mainly means

mass communication technology, as they often refer to media as new media or multi-media,

emphasizing the material platform (e.g., Zhou Z. 2013; Luo X. 2015; Zheng Y. 2013). Therefore,

———————————— 12 For more details about the primary and secondary senses of intermediality, see Herzogenrath 2012: 3; Rajewsky 2005: 47; Ellestrom 2010: 27-28; Bolter/Grusin 2000: 55-58, 65-68; Rippl 2015: 3.

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intermedia in this scenario mainly means presenting poetry texts through the Internet,

programming, or digital music, etc. For these public-oriented forms of poetry, embrace of such

an intuitive use of media and intermedia is understandable. However, the seemingly more

ambiguous term “border-crossing” better captures what is going on in these practices and the

idea of intermediality I am using. Contemporary Chinese poetry border-crossing practices

usually go beyond the creative use of materials and technologies; they also experiment with

artistic conventions and create a diversified demography of participants and restructure the

relations among them. In other words, they are crossing technological, semantic, aesthetic, and

socio-cultural borders—all important dimensions of intermediality studies.13

Border crossing among media is nothing new. Poetry crossovers existed extensively in

China’s ancient and more recent past. For instance, traces of intermedial interaction can be found

in poems both from The Book of Songs (Shijing 诗经) and Elegies of Chu (Chu ci 楚辞), the two

fountainheads of Chinese poetry. While the origin of poems from The Book of Songs, thought to

have been selected and compiled by the sage Confucius (551-479 BC), is unclear, it is widely

acknowledged that at the time of Confucius, these poems were recited, accompanied by strings,

sung, and danced to, and lines of the poems were quoted, often out of their original contexts, in

diplomatic negotiations (Shih-Hisang Chen 1974). The poems from Elegies of Chu are in the

form of shamanistic summons of deities and journeys into the other world, apparently designed

for religious invocation rituals, such as dancing and incantation, though the theme and form

became stock-in-trade for later imitators (Hawkes 1959; Watson 1962).

———————————— 13 To clarify the relation among medium, art, and genre, I regard a medium as an art and its material realization, a genre as a subdivision of a medium.

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The birth of later subgenres of poetry, such as ci (song lyrics) that matured during the

Song dynasty (960-1279) and qu (arias) that flourished in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), are

also manifestations of poetry’s intermedial collaboration with music and drama, though over

time the literariness of the poetry subgenres increased and the actual performance of the songs or

dramas gradually declined. Featuring a flexibility in line length and a rigidity in tonal pattern and

rhyme scheme, ci poems can either be composed according to existing tunes or composed first

and then fitted into tunes newly made for them. Although ci poets varied in the degree of

emphasis on the musicality of their ci compositions (J. Liu 1974), poetry’s interaction with music

and performance fundamentally transformed the form, theme, ethos, and social significance of

the involved media. Similarly, as part of the prosimetric zaju 杂剧 drama, qu verses not only

follow and manipulate musical requirements, but also fit appropriately into the dramatic

dialogues rather than form a collage of poetic declamations (Crump 1974). Therefore, they both

elicit and challenge poetic, musical, and dramatic medial conventions.

In addition to music and drama, poetry has also been traditionally juxtaposed with

painting, not only through the actual practice of writing poems on the blank spaces around the

edges of painting, but also in the belief in the homology between poetry and painting (shihua

tong yuan 诗画同源). Exemplified in the artistic views of Northern Song literati like Guo Xi 郭

熙 (ca. 1000-ca. 1090) and Su Shi 苏轼 (1037-1101),14 the conviction of homology between

poetry and painting accentuates a transmedial aesthetic pursuit of the authentic, the transmedial

transferability of the virtual and the real, and the transmedial validity of coded images that merge

———————————— 14 For overviews of traditional Chinese thoughts on homology between poetry and painting, see Cheng 2006; Liu X. 1986.

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the interior emotions and external happenings—a notion associated with the traditional

correlative cosmology.

Poetry’s interactions with other media in modern and contemporary China are lesser

known, but by no means unheard of. For instance, John Crespi (2009: 114-115) notices a

performance called “An Evening Meeting of Poetry and Folksong” (shige minge yanchang

wanhui 诗歌民歌演唱晚会) held in Yan’an on January 26, 1938. Featuring a collaboration of

the recitation of new poetry and the singing of folk songs—a collaboration that unified poetic

quality and the massification of poetry, this performance event is very similar to present-day

poetry border-crossing experimentation and transmission. Such events were a frequent part of

socialist culture in China.

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the Today poets were intimately associated with

artists of the Stars (Xingxing 星星) art association, which itself was a spin-off from the Today

journal. Not only did the Stars artists contribute cover images and illustrations to the Today

journals, but the two Stars art exhibitions also featured oil paintings accompanied by poems by

Today’s leading poets. Today poets also strongly supported these exhibitions through

advertisement, logistics, and protests against official bans (Li J. 2015). Their shared pursuit of

individual expression and their common personal networks can be seen as a precursor of today’s

poetry crossovers.

In the following years, well-known Obscure poems were recast into songs and woven

into the plots of films, such as Gu Cheng’s “Comfort” (Anwei 安慰) in Zhang Nuanxin’s张暖忻

film Sacrificed Youth (Qingchun ji 青春祭). Poems were also visualized in television programs,

exemplified in China Central Television’s (CCTV) award-winning Television Poetry and Prose

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(Dianshi shige sanwen 电视诗歌散文) launched in 1998, only slightly predating Cong Rong’s

claim of producing the earliest case of poetry border-crossing transmission in contemporary

China.

Elsewhere in the world, interactions between poetry and other media have also flourished

in recent years. On the one hand, there were poetic innovations incorporated into general art

movements that advocated integration of multiple media. For example, consistent with the belief

in the merging of procedure and chance held by the Happenings and Fluxus movements from the

late 1950s to late 1970s, Emmett Williams’ procedural poems and Jackson Mac Low’s poems

written in chance-operational and deterministic methods, embraced chance and the active

participation of audiences in the generation of poetry (Higgins 2001; Glazier 2002).

On the other hand, interrelated strands of experimentation surrounding poetry are also

numerous and predate the popularization of digital media technologies. For instance, “found

poetry” creatively rearranges ready-made words and phrases found in other sources into poetic

collages; “sound poetry” aims at performance through manipulating the phonetics of language;

and “concrete poetry” uses visual layout of the poem to form images that contribute to the

meaning of the poem. Even after the arrival of digital media technologies, experiments on

traditional communication platforms, such as the poetry slam, which combines poetry

composition and performance with an emphasis on competition and audience participation,

continued to have a strong presence.

Digital poetry, which takes various forms, also immensely expands the space for

intermedial interaction in the composition, distribution, and reception of poetry. Some major

types include: generative art, the digital version of procedural poetry that employs an algorithm

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instead of a set of schemes to generate poetic texts; code poetry, written in programming

languages that might be executable or for read-only (Hayles 2007); kinetic poetry that sets words

into motion using flash, hologram, projection on architectures or human bodies, etc.; hypertext,

which consists of hyperlinks to other content and is meant to be read on screen; network

communication-based poetry, such as Instagram poetry that fits a short poem into the limited

space of an image post and circulates it on social media; and collaborative writing on Facebook,

etc. Poetry transformed into or juxtaposed with other traditional or new art media, such as

installation, dance, animation, and video clips, often facilitated by digital technologies, also

demands attention. While a world history of poetry crossovers is well beyond the scope of this

study, these are some remarkable examples. All in all, they have overlaps and parallels with

contemporary Chinese poetry border-crossing cases in terms of crossover approaches, concepts

of the merging of art and life, and an emphasis on materiality and technology, interactive

participation, and process and contingency.

These precedents of poetry crossovers demonstrate that intermedial interaction has

always existed. Many of the above-mentioned border-crossing practices, which challenged

conventional ways of doing media when they first appeared, have been repeated so often over

time that they have become conventions themselves.15 The renewed enthusiasm for intermedial

interaction in the current trend of Chinese poetry border-crossing experimentation and

transmission bears some distinctive features. First, its practitioners consciously articulate and

advocate the idea of border crossing. Second, poetry is singled out as the medium to interact with

———————————— 15 The Book of Songs, Elegies of Chu, and other earlier cases may be considered as states prior to the conventional differentiation between poetry and other media.

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an extensive variety of other media. Though the general term “border crossing” is a buzzword in

China today, it is very unusual to have a discourse that pairs one particular medium with the

term, as in “poetry crossing the borders.” In most Chinese poetry border-crossing practices,

regardless of what media poetry is interacting with, how poetry interacts with the other media, or

if the centrality of poetry in the interactions is strengthened or destabilized, the original poetic

texts are usually presented. Third, most strategies that are used to cross medial borders in

contemporary Chinese cases have not been conventionalized. Unlike the gradual standardization

of the above-mentioned poetry genres (e.g., poems from The Book of Songs, Elegies of Chu, ci

and qu poetry) or movements (e.g., Happenings and Fluxus movements, procedure poetry, and

poetry slam, etc.), protocols have not formed in contemporary Chinese poetry crossovers.

Though practitioners may learn or gain inspirations from each other’s works, they mostly explore

medial borders in their own ways.

In this dissertation, I will focus on three major types of intermedial interaction in China’s

poetry scene today: the dialogic mode, where poetry text and at least one other completed media

product are simultaneously presented without losing their respective independence but producing

new meanings and effects through their association; the transferential mode, where poetry text is

juxtaposed with at least one other media product that is based on the poetic text, some medial

characteristics are transferred between poetry and the other medium/media, and new meanings

and effects are produced in the transference and juxtaposition; and the integrational mode, where

poetry text becomes an integral part of another composite media product, and the perception,

content, structure, and significance of the involved media are all transformed because of the

composite media’s integration of poetry. In these three categories, we see a deepening of the

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inseparability of poetry and the other medium/media and the degree of challenge to medial

conventions. I hope these patterns of border crossing can point out some directions these

practices have taken, while offering space to accommodate future practices.16

Each in their own ways, the different types of intermedial interaction and breach of

medial conventions in border-crossing practices create an experience of what Bolter and Grusin

(2000) call “the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy.” Though this concept mainly

concerns visual technologies’ creation of authentic experiences, it is equally applicable to the

authentification of poetry through its relationship with other media. Bolter and Grusin (2000)

discuss the experience of immediacy and hypermediacy in both epistemological and

psychological senses. Immediacy is both a reality and a feeling of unmediatedness or

transparency—media allows the audience to see the world through them and make it feel as if the

media disappear. Hypermediacy, by contrast, is both a reality and consciousness of mediatedness

or opacity—media make the audience aware that they bring the world to it through

representation and refashioning, and convince the audience that the mediation process itself is

part of the world and thus something real.

A sense of immediacy may be achieved by making the media products or events

immersive and interactive. As a result, the audience feel as if the media are transparent and what

they represent is real. To achieve a sense of hypermediacy, media products or events may

multiply fragmented, heterogeneous, mediated spaces, so that the excess of information entices

the audience to see the in-between spaces and thus to be aware of and participate in the

———————————— 16 My categorization is based on my observation of contemporary Chinese poetry border-crossing cases and other topologies employed by scholars of intermediality studies (e.g., Lund 1992; Rajewsky 2005; Elleström 2010; Redling 2015; Rippl 2015; Straumann 2015; Wolf 2015).

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mediation process. At the same time, attention to the mediation process also appeals to human

senses and experiences, producing a sense of liveness. While hypermediacy demonstrates our

efforts to obtain immediacy, immediacy embraces hypermedia to realize itself.17 The discrepancy

between immediacy and hypermediacy are unified in the common pursuit of authentic

experiences and complement each other to form a richer realness.18 Therefore, an intermedial

practice is simultaneously in and out, at the same time immersive and constantly out of place, by

all means a lived experience.

For an audience member, it is as if the “I” is split into the immediacy “I” and the

hypermediacy “I,” but two “I/eye”s see better than one. Seeing media as networks, Bolter and

Grusin (2000) do not regard the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy solely as aesthetic

standards at specific historical moments, but medial characteristics that are conditioned by and

are reforming materials and technologies, as well as economic and political milieus. For

example, the thrill of the interdependent coexistence of immediacy and hypermediacy comes

largely from the knowledge that it is the conceptualization and skillful use of materials,

techniques, and technologies that create the seemingly “natural” experiences. Immediacy and

hypermediacy effectively spread the media content “over as many markets as possible”

(Bolter/Grusin 2000: 68) and thus often play an economic role. The assessment of immediacy

and hypermediacy is not a given but is something cultivated in different communities within

———————————— 17 Media products or events appropriate concepts, techniques, technologies or people of other media to be more immersive and interactive; the real media networks may expand themselves in their interaction with other media networks and create more opportunities for involvement.

18 The realness is not in a metaphysical sense, but in epistemological and psychological senses.

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societies, and through reimagining the immediate world and rearranging the hypermedia, the

mediated world can be reformed.

An important message the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy convey is that

media do not work in isolation. They do not replace and are not replaced by each other. Instead,

they work with each other to relate the world to us more fully. This is how contemporary

Chinese poetry seeks to relate the world to us, and its border-crossing practices perfectly

manifest this point.

In the case studies in the following chapters, I show that various types of crossover in

poetry’s experimentation and transmission create simultaneously immersive and excessive

experiences in tune with the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy. Contrary to the

common assumption that most crossover practices are bombastic acts that cater to the market’s

low cultural tastes or eulogize state achievements (e.g., Gu 2014; Qiu Z. 2018), what figures

prominently in these practices is actually poems’ and poets’ self-reflection. Poets’ self-reference,

affective articulation of personal experiences, and reflection on contemporary poetry’s status and

poetry crossover events, allow the audience to relate to the poets of flesh and blood and assume

their perspectives. Other media that the audience encounter every day or occasionally, such as

song, paintings, television shows, film, and theatre are then brought in to enrich the poets’

perspectives with sounds, images, body movements, time, and spaces. Meanwhile, because the

meaning of poets’ self-reflections changes during the interaction between the poets, the artists,

the media professionals, and the audience at the crossover events, the audience join the reshaping

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of what the poems represent.19 Hence, the audience are immersed in the atmosphere of the poetry

crossover events through a given perspective, rich sensory experiences, and interactive

participation.

However, the immersive experience is constantly disrupted by an excess of information

from the use of multiple media, which in many cases leads to incoherence. As the audience

navigates the poetry crossover products or events, they will notice the discrepancies between the

poetry texts and the other media products in terms of content, tone, mood, rhythm, structure,

style, and other characteristics. Such discrepancies often point to the different media’s material

forms and conventions and nuanced understandings of the poems by members of the production

teams. Meanwhile, because of the medial borders and because of poetry’s demanding language

and strong emotive powers that explore its partnering media’s limits, the orchestration of

multimedia in poetry crossovers also leads to changes of medial conventions and the emergence

of new practices that generate a sense of unfamiliarity to the audience. Both the incoherence

between the involved media and the unfamiliarity of new practices raise the audience’s media

consciousness, which shows that poetry, like other media, is a representation, and reminds them

of their own reactions to these representational conventions. This enlightenment of the mediation

process makes one feel his/her participation in the poetry crossovers as real-life experiences.

———————————— 19 High mutability in meaning as a specific characteristic of poetry is aptly summarized in Peter Middleton’s (2005: xi-xii) account: “Poems exacerbate what most other kinds of text try to minimize: published and unpublished, the nonpoems are circulated with strong controls on pertinent reception that allow minimal opportunities for improvised responses. … Poems by contrast are deliberately made highly vulnerable to the instabilities of transmission by the intensification of the effects of language on ear, eye, thought, and feelings so that they can also explore, celebrate, and critique the intersubjectivity of language practice.”

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Poetry’s intermedial interaction in the crossovers not only produces new aesthetic

experiences but also makes extensive economic, political, and socio-cultural impacts. First, its

collaboration with other media facilitates poetry’s venture into popular culture. On the one hand,

equipment, technologies, and techniques that are originally targeted for other purposes are used

for the presentation of poetry; the entertaining and educating functions of poetry are also

explored (if not always exploited). On the other hand, as poetry crossovers assemble

interdisciplinary teams of producers and consumers of various media products, they reach

multiple markets and thus create opportunities for making profits and negotiating ideologies.

Second, as Bolter and Grusin (2000: 71) noted, the appeal of immediacy and

hypermediacy is socially constructed, and thus “[w]hat seems immediate to one group is highly

mediated to another.” Contemporary Chinese poetry is characterized by a rise of the personal and

the everyday, images subject to multiple interpretations rather than an unequivocal political

message, a naturalist style of poetry recitation instead of the official style, and independent

publication. These practices are poets’ response to China’s transition from socialist to

postsocialist conditions, and they seem immediate to some audience but not to others, depending

on the audience’s ages, political inclinations, economic status, geographical locations, and levels

of sophistication. When poetry interacts with other media, it appropriates characteristics of the

other media, such as the exaltation of the personal and the everyday of the blog, the ambiguity of

abstract visual art, and the unadornment of the folk song, to validate these practices and thus

boost its own immediacy. In so doing, it renders the experiences described in the poems as real

and provides a venue for the audience to discuss broader social issues related to the experiences.

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Third, contemporary Chinese poetry, as a network of mediation (e.g., texts and metatexts

exist in real objects, performances really take place, and personal connections and institutions are

really established), is a real existence and a part of the real world. It is a “locus of presence and

meaning” (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 61) in itself. At poetry crossover events, media professionals

and new audience groups, especially those in the middle strata, make a presence in contemporary

Chinese poetry, while not completely departing from their profit-making, entertainment-seeking,

and rule-following everyday life. Diverse as their backgrounds may be, poetry connects them

through their reactions to and conversations over the social realities indicated in the poems and

the intermedial interaction taking place at the crossover events. The refined sensibility of the

poems and the poets and the nuanced opinions of the artists and media professionals enable the

poetry crossovers to mediate between the sometimes polarized political and cultural stances of

the audience. As a result, understanding, respect, and collaboration are fostered among those

participating in the events despite their divergences. Therefore, border-crossing experimentation

and transmission reshapes reality by reshaping the media culture.

The Crossover “Experimentation” and “Transmission”

Having discussed “border crossing” at great length, let us now turn to the terms

“experimentation” (shiyan 实验) and “transmission” (chuanbo 传播). Both terms take on a

collaborative undertone in the specific context of contemporary China. Most scholars define

literary and artistic experimentation in terms of pushing the established boundaries of tradition or

orthodox values, themes, forms, and techniques (e.g., Bray/Gibbons/McHale 2012:1; Day 2005a;

van Crevel 2011). Once a strand of experimentation matures or becomes canonized, it is shaped

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into a new tradition by newer strands of experimentation that challenge it (e.g., Bourdieu 1993:

60). As contemporary Chinese poetry crossover cases challenge medial conventions and reshape

social relations, they bear the characteristic of experimentation in the common sense.

Nonetheless, “experimentation,” often used interchangeably with “trial” (changshi 尝试) and

“exploration” (tansuo 探索) by practitioners of poetry crossover, places more weight on the

pragmatic testing process of literary and artistic innovation—namely, how the innovation

actually enhances the involved media products’ quality and gains audience’s acceptance.

Another related but only occasionally elicited term in the discourse of poetry border-

crossing experimentation is “avant-garde” (xianfeng 先锋), a concept borrowed from the west in

the early 1980s (Day 2005a), widely adopted afterward, and then gradually becoming outdated

(van Crevel 2017). Unlike the avant-garde’s self-claimed autonomy from political authority and

their potential subversion of the prevailing political order, as is indicated in the military origin of

the word (Bray/Gibbons/McHale 2012:1), the scientific connotation of the word

“experimentation” suggests an ontological inquiry into the very nature of literature and art that

aims to educate rather than to subvert.

Both the pragmatic and scientific connotations of “experimentation” are used by

practitioners of poetry crossover to incorporate the general public. This is most conspicuous in

the practitioners’ paradoxical acts of claiming the events as unprecedented and referring to

poetry crossover precedents both in the West and in China’s ancient and recent past. On the one

hand, as they emphasize their practices as unprecedented experimentation, they take the

opportunity to educate the audience on what exact innovation they have made and show how

much effort they have put into the final products or performances (e.g., Huaduo yinyue 2012;

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Chen Si’an 2014). Like science’s expansion of knowledge, this act also raises the audience’s

awareness of literary and artistic practices. On the other hand, the claim of unprecedented

experimentation also plays pragmatic functions, including highlighting the symbolic value of the

crossover practices as aesthetic adventures and cautioning the audience of the trial-and-error

nature of these practices. In so doing, the practitioners try to achieve respect, tolerance, and a

sympathetic reception from the general public. These strategies are usually met with favorable

responses from the audience, as will be seen in some cases in the following chapters.

Despite the claim of unprecedentedness, practitioners of contemporary Chinese poetry

border-crossing experimentation frequently refer to preexisting poetry crossover cases. This act

also educates the audience while legitimizing the crossover practices. On the one hand, they

update the audience over social media about recent experiments of poetry crossovers in the West

(e.g., Yi nüxing chuban 2015) to prepare the audience. On the other hand, they refer to poetry

crossover in the Chinese tradition (e.g, Cong 2014; Zhou Z. 2013; Zheng Y. 2013) and western

practices as sources of inspiration and of validation.

The reference to poetry crossover precedents does not necessarily discredit the

practitioners’ claim of unprecedentedness. As mentioned earlier, poetry crossover practices that

initially challenge medial borders can be conventionalized over time. The precedents that the

practitioners refer to mostly fall into this category and thus render contemporary crossover

practices as a new wave of experimentation. Even if some crossover practices in the West that

they elicit are still new, contemporary Chinese practitioners are not simply copying their models.

They are facing a particular conjuncture of literary and art history, an ongoing cultural exchange

with the rest of the world, and a specific postsocialist condition. Therefore, they are indeed in a

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trial-and-error stage to discover what crossover strategies and executions will push the particular

artistic and social boundaries they want to push. Contemporary Chinese poetry crossover

practitioners’ declaration of experimentation is a gesture to connect with the general public and

foster productive relations with the past and the West, while also allowing them to claim

innovativeness.

Another term frequently brought up in the trend of contemporary Chinese poetry border-

crossing practices is “transmission,” which is not surprising because increasing poetry’s public

visibility is an important way to enlarge a sympathetic readership. However, a discussion of

poetry’s transmission in contemporary China requires a consideration of the current condition of

mass communications, which harbors potential for alternative patterns of social connections and

collaborations.

By mass communications, I mainly mean the technological and institutional platforms

that circulate media products—one element of media. On the one hand, with new developments

in information and communication technologies, especially the Internet and smartphones, mass

communications in twenty-first century China is characterized by what Henry Jenkins calls a

“media convergence.” In a media convergence, one single platform disseminates various media

products that in the past were transmitted in separate channels; cross-media corporate

conglomerates tend to distribute the same media content through different channels they own;

individuals and communities actively seek and piece together parts of the same media product in

multiple appearances through multiple channels (Jenkins 2006: 1-24). On the other hand,

according to Yuezhi Zhao’s (2008: 19-74) observation, the CCP takes a proactive approach to

media management that has shifted from total control to effective dominance of media messages,

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from a top-down coercive style of communication to a “public relations model of

communication” (Ren 2012: 16) that pays attention to the audience’s actual responses. In this

process, the party simultaneously rearticulates its ruling ideology through psychological

techniques and relegates alternative opinions to limited circles rather than negating them. The

media convergence and the CCP’s relinquishing of total control give rise to a participatory

culture, “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect,

where power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in

unpredictable ways” (Jenkins 2006: 2).

Poetry border-crossing transmission in this media culture fosters relations both between

poetry and life and among participants. While both traditional and digital media allow poetry

crossover practitioners to make joint presentation of poetry texts and other arts, some poets,

cultural brokers, media professionals, and other technologically-savvy poetry lovers also work

together and distribute crossover products and promote crossover events through multiple

platforms. In this process, poets may diversify their roles into performers, audiences, critics,

consultants, or citizen journalists, etc.; meanwhile, other participants may play roles ranging

from co-authors, performers, and editors, to discussants, organizers, sponsors, and many more. In

the unpredictable interaction among the participants of poetry crossover events, interests of

individuals and institutions are negotiated, and synergies are also formed between different

pursuits, such as ideological control and social morality, profit making and pure love of poetry,

self-educating and responsibility to educate the peers, etc. As will be shown in the various cases

in subsequent chapters, with border-crossover transmissions, the poetry scene becomes a more

open and engaging place, where poems are read, heard, or perceived in multiple ways; poetry

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becomes part and parcel of everyday life; and life experiences are shared and interpersonal

relations are formed.

Tracing the Transformative Power

As is loudly proclaimed in McLuhan’s (1964: 7) famous statement “the medium is the

message,” media are not hollow conduits of information, but a dynamic network full of

transformative power. This is even more so for intermedial products, practices, and partnerships,

such as those involved in poetry border-crossing experimentation and transmission in twenty-

first century China. To trace how these poetry crossovers reflect and reshape authentic cultural

and life experiences in present-day China, I adopt multimodal analyses of the products, situated

analyses of the circulation processes, and relational analyses of interpersonal behaviors. Several

strands of efforts were involved to manage these analyses. First, collecting cases as diverse as

possible, I acquainted myself with their material properties, technological functions, generic

protocols, and institutional structures through hands-on experiences and reading and archiving

documents. Second, as a participating observer of poetry performances and events taking place

in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, I immersed myself in repeated viewing of the same

works in different performances or settings, attending the pre-performance events, joining after-

performance inner-circle celebration parties, and following promotions and reviews of the

performances and events on social media. Following a performance approach to verbal art,

especially Richard Bauman’s (1975) concept of “emergent quality,” these observations have

allowed me to keep the particularities and contingencies of the poetry crossover practices and see

where changes emerged. Third, I also engaged in interviews and casual conversations with poets,

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performers, and other participants, which not only facilitated my understanding of the relations

among them, but become, along with the dissertation itself, a part of the discourse of poetry

crossover and reshape my personal relationship with their practitioners and participants.

Although products, process, and people are the three prongs of my investigation into poetry

border-crossing experimentation and transmission, I do not always give them equal weight in the

cases I analyze in what follows, nor do I always clearly separate and handle them in the same

order in each case. I assume some flexibility here to best present the particular strength of each

case.

The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first three trace poetry crossover as a

trend by each dealing with a type of crossover strategy adopted in poetry border-crossing

experimentation and transmission, namely the dialogic mode, the transferential mode, and the

integrational mode. The three modes are arranged in an order that highlights an increasingly deep

and complex intermedial interaction. The final chapter adopts a different angle by demonstrating

how poetry crossover is not simply a phenomenon but also a critical lens that produces new

insights into works of individual poets or groups.

Chapter 1 deals with the dialogic mode of poetry crossover through a scrutiny of the

collaboration between Zhai Yongming’s poetry and Zhou Yunpeng’s new folk song in the

performance event In Ancient Times (Zai gudai 在古代). Through a performance approach, I

demonstrate that poetry’s partnership with new folk song challenged the official style of poetry

recitation, connected the performance of poetry to a contemporary ethos, and rendered Zhai’s

poetry as authentic expression of personal experiences. Addressing shared topics such as the fate

of students across time, Zhai’s poetry and Zhou’s song formed thought-provoking conversations

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that engaged the audience in the topic and directed their attention to the relationship between

poetry and song as different media. The exchange session following the performance also offered

an opportunity for the poets, performers, and the audience members to negotiate over the concept

and practice of poetry crossover. Such negotiations reminded the audience of their authentic

experience of being present at the event and allowed poetry to bind them together as a middle-

strata viewing community. Alteration of performance conventions, shifts between involved

media, and a celebration of participatory culture present in the performance are shared by many

other poetry crossovers in the dialogic mode. They render the poetic expression as authentic, the

audience’s experience with poetry as true, and poetry’s social function as real.

Chapter 2 examines the transferential mode of poetry crossover through a comparison

between the apparently unrelated but actually very similar events of the We Poetize (Shide 诗的)

itinerant exhibition held by Poetry Island (Shige dao 诗歌岛) and the Sing a Poem for You

(Shige zhi wang 诗歌之王) television program produced by Sichuan Satellite Television.

Because both events featured the transference of poetic qualities into other media products, they

share some major characteristics. On the one hand, in both events, poets and artists/singers

exemplified how to relate the poems to personal experiences, which elicited audience’s own

emotional resonances. Various correspondences between the poems and the other media products

also drew the audience’s attention to the aesthetic characteristics of the poems. On the other

hand, a discourse of overcoming obstacles of transferring poetic qualities to the other media

products are also highlighted. It simultaneously entertained the audience and raised the

audience’s awareness of media borders. Consequently, both events enabled the audience to

approach poetry texts through intermedial relations and allowed participants to negotiate their

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opinions, needs, and desires. Therefore, they suggest that the transferential mode of poetry

crossover not only touches hearts and touches on social issues, but also constitutes an occasion

for sociality.

Chapter 3 turns to the integrational mode of poetry crossovers through analyses of two

works that have received considerable critical attention—Wu Feiyue 吴飞跃 and Qin Xiaoyu’s

秦晓宇 documentary film The Verse of Us (Wo de shipian 我的诗篇) on (migrant) worker

poets’ poetry and life, and Chen Si’an’s poetry theatre production Following Huang Gongwang

on a Visit to the Fuchun Mountains (Sui Huang Gongwang you Fuchun shan 随黄公望游富春

山) based on Zhai Yongming’s pseudonymous long poem. The two cases exemplify how poetry

could explore crucial characteristics of its partnering media, while renewing them with its own

qualities. The creative incorporation of poetry texts into the documentary film and theatre

production significantly changed the former’s cinematographic style and the latter’s structure of

theatricality. The film’s frequent imposition of verses onto scenery shots and extensive use of

reenactments that presented excessive details more than representing the content of the verses,

strengthened the visuality of the film while offering an opportunity for the viewers to appreciate

the poems and readjust their relationship with the directors and the poets. In contrast to the film’s

sense of social responsibility, Zhai’s poem is a series of personal contemplations situated in

contemporary urban life. The poetry theatre production’s correspondence to and use of Zhai’s

poetry text lead to a downplay of plot in the production, an exploration of transformation as key

element of theatricality, and a reconfiguration of the fictive and the real in the theatre space.

Such a spirit of experimentalism challenged the audience’s viewing expectations and habits, and

compelled the audience to choose their relationship with the performers and thus the phenomena

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described in the poem. While these two cases had quite different concerns, together they

contribute to a fuller picture of social issues in contemporary China and suggest how poetry

could facilitate artistic innovations in other media that engender various ways to invite the

audience to engage with these issues.

The final chapter shifts gears from examinations of poetry crossover cases to an

illustration of how poetry crossover could be used as a critical lens to help critics and scholars

understand individual poetry texts, works by individual poets, or a body of poetry. As mentioned

earlier, neither poetry crossover nor intermediality is anything completely new. This age of new

media, especially the Internet, gives new momentum to old practices. This means that poetry

crossover can be everywhere, with or without a conscious claim to being such. This also means

that poetry crossover is not solely a reaction by poets, poetry lovers, or cultural enterprises and

media businesses to contemporary poetry’s marginalization. Poetry is constantly crossing medial

borders. Therefore, when particular poetry texts’ socio-cultural relevance is discussed, an

intermedial perspective should be considered. Even if socio-cultural relevance is not the main

concern, an understanding of the texts as poetry crossover products still helps to generate a more

comprehensive view and a more accurate assessment. Therefore, this chapter looks at women’s

online poetry, especially Li Cheng’en’s 李成恩 poetry posts in her personal blog, through a

crossover lens. By seeing the Internet and her body both as integral parts of her poetry and by

seeing the blog as a media genre that her poetry interacts with, I show how Li Cheng’en engaged

with the discourse of Chinese women’s poetry and strengthened the feminist agenda of her

poetry by taking advantage of characteristics of the blog format. Particularly, she validated and

enriched her feminine, personal writing with the blog’s celebration of the personal; she defined

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her bodily boundaries and managed her public image as a woman poet by manipulating

components on the blog page; and she negotiated her relationship with male authorities and other

women through clever use of the reposting functions. An examination of the interaction of Li’s

poetry and blog reveals Li’s self-empowering strategies that previous scholarship on her works is

blind to. This suggests again that a crossover lens expands our vision of how poetry can engage

socially and culturally.

While I give each of the four chapters an emphasis—authentic experience with poetry,

approachability of the poetry texts, appreciation of the poetry texts, and application of the

crossover perspective—these themes are found more or less in each case. In the conclusion, I

review these questions and the issues of poetry’s readership, social responsibility and sociality,

against the background of an experimental stage that could move toward conventionalization or

engender ever more possibilities for crossover experimentation.

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Chapter 1: The Dialogic Mode of Poetry Crossover

The dialogic mode is the most discernible and commonly seen collaborative strategy in

poetry border-crossing practices in twenty-first century China. Presenting completed and often

published poetry texts along with other finished media products or prearranged performances,

this form of crossover happens less in the composition process, and mostly in the distribution,

performance, and reception stages. In this type of crossover, although poetry texts and the other

media products do not lose their independent status as individual works, meaning any of them

can be appreciated without knowledge of the other works, bringing the works together in new

contexts and on new platforms affects the way the works are presented and perceived, their

meanings, and their aesthetic, economic, and relational impacts. The combination of poetry texts

and other media products is so common that it sometimes becomes conventionalized and creates

its own generic borders. My focus in this chapter is on experiments that attempt to move beyond

these conventionalized approaches and create new forms of dialogue between poetry and other

media.

My investigation into the dialogic mode of poetry crossover mainly focuses on the

question of how it positions contemporary Chinese poetry as something authentic against the

public suspicion of it being outdated, pretentious, or even little more than embarrassing howls.

My analysis centers on poetry’s dialogue with songs, especially new folk songs (xin minyao 新

民谣), in the case of In Ancient Times: A Concert of Poetry, Song, Drum and Music (Zai gudai:

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shi ge gu yue yinyuehui 在古代——诗·歌·鼓·乐 音乐会). I illustrate that this type of crossover

practices enhances poetry’s authenticity by immersing the audience in the poet’s perspective and

raising its awareness of the crossover event as a real happening where conversations between

poems and other media products, the poet/performers and the audience, actually take place. The

creation of this immersive and media-conscious experience made both aesthetic and social

impacts.

As far as the immersive experience is concerned, because new folk song is usually

performed in a casual environment, the joint presentation of poetry and new folk song induced

new performance conventions that offered an opportunity for poetry to showcase and validate its

break from the rigid theatricality of the official style of poetry recitation and embrace of a

naturalist style of poetry performance. Such a performance style allowed the audience members

to identify with the poet from their own social stances and feel her expressions as genuine.

Meanwhile, it also engaged with China’s postsocialist situation. Compatible with the celebration

of individual expressions in contemporary Chinese poetry, it reflected a shift of social mentality

from ideological transparency to human complexity and the idea that “the personal is the public”

(Zhai 2010a). For audience members whose impression of modern poetry remained with official-

style poetry recitation, this crossover performance updated their knowledge and challenged them

as to what kind of poetry and presentation of poetry counted as real, and how they should

comprehend the realities in present-day China. For audience members with a mixture of

Neoliberal and New Left tendencies, the naturalist performance of contemporary Chinese poetry

might strike a chord and make them sympathetic to criticism of the fast-paced, alienating,

consumerist society through articulations of personal experiences.

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In terms of the media-conscious experience, because poetry and new folk song

performances in In Ancient Times preserved relative independence, frequent and rapid shifts

between the compartmentalized spaces of the two media were highly noticeable. Meanwhile, a

collective reflection on the performance held toward the end of the crossover event merged the

audience exchange session of poetry recitation with the encores of a concert. It carved out a

space for audience members to participate in the event and interact with the poet/performers and

other audience members in new ways. Aesthetically, the dexterous shifts between poetry and

new folk song maintained the audience’s attention while highlighting borders, common grounds,

and complementarity between the media. The collective reflection of the performance generated

a sense of on-the-spotness among the audience with its interactivity while allowing them to bring

in previous experiences and knowledges gained from other mass communication platforms. A

deep involvement in the performance event and an awareness of intermedial relations

authenticated the encounter with poetry in this crossover event as a real experience. Socially, the

shifts between media challenged the viewing habits of poetry lovers, music fans, and other

audience members that were gathered together by the crossover event. The collective reflection

of the performance also displayed diverse attitudes toward the concept and praxis of “poetry

crossover.” As conversations among the poet, the performers, and the audience members went

on, the embedment of poetry in popular culture and everyday life, the audience’s respect for the

poet/performers, and their celebration of democratic consumption of culture and individual

responsibility for the collective, formed real responses to the alienating effect of consumer

society and actually strengthened the bonds among the middle-strata audience members. Hence,

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a change in how to combine poetry and new folk song changed the reality of the participants’

consumer lives and the relationship among them in this one particular performance event.

In Ancient Times as Performance

One early example of the dialogic mode of poetry crossover is In Ancient Times: A

Concert of Poetry, Song, Drum and Music, a live performance that took place in the Hangzhou

Grand Theatre (Hangzhou da juyuan 杭州大剧院) on the rainy evening of Sunday, July 8, 2012.

Featuring the poet Zhai Yongming 翟永明, the poet and “new folk” singer Zhou Yunpeng 周云

蓬, the drummer Wen Feng 文烽, and the zither (guqin 古琴) performer Wu Na 巫娜, this two-

hour event consisted of a programmed alternation between and synchronization of poetry

reading, songs, and music. Meanwhile, the performance was accompanied by the projection of

surtitles and digitally generated patterns or animated ink-wash landscape paintings on a rear

screen. Its three themed sections, “Water Clock” (Genglou 更漏), “Ferry” (Dutou 渡头) and

“The Distal Cowherd Star” (Tiaotiao Qianniuxing 迢迢牵牛星), were followed by a partially

arranged and partially improvised encore song as well as a question and answer session.

Sponsored by the non-profit music promotion organization Flower Music (Huaduo yinyue 花朵

音乐), the event was advertised, documented, and reviewed online. I attended the performance

event in person, watched the official video recording of the full event shot from the center of the

performance hall, and gathered some feedback on the performance through casual chats with

audience members after the event, comments posted online, and news media coverage.

Unsophisticated as the program appeared to be, it was not lacking experimentation or

socio-cultural engagement. Whereas various forms of crossover were used in this one-off event, I

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mainly focus on the dialogic crossover between poetry and new folk song. As I have discussed in

the introduction, poetry as a medium is a network of people, objects, and practices that transmits

and transforms information in certain modal mixtures; it is far more than just an accumulation of

poetic texts. Therefore, In Ancient Times was not merely an expression of a bunch of poetry

texts; the event itself was part and parcel of the multi-dimensional nature poetry. Because live

performance played a crucial role in the event, my analysis mainly takes a performance

approach. It refuses to treat a written poetry text as an immutable original and its performances

as secondary derivatives, but regards every version of the poem—ranging from written

manuscripts and print magazines to live performances and audio recordings—as constitutive

layers of poetry’s multiformity (Bernstein 1998: 4-5, 6-8).

One aspect of the performance approach that is highly relevant to my methodology is

Richard Bauman’s concept of “emergent quality.” Bauman treats verbal art as performance, “as a

species of situated human communication” (1975: 291), and regards it as a display of

competence of expression. Although it is the performer’s responsibility to demonstrate this

competence, it is subject to the audience’s assessment and enhances the audience’s experience

through “the intrinsic quality of the act of expression itself” (Bauman 1975: 293). What should

be understood as a performance and how meanings of a performance should be interpreted is

keyed by the use of “a structured set of communicative means” (Bauman 1975: 295; Bender

1996; Foley 2002) that are conventionalized and specific to given speech communities. Although

these “keys” are patterned and normative, each performance is unique. A particular performance

simultaneously abides by performance conventions and brings in creative variations, as a result

of the “interplay between communicative resources, individual competence, and the goals of the

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participants, within the context of particular situations” (Bauman 1975: 302; Toelken 1996;

Gibbs 2020). Such a tendency for transformations to emerge out of conventions is what Bauman

calls the “emergent quality” of performance (Bauman 1975: 302).

Because communicative conventions are socio-culturally conditioned, the “emergent

quality” of performance is crucial in the restructuring of social relations. As far as the

performance of poetry crossover is concerned, the variations that emerge from the particular

performance are inevitably conditioned by the presence of other media. Such an adjustment to

the particular performance event and interaction with performance conventions engage the

audience and (mis)place it between the current performance and socio-culturally meaningful past

conventions. Whereas the “emergent quality” is available to any empirical performance, it makes

a particularly strong presence in poetry border-crossing practices such as In Ancient Times,

because performance conventions are consciously elicited and altered.

Mark Bender’s (1999) notion of “shifting” is also helpful in this regard. In his

observation of the Suzhou chantefable (tanci 弹词) performance, Bender notices the

phenomenon that storytellers customarily “change from one sort of genre, style, register, mode,

means… or communicative channel to another” (Bender 1999: 182). Tracking the patterns of

shifting (between various genres in the same performance, between speaking and singing, and in

music, gestures and movements, performers, costumes and ornaments, as well as extra-

performance conditions), Bender highlights that these shifts not only stimulate the performers

themselves, but also engage the audience by arousing and maintaining its attention. In addition to

these practical effects, the high frequency and quick pace of the shifts also contribute to the

artistic strength and vitality of the medium (Bender 1999: 193). Regular audiences of Suzhou

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chantefable performances are familiar with the shifting and they can navigate deftly between the

constitutive elements of the performance. For my purposes, shifting is an important feature in In

Ancient Times introduced through the combination of two or more media. On top of the engaging

effects brought in by constant changes, the uncustomary and perhaps incoherent shifting between

these media directs performers’ and audience’s attention to the margins of the involved media,

which encourages them to look beyond the performance itself and reflect on their own position

vis-à-vis such a hybrid performance and their relations with each other.

Staging Poetry

As Charles Bernstein (1998: 3) has nicely put it, “the performance of poetry is as old as

poetry itself.” The statement reminds us that poetry is indeed a medium with mixed modes and

that the integration of poetry and performance has long been conventionalized. Compared with

the chanting and improvisation of Chinese classical poems featured in the age-old “elegant

gatherings” (yaji 雅集) of literati as a means of literary socialization (Crespi 2010: 8-9), staged

performance of Chinese modern vernacular poetry in the form of “poetry recitation” (shi

langsong 诗朗诵) is a more recent creation. In staging poetry along with song and music, In

Ancient Times both actively elicited and diverged from performance conventions of poetry

recitation. One effect was that it exalted the authenticity of the recited poems through the

selection of performance venue, cast, style, and poems.

In his book Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China

(2009), John Crespi carefully delineates the gradual institutionalization of poetry recitation as a

performance genre in modern and contemporary China. How the new poetry should sound was

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theorized from the beginning by Hu Shi 胡适 (1891-1962), its primary advocate and one of its

first creators, and later by the left-wing China Poetry Society (Zhongguo shige hui 中国诗歌会).

Although the poets who first practiced reading aloud and reciting new poems primarily

experimented with new poetry’s prosody, during the war period (1930s-1940s) came, the kind of

poetry recitation practice that stressed communicating interior content to the masses prevailed

and was consolidated. As poetry recitation was massified during the socialist years (1940s-1976),

and continued and mutated in the Reform era (after 1976), it has not only established its own

protocols and aesthetics, but also maintains its social function of orchestrating what Crespi

(2009: 25) calls “a national interiority,” an emotional core that changed along with the nation’s

developmental needs.

The conventions of poetry recitation that are so often challenged by avant-garde poets but

still have a strong hold in China today belong to the official-style poetry recitation whose

popularity peaked in the early 1960s. In the form of poetry competitions, poetry rallies, poetry

recitals, or spare-time training courses, etc., poetry recitations in the early 1960s often took place

in rural people’s communes and in performance halls, theatres, schools, and cultural palaces

(multi-purpose centers for political education and entertainment) in the capital Beijing and other

large cities. Featuring the performance of professional actors, poets, and amateurs (e.g., students,

peasants, and workers), and often attracting an audience of hundreds or thousands (mostly

educated urbanites), these poetry recitation events tended to scale large and to be fervently

welcomed (Crespi 2009: 143-148).

Official-style poetry recitation suffered from a tension between the expression of

spontaneous revolutionary passion and a calculated application of theatrical techniques (Crespi

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2009: 149-164). While the theatrical techniques were supposed to transparently convey the

natural moving power of revolutionary passion, they were also a source of unnatural formalism

that threatened or sabotaged the authenticity of the former in terms of logic and praxis. These

theatrical techniques included a selection of poems within a narrow politically-correct emotional

breadth; the proper use of natural voices, facial expressions, and hand gestures; the articulation

of standard Beijing dialect with accurate consonants, vowels, and tones; the appropriate use of

different types of pauses, stress, and intonations; as well as a superb control of rhythm, speed,

and breathing (Crespi 2009: 149-164). Even today, official-style poetry recitation serves socialist

politics and aesthetics.

Meanwhile, a whole range of challenges to official-style poetry recitation have also

formed. For example, although the recitation of some Obscure Poems inherited the dramatized

form of the official-style poetry recitation, it also defied the socialist homogenization of

emotional content limited to revolutionary fervor and class love (Crespi 2009: 164-165). In some

poetry recitation clubs, socialist recitational aesthetics is promoted but mainly to serve personal

rather than socialist goals (Crespi 2010). Poetry recitation of various styles is also used at

government or business sponsored events to “boost local commerce, consolidate brand images,

and distinguish cities and regions from their neighbors to attract financial investors and

consumers” (Inwood 2014: 24). Avant-garde poets have opposed the socialist recitational

aesthetics because it seemed to preclude the individuality they celebrated. They advocate a

minimalist style of poetry reading and support the use of heterogeneous dialects, rather than

standard Mandarin, as a form of resistance against the state’s linguistic hegemony over its

subjects (e.g., Yu J. 2012). Ordinary people have also shown disgust toward the recitation of

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modern poetry, if not always its content, for its embarrassingly pretentious, exaggerated, and

empty style (Anon. 2019)—a problem that was detected but not discussed by reciters themselves

in the early 1960s (Crespi 2009: 152-155) and become even more conspicuous in a generation

unfamiliar with the cultural milieu of the burgeoning years of poetry recitation. All these

oppositional practices are driven by a question: how can the public presentation of poetry render

it authentic in content, performance form, and function to individual Chinese today?

At a first glance, the woman poet Zhai Yongming’s reading of her poems as part of the In

Ancient Times performance is a world apart from official-style poetry recitation. However,

placed against the backdrop of official-style poetry recitation and its mutations and challengers,

Zhai’s poetry reading reveals how its collaboration with song and music affected its application

of poetry recitation conventions and generated a sense of authenticity. To begin with, the use of

song and music heavily influenced the stage setting of the reading and the meanings of the

performance space. Held in the Modular Hall (Kebian juchang 可变剧场), the smallest but most

flexible performance space in the Hangzhou Grand Theatre, with its 400 fixed seats and space to

add other chairs, the setting of the performance did not fit squarely with the norms of poetry

recitation. Although a space accommodating over 400 seems modest when compared to official

events or entertainment performances, which often attract over ten thousand, this performance

was at the upper end of the spectrum for poetry recitation today. Normally, holding poetry

recitations on a grand stage in a grand hall or in the open would be reserved for government or

business sponsored events serving explicit or implicit goals, such as building a socialist country

in the early 1960s or building the country’s postsocialist cultural economy in the early twenty-

first century. However, adding song and music into the mix ruled out the necessity of seeking

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official or commercial sponsorship—the anticipation of drawing a large audience through its

multiple artistic forms justified the use of a large stage, and a partnership with Flower Music (a

non-profit music promotion organization) and revenue from ticket sales gave it financial

supported. This is not to say that poetry recitations at government or business sponsored events

necessarily lack authentic emotions and thoughts, appropriate expression, or genuine artistic and

social effects. But the choice of a large performance space for In Ancient Times created an

atmosphere very different from government or business sponsored events, one that celebrated the

expression of individual spontaneity and encouraged the audience to let down its guard and to

immerse themselves in the performance.

Nonetheless, the In Ancient Times performance is still different from other poetry

readings that are considered more authentic. Poetry readings at spontaneous in-group gatherings

aimed at honing the poetic art and fostering intimacy among poets normally take place, with or

without podiums, in small spaces: a salon in a bookstore, a classroom, a café bar, or a backyard,

etc. Compared with these small-scale events, the clearly demarcated on- and off-stage separation

and the physical distance between the stage and back row seats in the In Ancient Times

performance posed challenges to the formation of close relationships between the performers and

the audience. These challenges were met by the role of technologies.

Charles Bernstein (1998: 8) calls poetry reading “an oasis of low technology” in “an age

of spectacle and high drama.” He defends poetry readings’ “minimal” or “anti-expressivist” style

of performance—a “lack of spectacle, drama, and dynamic range”—as a valid performance style

(Bernstein 1998: 8). It is especially true for poetry readings within a tightly-knit circle of poets

and friends in a small enclosed space, where the unaided and unaccompanied voice of the

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performer reaches the audience in an unmediated and intimate way. This feeling of immediacy

and intimacy leads listeners to immerse themselves into the performance and to accept and

embrace the sincerity of the performer. In larger performance spaces, by contrast, the allure of

physical proximity disappears. Technologies can be used to break down that distance and foster

performer-audience communication, but they also raise other problems. The poet Yu Jian (2012)

takes issue with technologies, especially the microphone, on the grounds that technologies

produce only an imitation (mofang 模仿) of the original voice (yuansheng 原声) of the

performer; much is lost in the imitation. Meanwhile, for Yu Jian the microphone also symbolizes

state power and thus induces speakers to give up their local dialects and use standard Mandarin.

The combined effects of technology’s material limitations and its symbolic meaning effaces

individual differences and subjugates individuals to state hegemony. In sum, Yu designates

poems as “natural” (ziran 自然), and poetry recitation as “stagy,” or “artificial” (zuozuo 做作).

Linking technologies with the inauthenticity of poetry recitation, as Yu Jian does, is

partly motivated by an idealist admiration for or belief in the unmediated and partly a distaste for

the unnatural theatrical formalism and narrow range of emotions in official-style poetry

recitation of the Mao years. However, the introduction of song and music performance into

Zhai’s poetry reading in In Ancient Times deconstructed this myth of immediacy and offered a

different angle to look at technologies. Combined with instrumental sounds and vocal sounds,

the speaking voice of the poet was no longer the sole source of “originality”; rather, it mediated

what the poet thought and felt during the performance (e.g., reading the poems), within the limits

and potentials of the material condition (e.g., the poet’s vocal cords) and the poet’s intentions

and skills, along with the other sounds onstage. The sounds of drums or zither were no less

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authentic than the speaking voice as a bearer of meaning and of a sensorial experience. In this

vein, both the speaking voice and the microphone are forms of mediation, the former mediating

the poet’s thoughts and emotions and the latter mediating the voice. The microphone’s second-

hand mediation is not necessarily less authentic than the poet’s voice, because it can be the

fulfillment of the poet’s intention to augment the sound of her vocal cords. Therefore, the

combination of various media highlights the mediation process as a common condition, and thus

justifies the use of technologies.

As for the concern that technologies’ failure to capture the nuances of the poet’s speaking

voice would lead to a loss of authenticity, poetry’s collaboration with song and music in In

Ancient Times shows that advanced technologies, rather than a total rejection of them, offered a

solution. Live song and music performances today usually require advanced sound equipment,

which again showcases the pervasiveness of mediation. When technologically-facilitated

mediation is inevitable, improvement in technologies becomes the best way to capture more

nuance and support a wider range of expressions. On the one hand, as the audio equipment,

which is most likely intended for commercial song and music performances rather than poetry

recitation, improves in reducing background noise and accurately responding to sound wave

frequency, it will reproduce the speaking voice with higher fidelity and more detail. On the other

hand, the improved sound quality encourages people to speak into the microphone in new and

varied ways. For example, whereas poor sound equipment can lead, as in the early days of sound

film, to the exaggerated and stilted articulation of words, with advanced sound technologies the

performer can now be heard clearly even if he/she simply whispers into the microphone. As a

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result, a wider range of performance becomes possible for poetry readings in large settings. In In

Ancient Times, detailed and varied voices enhanced the authenticity of the performance.

Another major factor contributing to the perception of a link between technology and the

staginess and inauthenticity of poetry recitation comes from the conventionalized connection

between the microphone and official-style poetry recitation, which the performance of In Ancient

Times attempted to undo. It is not that the microphone forces speakers to adopt the theatrical

formality of official-style poetry recitation, but that performances elicit and redefine the uses and

connotations of the microphone.

The driving force behind the theatrical formality of official-style poetry recitation is a

pursuit of communicative transparency, based on the premise that as long as the poem’s socialist

enthusiasm is genuine, the only thing recitation need do is convey these feelings clearly with

minimal ambiguity. These natural feelings will then touch the audience and thus confirm

themselves as true and real. Not surprisingly, in this style of recitation, characteristics such as

speech clarity, sonority, and schematized rhythms are greatly valued (Crespi 2009: 149-164;

Crespi 2010).

However, as the market economy developed and China joined the world, the kind of

ideological unity undergirding official-style recitation has collapsed. With the celebration of the

individual in the Obscure Poetry and the exaltation of the personal and the everyday in the poetry

scene that followed, the proliferation of subtle individual emotions and thoughts could no longer

be captured by the single norm of revolutionary passion. Instead of demanding absolute

transparency, these emotions and thoughts are rife with ambiguity and obscurity and require new

forms of performance and expression that the microphone, sound systems, and music offer. The

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microphone’s capability of amplifying the human voice endows its user with a stronger voice

and thus enhanced speech power, but it does not, as Yu Jian fears, necessarily represent state

power. With the country’s economic and technological development, the microphone is more

familiar than ever to ordinary citizens, especially urbanites—best exemplified by the popularity

of karaoke. Such familiarity with the microphone, as well as the common use of multiple

microphones at a single event (sometimes passed among the audience members), decentralizes

the power that the microphone symbolizes, and attaches an element of individual agency to it. In

my view, using the microphone in poetry recitation can no longer be seen as excluding individual

authenticity.

For the particular performance of In Ancient Times, the sound equipment of the theatre

space, plus surtitles projected onto a screen, ensured the communicability of the presented

poems, allowing Zhai Yongming to speak in strongly accented Mandarin with an untrained voice

and minimal gestures and facial expressions—nuances that cue authenticity. Meanwhile, the

performance of song and music also pointed to the materiality of the voiced poems as sound.

Like the music, which could be heard but might not be “understood,” the voiced poems also

demonstrated the lag between perception and comprehension (Bernstein 1998: 16-18) and

justifying this poetry reading’s celebration of an elusiveness consistent with the poet’s subtle

individual emotions and thoughts. This variation of individual expression contributed yet another

layer of authenticity to the performance.

As discussed so far, high technology actually enhanced the authenticity of the

performance of In Ancient Times. Does this threaten the “minimal” or “anti-expressivist”

performance style of poetry reading that Charles Bernstein points to? Not at all. On the contrary,

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in this setting, it is technology’s ability to capture subtle nuances and variations, that can actually

sustain the “minimal” or “anti-expressivist” performance style. Can the use of high tech in a

large space replicate the effects of the small space in fostering intimacy? Although the

interpersonal intimacy between performers and audience allowed by a large public event seldom

matches that of a small private event, the former is not intended to replace the latter. The

different kind of intimacy that emerges at a large public event is itself worth recognizing.

Although the advanced sound equipment does not change the visually perceived distance

between the poet and the audience or change the public nature of the performance, that it allows

the poet’s voice to sound as if the poet is nearby can change the way the poet speaks. Instead of

speaking to a mass at the top of her lungs, she is now able to speak to individuals with a whole

range of her everyday voices, volumes, intonations, and tones, allowing her to sound intimate

and authentic. My recognition of the use of high tech should not suggest a technological

determinism that indiscriminately endorses its role in artistic expression; rather, it shows that

technologies can mean and do very different things in a performance’s interactions with its

conventions at a given historical moment in a given culture. In its combining of poetry, song, and

music, In Ancient Times weakened the microphone’s associations with inauthenticity and

strengthened its association with authenticity.

Another important source of authenticity of In Ancient Times lay in the cast of the

performance, which pointed to a poem’s authenticity lying in its actual performance rather than

in some fixed text. In contrast with the presence of professional performers in the fields of new

folk song, drums, and zither music, Zhai Yongming, the author of the poems, performed in In

Ancient Times instead of a professional poetry reciter, such as an actress or a television presenter.

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The presence of the author on the stage made a strong statement of authenticity in at least three

ways. First, avoiding professional poetry reciters, who are often associated with official-style

poetry recitation and political propaganda, the cast of In Ancient Times formed through personal

connections that, as the performers later acknowleged, gestured to the performance’s

spontaneity.

Second, unlike poems, which are customarily appreciated through reading the written

text, song and music are usually appreciated through actual performances, not by reading

musical scores. The joint presentation of poetry, song, and music shifted the audience’s attention

to the performative aspect of poetry. Seeing performance as an intrinsic part of poetry’s

meaning-making mechanism formed a rupture both with official-style poetry recitation and with

its critics, for whom poetry’s authenticity is firmly anchored in the text and for whom the

performance of poetry is something external, transparent at best and distorting at worst.

However, when performance is regarded as an intrinsic part of poetry, it becomes an organic and

authentic element of the sensorial pleasure, affective power, and meaning of the poem.

When the text is prioritized, the author is usually considered the ultimate authority to

interpret and perform the poem. However, when one considers the temporal, spatial, and

experiential distance between the author who reads the poem in the present and the author who

wrote the poem years earlier, the authenticity of authorial reading becomes problematic. As Peter

Middleton (2005: 33) observes, in a poetry reading, “the poet performs authorship, becoming in

the process a divided subject by reproducing language constructed into a poem at some time

prior to the reading, while reading aloud as if it were a spontaneous speech act arising at the

present.” This distance between the two authors almost sabotages the authenticity of the reading

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poet. However, when performance is deemed an intrinsic part of poetry, authorial reading

becomes a moment in the ongoing process of creation. The cultural and personal changes that the

poet experienced between the current performance and the poem’s initial composition, as well as

the relationship between the poet and the audience, are compressed into the poem through the

way the poet reads it. It is the poet’s continuous creation of the poem through writing and

performing that makes authorship important and authentic. These situated mutations of the poem

enabled by performance constantly reassert the poem’s validity and its ongoing relevance to the

real life of the poet, to the audience, and to those represented in the poem.

Third, as Middleton suggests (2005: 33-36), the physical presence/presentation of the

author substantiates the poem into the body and social identity of the poet. The fact that the poet

is assuming the first person singular “I” in her direct speech to the audience at the moment

verifies that the poet means what she says (either consistent with or contradictory to the meaning

of the poem in text form based on the particular way she delivers it). She is embodying the poem,

at least momentarily, and this embodiment is strengthened when one imagines the moment she

wrote the poem. In In Ancient Times, the poet’s embodiment of the perspective of the poems was

further reinforced by the autobiographical and self-reflexive nature of the performed poems.

Reflecting on the Poet’s View

Having covered the particular arrangement of stage, performance space, technology,

style, and cast of the performance of In Ancient Times, I address in this section the interplay

between the perspective of the performed poems and the particularities and contingencies of the

performance that generated an experience for the audience at once immersive and media-

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conscious. Named after Zhai Yongming’s poem “In Ancient Times” and built around her poetry,

the performance of In Ancient Times as a whole expressed a nostalgia for the poetic past. The

poet’s frank self-reflections on her personal relationship with “ancient times” were materialized

by the poet’s physical presence on stage and excessive details that arose both from the planned

program and from unexpected happenings during the performance. As a result, audience

members were invited to empathize with the flesh-and-blood author, while creating their own

experiences by navigating through the excess in their own ways. Instead of aiming toward

transparent communication, the performance’s exaltation of excess exposed the role of mediation

and made it serve the interests of authenticity and genuineness. Hence, knowing more about the

poet while not falling prey to the transparency myth, the audience could recognize the

authenticity of the poetry it was encountering here and now. This authenticity suggests that life

today may be poetic after all, despite poetry’s tangled relationship with the past.

The performance began with Zhai Yongming’s reading of her 1999 poem

“Chrysanthemum Lanterns Flow Near” (Juhua denglong piao guolai 菊花灯笼漂过来), in which

she reflects on her own act of imagining the past. Featured under the section “Water Clock,” the

poem recounts a woman’s fantasy of ancient times during sleepless nights. She envisions an

ancient gentry lady’s daily midnight search for the owner—probably a lover—of the

chrysanthemum lanterns along the riverbank accompanied by singing children, her wet nurse and

maidservants. The last two stanzas of the poem explicitly reflect on her own reactions toward her

fantasizing:

If I sit on the floor I will be afraid of that force I will be afraid of those shadows of chrysanthemums lights people

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I will also be fast and slow jingling in the room If I sit on the couch or on the bed I will enjoy I will also feel myself fading away turning colors I will also hold the cigarette in my mouth all night long then get off the ground 如果我坐在地板上 我会害怕那一股力量 我会害怕那些菊影 光影 人影 我也会忽快忽慢 在房间里丁当作响 如果我坐在沙发或床头 我就会欣赏 我也会感到自己慢慢透明 慢慢变色 我也会终夜含烟 然后 离地而起 (Zhai 2012: 246-247)

This reflection on the woman speaker’s fantasizing betrays the poet’s delicate distance from the

past—longing to be there, afraid of being there, and knowing she is not there. While the images

of the flowing river, floating chrysanthemum lanterns, and the movement of the ancient search

party in earlier sections of the poem naturally invoke the passing of time, the physical space of

the speaker’s home replicates the ancient search scene, with the floor resembling the river and

the couch or bed the riverbank. Seen this way, the woman speaker’s fear of sitting on the floor

derives from her conflation of the floor with the river of passing time, from a fear of being

caught up by time and assimilated by the past. However, sitting on the couch or bed, she is

removed from the river of time; distanced from the eerily graceful past, she is now able to

appreciate the past as she likes and actively identify with and carry it on. Meanwhile, the contrast

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between the all-night smoking in the second to last line and the abrupt departure in the final line

indicates she is leaving behind the slowness of the past and returning to her fast-paced urban life

of the present. Both the correspondence between the contemporary room setting and the search

scene along the ancient riverbank and the gap between the imagined past and the actual present

highlight a distance between the here and now and ancient times. The revelation of this distance

from the past renders the woman speaker someone locatable and her experience sharable to

contemporary readers.

As one of her favorite works, Zhai has read “Chrysanthemum Lanterns Flow Near” on

various occasions. Her In Ancient Times performance materialized the poem’s perspective in a

way that simultaneously immersed and distanced the audience. Most noticeably, the multifarious

sensory experiences in the performance enriched the perspective of Zhai’s poetic speaker. For

instance, bell sounds preceding Zhai’s reading of the poem were spaced out to suggest the

sounds of night watches, which cued the theme of this section of the program and the midnight

setting of the poem. The musical accompaniment also reinforced a sense of suspense and tension

lurking in the quietness of the dark night. The darkness on the stage, the blueish spotlight on the

poet, and the poet’s black cape, black shirt, and black dress all enriched the scenario of sleepless

nights and added a tint of gruesome tranquility. The mise-en-scene of the performance

materialized the ghastly beautiful scenes that Zhai’s woman speaker envisions of the past and

brought the audience into them.

Meanwhile, some discrepancies between the actual performance and the poetry text

added a new layer of meaning to the poem. Whereas the projection of floating smoke onto the

rear screen visualized the act of smoking and the associated act of fantasizing in the poem, its

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combination with still images of classical landscape painting made a connection between the

story of the gentry lady and mountain-dwelling recluses. The otherwise mundane story of

searching for a lover was imbued with a transcendental sense of soul searching. Although a sense

of transcendence can be found in the poem itself—the woman speaker’s fantasy of ancient times

is rendered as a fearsome but alluring sanctuary from the fast-paced present—the references to a

sequestered life in the projected landscape paintings made the sense of transcendence clear.

Besides a paradoxical relationship with ancient times, this desire for transcendence from

daily trifles was another point where the audience could relate to the poet and enter into the

poem. The poet’s physical presence, her filling the first person “I” with this presence, and prior

knowledge of the poet the audience brought with them to the performance (most of them at least

gathered some basic information about the poet from promotional texts of the event), might raise

some of the following questions: What makes this well-established and widely acclaimed poet

sleepless? Why does this owner of the White Night (Baiye 白夜) bar, host of cultural salons, and

busy person with tight schedules squander so much time on midnight fantasizing? Is it a gesture

of resistance to the emptiness of today’s busy life of production and consumption? Is it what

makes her a poet? Doesn’t a part of me feel the same? This resonance was best demonstrated in

one audience member’s comment that this performance represented a pursuit for perfection in

this incomplete, utilitarian age (Huaduo yinyue 2012) and another audience member’s

confession: “I started weeping from the moment she read the first poem” (Anon. 2012d). This

tear-shedding would seem to have arisen from an intense desire for transcendence that Zhai’s

poetry reading satisfied. Here, poetry’s coordination with other media together with the physical

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presence of the poet enveloped the audience in details and sensory experiences, creating common

ground to accept and understand the poet’s perspective.

Nonetheless, the authenticity of Zhai Yongming’s reading of this poem in In Ancient

Times did not only derive from the audience’s immersion in the scenes of the poem and

identification with the poet, but also from an awareness of the mediation process elicited by the

program and incidents of the performance. The event was carefully planned. For example, the

bell sounds that preceded Zhai’s reading not only enhanced the perspective of the speaker/poet,

but also functioned to draw the audience’s attention, preparing them for the entire performance,

and setting a pace for the recitation. These functions alerted the audience that a performance was

on and conveyed the message that it required an extra degree of theatricality to pull the audience

from the hustle and bustle of their daily affairs to enjoy the performance. Similarly, as the music

and image projection joined Zhai’s reading at the beginning of the second stanza, they helped to

mark the debut of her ancient figures and build up an emotional flow. However, their timed

appearance also reminded the audience that a calculated performance was going on.

In fact, a great portion of audience comments on the performance focused on the sensory

(ganguan 感官) pleasure of the performance, the mashup (hunda 混搭) of arts, the form (xingshi

形式) of presentation, and the cooperation (hezuo 合作) between the performers (Huaduo yinyue

2012). This awareness of the mediation process worked together with the audience’s emotional

resonances with the poem and the poet to validate this encounter with the poem as an authentic

experience. One commenter described the collaborative performance as both “fascinating”

(rangren milian 让人迷恋) and “fresh and new” (ermuyixin 耳目一新) (Huaduo yinyue 2012),

which suggests that the appeal of the performance lay not in the audience being fooled into

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believing that the poem was a natural expression of the poet’s true feelings, but in the awarenes

that the immediate effect of the performance was made possible by thoughtful and skillful

mediation. It is this discrepancy between what their hearts felt and what their minds told them

that allowed them to assess the poet/performers’ expressive competence and feel their experience

of the crossover performance as real and satisfying.

Intriguingly, incidents taking place during the joint performance also contributed to the

audience’s awareness of mediation. For instance, Zhai began reciting “Chrysanthemum Lanterns

Flow Near” before the projection of the surtitles were ready. Staff members responded quickly,

and the surtitles caught up with the reading by the second line. As for Zhai’s reading, though it

was generally error free, her accented Mandarin Chinese systematically replaced retroflex

consonants with alveolar consonants, and her reading was also subject to brief interruptions due

to page turning. Not uncommon as these incidents were, they cannot be conveniently overlooked

as extra-diegetic and thus irrelevant to the performance, or simply dismissed as signs of a lack of

rehearsal. Instead, they were indispensable elements that created special on-the-spot effects for

this particular performance and thus highlighted the performance as a mediating and meaning-

making process.

Although the initial lag of the surtitle projection was most likely unplanned, it created a

unique opportunity for the audience to be absorbed into the voice of the poet with minimal

distraction from other sounds or visuals—even the written text of the poem. Such an exclusive

exposure to the poet’s reading voice, in contrast to the multi-media coordination of the rest of the

performance, underlined the mediatedness of the whole performance. Meanwhile, the obvious

desynchrony between the poet and the staff, the accented pronunciations of the poet, and the

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physical limitation of the printed page highlighted human flaws and the limits of material

support—a reality that any mediating act has to face. Unlike typical official performance events

that target perfect coordination, emphasize repeat rehearsals, and hide extra-diegetic details, this

performance, with its imperfections, seemed to recognize and accept its material and corporeal

limits and thus gain an extra sense of liveness and authenticity.

How did the revelation that the performance was a mediation and live event work with

the audience’s immersion into the content of the poem—a desire to transcend worldly affairs? I

would suggest that it generated a distancing effect that enabled the audience members to adjust

their relationship with the poet and gain a fuller picture of the performance. As one audience

member claimed, through forging a relationship with the past and through the crossover

experimentation, the audience could try to figure out how to calm their own hearts in a fickle

society (Anon. 2012d). His remark showed that he identified with the poet’s desire for

transcendence and her contemplation of her relationship with the past. However, the immersive

experience of the crossover performance did not lead him to completely lose himself in the past

or in the perspective of the poet; instead, his recognition of the affective power of the

performance and awareness of the crossover event as a contemporary artistic adventure led him

to ponder over the performance’s relevance to his own life. Rather than seeking transcendence

through fantasizing the past like the poet, he actually used his own presence at the poetry

crossover event as an antidote to the decaying morals of a commercialized society.

This different agenda for transcendence distanced these audience members from the poet.

On the one hand, with the nightly fantasizing being compressed into a couple of minutes of

poetry reading, the poet’s resistance against the fast pace of contemporary life was attenuated at

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the live event. It suggested that whatever transcendental experience the audience might have was

fleeting. On the other hand, while many audience members wished to resist the alienating effect

of consumer society, how much their emotional and intellectual vacuum could be filled by the

performance depended on how much they could dig out of it. Some commenters and news

reporters emphasized the duration of the performance, some audience members confessed their

difficulties in grasping the content of the performance, and others expressed their surprise at and

pleasure with the poetry crossover performance (Huaduo yinyue 2012; Anon. 2012d; Luoye d

henji 2012). These comments suggest an acknowledgement of distance from the poet and show a

diversity of feelings. We can see that the down-to-earth knowledge of their own identification

with and distinction from the poet allowed the audience to make their own meanings and

functions out of the poetry crossover event and thus obtain a sense of the real. Just as Zhai

Yongming’s woman speaker gains the best view of the past by sitting on the couch or bed—a

suitable distance from the past—the audience was the right distance from the performance for

them to gain a broad perception of it and an understanding of their own reaction to it.

In addition to the materialization of perspectives in the poems, the joint performance also

paralleled them with calculated designs and customized elements. Zhai Yongming’s “The Person

in the Portrait” (Hua zhong ren 画中人) in the section “Ferry” serves as a telling example. Here

is an excerpt from the poem:

Suppressing the self-cultivation doctrine like an ancient well I request you to paint a portrait of me or I of you. To paint or not both manifest images of the heart ….

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At the sight of you kneading on the paper at the sight of you wielding the brush like playing the zither gesturing like flowing water my heart becomes turbulent becomes alternate like lineation becomes so sonorous and unrestrained that it returns to innocence Perhaps in a snap of fingers perhaps in five hundred years this I, having cast off all tempers lies in a page of pure air Look Whose hand takes a grip whose hand lets loose A stroke of Tang a stroke of Song a stroke of Yuan, Ming, Qing a stroke goes all the way down the three thousand years You and I see each other’s faces as if crossing thousands of mountains turn around and we are already ten thousand miles apart 按捺住古井一样的修行观 我让你为我 画一幅肖像 或是我为你 画与不画 皆为心象所现 …… 看你在纸上揉搓 看你落笔如操琴 手势如流水 我的心便汹涌便拍岸 便错如分行 便淋漓铿锵到懵懂 也许是一弹指 也许是五百年 褪尽火气的这个我 躺在一页重的清气中 看 谁手一握 谁手一放 一笔唐 一笔宋 一笔元明清 一笔下去三千年

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我与你 睹面如过千山 掉头便已万里 (Zhai 2010b)

The poem takes the voice of an ancient beauty pondering portrait making. Having “I” address

“you,” the poem ruminates over the interconnectedness and distinction between the

contemporary woman poet “I” and the ancient beauty “I,” the poetic “I” and the painterly “you”

that are ages apart, and the art of poetry writing and that of painting. All of these thought-

provoking and emotionally stimulating relationships are paralleled in the performance. Here I

focus on the relationship between poetry writing and painting.

The middle part of the poem (the five lines starting from “At the sight of you kneading on

the paper”) details the process of “you” (a real painter friend/lover or an imaginary painter from

future generations) making a portrait of “I” (a merge of the ancient beauty and the contemporary

woman poet). Using the trajectory of the emotional development of “I” as a thread, it traces a

smooth chain of transference. As “I” watches “you” painting, the painting movements are

associated with those of zither playing through the kinetic likeness. Then the smooth movements

of both the painting and the zither playing resemble the flow of water. On top of that, zither

playing also reinforces the image of flowing water by alluding to the story of “knowing the

sound” (zhiyin 知音)20 and implies a mutual understanding and appreciation between the player

and the listener, the painter and the viewer. The motion of the flowing water and the mutual

———————————— 20 According to the legend, Zhong Ziqi 钟子期 is the only person who can accurately understand the tunes played by the great zither player Bo Ya 伯牙, be it about high mountains or flowing water. Upon Ziqi’s death, Bo Ya smashed his zither and never played again. The story is first collected in Liezi 列子 and Lüshi chunqiu 吕氏春秋 (Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn annals), and is often referred to by later generations to describe sympathetic friendship.

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understanding further trigger the surge of emotions in the heart of “I,” which is then channeled

into verses.21 As the (imaginary or real) clanging sound of the verses reaches its climax, it returns

the heart to an earlier innocence. Therefore, the passion between “you” and “I” consummates in

the acts of portrait painting and poetry writing and then reaches a state of transcendental peace.

Zhai’s description of the interaction between poetry writing and portrait painting that

mediates the change of the heart of “I” reminds us of the traditional correlative cosmology of

ancient China. However, it differs by carefully tracing each link in the chain of correlation rather

than leaving the harmonious order, or the Way (dao 道), something mystical. It embodies an

intermedial understanding of the two arts. By focusing on the hand movements of the painter,

Zhai renders painting a kinetic or tactile art. The word “kneading” (roucuo 揉搓) synchronizes

the formation of image on paper with the touch of the hand, foregrounding its force and texture.

This strongly corresponds to W. J. T. Mitchell’s (2005: 259) compelling argument that there are

no pure visual media: “the beholder … need only understand that this is a painting, a handmade

object, to understand that it is a trace of manual production, that everything one sees is the trace

of a brush or a hand touching a canvas. Seeing painting is seeing touching, seeing the hand

gestures of the artist, which is why we are so rigorously prohibited from actually touching the

canvas ourselves.” Along the same vein, music is also not purely aural; it has a tactile and visual

dimension, in terms of the bodily response to it by listeners and the movements of the

performers. Plus, when music reaches one’s ear, sound waves do actually touch the eardrum and

———————————— 21 The poem’s mention of “lineation” is a cue to the writing of Chinese modern poetry, as line break is the most conspicuous formal characteristic of written poetry text in most cultures today, including Chinese modern poetry (it is absent in classical Chinese poetry, though modern punctuations and line breaks are added to the earlier texts now).

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the vibration is transmitted within one’s body. Through a combination of sensory experience and

a semiotic mechanism, music does in fact pluck the heartstrings. As the music interacts with

one’s subjectivity and elicits emotions and thoughts, which are then expressed in the form of

poetry, it also attains a visual dimension through the layout of the text and an aural dimension

through poetry’s uttered or imagined sound. Vision and sound again appease the heartstring with

their touch.

Just as Mitchell’s (2005: 260) assurance that the mixed nature of media does not cancel

medial specificity but forefronts the precise mixture of sensory and semiotic experiences in each

medium, Zhai’s highlighted correlation and transferability of the arts retains the particularity of

the arts by plainly displaying each image in her chain of metamorphosis from portrait painting to

poetry making. Most importantly, to the combined persona of “I,” poetry is still the closest to her

heart compared with other arts. The portrait painting scene, either real or imaginary, offers a

unique opportunity for poetry and painting to meet, even though the meeting is as ephemeral as

the poem itself. By tracing such an interconnected yet differentiating relationship between poetry

and painting, the contemporary poet demonstrates both an understanding of the intermedial

relationship and a way of intervening into China’s cultural past. It allows the spectator/reader to

appreciate her candor and use her as an entry point into the ancient world she is depicting.

The collaboration among poetry reading, zither, guitar, and drum playing, as well as

lighting and image projection in the performance of In Ancient Times produced an intermedial

correspondence that paralleled the interconnecting and differentiating relationship between

poetry and painting as highlighted in the poem. One way to see this is that because audience

members had different degrees of interest in the different media, it was tempting for them to

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distinguish one medium from others. Unlike a typical poetry recitation where musical

accompaniment mainly serves to set off the poem with sparse notes, simple melody, or

unrecognizable tunes, Zhai’s reading of “The Person in the Portrait” was paired with one of

China’s most famous zither tunes “Three Variation on Plum Blossoms” (Meihua san nong 梅花

三弄). With its high recognizability, dense notes, and varied techniques, the zither music itself

made a strong presence. Also standing out were the drumbeats, performed by Wen Feng. He

gently tapped the drums with his hands rather than with drumsticks, so the drumbeats were not

very loud, but they served to regulate the highly flexible rhythms of the poetry reading and zither

music into a steady pace. The audience was thus subject to an overflow of sensory stimulations,

with the different media competing for its attention.

Nonetheless, the effects of the collaboration of the various media were based on their

distinctions. The zither’s outstanding role in the performance of this poem should be perceived

through its role in the poem itself. Just like the zither playing image in the poem that serves as a

link in the chain of emotional transference between painting and poetry, zither music in the stage

performance also transferred the emotional content of Zhai’s poetry. With the zither

accompaniment, Zhai did not have to express the emotional ups and downs with her own voice.

Allowing the music to represent the emotional ebbs and flows in the poem, Zhai was able to

maintain her calm and composed style of reading. This correlation between media corresponded

well to the intermedial transference of emotions delineated in the poem. Furthermore, registering

the distinctions and dynamics among the involved media did not necessarily mean that the

audience always had to focus their attention on teasing out each component of the performance.

Like the smooth chain of emotional transference in the poem, the joint performance also stirred

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the heart with a smooth flow of rich sounds. With a skillful mixture of vocal and instrumental

sounds, ancient and contemporary sounds, sounds from both traditional China and the west, this

ensemble cut across times, spaces, and cultures to bring about an unlikely but real web of

correlations that shattered artificial divides and invited the audience to plunge in.

Seeing the relationship among the involved media another way, one can start by

acknowledging that everything on stage could be perceived by the audience all at once. As the

stage lighting became brighter and warmer, the audience could see the stage even more clearly.

Not only were more details of the performers’ gestures revealed, but visual combinations, such

as the overlap of the poet and the projected image of an ancient beauty, could also be noticed.

Nonetheless, the excess of information could be overwhelming and difficult for any audience

member to take in in its entirety. As a result, the audience tended to shift its attention, rather

randomly, from medium to medium. This process offered an opportunity for the audience to

realize the “mashup” nature of the performance and that the crossover performance was a

process of mediation and remediation of thoughts and feelings. They might even participate in its

mediation and remediation process by generating their own unique perceptions of the crossover.

For example, because Zhai’s Mandarin was heavily accented, some had to rely on the surtitles to

know the exact words she was uttering and on the image projection to approach the mood of the

poem (Huaduo yinyue 2012). For others who were familiar with the poem or understood Zhai’s

reading with relative ease, the poet’s physical appearance and the live scene of the performance

attracted more of their attention. They might either choose to glue their eyes on the poet, or

occasionally shift their glance to the other performers (Luoye d Henji 2012). For their part,

music fans might focus on what Zhou was doing as Zhai read her poem. Seated among the

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audience, I was not the only person to notice the eye contact exchanged among the performers.

In other words, one’s background conditioned to a certain degree the movement of one’s gaze,

which then conditioned how the relations between the stage images were to be discerned and

understood. Hence, the stage performance of the poem not only recreated the interaction between

poetry and painting delineated in the poem as the poet’s authentic experience, but also rendered

the mediation and remediation process as something real that the audience could experience for

themselves.

In other cases, such as the poem “Lamenting the Student Scholar” (Ai shusheng 哀书生)

in the section of “The Distal Cowherd Star,” we see that the perspectives of the poems continued

to develop in the joint performance. Intriguingly, this particular poem contained more errors in

pronunciation, tones, and pauses than any other poems, but was still one of the most touching

pieces performed that night. This was largely due to the joint performance’s extension of the

dynamic perspective of the poem. Quoting Wallace Stevens’ (1947) lines “The whole race is a

poet that writes down/ The eccentric propositions of its fate” as a preface, the poem injects the

essentialized figure of the poet into that of the student scholar. In witnessing other people’s

invocation of the past, Zhai Yongming identifies with the student scholar figure and illustrates

her changing feelings toward him at different stages of her life. The first two stanzas of the poem

read:

Living in 1699, you are a student scholar with talent and the favor of all the beauties Living in 1969, you are a guilty person with disheveled hair and covered face enclosed in an ancient costume denounced and paraded played by the character turned into the character you once played

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That evening, I was sleepless all night because of seeing you outside the movies That evening, I was sleepless all night because your appearance was withered, your face pale as ashes That evening I was sleepless all night because you were a class enemy, accused by thousands of fingers 活在一六九九年 你就是一介书生 风流倜傥美人缘 活在一九六九年 你就是一个罪人 披发散衣 掩面低首 密封在一套古老戏装 被批斗 被游街 被角色演绎你 成为你演绎过的角色 那一晚 彻夜未眠因为 在电影之外见到你 那一晚 彻夜未眠因为 你形容枯槁面如死灰 那一晚 彻夜未眠因为 你是牛鬼蛇神 万人唾弃 (Zhai 2012: 300-303)

Referencing the play Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan 桃花扇)22 and memorializing the late

movie star Feng Zhe 冯喆 (1920-1969), the poem establishes a strong connection between Kong

Shangren 孔尚任 the playwright, Hou Fangyu 侯方域 the male protagonist in Peach Blossom

Fan, and Feng Zhe, through a sharp contrast between people with similar personalities who

experience different fortunes at different times. Whereas in 1699, the year The Peach Blossom

Fan was completed and almost half a century after the fall of Ming, Kong and Hou were

———————————— 22 The Peach Blossom Fan is a historical drama by the Qing dynasty playwright Kong Shangren 孔尚任 (1648-1718). Elaborating on the love romance and final separation between the famous courtesan Li Xiangjun 李香君 (1624-1654) and the young scholar Hou Fangyu 侯方域 (1618-1655), the story portrays the downfall of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).

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appreciated for their talent and romance, in 1969, the fourth year of the Cultural Revolution,

Feng was tormented to death. Another thread that connects the two is that Feng once played Hou

in the film version of Peach Blossom Fan, a role that led to his persecution during the Cultural

Revolution; Feng was forced to wear Hou’s costume in his public shaming parade. Zhai

Yongming’s lines “[You were] played by the character/ turned into the character you once

played” sharply capture the irony in this connection. In playing Hou, Feng artfully engaged with

the past, but he was also, so to speak, played by Hou: his connection with Hou, which should

have brought him honor, ended up giving him shame and ruination. In such a description, Zhai’s

speaker gives rise to a deep grievance over the discrepancy between the student scholar’s talent

and the ruthlessness of history.

Following this stunning contrast between the fortunes of Feng, Hou, and Kong, as well as

the ironic connection between them, the speaker moves on in the second stanza to reveal herself

as a witness of Feng’s public shaming parade. As is confirmed in a footnote to the poem, Zhai

Yongming witnessed the public denunciation of Feng Zhe in front of the Babao Street Movie

Theatre (Babao jie dianyingyuan 八宝街电影院) in Chengdu when she was young. This makes

the poem self-referential—the speaker in this poem is none other than Zhai herself. Her

reaction—sleeplessness, the excitement of seeing an idol in real person, and the shock of seeing

him in such a miserable state—suggests her affection toward and identification with Feng, the

student scholar, and, ultimately, the figure of the poet. Although she apparently kept a safe

distance from the denunciation, in her mind she was with him.

If the initial identification between Zhai and the student scholar is characterized by a

shock at the latter’s fate, it quickly transforms to calm acceptance through Zhai’s contemplation:

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You are just a student scholar, in ancient times and also today chanting, looking askance, and singing all along the way You are just a student scholar, with a student scholar’s fate You are just the rebel doomed to fail, the revolutionary ended up being revolutionized You are the first one to be destroyed at the burying of Confucian scholars the person who had better distinguish appreciative and contemptuous looks 你就是一介书生 无论古今 且吟且睨且歌行 你就是一介书生 书生命 你就是起事事不成 造反反被造的那个 你就是坑儒时第一个该灭 青眼白眼最宜分的人 (Zhai 2012: 300-303)

In an attempt to see through the nature of the student scholar, she summarizes the twin facets of

his character—the superb sensibility and aspiration cultivated to serve the state and empathize

with its subjects, on the one hand, and the disregard for the political vicissitudes that render him

powerless to advance his ideas or protect himself, on the other. The student scholar is the

embodiment of the condition in which “defeats and dreams are one” (Stevens 1947). Although it

is debatable if Zhai’s view of the student scholar accurately describes the lives of literati in

dynastic China and intellectuals and artists in modern China, her summary explains how

persistent idealism determines the tragic fate of the student scholar. This is the point in the poem

where her initial shock at his fate turns into lament. However, as the story of the student scholar

extends into the present day, her empathy toward him takes on another hint of pathos:

Are you the one who rises when the cock crows stays awake by tying the head to the beam and stabbing in the thigh and sits for the examination by the light of the moon and stars? Thank goodness! Student scholars of this dynasty have a better fate, though the heads born for studying are still tied, for parents and teachers for prestigious schools and their college admission rates The examination of thousands of years, are still taken today

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Are you the student scholar today who goes to receive the admission letter from Peking University dragged by the hair? You are just a student scholar, this is who you were in the past and who you still are today You stand in the wrong line, and shall never return Your death is as empty as an elegant harp, as light as a feather 你是鸡鸣晨起 头悬梁后还要锥股 披星戴月去赶考的书生？ 谢天谢地 本朝书生 命运胜过他们 虽然 那颗为读书而生的人头 依然悬着 为父母为老师 为名校为名校的升学率 几千年的赶考 今天还在赶 你就是那个头发被拎着 去领取北大录取通知书的本朝书生？ 你是一介书生 过去是 现在仍然是 你站错了队 再也站不回来 你死得空如箜篌，轻如鸿毛 (Zhai 2012: 300-303)

If Hou and Feng are ensconced, respectively, in the ancient and recent pasts, Zhai brings the

story into a very familiar present with these lines on China’s college entrance examination.

Although students today appear to face a less demanding exam and a less dismal future, like

student scholars of the past they are cultivated to serve others. Worse still, the objective of all

their studies may not even be as grand as the nation or the people, but limited to family pride and

the vanity of attending a prestigious university. Even with this diminished dream, student

scholars today are still vulnerable to political factionalism and the threat of death, which may not

be right around the corner but is predictable based on historical precedent. Yet, Zhai knows this

college dream is also a kind of helpless persistence not to be changed. From shock, to lament,

and to pity, as the student scholar’s story mutates during different historical moments and as

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Zhai’s speaker advances in years, the identification between them grows and bears different

shades of emotions.

The interweaving between the student scholar’s story and Zhai’s own maturation was

also conveyed in the performance of the poem. When Zhai read the poem on stage, she stumbled

over the number 1699. While the contrast of 1699 and 1969 is powerful on the page, it was

somewhat challenging for the tongue. Because it already took a while for Zhai to find the page of

the poem after Zhou Yunpeng had finished a song, there was little time for Zhai to compose

herself and get it right. Instead of interrupting the flow of the performance, Zhai simply corrected

herself, with the “1699” still pronounced in awkward tones, and moved on. The second stanza

got even worse. She not only mispronounced “gao” 槁 (withered) and read “niu” 牛 (ox) with a

wrong tone, but also made a very abrupt stop after the first “yinwei” 因为 (because of), as if she

had forgotten why she decided to break up the lines in this particular way when she wrote the

poem. Nevertheless, these mistakes did not ruin the reading. Instead, Zhai turned them into

elements that enhanced the poem’s relevance to the poet here and now.

Just as her witnessing Feng Zhe’s public shaming parade betrayed Zhai’s age and place

of origin, the pronunciation mistakes also betrayed personal information, because age and place

of origin were the main factors that conditioned what kind of Putonghua (standard Mandarin)

and literature education she would formally receive. Her imperfect and untrained speech was full

of individual nuances and personal history. Her witnessing of Feng’s experience is that of a real

person, not some pretentious god-like narration. It is true that her abrupt stop after the first

“because of” seemed to detach the poet onstage from the poet who had written the poem,

relegating the latter to some unfathomable past. The temporal distance between the stage

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performance and the writing of the poem, moreover, may have caused the lapse of memory. But

these things did not make the witnessing of Feng’s denunciation any less powerful. The distance

between the poet on the stage and the poet writing the text was also something real that should

not be ignored; in her reading, Zhai was resuscitating her younger self’s witnessing of Feng’s

experience. Or, to be more precise, a much younger Zhai’s witnessing was resuscitated in the

writing of the poem and then resuscitated again in the reading. As a result, the historical moment

did not become ossified but grew and changed along with Zhai herself.

As Zhai read on, she regained the tempo of the poem, but following her abrupt stop after

the first “because of,” she deliberately made the stops after the second and third “because”

abrupt. These abrupt stops, which fell just before the reasons for her sleeplessness, revealed how

Zhai felt about her earlier witnessing of Feng’s persecution at this moment on the stage. If the

sight of the miserable Feng once shocked her, the re-enactment of the shock was full of greater

complexity: it suggested a reluctance to look back at Feng’s agony at the persecution, but also

the necessity to quell that reluctance; an indignation at Feng’s torture, but also an understanding

of how it had happened; an impulse to represent the persecution scene with eloquent words, but

also a doubt about whether words could ever sufficiently describe the suffering. The three abrupt

stops after “because (of)” were tongue-tied moments replete with these paradoxical sentiments.

Though partly triggered by a slip-up, Zhai’s handling of the abrupt stops bespoke how the

witnessing more than forty years earlier still disturbed her now. That the errors and Zhai’s

adjustments to them were laid bare in front of the audience suggests that the performance was

illustrating that a mediating process was underway, that this process was a reality that could not

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be overlooked, and that the poem’s meanings and relevance continued growing through this

process.

In a similar vein, the poet’s contemplation on the fate of student scholars today also grew

in the live performance. When reading the stanza that links today’s college entrance examination

to the imperial civil service examination, today’s high school students to the ancient student

scholars, Zhai added some extra-long pauses at the end of sentences, such as after “for

prestigious schools and their college admission rates” and “Are you the student scholar today

who goes to receive/ the admission letter from Peking University dragged by the hair?” The

pregnant pauses were needed to keep in sync with the music, but they also constituted a form of

direct address to her audience, many of whom were young people in their twenties and thirties

for whom the college entrance examination was very real and relevant.

It also created a confrontation between the audience’s and the poet’s backgrounds, with

the former being informed of the past experience of the latter through promotional texts of the

performance event (e.g., Anon. 2012a; Anon. 2012b). Putting the young audience members into

the shoes of Hou Fangyu and Feng Zhe, Zhai was associating their present-day submission to

family and school authority with Feng’s artistic idealism and Hou’s political idealism, but she

was also linking their future to Hou’s and Feng’s vulnerability to political tides. For those urban

youngsters from well-to-do families, quality education was not a problem and the college

entrance exam was less a ladder out of the social bottom and more about reputation. Their

submission to authorities marks both the internalization of the talent selection system and the

pursuit of a cultural identity for those enjoying economic security in the market economy (Miao

2016)—a good fit to the postsocialist condition of contemporary China with its negotiation

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between regulation and free-market. However, this fit was a delicate balance, which lead Zhai to

express concern that they might be casualties of factional fights. In contrast, Zhai abandoned the

career path offered by the system and temporarily rode the tide of China’s cultural economy, by

quitting a job that matched her college specialization to become a poet, running cultural salons at

her own bar, and performing poetry onstage. Unlike most students, who submit to the system’s

expectations, Zhai’s leaving the system to join the cultural economy offered an alternative that

also matched China’s postsocialist condition today. Not unlike students, who are subject to

factional fights, Zhai had to walk the fine line between political positions. In their own ways,

both the students today and Zhai Yongming herself come to resemble the student scholar’s

predicament in being caught between idealism and politics.

The poet’s pity for today’s college students evolved in the performance into questioning,

contradicting, and mutual completing. Again, the performance brought in elements not

necessarily inherent in the poem, and its extension of the dynamic perspective of the poem drew

the audience and the poet together, while also illuminating a mediating process that thrived on

calculation and contingency. Relatable and reflexive, the joint performance rendered poetry

authentic.

Shifting between the Media

Having covered the authenticating effects of the joint performance’s particularities and

contingencies, I now turn to the particular interactions between poetry reading and new folk

song. The term “folk song” (minge 民歌, or minyao 民谣) can mean various things, including

but not limited to: 1) ancient songs created by and circulated among common people but

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collected by scholars and government officials and passed down only as texts; 2) commoner

songs in Chinese topolects or ethnic minority languages that are transmitted orally in local areas

(usually rural regions) for specific occasions; 3) commoner songs collected by state-sponsored

scholars, adapted to support political causes, and spread nationally.23 The folk song that Zhou

Yunpeng is particularly associated with refers to a subgenre of pop music in mainland China that

has been extremely trendy since the turn of this century, sometimes termed xin minyao 新民谣

(new folk song). Heavily indebted to the critical and local (rural and ethnic) elements of the first

two strands of Chinese folk song listed above, the new folk song is often half adapted from

existing tunes and lyrics and half composed by individual singers to reflect on social issues in the

context of everyday urban life. Mainly performed in small spaces like bars, live houses, and

small-scale gatherings, and widely spread on new media platforms like music sharing

applications and media review websites, the new folk song highlights an intimate and interactive

listening experience. Stylistically, the songs are usually characterized by simple musical

accompaniment (typically an acoustic guitar), unadorned tunes, plain lyrics, and raw voices. The

crudeness and casualness of the songs often produce an effect of authenticity, even though this

authenticity is subject to question with the subgenre’s increasing commercialization.24

The collaborative performance of poetry and song, especially folk song, is by no means

unprecedented. Not to mention the inclusion of chanting and singing verses in traditional operas

and folklores, ever since the early years of modern Chinese poetry, poetry recitation has shared

———————————— 23 For more details of Chinese folk song traditions, see Mair/Bender 2011: 7-10, 90-92; de Kloet 2005: 623-624; Latham 2007: 337-338. For various uses of the concept of folk song in different discourses, see de Kloet 2005: 623.

24 For more details about the new folk song, see de Kloet 2005; Wei 2010; Qiao 2014; Chen M. 2018, etc.

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the stage with folk song. With the Evening of Poetry and Folk Song (Shige minge yanchang

wanhui 诗歌民歌演唱晚会) in the Communist stronghold Yan’an in 1938 being arguably the

earliest case of joint performance dedicated to new poetry and folk song (Crepsi 2019: 113-116),

this collaboration has continued to the present. It snowballed during the massification of poetry

and the New Folk Song Movement (Xin minge yundong 新民歌运动) of the Great Leap Forward

(Da yuejin 大跃进, 1958-1960), thrived with the cult of poetry and new waves of folk song

collection in the 1980s and 1990s, and has resurged in the present boom of poetry and folk song

events within the context of the new cultural economy (Crespi 2009; Zhang T. 1999; Li J. 2015).

Notwithstanding the long-existing bond between poetry and song, the dialogic crossover of the

two media in In Ancient Times revamped the conventional interactions between them. Rather

than chanting verses to highlight the emotional intensity of specific plots and facilitate the

unfolding of the overall narrative in traditional operas and story-telling, or having poets,

professionals, and singers take turns to hold the stage, In Ancient Times presented the poet and

performers together throughout the event; their interaction on the stage created a plethora of

shifts among the involved media. This pattern of intermedial interaction established meaningful

and pleasing dialogues between the poems and songs that enhanced their artistic quality and

maintained the audience’s attention. Meanwhile, it also disclosed both the interconnectivity and

gaps between poetry and new folk song, which produced at once an immersive and distanced

experience that the audience could feel was both relatable and transcendental.

A comparison of Zhai Yongming’s poem “Lamenting on the Student Scholar” and Zhou

Yunpeng’s song “The Missing Person” (Shizong de ren 失踪的人), both featured in the section

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“The Distal Cowherd Star,” immediately reveals parallels and contrasts in verbal content,

structure, and linguistic style. Here is an excerpt of the song lyrics of “The Missing Person”:

Submitting five fen to a stranger 交给陌生人五分钱 mom bought a bullet 妈妈买了一颗子弹 Where should she put it 该把它放到哪里 She longed to see it and feared to see it too 想看见又害怕看见 Mom became a little girl 妈妈成了一个小姑娘 running on the street with bare feet 光着脚跑到大街上 She wanted to hide the bullet 她想把子弹藏起来 away from everyone’s eyes 躲开众人的目光 Time, please stop 时间请你停下吧 at the last day of April 在四月的最后一天 Let her run through all the streets 让她跑完所有的街道 then let her die 再放她死去 At the corner of a street 在一条街的转弯处 a bunch of kids caught up with her 一群孩子追上了她 In a hurry, she hid the bullet 慌忙中她把子弹藏进了 into her daughter’s body 她女儿的身体中 and she buried her daughter in a place 她又把女儿埋在了

no one would know 没有人知道的地方 No one would ever find her 谁也别想找到她 (Zhou Y. 2015: 187-188)

Though the event as a whole was set in some unspecified “ancient times,” both “Lamenting on

the Student Scholar” and “The Missing Person” recount stories of specific persons in specific

historical moments in China’s recent past. Like Feng Zhe’s being publicly denounced during the

Cultural Revolution for his starring role in the film The Peach Blossom Fan, Lin Zhao 林昭

(Peng Lingzhao 彭令昭, 1932-1968), to whom Zhou’s song is dedicated, was labeled a rightist

during the Anti-Rightist Campaign (Fanyou yundong 反右运动) in 1957, jailed for years as a

counterrevolutionary, and executed by shooting during the Cultural Revolution (only one year

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prior to Feng Zhe’s death). The poem’s witnessing of the persecution of the male movie star and

the song’s recounting of the death of the female student obviously address the same issue of the

poet’s fate in vicissitudes of time. Whereas Zhai tells Feng’s story by linking Hou Fangyu, Feng

Zhe, and present-day students, Zhou develops Lin’s case through the mother-daughter family tie.

Whereas Zhai adopts literary or even archaic diction, Zhou mainly employs plain, everyday

language. Compared with Zhai’s careful structuring of relatively long sentences suitable for

subtly building up emotions, Zhou’s stanzas of uneven length and relatively short lines are

perfect for expressing powerful emotions with refrains and musical improvisations. These

correspondences and contrasts between the poem and the song enable the experiences of Feng

Zhe and Lin Zhao to form a dialogue with and complement each other, doubling the tragic

heroism of the figure of the poet. For the audience, the poem and the song were not laid out in

front of them side by side for comparison but were experienced in a temporal sequence. This

does not mean that connections were lost, but that the dialogue between the poem and the song

were gradually formed when the poetry reading shifted to new folk song singing, and that all the

correspondences and contrasts reinforced the sense of shift.

In addition to textual shifts between the poem and the song, the performance also

exhibited many paralinguistic shifts: most obviously, the main performer shifted from the poet to

the singer; the articulation of words shifted from recitation to singing; the voice shifted from

Zhai’s composed female voice to Zhou’s tender male voice; the music shifted from the

background to the foreground; the atmosphere shifted from a quiet contemplation to a loud

outpouring of emotions; and the onstage interaction shifted from Zhou’s guitar accompaniment

to Zhai’s recitation to Zhai’s turning her face to watch Zhou sing (he did not look at her because

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he is blind), etc. The shifts abounded in the interplay between this one poem and one song, but

they also characterized the entire event an alternation and cooperation among poetry reading,

new folk song singing, zither and drum playing. The shifts mobilized different senses and kept

the audience busy by forcing them to readjust their focus from one aspect to another. As a result,

the performance could arouse and sustain their attention and thus enhance their perceptive

experience.

The shifts between “Lamenting on the Student Scholar” and “The Missing Person”

immersed the audience and generated a sense of immediacy. To begin with, as the performance

shifted from one medium to another, the audience was compelled to detect the borders between

them in order to participate in a culturally appropriate manner. Take the act of applause for

example. For an experienced singer like Zhou, who gave clear cues to the beginning and ending

of his performance with gestures, anyone with some basic familiarity of stage performance in

China could recognize these cues and determine with ease when to applaud. However, for a poet

like Zhai, who was more used to reading poems in small salons than on stage and did not make

clear gestures to signal the start and end of her reading, the audience needed some previous

exposure to the poem, a sense of the structure and flow of the poem, or an accurate perception of

the atmosphere the reading created, to decide when to applaud. To make it even harder, the

innovative combination of poetry, song, and music, as well as the relative quietness of poetry

compared with the liveliness of song and music, also raised the question about whether applause

was appropriate at all for a poetry recitation. This uncertainty seemed to force the audience to

delve deeper into the poem.

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Another way for the shifts between the poem and the song to immerse the audience was

that they offered a gradual revelation that poetry and song could be about very similar things

and, although performed in highly contrastive ways, could address the common issue of the

poet’s virtue and vulnerability to the times. The resulting effect for the audience was to make

poetry seem closer and more familiar, rather than remote and impenetrable. The facts that the

shifts between the poem and the song were both linguistic and paralinguistic, and that they were

often moving between polar opposites, produced an effect of completeness. It suggested that the

poet’s fate is something universal and inevitable. This sense of inclusiveness peaked when Zhai

linked the students present at the performance to the figure of the poet.

Yet another way for the shifts between the poem and the song to immerse the audience

lay in the poet’s and singer’s careful choice and handling of the persecution stories that reflected

a middle-strata political attitude. As scholars of Chinese middle strata have observed, this mixed

group prefer social stability and gradual political change (Cheng Li 2010); rather than

overthrowing the regime, they are more concerned about “effecting adjustments to the existing

system,” particularly in areas such as the protection of individual rights (Chen/Goodman 2013:

7). Zhai’s and Zhou’s respective representation of the cases of Feng Zhe and Lin Zhao was in

tune with this inclination toward moderate changes within the system. On the one hand, the

poem’s support of Feng’s pursuit of artistic freedom and the song’s support of Lin’s pursuit of

freedom of speech demonstrated a strong disposition toward individualism and democracy. On

the other hand, the poet and the singer did not choose to defend controversial figures of our time.

Instead, by empathizing with Feng and Lin, figures in the recent past whose grievances had been

officially redressed, they were less about questioning the party’s leadership than sighing over

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individual fates. By drawing audience’s attention to these specific cases, they participated in

righting the wrongs done to Feng and Lin rather than advocating a radical change of regime.

Such appeals for moderate changes on a case-to-case basis fit the middle-strata political attitude

and seemed to be effective in arousing emotional resonances from the audience mostly made up

of urban youth—some left enthusiastic online feedbacks on this part of the performance (e.g.,

Luoye d henji 2012).

Besides the multilayered shifts between “Lamenting on the Student Scholar” and “The

Missing Person,” the performers’ shifts between engagement and disengagement also prompted

the audience to both evaluate the performance and reflect on their own situations. The fact that

the poet and the performers were onstage together throughout the event, regardless of whether it

was their turn to perform, not only presented them as a team but also offered excessive

information that sharpened the audience’s sense of medial edges. In addition to the performers’

culturally recognizable or idiosyncratic gestures cuing the start and end of a piece, such as

straightening up the body, drawing closer to the microphone, laying hands on the guitar strings,

pulling back hair, and picking up the script, etc., spotlights were used to visually guide the

audience to shift their attention. Moreover, the artists who were not performing in a particular

poem or song could tend to their own business, such as adjusting their sitting positions, drinking

bottled water, or skimming through musical scores, in plain sight of the audience. This aspect of

the performance cannot be dismissed as extra-diegetic, because they contributed to the viewing

experience of the audience, reminding them that multifarious shifts were taking place among

these very real human beings and their own respective media.

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The constant shifts between the media in In Ancient Times generated a sense of

hypermediacy, like a computer user browsing from one webpage to another, from one window to

another. Like the windows in the computer interface that create multiple, autonomous, and

heterogenous spaces, poetry and new folk song in the performance also created such fragmented

spaces. And like the windows that also draw attention to the spaces in-between (Bolter/Grusin

2000: 54), the shifts between poetry and new folk song in this performance also promoted this

aesthetic of glances between different spaces. Navigating through the fragmented medial spaces,

the audience was given a chance to accept multiple forms and question monologic representation

of reality. In an increasingly fragmented society, where people seem to live in different worlds

with conflicting ideologies, various subcultures, exclusive coteries of friends, etc., this

multiplicity registered especially well to the middle-strata audience who were comprised of

people with diverse backgrounds and opinions. As a result, the audience’s attention was directed

to the ubiquitous process of mediation and their own desire to grasp the real beyond medial

limits. This reflexivity on the performance’s hypermediacy rendered it as an authentic and

appealing experience for any audience raised on the Internet.

Communicating on a Meta-Level

Be it the poet’s self-revelation or the performance’s self-reference, both lead to the

performers’ and audience’s self-reflection on the performance. Interestingly, among the plethora

of shifts taking place during the performance was the shift from the main body of the

performance to a prearranged encore session and an audience exchange session. The exchange

session is particularly worth attention for three reasons. First, it was a direct result of the

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combination of poetry and song and music. Its existence transgressed the conventions of typical

music concerts—an exchange session is an integral part of poetry readings but rare for concerts.

Second, following the previous sections of the performance, which demanded great attention and

involvement from the audience, the exchange session added even more shifts to the performance.

Third, following the main body of the performance but still part of the event, it allowed the

performers and audience to comment on the performance and communicate on a meta-level. This

not only made the audience feel that their encounter with poetry was something real, but also

pointed to the process of the performance’s social construction. In the context of media

convergence and participatory culture, the exchange session offered a precious opportunity for

the poet, performers, and audience members to negotiate on the quality and meaning of the

border-crossing event. The form of face-to-face communication—as well as the audience’s

confessed prior knowledge about the poems, songs, music, and performers garnered through

multiple communication platforms—created an atmosphere that bound the audience to the

poet/performers. By showing off their knowledge and contributing their thoughts, the

participants also demonstrated the middle-strata tendency for democratic cultural consumption

and yearning for a cultural identity. The whole process further enhanced the sense of poetry’s

authenticity.

With lights on, the rear screen projection off, and chairs rearranged into a panel

discussion format, the exchange session made a clear shift of atmosphere and started with an

introduction to the performers by an emcee. The session was mainly comprised of four rounds of

conversation. Although the direction of the conversation was highly unpredictable, it turned out

that it had a smooth flow and a favorable reception of the performance took shape.

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The first round of conversation set the basic framework for the discussion through an

appropriation of performance conventions for poetry and song. The questioner asked if Zhou

Yunpeng could hum his “Spring Songs” (Chun ge 春歌), one of his well-known songs that was

not performed that night. Making a request rather than asking a question or contributing a

comment, this audience member actually appropriated the practice of exchanging thoughts,

which is conventional in poetry readings, and turned it into an opportunity for an encore song—

something usually prepared by the performers or initiated collectively by the audience at a music

concert. That the questioner used the word “hum” (heng 哼) rather than the formal “sing” (chang

唱), that his tone was tentative, and that his request was met with a round of well-meaning

laughter both on and off stage, suggest that most participants, including the questioner himself,

recognized his manipulation of performance conventions belonging to each media, as well as his

preference for new folk song over poetry.

Zhou Yunpeng, in response, took the opportunity to redirect the audience’s attention to

how to participate in the exchange session and interpret the performance. After joking that an

extra song should cost an extra fee, Zhou explained,

“In fact, it is better said than sung. Exchange is very important. Music is one aspect. … We planned for a long time and had numerous quick or lengthy meetings. … We hope to convey some concepts through the careful structure of the performance. For example, how could poems sound better with music? We are all trying to figure out a way. I hope today is a start that casts a brick to attract a jadestone.” (Huaduo yinyue 2012)

By humorously deflecting the questioner’s request, refusing to steal the spotlight and make it

into a personal show, and promoting the idea of structured collaboration, Zhou Yunpeng was

encouraging the audience to view the performance from a border-crossing perspective. On the

one hand, while his joke appeared to confirm the commercialization of new folk song, his serious

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advocacy of an exchange of thoughts instead linked his songs with aesthetic pursuits. While he

explicitly sought discussions on the joint performance, he also implied that discussion should be

extended to his songs as well. On the other hand, by prioritizing poetry and focusing on

questions such as how to make poems sound better with music, Zhou explored the musicality and

performativity of poetry, urging the audience to acknowledge the commonality between poetry

and song (between poetry’s thought exchange and song’s performativity), and pointed out an

opportunity for mutual fertilization. Toward the end of his response, Zhou humbly acknowledged

the experimental, trial-and-error nature of the performance. Together with the relaxing and non-

judgmental atmosphere created by the emcee’s emphasis on casual exchange, Zhou’s humor, and

the audience’s understanding laughter, his remarks on the experimental nature of the

performance gave the discussion a frame and elicited recognition of their collaborative efforts.

With the interpretive frame offered by Zhou, the audience members could formulate and

re-formulate their questions and comments. As if to confirm Zhou’s success in convincing the

audience on how to look at the performance, the following questioners all sympathized with the

performance’s concept and practice of intermedial collaboration. The second questioner even

explicitly brought up the term “crossover,” when nobody on the stage had used it. Agreeing with

Zhou’s interpretive frame of border-crossing experimentation, these questioners showed

significantly more confidence, compared with the first questioner’s tentative request for an

encore. This bespeaks the binding power of the live performance, where the performers’

expressive competence, the general atmosphere, and the multiple means of communication in

different sessions of the performance drew the audience in. This is not to say that the

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performance received unanimous praise, but it was through the process of the post-performance

conversations that an increasingly favorable reception was achieved.

The second was the most critical among the questioners. First, he brought up the concept

of “crossover” and confirmed the significance of this performance’s border-crossing

experimentation. Through a reference to Confucius’ view of the practical functions of The Book

of Songs, he endorsed the border-crossing concept as a return to tradition. He then made the

following criticism of the performance: poetry and zither had been overshadowed by song and

drum; the idiosyncratic styles of Zhai and Zhou led to many jarring moments; and the poet Zhai

Yongming seemed less productive in recent years. He finished by asking for solutions to

maintain poetry’s status in a commercialized society (Huaduo yinyue 2012).

This questioner had many important things to say, and though highly critical, his tone

was far from the kinds of attacks one finds on other communication channels or platforms—for

example, audible chitchat among the audience members hidden in the dark during the

performance and the anonymous invective hurled at the poet on her personal poetry blog. Unlike

some audience member’s lighthearted scoffing of Zhai’s heavily accented Mandarin, or some

Internet-users’ ignorant deprecation of the poems as nonsense (e.g., Zhai 2010b), this questioner

employed strategies and dictions that showed great respect and good intentions. First, through

references to the crossover concept and related views, he demonstrated that he was well

informed with and cared about recent trends in the contemporary Chinese poetry and art scene.

Second, by buffering his criticisms with endorsement, he showed his eagerness to establish an

emotional tie with the poet and performers and suggested that his criticisms were meant to

improve the performance. Third, by addressing the performers as “teachers” (laoshi 老师) and

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throwing out a question regarding poetry’s survival, he also indicated trust in and hope for the

poet and other performers.

What lead him to show such high respect for the poet and poetry while holding such a

critical view of the performance? While the questioner’s personality and knowledge of course

factored into his behavior, the form of face-to-face interaction and the collaborative atmosphere

also factored in. They compelled the audience to engage in “facework” that avoided

embarrassing those on the stage and maintained their own dignity (Hjarvard 2008: 124). Most

importantly, reproofs or ridicules common online or in private would appear inappropriate in this

context, because it threatened the harmony of the community that formed in the shared

experience of the performance (Hjarvard 2008: 124). Therefore, this questioner was respectfully

building up the conversation and giving useful feedback despite some dissatisfaction. As a result,

his comments contributed something positive to the audience’s reception of the performance.

Zhai responded by emphasizing the experimental nature of the performance and

admitting that she was not used to such events. Explaining that poetry’s focus on exchange more

than performativity might have been the source of the questioner’s reaction to her readings, she

ensured him that changes should be made to poetry and attempts should be made for poetry to

merge with other arts. By resorting to the discourse of the experimental, Zhai transformed the

perceived shortcomings into the very reason why such a performance should exist, which is not

to say that experimentation could be used arbitrarily as an excuse for low quality conceptual

productions. While neither the questioner nor the poet herself recognized poetry reading’s

“minimal” or “anti-expressivist” style as a valid form of performativity, as other scholars and I

do, their exchange did open up the discussion on poetry’s specific performativity and how it

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could potentially work with other media. In response to the questioner’s criticism of her

relatively low productivity, Zhai defended herself by maintaining that it was not that she was

writing less but that her poetry was struggling to reach readers. She further suggested that

crossover performances could be an important way for poetry to be disseminated, which also

addressed the questioner’s concern about contemporary poetry’s status in general. Either

accepting criticisms or defending herself, Zhai highlighted the necessity of the border-crossing

collaboration featured in the event and of exploring the potentials for such intermedial

interactions.

Zhou and Zhai’s emphasis on the collaborative experimentation among different arts

seemed highly effective in convincing the audience and winning their approval. It was reinforced

by the zither artist Wu Na and the emcee, who joined the conversation and expressed their

understandings of the experimentation. As the conversation across the stage went on, the concept

and practice of intermedial collaboration progressively gained recognition. When it came to the

third questioner, though she had some doubts about Zhou’s song selection, she did not even

articulate it as a criticism, just a question. The fourth and final questioner did not see any flaws in

the performance but only suggested that dance could also be added and wished that similar

performances could be regularly held at the theatre. The last two questioners both spoke highly

of the performance not only conceptually but also in terms of practice, and they did this in

creative ways.

Interestingly, the third questioner picked a line from Zhai’s “The Person in the Portrait”

and made a parallel to it: “For you on the stage, it was ‘[my heart] becomes so sonorous and

unrestrained that it returns to innocence’; down here, it was ‘[my heart] feels so touched and

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secretly elated to the point as if being punched’ for us” 你们在台上就是“淋漓铿锵到懵懂,” 我

们在下面是“戚戚暗爽到内伤”. The moving of the heart and the sensorial pleasure indicated in

the parallel suggested both the depth of emotions the performance was able to reach and the

expressive efficacy of the joint performance’s multi-layered mediation. The parallel suggested

that this audience member willingly presented herself as someone who “knew the sound” and

embraced the correspondences between different arts, between “I” and “you,” and between the

poet and the audience, things that Zhai Yongming had highlighted in her reading of the poem.

Last but not the least, in making this parallel, the questioner also presented herself as someone

whose creativity was stimulated by the performance, especially the poetry reading. In so doing,

she exalted poetry as a major source of creativity that changes ordinary people’s lives.

While the last questioner’s comment was not as sophisticated as the previous one, she

contributed to the favorable reception of the performance with her own point of view.

Contradicting the second questioner’s criticisms, she compared the entire performance to a

seamless heavenly robe (tianyiwufeng 天衣无缝), and praised the performance for being perfect

in all its dimensions, from the music, to the background, to the coordination among the media.

She approved of the collaborative performance as a wonderful form to bring poetry back to

contemporary life, to bring the aesthetic back to the utilitarian world, to make life complete

again. Her comment fit well with the performance’s representation of poetry as something

simultaneously transcendental and down-to-earth, desirable and relatable. Here, the performance

culminated in a predominantly positive view of its aesthetic quality and significance.

The post-performance conversation also revealed and reshaped the relationships among

the poet, the performers, and the audience. Alliances were formed among them not only to make

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poetry and poets more approachable, but also to foster a middle-strata identity based on an

informed consumption of cultural products among the participants. All in all, it was a bonding

experience. The exchange session revealed at least three important messages regarding the

restructuring of relationships among the participants. First, the engagement of the poet, the

performers, and the audience in direct conversation about the collaborative performance on a

meta-level suggested an alternative way for poets to defend and promote their poetics and gain

significance for their works. Zhai Yongming’s hyperactivity in metatextual production in the

exchange session of this event was symptomatic of contemporary Chinese poets’ keenness to

grasp discursive power in the interpretation of their works. As Heather Inwood has pointed out,

this increasing literary historical consciousness was generally triggered by the discrepancy

between the poets’ experience of modern poetry as something lively and the general public’s

perception of it as something ossified and found only in textbooks (Inwood 2014: 29). To make

things worse, poets also distrusted critics’ ability to do justice to their works due to their lack of

creative experience (Inwood 2014: 33). However, rather than the common practice of securing a

place in the contemporary poetry scene and in literary history by breaking from other poetry

communities or from one’s own circle, the poet here chose to collaborate with other artists and

reach out directly to the general public. Instead of generating contentions, Zhai was actively

seeking alliances to build a discourse of artistic experimentation beyond the coterie of poets.

Again, this is not to say that intermedial collaboration and poet-initiated public poetry events are

unprecedented, but that the meta-level partnership among the poet, artists, and the general public

raised their relationship to a new strategic height.

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Second, those on and off stage both exerted their agency in the exchange session.

Although the conversation moved in a direction that validated the performance, this does not

necessarily mean that the agency of the poet and the performers prevailed over that of audience

members. On the one hand, in a participatory culture, the star-status of the poets is no longer

secure, though a tone of respect can be anticipated at face-to-face events much more than in

other contexts, such as online. Poets are vulnerable at public events, where young people are

often keen to throw out their two cents worth. Once in a while, at poetry events in China’s major

cities, one will encounter young people who seldom read poetry but still feel entitled enough to

give mediocre comments or even advice. In the case of this particular performance, a leading

poet like Zhai Yongming in her fifties was criticized directly by an obscure youngster. Although

I do not mean to suggest that an exchange session should consist only of compliments, it is clear

that in the participatory culture of today the authority of poets, even established ones, can be

challenged. To make poetry real and to make it speak to the heart, poets have to mobilize all

communicative means available to them, be it self-reflections in the poems, the collaborative

atmosphere at face-to-face events, or defenses for and explanations of their artistic experiments.

On the other hand, a favorable reception of the performance would not have been

achieved if the audience did not resonate with the performance’s nostalgia for the poetic past, did

not give heartfelt agreement with the crossover concept and practice, or did not participate

actively in the building of the conversation around the significance and aesthetics of border-

crossing experimentation and dissemination. Indeed, just as the poet and performers anticipated

an alliance with the audience, audience members also enthusiastically sought connections with

the poet and the performers. With the exception of the third questioner, all the questioners based

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their remarks on their previous familiarity with the poet/performers. While the first and second

questioners claimed to be Zhou’s and Zhai’s fans, respectively, the last questioner said she had

always been fond of Zhou’s, Zhai’s, and Wu’s works simultaneously. While the first questioner

expressed his regret at not being able to listen to his favorite song and the second questioner

mentioned his disappointment at not being able to meet Zhai in person when he visited her White

Night bar, the last questioner saw the current collaborative performance as a dream-come-true

moment. By bringing up their past exposure to the poet’s and performers’ works, they were

attempting to build common ground for their conversation. By mentioning lost opportunities,

they were also highlighting the preciousness of the current conversation, as well as indicating a

wish to establish stronger bonds. Although the poet-audience bond they expected was not likely

as close as the friendships within the poetry community, they were still demonstrating

spontaneity to know and ally with the poet through multiple communicative means and platforms

to keep contemporary Chinese poetry thriving.

Third, in their remarks the questioners were directly addressing the poet and the

performers, but they were also performing for their peers and (trans)forming the relationship

among them. Their remarks at the exchange session turned their prior knowledge about the

performance and contemporary Chinese culture into an opportunity to educate their peers about

contemporary Chinese poetry and to perhaps show off their own knowledge. In so doing, they

consolidated the middle-strata identity of the audience, an identity characterized by democratic

consumption of culture and responsibility to the collective through being informed, calculated,

and civilized consumers.

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On the one hand, the exaltation of what Jing Wang (2001) calls “democratic

consumerism” was demonstrated in several ways. Above all, although the ticket price (120 RMB

to 150 RMB, approximately 18-25 US dollars) set the audience apart from the underclasses, the

fact that the event was not overly expensive and was held in leisure time (a Sunday evening

during summer break) signaled that it was a consumer product “open and accessible to all” (J.

Wang 2001: 73). In the meantime, consumption of the performance was highly individualized,

and how audience members reacted depended largely on how they learned about the

performance and their background knowledge. A look at advertisements for the event shows us

that consumers were reached through multiple platforms. For instance, on the Douban event

page for the performance, 3503 people indicated interest and 324 indicated that they were going.

A poster of the event was also posted on the website of Good Play 好戏网 with brief

introductions to the performers. Tickets could also be reserved through the shopping website

Taobao 淘宝. From the remarks of questioners at the event, it can also be seen that all of them

had previously encountered works by at least one of the performers. Interestingly, they further

disclosed other related cultural products they had consumed, such as poetry by Yu Jian, a

television program that featured conversations between Zhai Yongming and playwright Liao

Yimei 廖一梅, and works by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (Yunmen wu ji 云门舞集), etc. This

information suggests that the questioners had a cultured lifestyle as well as a tendency to spend

money based on their knowledge of poetry and other arts (Ren 2012: 90). Their acts of paying

for the current performance and evaluating the quality of the performance hinged on information

gleaned from their past consumption practices (rather than school education or research). One

can say, therefore, that they exerted their individual subjectivity through a targeted investment of

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their money. Last but not the least, in addition to being informed and calculated consumers of

culture, the audience also embodied individualist ideals. All of the questioners emphasized that

their requests, questions, or comments were motivated by personal tastes, personal impressions,

or personal feelings. They were able to take different positions with regard to the performance,

ranging from ignoring its crossover concept to whole-heartedly embracing its practice. Such an

informed consumption-based position-taking showcased among the audience ways for persons in

the middle strata to define and assert themselves.

On the other hand, individual responsibility for the collective was also conspicuous in the

exchange. Above all, although the questioners emphasized their remarks as personal opinions,

their frequent mentioning of contemporary people and contemporary life in general conveyed the

message that the individual is connected to a larger public. For example, when the third

questioner introduced the parallel poetic lines and the last questioner talked about the sense of

incompleteness in contemporary life, they assumed that many among the audience shared their

knowledge or felt the same way. Moreover, the audience’s consumption of culture in the

convergence of media platforms also demonstrated efforts to transform the audience community.

In disclosing their previous consumption, the questioners were not merely showing off their

cultured lifestyle to their peers; they were also contributing to a fuller reference frame for them

to better comprehend the performance. They were working with the poet and the performers to

train their peers to properly perceive the performance. What is worth mentioning is that audience

members who did not have a chance to speak at the event also felt obliged to post reviews on

their personal blogs (e.g., Luoye d henji 2012). This practice not only informed the general

public of the performance, but also refreshed the memories of those who had attended,

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transformed their perception, and drew them closer. Furthermore, the questioners also expressed

their concern about the fate of contemporary Chinese poetry and expectations for changes.

Whereas the second questioner gave suggestions to the poet and the performers, the last

questioner placed hope on Hangzhou Grand Theatre, a party-controlled institution, to hold

similar performances on a regular basis. Their approach was in tune with the middle-strata’s

general tendency to seek and advance changes in everyday life within China’s existing

postsocialist condition (e.g., Cheng Li 2010; Chen/Goodman 2013; Miao 2016). This sense of

responsibility, the efforts to transform the audience’s perception, and an everyday orientation

rendered poetry something at once personal and communal. The participation in the social

construction of poetry and the use of poetry in the shaping of interpersonal relations made poetry

into something alive and part of life.

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the dialogic mode of poetry crossover in the performance of In

Ancient Times. I mainly focused on three aspects of its authenticating effect. Most obviously, the

joint presentation of Zhai Yongming’s poetry and Zhou Yunpeng’s new folk song significantly

transformed the ways in which poetry was read and the ways poetry reading produced meanings.

Second, the alternation and accompaniment of poetry reading and singing formed rich dialogues

between the media and thus enhanced the artistic quality of both the poems and the songs. Third,

the collaboration of poetry and song also affected the general procedure of the performance,

offering opportunities for the redistribution of discursive power among the participants, as well

as the formation of bonds among them as a middle-strata community. In all these areas, the

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poetry crossover stuck to the medial conventions of poetry and new folk song while embracing

calculated or contingent modifications. As a result, the participants on and off stage were

crossing medial borders while being fully aware of the existence of these borders.

The crossover was at once immediate and hypermediated. On the one hand, the fact that

the poetry crossover performance drew audience’s attention to the poet’s personal experiences

and enabled it to see some aspects of the postsocialist reality of contemporary China, made the

performance immediate in an epistemological sense. With the poems being highly self-reflexive,

the poet and the performers endeavoring to connect the poems with the here-and-now of the

performance scene, and the engaging and interactive flow of the performance, the audience could

relate to the poems and be mesmerized as if the media of poetry and new folk song were

transparent. Audience’s emotional resonances with the performance rendered it immediate in a

psychological sense. On the other hand, the performance involved artists with different expertise,

attracted an audience with diverse interests, and relied on the convergence of media platforms for

knowledge gathering, event promotion, and reviews. As the audience moved back and forth

between the poetry text and the live scene, poetry and new folk song, and the current event and

their previous consumption of cultural products, it noticed the collaboration between different

media and acknowledged that it was accessing what is represented in the poetry texts through a

complicated process of mediation and remediation. The fact that it was learning through

mediation acts and learning about mediation itself made the poetry crossover performance

hypermediated in an epistemological sense. As individual audience members exerted their own

agency in creating their own intermedial viewing experiences, constructing the meaning of

crossing medial borders, and actively finding out who they were and where they belonged at the

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event, they were demonstrating a belief that the experience of mediation is something real and

the participation in it is transformative. This belief in mediation as a reality rendered the poetry

crossover event hypermediated in a psychological sense. All in all, the immediate and

hypermediated realities and perspectives made poetry a real experience that also felt real.

As mentioned earlier, the dialogic mode is the most common poetry crossover mode in

China today, and in recent years it has enjoyed some mini-booms. For example, Zhai Yongming

has continued to seek collaboration with other artists, including Wu Na, Gao Ping 高平, Wang

Jiani 王佳妮, and Si Si 思斯. Poetry and music festivals and gatherings featuring multiple poets

and performers continue to be held in cities and tourist towns. Considering the favorable

reception of In Ancient Times and the audience’s active participation, it is little wonder that

poetry lovers and cultural brokers take the dialogic mode of poetry crossover into their own

hands. Entrepreneur- or individual-owned WeChat accounts devoted to poetry, such as Poems

for You (Wei ni du shi 为你读诗), regularly post poetry texts alongside audio recordings of

poetry reading, music or songs, paintings or photographs, etc. The poems are often selected

according to the hosts’ personal tastes or to promote particular festivals or events. The posts can

be with or without the hosts’ comments but are usually open to readers’ comments. Albums of

similar joint presentation of poetry and other media have also mushroomed on major FM apps,

such as Zhong Fang’s 钟芳 When Poetry Encounters Songs (Dang shi yujian ge 当诗遇见歌)

and Xixi’s 西桸 Word Temple (Yan si 言寺) on Lizhi 荔枝 FM.

While this combination of poetry and other media on mobile apps is significantly

different from the live performance of In Ancient Times, many of the characteristics and

implications of the crossover performance still applies. More importantly, it puts poetry lovers

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under the limelight and enhances their sense of responsibility and ability to promote poetry

among the general public and form like-minded communities. Meanwhile, their proactivity and

online visibility then increases their contact with poets. Occasionally, they enjoy opportunities to

invite poets to record a poetry reading or to interview them. Rather than simply being readers,

listeners, or a passive audience, they now take the roles of performers, commenters,

disseminators, gate-keepers, and trend-setters, etc. Like all other cases of the interplay of poetry

and other media, this practice makes the contemporary Chinese poetry scene a more inclusive

and socially relevant space.

The collaboration among poetry and other media in In Ancient Times was far from being

smooth. One unresolved issue that surfaced at the performance was how to balance the media

involved. The respective styles of performativity of poetry and new folk song aside, this concern

is less about a competition for status among media25 than a competition for audience attention.

Since poetry crossovers in contemporary China are both forms of artistic experimentation and an

outreach strategy, audience attention is crucial to their meaning-making mechanism, aesthetics,

and social impact. The question remains: how can border-crossing collaboration between poetry

and other media make people read poetry, make it approachable, appreciated, and actually

functional in an environment in which there is much competition among media for audience

attention? This question will be addressed in the next chapter on the transferential mode of

poetry crossover, where the issue is even more conspicuous.

———————————— 25 For example, artists’ elevation of the status of visual arts from crafts to one that surpasses poetry in the Renaissance. See Rippl 2015: 4.

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Chapter 2: The Transferential Mode of Poetry Crossover

The transferential mode can be considered a moderate type of poetry crossover in terms

of both popularity and degree of experimentation. This type of crossover features juxtaposition

of a poetry text with another media product that is based on that text (often created in

collaboration with the poet). As a result, certain aspects of the poetry text (such as literal content,

general concept, tone, mood, rhythm, or structure) are transferred to the other media product

within the other media product’s conventional expressive repertoire (including the product’s

material and technological configuration, the medium’s meaning-making mechanism, and the

artist’s personal style). Meanwhile, new understandings, aesthetics, and social effects are created

as the poetry text and the other media product are being appreciated simultaneously or in

succession, and as the network of poetry and that of the other medium merge and clash.

The transferential mode resembles some more familiar types of poetry crossover in many

ways and therefore demands some clarifications. In this crossover mode, though the other media

product can be appreciated on its own, it originates from the poetry text itself. This distinguishes

it from the dialogic mode, where the other media product has an independent origin and is

selected to form a collaboration with the poetry text. While the transferential mode enhances the

collaboration between poetry and other media, it also intensifies the tension between them.

However, rather than a competition for status, the tension is often practical and situational: a

competition for the audience’s attention; a possibility of one involved medium dominating over

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the other(s) in the artists’ pursuit of aesthetic effects; a negotiation of intentions among all

participating parties. However, as is shown in many cases in the transferential mode, a perfect

balance between media is not always sought. Even without an ideal balance, the dynamic still

brings medial specificities and interrelations to the forefront, producing new insights into the

poetry text and the other media product and forming new alliances among participants.

The transferential mode also refashions the conventional practice of adaptation. To start

with, while adaptation tends to favor certain authors, texts, genres, and time periods (Sanders

2006: 120-121; cf. Straumann 2015: 252) and thus normalizes particular intermedial partnerships

(such as the adaptation of novels into films, tales into paintings and sculptures, poems into

music, etc.), the transferential mode both continues the commonly seen partnerships and creates

unlikely new ones. More importantly, unlike adaptation, in which the adapted work is usually

appreciated on its own, the transferential mode presents the poetry text and the other media

product together. Therefore, unlike adaptation’s reliance on audience’s familiarity with the

source media product to discern the overlaps and differences in the adapted work (for those who

lack that knowledge, the source media product completely “disappears” as they appreciate the

adapted work), the transferential mode provides the (often unfamiliar) poetry text and

foregrounds the transference of medial characteristics from the poetry text to the other media

product. The poetry text does not disappear, and it shifts the audience’s pleasure from gaining a

novel experience of an old story (Hutcheon 2006: 114; cf. Straumann 2015: 252) to relishing the

medial specificities and interrelations involved in the transferring process. If adaption reinforces

and enriches one’s memory of a narrative, the transferential mode leads to deeper understandings

of the poetry text and the other media product through their synergies. Last but not least,

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crossovers in the transferential mode always include more than one or two particular works. It

often involves poetry’s transmission on the communication platforms associated with the other

media, extensive collaboration between the poets and artists, the poets’ and artists’ articulation of

personal feelings related to the works in front of the audience, as well as the advancement of

common social purposes through the joint efforts of poets, artists, event organizers, sponsors,

media professionals, etc. Therefore, rather than engendering fan communities, as is often the

case with adaptation, the transferential mode transforms social behaviors and relations in a way

that draws all those involved closer together.

In this chapter, my analyses center on two seemingly distinct but very similar cases of the

transferential mode of poetry crossover in contemporary China—the We Poetize (Shide 诗的)

itinerant exhibition organized by Poetry Island (Shige dao 诗歌岛) and the talent show Sing a

Poem for You (Shige zhi wang 诗歌之王) produced by and broadcast on Sichuan Satellite

Television. Against the public complaint about modern poetry’s “incomprehensibility”

(kanbudong 看不懂), my comparison of the two cases illustrates how the transferential mode

makes poetry texts more approachable to the general public, how the transference of poetic

qualities is highlighted, and how such an intermedial interaction between poetry and other media

reshapes the social relations among poets, artists, media professionals, cultural enterprises, and

audience.

I argue that both events make the poem-based artworks or music into spectacles that

incorporate the artists’ or singers’ life experiences. In so doing, the artists/singers exemplify a

personal way to relate to poetry, which can immerse and inspire the audience or trigger

emulation. Hence, poetry is rendered as empathetic and everyday, rather than elusive or ethereal.

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These events also appeal to the audience by foregrounding the disparity in the sensory and

semiotic modes of poetry and the other media, or by sensationalizing the divergences and

contentions between the poets and the artists/singers through their own or third-party accounts.

In such an enlightening and entertaining process, the transferential mode provides an opportunity

for all those involved to form an alliance to negotiate the socialist and capitalist components of

life in postsocialist China. Media companies and cultural businesses fulfill their twin duties of

(1) building the nation’s “cultural confidence” (wenhua zixin 文化自信) as part of the state’s

ideological and moral program, and (2) making profits that contribute to the market economy

and the national GDP. At the same time, poets and artists can help their media to maintain/gain

the symbolic status of high culture, while also allowing them to saturate into popular culture and

making them into integrated entities that fuse the multiple facets of aesthetics, history, economy,

memory, and everyday life. Individual consumers of the media products not only quench their

upward middle-strata craving for culture (Miao 2016) and support the “eyeball” economy, they

also satisfy their own needs for entertainment and emotional outlets.

We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You

Taking place between 2015 and 2016, the We Poetize exhibition and Sing a Poem for You

show both feature the composition of artworks or music out of poetry texts, as well as the

juxtaposition of poetry texts and these works over a convergence of communication platforms.

Affiliated with the Shenzhen Moment Culture Communication Company Ltd. (Shike Wenhua

chuanbo youxian gongsi 时刻文化传播有限公司) and self-claimed as a “convergent platform of

literature and arts based on poetry” (yi shi wei yin de wenyi juhe pingtai 以诗为引的文艺聚合平

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台), the Poetry Island team has been devoted to organizing poetry crossover events since 2014

(Zhong/Huang 2014). Based on Moment Culture’s previous connection with International

Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (IPNHK), a biannual event launched by the famous poet Bei Dao

北岛 in 2009, Poetry Island initiated the We Poetize itinerant exhibition in July 2015 by privately

and publicly inviting artists to compose works based on poems by local and international poets

who would attend the IPNHK, to be held in November (Shige dao 2015a). After successfully

collecting and selecting the main body of the artworks, the exhibition toured Guangzhou,

Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing, and Hangzhou from December 2015 to November 2016. As the

exhibition toured, new artworks were added.

The exhibition was indeed multimedia, as selected artworks ranged from music, dance,

paintings, installations, and mixed media on wood boards, to neon lights, photographs, drawings,

graffiti, illustrations, and videos, etc. Each artist was allowed to select multiple poems; works on

the same poem were exhibited together, usually with the poem attached to the artworks. The

Poetry Island team also frequently posted information about the exhibition on its Douban

channel, Weibo account, and WeChat official account. In addition to reports on the exhibition’s

reception, articles featuring one poem and its corresponding artwork were regularly posted. The

facts that the artworks originated from poems and were organized around poems at the exhibition

show that the artworks were transferring certain aspects of the poems and were inevitably

interpretive. The copresence of the poetry text and the artworks at the exhibition and on social

media also indicates that the text and the artworks were meant to be read against each other.

Sing a Poem for You, by comparison, restricted its media to poetry and music

(occasionally dance) and paired up poets and singers. Broadcast every Saturday night between

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December 12, 2015 and March 11, 2016 (except the week of the Spring Festival), the program

took the form of a talent show to discover the “Kings of Poetry” (which is what the Chinese title

of the show literally means): judges (critics/editors/scholars, music producers, and professional

poetry reciters) critiqued and voted on the poets and singers; selected audience groups (e.g.,

members of college poetry societies, college graduates, and migrant workers), established poets

(the final episode), and media representatives (the final episode) were also invited to vote. As is

the common practice in poetry society gatherings, the program supplied topics (thirteen) for the

teams to work on. Except for the second episode, when poets were asked to fill the singers’

existing tunes with new poems, singers were supposed to compose and perform new songs based

on the poets’ poems.

Adopting a procedure similar to that of the We Poetize exhibition, Sing a Poem for You

offered musical pieces that transferred characteristics of the poems and that were more or less

interpretive. Meanwhile, because the poems were sung as song lyrics, poetry texts were always

presented together with the music. In addition, judges and audience at the television studio were

given pamphlets with all the poetry texts (shigeben 诗歌本). In cases where the poetry texts were

significantly altered as they made their way into the songs, the professional poetry reciters would

read aloud the original texts. Like the We Poetize exhibition’s active presence on social media,

poetry texts and audios or video clips of the songs were also posted on Sing a Poem for You’s

official WeChat account, Weibo account, and Baidu Tieba (sometimes in response to audience’s

requests, e.g., Xiaoshi he xiaoge 2015a; Xiaoshi he xiaoge 2015b). Again, this demonstrates the

production team’s and some audience’s common desire to have the poetry text and music

juxtaposed so as to appreciate the connection between the two. The impact of these two poetry

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events was significant in terms of the variety of poets, artists, organizations, and communication

platforms involved, their time span, and their targeted urban audiences.

Poetry Spectacles

Seen from the We Poetize exhibition’s promotional slogan “Together, let poetic quality

be seen, heard, and felt by touch. Everything is poetized”26 一起，让诗意被看到，听到，触得

到。一切都是诗的 (Shige dao 2015b) and the television show’s opening remark “Sing poetry

for you” 把诗唱给你听 (Han 2015a), one can see the organizers’ ambition to expand poetry’s

sensory modes and saturate it into niche markets or popular culture. It is worth mentioning that

though the transferential mode of poetry crossover in the We Poetize exhibition has an elitist

dimension, which in that sense is unmistakably different from Sing a Poem for You’s popular

orientation, it was intended for public consumption, according to its curator Zheng Yi 郑轶

(Shige dao 2015d). Not only did it include art forms not customarily regarded as “highbrow,”

such as graffiti, manga, and miniature books, but most of the works on display were also by

obscure or emerging artists. One of the venues for the exhibition was the “eat, drink, play, and

enjoy” space of the Asian Design Management Forum in Hangzhou where new commercial

brands were displayed in different booths (Shige dao 2016f), and it held multiple workshops that

were open to the public and required no prior experience. Hence, the exhibition shared with the

talent show the goal of bringing poetry to the general public.

———————————— 26 I used the term “poetized” here to align with Poetry Island’s translation of the Chinese word shide 诗的 in the title of the itinerant exhibition “we poetize.”

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In their own ways, the visualization, musicalization, and tactilization of poetry in the two

events enriched the audience’s sensory experiences and transformed the poetry crossover into

spectacles. However, questions remain: Do the events succeed in allowing poetry to touch more

hearts or do they simply commodify it? Do they constitute a promising direction for poetry? Do

they facilitate poetry’s age-old role of connecting people or do they reduce poetry to profitable

entertainment or reinforce social stratifications that can drive people apart?

Guy Debord, with whom the idea is commonly associated, holds a rather negative view

of “spectacle.” For him, the spectacle is more than a collection of images (or even images plus

sounds); it is “a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 2014: 2). He

condemns a spectacular society for replacing “everything that was directly lived” by “a

representation” (Debord 2014: 2). Since the spectacle is the product of the dominant mode of

production and consumption—be it commodity fetishism or personality cult—it serves to

legitimize the existing system (Debord 2014: 3). Therefore, in a spectacle, “spectators are linked

solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other”

(Debord 2014: 10). Debord’s insight of the spectacle’s effectiveness in engineering citizens’

perceptions, values, and even actions in everyday life (Ren 2012: 70) can be very useful in

diagnosing contemporary society and its cultural scenes. However, he fails to recognize the

ultimately mediated nature of life and overlooks the cooperation and negotiation involved in the

meaning of the spectacle by downplaying human agency. Neither was Debord able to foresee the

complexity of the reality of postsocialist China or envision a participatory culture facilitated by

advanced technologies and media convergence and characterized by multi-directional

interactions. These factors all make the spectacle in the transferential mode of poetry crossover

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in contemporary China very different from what Debord was critiquing. This mode offers an

opportunity for people in a fragmented society, despite the diversity of their life experiences, to

relate to each other through the mediation of poetry and other arts.

Although the specialization and professionalization of modern and contemporary Chinese

society have partly contributed to the sense of “incomprehensibility” of new poetry for the

general educated Chinese public, both We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You tactically used

artworks/music as well as poets’ and artists’/singers’ self-accounts to exemplify a personal way

to relate to the poems and thus engage the audience so that they can better “understand” the

poems. Huang Ying 黄英 (a.k.a. Tian Shui 天水), initiator of the itinerant exhibition and

manager of Moment Culture, asked in a promotional video, “You really don’t understand

[poems]?” 你真的不懂（诗）吗 (Kaishi zhongchou 2015). And Yang Lin 杨林 the host of the

show claimed, “Convey the feelings through poetry, express the meanings through songs” 以诗

传情，以歌达意 (Han 2015a). From these remarks, we can see that making poems

approachable to the general public was an important part of the events’ agendas.

Concrete measures were also taken to achieve this. Both events sought to elicit affective

articulations from the poets and the artists/singers to highlight the artworks/music as emotional

reactions to the poems. These creative reactions were rendered as personal and thus one out of a

myriad of possible interpretations. For example, once the We Poetize exhibition visited a city, it

was accompanied by related events, such as poetry readings and seminars, where some of the

IPNHK poets made a presence and talked about their own works and their views of poetry

crossover. Meanwhile, at the artwork collection stage, We Poetize required the artists to record

their compositional process and chain of thought on an IPNHK notebook, which would be

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displayed as part of the exhibition (Shige dao 2015b). As the exhibition toured, photocopies

and/or transcriptions of the notes were also posted on Weibo. In addition, Poetry Island

systematically posted brief correspondence between the artists and the poets, featuring the

former’s questions and the latter’s answers. It showcased both the artists’ perspectives and the

poets’ major concepts.

Similar strategies were also adopted in Sing a Poem for You. Taking advantage of the

interviews with the poets and the singers before or after the singers’ performances—interviews

like this are an integral part of the talent show format—the program often had the poets and the

singers recount personal stories or add details about their generation, home region, and family

background, etc. While the articulations in the itinerant exhibition were mostly a mixture of the

intellectual and the emotional, those in the television show were dominated by the emotional.

For instance, in the We Poetize exhibition, multiple artists chose to work on poems in

Wang Xiaoni’s 王小妮 (b. 1955) collection To Another World (Zhi lingyige shijie 致另一个世

界). At the IPNHK opening ceremony in Guangzhou, Wang Xiaoni talked about her poem “To a

Sunny Day” (Zhi qingtian 致晴天). Poetry Island reported part of her speech as follows:

As we all know, we rarely see the blue sky. When the sky suddenly turns blue, we will suddenly feel that the sky starts to have colors. Today, my WeChat Moment was flooded with my Beijing friends’ posts saying how the sky looked. … All of our happiness should originate from within ourselves, rather than a higher order that represents us, such as the motherland. “The motherland” and “I,” there is a huge gap and distance between the two. After all, our feelings are natural, personal, and poetic. (Shige dao 2015c)

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The poem itself begins with the line “The day is so nice, but I’m not” 天这么好，而我这么不好

(Wang X. 2015: 8-9).27 The contrast between “I” and the weather forcefully severs the human

social world from the natural world, and the poet clearly casts aside the traditional correlative

cosmology that binds the two worlds in a harmonious order, or any harmonious correlation

between “I” and others. “I” refuses to have her reality represented by the “fantastical” 奇幻的

(Wang X. 2015: 8-9) illusion of the natural world and, in corollary, any standardized illusion

produced by the state apparatus or the market order. Moreover, as the poem unfolds, the poet

even questions the ownership of the human world by asking “Whose world is this/ yours or

mine” 这是哪一个人间/ 是你们的还是我的 (Wang X. 2015: 8-9), a gesture that almost sets the

individual “I” and the rest of the world into a competitive relationship. The poem ends with the

lines “Burning irons shuttle between these two worlds/ the future’s pallidness and cold/ wait for

that whirring stab of the drill bit” 在两个世界间穿梭的是烧烫的铁/ 未来的苍白和冰凉/ 就等

着那钻头的刺啦一声 (Wang X. 2015: 8-9), suggesting that the two worlds are not completely

detached from each other after all. When the two worlds are connected, all illusions will be

shattered. In the poet’s investigation into the intricate relationship between the individual and the

world through her contemplation of everyday objects, scenes, and events, the individual,

subjective, and personal prevails, even if that reality might not look pretty.

Such a stress on the personal was refreshed and reinforced in Wang’s remark at the

IPNHK opening night in Guangzhou: she refused to replace individuals’ authentic feelings with

the ideology of the national imagined community, in which, as Benedict Anderson (2006: 6) puts

———————————— 27 Translated by Eleanor Goodman.

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it, people “never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the

minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Although her poem collection was published

in 2013 and the sunny day she wrote about was unspecified, Wang’s mention of the blue sky in

her remark inevitably recalls a specific historical moment—the “APEC blue” of 2014, when the

government sought to curb emissions to create beautiful blue skies for visiting dignitaries. But

Wang refused to be represented by a feeling of happiness brought by the blue sky and, by

implication, an effective government. By hinting at the APEC blue and referring to her Beijing

friends’ posts on WeChat Moment, she was exemplifying how to relate everyday life details to

her poem and how to produce new understandings of her poem.

To render the artworks as personal reactions to the poems, Poetry Island asked the artists

what aspect of Wang Xiaoni’s poems or poetry collection touched them most deeply. The artists

often gave personal and emotionally charged answers. Zhong Dangxuan 钟当宣 (b. 1985), who

created a work of mixed media on wood boards based on Wang’s “To a Sunny Day,” described

his feelings in this way: “‘A sunny day’ is a common image, but Wang Xiaoni’s ‘To a Sunny

Day’ conveys a distinct sense of connectedness and confrontation to me. ‘The day is so nice, but

I’m not.’ Often times, no matter what we envisage, the reality is right there in front of us. I

cannot escape, and no one will come to rescue me. Isn’t this what I have to face?” (Shige dao

2016a). On the one hand, Zhong captured Wang’s investigation into the uneasy relationship

between the individual and the rest of the world; on the other hand, he demonstrated his own

brand of personal struggle. Although the scenario he depicted was highly abstract, he still clearly

demonstrated a conflict between individual aspirations and the insurmountable obstacles posed

by reality, as well as the necessity to reconcile this conflict on one’s own. Far from Wang’s

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certainty of individual authenticity and cynicism toward the illusions created by others, Zhong’s

account of personal dream versus shared reality reshuffled the power dynamic between the

individual and the world. Considering Zhong’s recent (2014) completion of his graduate study

and uncertainty about the future (including possible setbacks in launching a career) and Wang’s

sure experiences of weathering the vicissitudes of multiple political campaigns since the early

1980s (Xu J. 2010), there is little wonder why Zhong expressed much more helplessness and

self-doubt than Wang. With the resonance between the tension in the poem and that in the artist’s

narrative, and with the poet and the artist being born three decades apart, Zhong’s response to the

poem could be seen as a valid personal reaction.

In contrast to Zhong’s general statement, Cui Ying 崔莹, who shot a short film based on

Wang’s To Another World, especially “To Feeling” (Zhi ganjue 致感觉), gave a detailed and

even more emotional account:

there is one line in “To Feeling”: “because this world doesn’t have a you.” To me, this is not poetry but philosophy. Because my mother passed away, I always assumed that there must come a new mother to love me, but really there won’t be. Human feelings are the same. You only have yourself. All other feelings are an atmosphere and an ephemeral meeting. Therefore, this line in the poem gave me the momentum to create my work. I wish to carry out a conversation with my feelings through my work. (Shige dao 2016b)

In this account, Cui firmly anchored her understanding of the tension between the individual and

the world, the reality and the illusion, authenticity and representation in Wang’s poem collection

into her personal experience of losing a loved one. Therefore, Cui’s tone diverged from the

prophetic composure and the low-key resistance present in Wang’s poems, and turned toward a

contemplation and an acceptance of human solitude. Whereas Wang’s “I” is more like a truth

revealer, Cui is more like the one being enlightened; whereas Wang faces the outside world

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head-on, Cui looks inside her heart. The artist’s self-account and the poem formed two sides of

the same coin of the individual-world tension. Therefore, Cui rendered her work as another valid

personal reaction to Wang’s poems.

Zhong and Cui both brought personal experiences into their understandings of the poems,

and the composition of their works strongly conveyed the message that poetry texts could be and

should be approached through personal experiences, however diverse they are. That the details

Wang, Zhong, and Cui ascribed to the poems were so different suggests that there is no standard

understanding of the poems. If a single artistic visualization limits people’s imagination of

poems, a plethora of them inspire the audience to dig more out of the poems. The fact that

Zhong’s and Cui’s personal accounts were both emotional—expressing frustration or

vulnerability—indicated that reading poetry entails much more than intellectual comprehension;

reading poetry is also a space where affections are articulated and poets, artists, and audience are

bound together, a function that is not unlike popular culture (Grossberg 1992).

The articulation of personal, emotional responses to the poems is even more conspicuous

in the television show. The best example occurs in Episode 4 when teams of poets and singers

battled on the topic of family affection. The Internet-based poet Zhongni 仲尼 (Huang Xiaofeng

黄小沣) wrote a poem to express his filial devotion that employed the image of a lotus in autumn

as a metaphor for his single mother. During her performance of the song based on the poem, the

singer Zeng Jingwen 曾静玟 was so moved that she choked up and could not perform the most

powerful part of the song, which featured the mother’s comfort and encouragement to her son

supposedly to be sung or spoken in Hokkien (the subtitle showed the unarticulated words):

“Things at home, don’t worry about them/ Without a companion at night, I’m just happy/ The

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world is so big, you have to take a look/ In case of troubles, don’t be afraid/ You should know,

your dad blesses you from heaven” 家里的事情，你免牵挂/ 我夜晚无伴，也倒快活/ 世界那

么大，你要去看看/ 遇到事情也别怕/ 你要知道，你阿爸在天上会给你保佑啦 (Han 2015a:

Ep. 4).

Both the singer and the poet were given a chance to explain why Zeng choked up. Zeng’s

remarks mentioned her hardworking mother’s encouragement to her, which indicated that this

was the point where the poem resonated most with her. Her remarks included additional details,

such as how her mother worked at a farmers’ market in Taipei and how her mother urged her to

hang in there at the Sing a Poem for You competition. With the revelation of her family

background and the reference to the current show, she was making a clear gesture that she

related to the poem personally and emotionally. Then Zhongni was given a chance to reveal the

personal story behind the poem. Rather than reiterating the notion of a mother’s love, Zhongni

described his mother’s love for his late father by recounting how, in the days before his death,

she transferred his debts to her to free him of debt collectors. These details created a fuller

representation of his mother’s character and indicated the space that a poem leaves for personal

experiences. During his account, Zhongni stopped several times to hold back his tears and at the

end of the interview knelt down to show gratitude to his mother.

Such moments of affective articulation, including singer Luo Zhongxu’s 罗中旭

disclosure of his first love, judge Xu Tao’s 徐涛 relating of singer Zhou Xiaoou’s 周晓鸥

rebellious acts in his youth, and poet Yuwen Jue’s 宇文珏 memory of hometown, etc, abounded

in the television show. Sometimes, as in Zhongni and Zeng Jingwen’s case, crying among the

poets, singers, judges, and audience members were filmed in closeup shots. Although these

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articulations of emotions might have been “performed,” the articulation of personal emotions,

authentic or not, allowed people to relate to the poetry texts and connected those participating in

the event. Admittedly, such acts were a selling point of the show, but as Lawrence Grossberg

(1992: 85) points out, “the terrain of commercial popular culture is the primary space where

affective relationships are articulated; and the consumer industries increasingly appeal not only

to ideological consensus, but to the contemporary structures of affective needs and investments.”

The production team of the program enabled the transferential mode of poetry crossover to ally

with the affective field of popular culture and make poetry texts more approachable and

relatable.

Apart from the poets’ and the artists’/singers’ articulation of personal emotions, the

artworks and music in the exhibition and television show also proved to be creative remediations

that made the poetry texts more approachable. Transferring conceptual, structural, or stylistic

aspects of the poetry texts with their own specific combination of sensory and semiotic modes,

these artworks and music attracted the audience with their virtuosity and served as an entryway

for audiences into the poetry texts. Take, for example, Bai Hua’s 白桦 (a.k.a. Bai Daniu 白大妞)

series of five ink-wash paintings based on Wang Xiaoni’s poem “To an Unknown Bird.” The

poem addresses the connection and confrontation between the individual and the world, reality

and the illusion, authenticity and representation, themes that run consistently throughout her

poem collection. The poem goes:

Sleepless, the birds start to chirp and so many, so many beaks are pecking holes around my heart. It is long before dawn, they compete with their calls will-o’-the-wisp, flickering light, bean sprouts, leather drums one is so dull, as if he is playing wooden clappers.

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In the tree shadows stirred up by a strange light the wooden clapper player works the hardest, no matter how dark it is. That old man with two wings refuses to give this world an all’s well. 失眠，鸟们开始叫了 很多很多的喙 在心的四围啄洞。 天亮还早，他们争着喊叫 磷火，跳灯，豆苗，皮鼓 有一只真木讷，好像在敲木梆子。 灵光撩动的树影 敲木梆的最卖力，无论多么黑。 带翅膀的老汉 不肯对人间喊一声平安无事。 (Wang X. 2015: 28-29)28

Noticing bird calls due to her insomnia, which is then exacerbated by the calls, the poet projects

her own anxiety about human affairs on the image of birds, especially the one (perhaps a

woodpecker) that makes sounds like a wooden clapper, in her contentious relationship with the

natural world. Compared with the nimble birds whose calls might be showy or even annoying,

this dull bird is steadfast in revealing the disturbing reality. He is the cognate of the poet’s

genuine self in the natural world.

On the level of content, in response to Wang’s typical contemplation over social relations

through everyday objects, the compositions of Bai Hua’s paintings are simple. All five of them

feature the face of a woman surrounded by a tangle of black brush strokes interspersed with solid

colored dots (See Figure 1).

———————————— 28 I made major revisions to Eleanor Goodman’s translation to preserve some linguistic features of the original poem related to my analysis.

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Figure 1: “To an Unknown Bird” by Bai Hua, 50×56.5 cm, ink-wash painting on paper, one of five. Photo source: Poetry Island. URL (accessed 7/2/2020): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4MTgxNjEzNA==&mid=2654152589&idx=1&sn=0f6c8f5816a3f7cdca65d03b2526752f&scene=19#wechat_redirect. The brush strokes in varying shades of black ink and in assorted widths and shapes form both the

hair of the woman and suggest old tree branches, young sprigs, and spiral vines where birds can

perch or nest. Such a design merges the individual with nature, but it is an uneasy union. Birds

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are not depicted directly in the paintings, and the solid colored dots are ambiguous: are they the

birds’ sounds flying into the woman’s mind or the woman’s thoughts being projected out to the

natural world? The dots tend to be dense at the peripheries of the tangle of brush strokes and

sparse toward the core, indicating some resistance from the individual—either her mind is so full

of thoughts that it resists the sounds of the birds, or she actively projects her thoughts out to

shield herself against the illusion of nature. Such a coexistence of connection and confrontation

explains why the poetry text says the beaks are “pecking holes around my heart” rather than

directly into her heart.

Structurally speaking, the poem zooms in from a hubbub of birds’ sounds to focus on the

“wooden clapper player.” Taking the darkness of the night into consideration, the poet most

likely does not actually see the birds but conjures them in her mind’s eyes from their calls. As

the poem unfolds and as time goes by, the dull bird becomes more vivid. Interestingly, the

painter did not reproduce this part of the poem; instead, she focuses her attention on the sleepless

poet. This is a clever way to deal with the poem, because, as I see it, the poem is more about the

poet than the bird. With five paintings of the same woman seen from different perspectives, the

painter not only gave the audience a fuller view of the woman, but more importantly, she

represented how the poet tosses and turns in her sleepless nights. Although the paintings were

hung one by one on the wall and could be captured in one glance, the different postures strongly

hinted at the woman’s troubled mind and the passing of time. In a way, the paintings zoomed in

to focus on the sleepless woman.

In terms of language, Wang writes, as she has been doing since the start of her career, in

a colloquial style. However, although she eschews ornate diction, intellectual discourse, and

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elaborate rhetoric, her language demonstrates careful word choice, a degree of elegance,

syntactic flexibility, and a careful structure that makes every word count. She may use the

colloquial “so many so many beaks” (henduo henduo de hui 很多很多的喙) to render her

encounter with the birds in a mundane way that draws her closer to her readers; she may also use

the contrast between the dull bird and his refusal to give the slightly literal “all’s well” (ping’an

wushi 平安无事) to punch readers in their hearts. In other words, her calculated colloquialism

paired up with her inspection of ultimate questions through everyday objects blend “the earthly”

and “the elevated,” to borrow Maghiel van Crevel’s (2008) terms, and form a texture of

unexpected sharpness within the plainness.

Bai Hua’s painting series corresponds well with this blend by employing both the

freehand brushwork of traditional ink-wash paintings for the strokes and dots, and the realistic

sketch in black and white illustrations to delineate the woman’s face. As a result, the paintings

take on an appearance that is simultaneously abstract and concrete, traditional and modern,

intellectual and sensual. Nonetheless, in tune with Bai’s personal delight in the heightened

sensations and creativity accompanying insomnia (Shige dao 2016c), the paintings do not

highlight the sharpness that characterizes Wang’s language. Fortunately, this feature is amply

demonstrated in Yu Xiang’s 宇向 drawing series based on Wang’s To Another World collection

(Figure 2).

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Figure 2: “To Another World” by Yu Xiang, 153.5×107 cm ×2, drawings on paper. Photo source: Poetry Island. URL (accessed 7/15/2020: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4MTgxNjEzNA==&mid=2654153303&idx=1&sn=a300296446e38687a188452a5f1a1572&scene=19#wechat_redirect. Although Yu drew different aspects of the same objects as Bai, she also expressed a sense of

sharpness by drawing pointed objects (such as pen, knife, drill bit, and bottle opener), depicting

the effects of sharpness (such as holes and cracks), and physically boring holes in the paper

(obviously with sharp objects). Therefore, she conveyed Wang’s linguistic features with both the

visuality and materiality of her drawings. In transferring just a partial quality of Wang Xiaoni’s

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poems, Bai’s and Yu’s works encouraged the audience to discover other characteristics of the

poems and make connections with them.

This being said, I do not mean that the transferential mode merely works as synesthesia,

or that the artworks are mere interpretations. On the one hand, painters like Bai Hua projected

their own personal experiences (e.g., delight in insomnia) and aesthetic ambitions into their

works (e.g., the merging of painting styles). On the other hand, the juxtaposition of texts and

visual arts also articulates aspects of the paintings that often are not explicitly forefronted (e.g.,

the theme of sleeplessness is an interpretation rather than a definitive given in the painting,

unlike the way it is explicitly stated in the poem). As the poet Zhang Dinghao 张定浩

maintained in one seminar accompanying the exhibition, “We don’t understand this painting; we

don’t understand this installation; we don’t understand this poem; these are not important. When

we juxtapose two things that we don’t understand, we seem to understand something. I think this

is a better, more comprehensive way to understand the world” (Shige dao 2016d). In the

transferential mode, poetry texts and artworks are not subservient the one to the other, but form a

system of mutual reference that trains the audience to approach both and detect relationships

between the two. With medial differences, overlaps, and creative interactions, it forms an all-

inclusive intermedial network that bases understanding on relationships. In this sense, it

exemplifies a way of understanding.

Similarly, in Sing a Poem for You, poetry’s transferential juxtaposition with music also

inspired audience understandings through relations between poetic qualities and singers’

personal experiences and singing styles and skills. While some scholars believe music is

primarily iconic (e.g., Elleström 2010: 29), others maintain that it does not resemble anything

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beyond itself but acknowledge that musical composition signifies people’s inner states (e.g.,

Wallrup 2018). In Sing a Poem for You, music pieces’ transference of poetic qualities did not lie

in any resemblance or contiguity between the musical notes and the literal meanings of the words

in the poems, but primarily in their creative reactions to the tones, moods, and linguistic

characteristics of the poems. The poet Li Li 李笠 (b. 1961) and the singer Huang Ling’s 黄龄 (b.

1983) cooperation in the song “Childhood” (Tongnian 童年) is a perfect example, because it was

a rare case where the elusiveness of the poem was given great attention both in the show and in

its online distribution (e.g., Han 2015a: Ep. 10; Zhinian 2019).

Li’s two-part poem consists of snippets of childhood activities, in the first part, and

continuous interactions with his mother, in the second. I quote some parts of the poem here:

Running, twirling, and crying in Mom’s own kindergarten Fighting for a rationed fish with elder brother Being scrawled into slogans and model plays by red color Enduring four classes with a single bowl of porridge, learning to be a screw Making scrubbers with the history textbook, practicing the wisdom of losing is

winning Skipping classes, encountering the emperor in the teacher’s slap on the face,

violence in the cage Growing up, learning “troubles issue from the mouth” Learning to turn tears into stones Climbing up summer trees, with a net, catching Tang dynasty cicadas Crawling into autumn graves, with breath held, catching Ming dynasty crickets Drawing heroes, thirty years later, heroes became clowns Painting landscape, forty years later, landscape became skyscrapers At twelve, in the crackles of the firecrackers, mahjong tiles in sweet wrappers winning away all of my candies with a smile, anticipation for the Spring Festival Reminisce, everything is turned into a dream… You were sitting there, holding an empty bowl I walked to you, you became a chair I sat down. You became the brush pen, ink, inkstone and paper I wrote, you became a crooked “person” … I lay down, you became oceans, surging waves

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I floated, I heard you cry in a sorrowful voice like a deserted child The child is me waking up from the dream I’m sitting, by the snow-covered window in a foreign country writing poetry, writing what you’ve said: The universe, is no more than an upside-down empty bowl 在母亲一个人的幼儿园里奔跑，打转，哭喊 和哥哥争抢一条配给的鱼 被红色涂写成标语，样板戏 用一碗泡饭支撑四堂课，学做螺丝钉 用历史课本做刮片，练习输就是赢的智慧 旷课。在老师的一记耳光里遇见皇帝，笼里的暴力 成长，学会“祸从 口出” 学会 把泪水 化作 石头 爬夏天的树，用网 捉唐朝的 知了 钻秋天的墓，用屏息 抓明朝的 蟋蟀 画英雄，三十年后，英雄变成了小丑 画山水，四十年后，山水变成了楼房 十二岁，鞭炮声中 糖纸裹着的麻将 微笑赢走我所有的糖果，对春节的期盼 回忆，一切就变成梦…… 你坐着，端着一只空碗 我向你走去，你变成一把椅子 我坐下。你变成笔墨砚纸 我写字，你变成歪歪扭扭的“人” …… 我躺下，你变成海，涌动的波浪 我漂浮，我听见你悲声哭喊 像个被遗弃的孩子 孩子是梦醒后的我 我坐着，在异国飘雪的窗口 写诗，写你曾说过的话： 宇宙，无非是一只倒置的 空碗 (Xiaoshi he xiaoge 2016a)

Growing up during Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Li infiltrates his childhood memory in the

first part with hallmarks of the Cultural Revolution (e.g., rations, slogans, model plays, and a

screw in the socialist machine) and his sarcasm toward its absurdities (e.g., the strange dynamics

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of losing being a form of winning, words and troubles, soft tears and hard stones, heroes and

clowns, landscape and skyscrapers). Meanwhile, the poet reminisces about his mother’s love for

him in the second part of the poem by describing how she provides for his changing needs as he

grows up. In retrospect, the poet realizes that he has underappreciated his mother’s love and feels

great nostalgia. Distinct as the two parts of the poem appear, the sense of being falsely

represented, brainwashed, hypnotized, and deceived by people and by state ideology in the first

part, and the worthlessness of dreams and the irretrievability of love in the second part, are

merged in a deeply absurd sense of loss.

Huang Ling based her music on the second part of the poem, but she also broke the first

part of the poem into two sections and inserted them into the main tune as a poetry recitation and

a rap, respectively.29 The music took both straight-forward and more culturally sensitive

approaches to transfer the poem’s sarcastic and nostalgic sense of loss. The main tune of the

song was not melodious and could even be called monotonous. Almost every line was

characterized by the steady progression of a string of almost flat tones followed by a quick

succession of descending portamentos and ornaments. Although such a pitch contour drew a

mental picture of repression and falling that is directly linked with a sense of loss, its anti-

melodic composition and virtuoso sound shifts at the descending parts also suggested rebellious

and nostalgic tones. Moreover, the nostalgia was reinforced by recorded sounds of children

———————————— 29 It is worth mentioning that though the television show advertised that singers had to compose the music and perform the song, the composition and performance of the music were completed by a whole team of singers, composers, arrangers, and the band, and the singers represented the whole team’s understandings of the poems. While the majority of the singers took music composition in their own hands, in Huang Ling’s case, she worked with her regular composer partner. “Childhood” was composed by Wei Shiquan 魏诗泉 and arranged by Lei Zhen 雷震.

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playing and a recording of the nursery rhyme “Grandma’s Bridge” (Waipo qiao 外婆桥) sung by

a children’s chorus with simple piano accompaniment. The sarcasm was also reinforced by the

incorporation of elements of musical genres that are historically deemed rebellious, such as

psychedelic rock and rap.

While such a correspondence with the poem’s tone appeared mechanical at first glance, it

actually contained more conceptual creativity. For instance, Huang cast the second half of the

first part of the poem (from “growing up” to “Spring Festival”) into a rap, which was performed

by Huang and the poet himself together. Huang’s young, fruity, female voice and Li’s old,

husky, male voice were not in perfect unison. Although this is the most patterned part of the

poem, Huang used regular caesurae and elongated vowels to make the rhythm even stronger. Her

lively rhythm paired with her serious facial expression produced an effect that was

simultaneously playful and rebellious. Li Li, who was not professionally trained in singing, was

trying to both keep his own pace and synchronize with Huang, but his raspy voice itself bore the

sense of passing time.

Huang Ling, who grew up with China’s economic Reform and Opening up, never

directly experienced the absurdities of the Cultural Revolution. Her rebellious attitude was

expressed through allusions to western music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the advent

of a globalized “consumer society” loosened moral codes and bred black or youth subcultures

that were often “overtly politicised in opposition to establishment values and policies”

(Borthwick/Moy 2004: 49). While these allusions cued the same time period as Li Li’s childhood

and the moral decay of the Cultural Revolution, it was closer to the current experience of “young

cynics” (fenqing 愤青) in postsocialist China than to Li Li’s subtle retrospective subversion of

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the absurdities of the Maoist years. Nevertheless, in the cooperation between Huang and Li,

Huang’s youthful rebelliousness seemed to refresh Li’s fading memory and gave it extra

vividness, and Li’s deep sarcasm also added the heaviness of history to Huang’s performance.

Therefore, the transference of the poem’s tone was realized in an intricate web of relations

embedded in Huang’s performance and the imperfect unison between the singer and the poet.

In terms of the general atmosphere of the poem, Li creates a dream-like state in the

seemingly unconscious plucking of fragments of childhood memory and the uncanny

metamorphosis of the mother in a reminiscence that is explicitly likened to dream. Similarly,

Huang’s monotonous tune and downward turns were hypnotizing. In addition, the song also

adopted techniques similar to those of psychedelic rock (in this case, only to generate a dream-

like state rather than an altered vision under the influence of drugs), including the use of a

nursery rhyme and partial repetitions that imitated echoing and phasing effects. It is worth

mentioning that the “Grandma’s Bridge” that Huang chose was not only a song popular in

southeast China, including Li Li and Huang Ling’s hometown Shanghai, but it was also

commonly sung as a lullaby by mothers and grandmothers. Its appearance in the beginning of the

song worked to lull the audience into a dream state. Other poets, singers, judges, and the

audience recognized the dream atmosphere well: Zhongni used the word “hallucinatory”

(mihuan 迷幻) to describe the feeling; the pop music producer Huang Guolun 黄国伦 said that

the music reminded him of the British psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd; and many audience

members closed their eyes to appreciate the music.

As far as the poem’s language is concerned, it mingled concrete, easily recognizable,

quotidian activities and idiosyncratic references to abstract truths of specific historical periods.

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Thanks to Huang’s vocal skills, her versatile shifts between real voice and falsettos and semi-

falsettos, high and low pitches, and various embellishments aptly remediated the original poem’s

blend of substance and abstractness, everydayness and transcendence.

The music itself exemplified a way to approach the poem, especially its tones, moods,

and linguistic characteristics, through a plethora of connections. Interestingly, neither the poet

nor the singer seemed to hold the idea of expounding each idiosyncratic symbol of the poem

through music. When the host Yang Lin inquired about the meaning of “The universe, is no more

than an upside-down empty bowl”—the line repeated most in the song—Li simply replied that

it was something his mother used to say. It was the judge Shang Zhen 商震, poet and executive

deputy editor of the prestigious Poetry (Shikan 诗刊) magazine, who pointed out that the mother

provided her child with food in a bowl when he was young, but when she was gone, the upside-

down empty bowl would be her grave (Han 2015a: Ep. 10). Here, the program met the

audience’s demands for comprehension of the poetry text, but also rendered the deciphering of

poetic image codes as an intellectual game that required reading experience. Here, the

transferential mode of poetry crossover recognized medial specificities (what can be transferred

and what cannot), while revealing how music made poetry texts more approachable and how it

urged the audience to pay attention and figure out ways to approach the poetry. It hinted at the

accumulation of experiences, be it mediated life experiences or experiences with media culture.

As if echoing Zhang Dinghao’s advocacy to understand poetry texts and artworks through their

interrelations, the program asserted intermediality as an important mode of understanding.

Were the audiences of We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You actually inspired by the

juxtaposition of the poetry texts and the artworks/music to produce their own understandings of

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the poems? Were their understandings of the poems constrained or even standardized by the

artworks/music? While neither of the two events completely fulfilled their goals of “lifting the

separation between arts and the general public” (Shige dao 2015d) and dispelling the myth that

poetry stands high above the masses (Chang X. 2015), there were still promising signs in public

participation and comments. Although these two events could not compete with conventional

variety shows in terms of popularity, they still gained a sizeable audience. Sing a Poem for You

enjoyed an average rating of around 0.5% on CSM52, ranking around number 10 to 20 among all

variety shows on provincial satellite televisions on Saturday nights, and single day visits to its

Baidu Tieba reached as high as around ten thousand (e.g., Xiaoshi he xiaoge 2016b; Xiaoshi he

xiaoge 2016c). Poetry Island’s own statistics show that visitors to the exhibition in each city

numbered from around 900 to over 100,000 (Shige dao 2015d; Shige dao 2016f). In fact, both of

the events were well received enough to ensure sequels. However, the impact of these events can

be seen more clearly in the audience’s creative participation and discussions.

Audience members were inspired to express their personal reactions to the poems by

creating their own artworks or music pieces, just as the artists/singers had done. Poetry Island

held a series of activities that allowed visitors to have hands-on experiences of making poetry-

related crafts. When the We Poetize exhibition went to Beijing, it partnered with Beijing

Romantic Moments Culture Communication Center (Manshi wenhua chuanbo zhongxin 漫时文

化传播中心) to offer free tutorial sessions at the exhibition that helped audience members

express their feelings and understandings of Wang Xiaoni’s “To a Sunny Day” through painting.

While many novices chose to imitate some landscape paintings provided by the organizers,

which suggested that there were still significant barriers between the visitors and the poetry texts,

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others creatively expressed their personal reactions or established intriguing relations to the

poem with imitated or original works.

For example, a young visitor imitated a landscape painting of dark clouds over a seascape

with beams of sunlight penetrating the clouds (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A visitor’s imitated painting at the We Poetize exhibition. Photo source: Poetry Island. URL (accessed 7/5/2020): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4MTgxNjEzNA==&mid=2654153357&idx=1&sn=ea9e465296afe54d6224f4425490d4bc&scene=19#wechat_redirect. Without knowing the painter’s own explanation for his choice of subject matter, when the

painting was linked to the poem, it suggested that the sunny day that Wang described might not

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really be a sunny day, but a day with such a “fantastical sky” (Wang X. 2015: 8-9). The “burning

iron” that shuttles between the poet and the natural world, might be nothing but the beams of

sunlight, and the impending breakdown of the separation between the two worlds might be the

coming storm. Therefore, the painting actually offered a reading of the poem. Interestingly, the

young visitor also had a photo of himself and his painting taken against the backdrop of artificial

light radiating against the wall. The light on the wall worked in concert with the light in the

painting, suggesting a connection between somewhere else and here and now, the virtual and the

real.

Another older woman created her own original painting of a well-dressed gentleman

looking up at the blue sky (Figure 4). She came well prepared; she told the organizers that she

drafted her work after reading the poem, took a photo of the draft, and then painted it at the

exhibition (Shige dao 2016e). As if to challenge Wang Xiaoni’s own perception in the poem, the

woman said, “The blue sky is beautiful, the world is good. Only if you immerse yourself into it

and taste it, can you feel its beauty. Nobody is holding you back, why should you hold yourself

back?” (Shige dao 2016e). She also had a photo of her and her painting taken against the

backdrop of a print of Wang’s poem hanging on the wall. Her sheer optimism and rejection of

the poet’s bleakness might have been conditioned by her own life experience and her personal

engagement with the poem, but she was also offering her own reading and expressing her

attitudes.

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Figure 4: A visitor’s original painting at the We Poetize exhibition. Photo source: Poetry Island. URL (accessed 7/5/2020): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4MTgxNjEzNA==&mid=2654153357&idx=1&sn=ea9e465296afe54d6224f4425490d4bc&scene=19#wechat_redirect.

Compared with We Poetize’s programmed attempt to engage visitors in artistic creativity,

creative participation in Sing a Poem for You centered more on incidents and audience’s

spontaneity. For instance, in Episode 3, the poet Xiawu’s 下午 partner failed to make a presence

at the studio due to a family emergency, so the poet had to read her own work alone on stage.

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This triggered online discussions among the audience, and one Tieba user took matters into his

own hands, composing music for the poem and later revising it (Xiaoshi he xiaoge 2015a). On

other occasions, Tieba users also posted videos of themselves singing contemporary poems with

guitar accompaniment (e.g., Guanyu beyond gushi 2016). These activities suggest that some of

the audience were inspired by the form of the program and tried to express their own

understandings of the poems through music compositions and performances, in which they

invested time, energy, and talent.

We Poetize did not gather a significant amount of online discussions partly due to the in-

person nature of the exhibition. Sing a Poem for You, however, targeted a national audience and

fared much better in generating public discussion. One common practice among the commenters

was to express their personal understandings of the poems through evaluations of the songs.

Discussions were very lively around the transference of the poetry texts by the demolition

worker Chen Nianxi 陈年喜 into the music by the established pop singer Luo Zhongxu 罗中旭.

For instance, in a Baidu Tieba thread titled “Luo Zhongxu ruined poet Chen Nianxi’s poems”

(74507qq 2015), we could hear several different voices. The thread initiator claimed, “Poet Chen

Nianxi’s style of gaining deeper insights of life through enduring hardship was, after multiple

revisions, turned into Luo Zhongxu’s own Shanghainese ditties. It lost deeper meaning and

became superficial!” In protest, another post insisted, “Luo Zhongxu properly interpreted Uncle

Nianxi’s poems, and incorporated a kind of pain, a shared pain of Chen Nianxi and Luo

Zhongxu!” Another went further, “I went out of my way to read some of Mr. Chen Nianxi’s

poems. Looking at them in black and white, (I feel like) even though a volcano and an ocean are

hidden in between the lines, without Brother Luo’s music, the volcano would not erupt, and the

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ocean would not gush into teardrops.” Elsewhere, some netizens reminded others of the intrinsic

difficulty of composing music for Chen’s poems: “I don’t think Luo Zhongxu’s revisions are

problematic, because Chen Nianxi’s poems themselves are very down-to-earth. To some extent,

they are not easy to sing. … The only thing is that they are people from two different worlds, so

it is difficult for them to communicate about some sentiments” (Tengxun shipin 2016a). Still

others celebrated personal differences: “Everyone’s moods and life experiences are different. It

depends on how individuals understand [the collaboration of poems and music]” (Tengxun

shipin 2015).

Despite obvious biases toward the poet or the singer, these online discussions suggest that

through a comparison of the poems and the music pieces, some audience members who do not

often read poetry started to sample some poetry texts both in the television show and beyond.

Some even seriously thought about personal poetic styles and the general impression they

generate, as well as the emotional content and linguistic characteristics of poetry. Although these

comments tended to be simple, they showed that audience members either used the

correspondence between the poetry texts and the music or their own musical connoisseurship to

savor the poems, or started from the observed divergence between the two to formulate their own

impressions and understandings of the poems. Most importantly, these comments were often

highly emotionally charged (seen from the frequent use of exclamation marks, distinct ways of

addressing the poets and singers, and the often-exaggerated expressions, etc.). The audience

members, like the singers, were also articulating their personal, emotional reactions to the

poems.

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In sum, the transferential mode of poetry crossover in We Poetize and Sing a Poem for

You succeeded in making poetry texts more approachable to the general public or at least

encouraged the general public to approach poetry. As Huang Ying indicated in her question

“You really don’t understand [poems]?” (Kaishi zhongchou 2015), the general public has

millions of ways of understanding poetry in our mediated lives; poetry just needs to be

demystified for them to develop a willingness to know and actually read it.

The Pleasure of the Transferential Mode

As mentioned earlier, not unlike what happens with conventional adaptations, audiences

inevitably compared the commonalities and differences between the poetry texts and the music,

which also constituted an important way for them to reflect on the poetry texts. However, in the

transferential mode of poetry crossover in We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You, much of the

viewing pleasure lay in the process of transferring poetic qualities to the other media products.

The organizers, poets, and artists/singers of these events generated a narrative that highlighted

the obstacles poets and artists/singers encountered in the transferring process and the efforts they

made to overcome them.

This narrative points to some profound questions: What constitutes a perfect partnership

between poetry and other media? Should a balance be sought between the poets’ and the

artists/singers’ emotional and aesthetic styles? If a predominance emerges in the partnership

between poetry and the other media, does it have to conform to the hierarchical order of high

culture and popular media? What role does chance play in the partnership? Not all of the

questions were given a definitive answer in these two events, but one thing for sure is that a

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significant tension exists between poetry and other media, ranging from some intrinsic

incompatibilities between certain types of poetry texts and media genres, to irreducible

differences between individual poets and artists/singers.

By reflecting on the process of how poetic qualities were transferred to other media, these

two events both generated the dual pleasure of seeing how the poets and artists/singers came up

with ideas to resolve these tensions and seeing how poets and artists/singers dealt with the

tensions when they were irresolvable. Rather than setting up standards or offering fixes, this

strategy highlighted intermediality. At the same time, it created opportunities for poets and

artists/singers to gain some discursive power over their own works and to help the audience to

approach and appreciate them, while enabling the organizers and production team to attract

eyeballs with the dramatic tension between the poets and the artists/singers.

Whereas artists of the We Poetize exhibition tended to frame their works as personal

reactions to the poems and to highlight their resonances with the poems, their narratives of the

compositional process—transferring poetic qualities to their works—often emphasized the

obstacles or contingencies. For example, Cui Ying described the difference between her final

work and her original plan, expressed her initial frustration at the irreducible distance between

the poet and her, and recounted how she handled the problem: “I wished to be faithful to the

original poem. I visited many film camera stores, in the hope that I could use single-frame

filming to render a historical sense and a gradual change of emotions. I was confused then,

because I was not able to fully represent the poet’s feelings, because I was not her. … What I

needed was to free myself from the text and work on this poem with my feelings” (Shige dao

2016b). Like many other participating artists, Cui was confident about the potential

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correspondences between poetry and her own medium of film. Her main challenge ultimately

came from the individual differences between the poet and her and confusion over whose

feelings should dominate the film. Only after she grasped the main connection and accepted the

differences between the poet and herself and after she recognized her own originality and

experimentalism, was she able to shoot the film. Her account not only allowed her to articulate

her understanding of the poem, it also enabled her to explain the efforts she exerted in the

compositional process and the changing attitudes she experienced, convincing readers of her

sincerity and authority in the pursuit of an ideal collaboration between poetry and film.

Careful not to limit viewers’ imagination with too much explanation (Shige dao 2016a),

Zhong Dangxuan only briefly mentioned that his compositional process was filled with

accidents, though in retrospect it seemed predestined (Shige dao 2016a). In his record of the

process, which was submitted to Poetry Island for public display, he also kept some drafts of

works based on other poems that he chose not to include in the exhibition. Despite his relative

reticence, his account still clearly conveyed the message that the artist was not short of ideas on

the correspondences between poetry and his own media; he was able to put his plan into

practices, but he also embraced chance and changes of mind. Like Cui, he also put on display his

effort, sincerity, and authority over his work.

Whereas these artists mainly described the obstacles of transferring poetic qualities into

their own media in terms of dealing with personality differences, establishing a predominant

artistic persona, and handling contingencies, Poetry Island’s discourse gave more attention to the

differences between poetry and other arts in terms of medial characteristics. From the very start,

Poetry Island emphasized the multimedia, crossover nature of the exhibition. In addition to

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boasting about the large variety of artworks it collected, it also made efforts to accentuate the

seemingly huge distance between a poetry text and an artwork in terms of sensory and semiotic

modes, the unlikely connection between the two, and thus the creativity involved in the

transferring process.

For instance, it gave a vivid account of the team’s reaction upon receiving Zhong

Dangxuan’s work of mixed media on wood boards: “Upon receiving his work for the exhibition

in the mail, our buddies were dumbfounded. Four wood boards? Who can tell me which side is

the work?” (Shige dao 2016a, Figure 5).

Figure 5: “To a Sunny Day” by Zhong Dangxuan, 30×22 cm × 4, mixed media on wood board. Photo source: Poetry Island. URL (accessed 6/30/2020): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4MTgxNjEzNA==&mid=2654154534&idx=1&sn=841ee2e9c255dd3be5e5c79f6898f4c9&scene=19#wechat_redirect.

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Such a reaction showed that while linguistic texts are often full of ambiguity, equivocality could

be just as pronounced in abstract visual arts, without the (primarily) symbolic system of

language. Meanwhile, the apparent casualness of the seemingly “found objects” formed a sharp

contrast with Poetry Island’s knowledge of Zhong Dangxuan’s earnestness and professionalism

(Shige dao 2016a). It fueled a desire for readers to learn the story behind the work and

investigate the relationship between the work and the poem. By depicting Zhong as able to

bridge the huge gap between the verbal text and the visual art, to extend visual art from common

materials and forms (e.g., ink-wash painting on paper, stone sculpture, or wood carving) to

unconventional ones, and to destabilize the authorship of the work (by enlisting the poet, the

artist, nature, and chance, etc.), Poetry Island used the disparity between poetry and other media

as a foil to highlight its artist’s creativity and thoughtfulness. The dramatic tension in its

narrative was engaging, while demonstrating that the exhibition was not all about displaying the

final artworks but really about the process of how poetic qualities could be transferrable and

were actually transferred.

Tracing the transferential process and the success or failure to overcome obstacles also

constituted an important aspect of Sing a Poem for You. Its director Han Jiaozi stated that she

“wished to represent the merging of poetry and music from multiple angles” (Chang X. 2015).

Through statements of the poets, singers, judges, the host, and voiceover, the program built up a

narrative of the general conflicts between poetry and pop music or the specific conflicts between

poets’ and singers’ respective styles, including modern poetry’s flexibility in rhythm and rhyme

versus pop music’s demand for regularity and repetition (e.g., Han J. 2015a: Ep. 12); the high

density of meaningful images in Yuwen Jue’s poems, which required time to appreciate and

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digest, versus the fast pace of Su Xing’s 苏醒 hip-hop blues music (Han J. 2015a: Ep. 6); the

narrativity of Chen Nianxi’s poems versus the lyricism of Luo Zhongxu’s music (Han J. 2015a:

Ep. 7), etc.

These conflicts were then mingled with differences between individual poets and singers,

including their ages, genders, social status, regional cultures, and personalities, that generated

different life experiences, perspectives, and emotional content. These differences further

contributed to forging varying power dynamics in the poet-singer teams. The six initial teams of

participating poets and singers represented six different types of partnership. Among the more

balanced types, the team of poet Liang Mang and singer Zhou Xiaoou represented a partnership

in which both parties were established in their own fields and were already acquainted with each

other. Liang had published several poetry collections, though he gained more fame as a lyricist

than a poet. Although Zhou, former lead singer of the rock band Zero (Lingdian 零点), was

introduced as a “forerunner of the Chinese pop scene” (Han J. 2015a: Ep. 1), he still enjoyed a

sizable fan community. The male poet Zhongni and the female singer Zeng Jingwen, who

appeared to have never met before the show, ranked in the middle in terms of media exposure

and popularity; Zhongni had gained popularity on the Internet and in reality TV shows, and Zeng

Jingwen had some recent performances at talent shows under her belt. The poet Xiawu and the

singer Ding Yu 丁于 were relatively obscure, though both appeared to have very strong

personalities. Among the less balanced teams, the seventy-year-old poet Li Li, who had also

translated the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, appeared to hold more prestige than the post-

1980 female singer Huang Ling, who had several hit songs but had never reached stardom. The

situation seemed to be reversed in the partnerships between Chen Nianxi and Luo Zhongxu,

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Yuwen Jue and Su Xing. While both Chen and Luo were born around 1970, Luo started his

singing career when he was young and had been winning domestic and international singing

awards ever since, but Chen was a migrant worker poet who was on the verge of being

discovered by the poetry scene and the general public.30 Compared with Yuwen Jue’s modest

and gentle temperament, the singer Su Xing appeared much more assertive and resolved.

The kaleidoscopic mix and match of the three factors—distinctions between media,

personal differences between poet and singer, and power dynamics—created a plethora of

scenarios. How great the obstacles were, how successfully they were resolved, and who had

more influence in the works varied from case to case. Such a representation of the process of

transferring poetic qualities to pop music demonstrated both medial specificities and correlations,

while offering a dramatic viewing pleasure.

Even with a balanced and well-matched pairing like that of Liang Mang and Zhou

Xiaoou, significant differences could arise. In Episode 7, the teams were working on the theme

“hometown.” The host did not neglect to mention the fact that Liang was from Sichuan, while

Zhou was a Beijinger. As a matter of fact, the poem that Liang submitted was significantly

different from the lyric that Zhou used for his music, a tactic that was rare for the team and could

be considered an example of music’s predominance over poetry. Inspired by the Sichuan folk

song “Jubilance for Sunshine” (Taiyang chulai xiyangyang 太阳出来喜洋洋), Liang’s poem

expressed his ties to home and presented the Sichuan character as optimistic despite the

province’s humid climate and many foggy and cloudy days. To do so, he selected delightful

———————————— 30 I will discuss about Chen and his works in more details in the next chapter.

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images (e.g., dancing, laughing, climbing hills) and merged his personal memories and features

with the local landscape (e.g., “I dance on the rock” 我在石头上跳舞 and “I find the dimples on

my cheeks/ are laughing like vortexes in the river” 我发现我脸上的酒窝/ 笑得好像江里的旋

窝, Xiaoshi he xiaoge 2016d). The song retained the merging of people and landscape found in

the poem, but it also depicted the endurance of hardship and a fighting spirit, which are more in

tune with rock music and slightly different from the poem’s cheerful atmosphere. The personal

attachment to home in the poem was generalized and embedded in an everyday street and alley

culture not unlike the hutong culture of Zhou’s hometown of Beijing.

However, the team tried to resolve the conflict between the poem and the music and

restore a balance between the poet and the singer by incorporating more Sichuanese elements

and including the poet in the performance. On the one hand, Zhou not only inserted the folk song

“Jubilance for Sunshine” into his work, but also used Sichuan dialect in a rap and listed what the

Sichuanese typically do on the sunny days so rare to the mountainous basin (e.g., eating hotpot,

eating skewers, and playing mahjong). Superficial as this employment of cultural markers might

be, it did register as Sichuanese and earned positive responses from the audience. On the other

hand, the rap in Sichuanese was done by none other than Liang himself. He also repeated some

words that Zhou sang to create an echoing effect that recalled the mountains of Sichuan. Liang’s

big role in the performance somehow left a good impression among the audience, and more poets

tended to come to the forefront as the program went on. Therefore, although this way of

resolving the tension between the poem and the music, the poet and the singer, was not perfect, it

was generally well received among the judges and the audience.

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In pairings where the power relation between the poet and the singer seemed more tilted

toward one and personal differences were more pronounced, there could also be a relatively

successful resolution (both in terms of artistic quality and audience reception) to conflicts

between the poetry and music. For instance, Li Li and Huang Ling’s cooperation appeared like a

father-daughter relationship, with the poet Li taking the lead and the singer Huang trying to

understand the life and thoughts of the poet. Huang was particularly praised by the judge Shang

Zhen for being able to sing Li’s poem without changing a single word (Han J. 2015a: Episode

12). Such a relationship would seem to suggest poetry’s predominance over music.

Some major conflicts in this team included: the generational gap between the poet and the

singer; Li’s inclusion of mundane or grotesque images (e.g., meetings, restrooms, and Maotai

spirits) versus Huang’s exaltation of beauty in both singing and clothing; Li’s preference for

fragmented narrative versus the steady flow of music; and modern poetry’s altered line lengths

versus pop music’s demand for regularity. Huang did not have to subjugate her music to the

poem to deal with these conflicts; instead, she responded with creativity and thoughtfulness to

maintain and highlight her personal style. In addition to establishing emotional ties with the poet

by learning more about him, she also tried to connect with his generation through musical

allusions (as is seen in the case of “Childhood”). Sometimes she took advantage of the father-

daughter like relationship and used it to better understand and represent Li’s poems, especially

those addressing his own daughter. As a result, Huang was able to appear on stage as the

embodiment of the daughter the poet was writing about or as a daughter relaying her poet

father’s words (e.g., Han J. 2015a: Ep. 1, Ep. 11). In so doing, she not only established

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meaningful connections with the poem, but also gave herself a space to be young and beautiful,

even as she sang the sometimes mundane words of her “father.”

Although Li’s preference for fragmented narrative and a “loose” compositional style

might pose a challenge to many pop music composers, it was not a big problem for Huang, as her

personal style is characterized by versatility, flexibility, and sound shifts. In this sense, Li’s

poetic style actually highlighted the strengths of Huang’s music. Incorporating elements of

various music genres, such as pop, folk, rock, rap, and R&B, Huang was able to cast Li’s

fragmented narrative into a variety of styles and still orchestrate them into a musical flow. She

and her composer also made various changes in the poetry text’s sound effect: she repeated some

words, elongated some words, and used filler sounds and embellishments to adjust the line

lengths and maintain a sense of variation. Such strategies not only allowed Huang to show great

respect to the poetry text but also allowed her to showcase her vocal skills. Therefore, the team

was popular enough to make it to the final.

This does not necessarily mean that all of the strategies worked equally well or that the

poetry always dominated the music in the interaction. For example, in the song “Without You”

(Meiyou nimen 没有你们), one line went: “the lawn, the girl and the boy” (Sichuan Weishi

Shige Zhi Wang 2016). Although the combination of the words and the tune sounded

harmonious, the problem was that the musical emphasis fell on the word “lawn,” which was not

the most important in the verse, generating an awkward feeling. It was also a minor example of

musical concerns overriding those of the poem. Conflicts in the transferential mode were, thus,

handled in a situational and practical manner from one team to the next.

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As mentioned earlier, not all these conflicts were resolvable, which was especially

demonstrated in the collaboration between Chen Nianxi and Luo Zhongxu. Although some

coincidences led to opportunities for mutual understanding between the two and facilitated the

production of high quality songs (such as in the case of “Dream” 梦见, where the shared

experience of losing first love brought the two closer and some started to think the two actually

made a good match [Han J. 2015a: Ep. 3]), that the team made it to the final was not because of

the compatibility between the poem and the music, but rather because of the high quality of each,

as well as the controversy surrounding their pairing. Luo’s predominance over Chen was obvious

in the pairing: Luo repeatedly asked Chen to revise his drafts either to fit the poems to the music

or improve the poems. Luo also revised, to a certain degree, Chen’s final versions in his song.

While the judges sometimes praised the songs for enriching the poems, on other occasions, they

criticized them as too different from the poems, both in wording and in emotional content (Han J.

2015a). In some cases where the poem and the music did not match well, the song still earned

high scores and the audience expressed their fondness either for the poem or for the musical style

(e.g., Tengxun shipin 2015); in other such cases, the song got low scores but triggered debate

online (e.g., Tengxun shipin 2016b).

The program seized the chance to highlight the tension between Chen’s poems and Luo’s

music, thus making their interaction both educational and entertaining. For example, in Episode

7’s contest on the topic of hometown, in contrast to the judge Shang Zhen’s comment that Chen

and Luo did not communicate sufficiently, indicating space for improvement, the program

emphasized the insurmountable obstacles in their pairing. In post-performance interviews, Chen

reflected on Luo’s difficulty in understanding the backward life in a remote village; Chen, for his

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part, explicitly admitted his ignorance of the musical allusion Luo was employing. The voiceover

also summarized the individual and stylistic differences between the two and reviewed the

divergences between them from the beginning of the contest in Episode 1. Although the host had

to diplomatically emphasize that singing a poem required the collaborative efforts of the poet and

the singer, the show’s highlighting of differences between poem and song and the fact that one

could dominate over the other was impressive and educational (Han J. 2015: Ep. 7).

In fact, the sharp contrasts between Chen and Luo also constituted a part of the program’s

promotional strategy. In her Weibo post, the director Han Jiaozi (2015b) referred to the team as

“Petty Bourgeois Luo” (Xiaozi Luo 小资罗) plus “Unadorned Xi” (Pushi Xi 朴实喜). Not only

did she refer to them as “the most out of tone” (zui tiao tone 最跳 tone) pairing, but also joked

about their opposing opinions on fashion. Although Han Jiaozi may have been stereotyping the

poet and the singer, her comment also shows that she had great expectations for the dramatic

effects that such an odd couple could achieve.

The assistant director Wang Pingping 王萍萍, who was in charge of the team, also

compared the team to “coffee” and “garlic” in a post in the program’s WeChat official account,

highlighted the difficulty in mediating between the two. Nevertheless, instead of complaining,

she forgivingly concluded:

Actually, the “divergences” between their works continued to the very end. These are the most fundamental issues involved in the merging of poetry and song, and the most difficult ones. Since The Book of Songs of thousands of years ago, poetry and songs had been separated for a long time after their original merging. [These issues] are not to be solved by one person or two, nor by our program. We only provide a channel for the broad and profound poetry culture to return to public view. … I’m a person who likes strong flavors. I just like coffee plus garlic, so what!” (Wang P. 2016)

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Wang’s account aptly summarizes the two-fold reasons for underscoring the tension between

Chen and Luo and between their works—to demonstrate the “borders” between media that had

been conventionalized over time (an important aspect of intermediality), and, no less important,

to attract public attention. Like other narratives surrounding the process of transferring poetic

qualities to other media in We Poetize and Sing a poem for You, Wang’s account was also

thought-provoking and pleasurable.

The Negotiation of Meanings

As discussed above, besides their common goal of bringing poetry/arts closer to the

general public, the two events also transformed poetry into sensory-rich spectacles (a

phenomenon that was emphasized in marketing strategies) to attract public attention. What social

roles did the transferential mode of poetry crossover play in these events? Did it produce artistic

representations that reflected lived experience in postsocialist China? Did it instill the general

public with the ideology of the state or the logic of the market? Did it bring its audiences

together or did it isolate them from each other? While these are valid questions for any

“spectacle” and for any attempt to push high culture into the popular realm, answers can be

found only in examining the actual practices of specific cases in their specific historical contexts.

In We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You, I find moments of enlightenment, the negotiation of

needs and agendas, and attempts to make connections.

As demonstrated earlier in this chapter, the transferential mode in both these cases

centered on potential correspondences across media and material or conventionalized borders

between media. It also celebrated the personal ways—among the poets, singers/artists, and

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audience members—of relating to the poetry texts that featured emotional resonances and

distinct experiences and perspectives. While the intermedial correspondence and emotional

resonances generated an immersive experience for the audience, an emphasis on medial borders

and divergences among the poets, singers/artists, and audience members laid bare the mediation

process of poetry and other arts. Although the immersive experience convinced the audience that

the poems came directly from real life, the exposure of poets’ and artists’/singers’ (re)mediation

acts suggested that poets’ real-life experiences could be altered by medial conventions and other

people’s personal experiences, perspectives, and purposes. This alteration was a reality in itself.

This twin logic of immediacy and hypermediacy, while still leaving space for the possibility of

shaping of minds, also generated some resistance to individuals being unwittingly or falsely

represented by another.

In both events, poetry was undeniably used to support ideological agendas and

commercial needs. In an interview with Southern Daily (Nanfang ribao 南方日报), Huang Ying,

manager of Moment Culture confessed: “Actually, what we are doing is the production and

promotion of literature and art products. This process is nothing literary or artistic at all. It is not

fundamentally different from commercial businesses” (Zhong/Huang 2014). Indeed, during the

promotion of the We Poetize exhibition, Poetry Island tried to make “We Poetize” into a brand

and to actively market creative cultural products related to the exhibition, including a “We

Poetize” pendant and necklace, a collectable IPNHK 2015 notebook, the Poetry and Conflict

anthology, and verse tattoo stickers, etc. (e.g., Shige dao 2015e; Shige dao 2016g). In so doing,

Poetry Island made poetry into a symbol of a cultured lifestyle supported by the consumption of

cultural goods. When the exhibition visited a city, Poetry Island also collaborated with local

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galleries, cultural enterprises, or commercial events to give the exhibition some local flavor and

to promote local businesses (e.g., Shige dao 2016e; Shige dao 2016g). Turning the symbolic

value of poetry into financial gains for both Poetry Island and local businesses, We Poetize was

participating in the country’s cultural economy.

The ideological and economic motivations were even more obvious in Sing a Poem for

You, perhaps not surprising given its medium of television. The theme of the final contest of the

show was “China Love” (Zhongguo ai 中国爱), an obviously patriotic theme that constituted an

important part of the “advanced culture” (xianjin wenhua 先进文化) the Party represented and

the core of the Chinese national spirit in political theories from Jiang Zemin’s江泽民 “Three

Represents” (Sange daibiao 三个代表) to Xi Jinping’s 习近平 “Four Confidences” (Sige zixin

四个自信). Not coincidentally, it was also the brand that Sichuan Satellite Television has used to

position itself since 2011. Sichuan Satellite Television also infused the patriotism of the “China

Love” theme with a special sense of national unity and charity by referring to the disaster relief

Sichuan received from the Party and across the country after the destructive Wenchuan

earthquake of 2008 (Weii 2010).

Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that the team of Liang Mang and Zhou

Xiaoou won the championship with the song “Dragon Boat” (Long chuan 龙船). The song not

only mentioned “revival” and “dream,” which cued Xi’s ideas of the “Road to Revival” (Fuxing

zhi lu 复兴之路) and the “China Dream” (Zhongguo meng 中国梦), but the Sichuan native

Liang also recounted his personal experience of the Wenchuan earthquake, how his friends all

went to donate blood, how the donated blood exceeded the blood banks’ storage capacity, and

how people were holding up banners with encouraging words in Tian’anmen Square in Beijing.

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The host also explained how “China Love” was special to Sichuanese and why Sichuan Satellite

Television employed “China Love” as its brand (Han J. 2015a: Ep. 13). While one might doubt

the sincerity of the poet, the singer, and the host here, the song itself, its personal articulation of

affect, and its association with well-known events, were very powerful in touching hearts and

conveying patriotic values.

In addition to its celebration of patriotism, the final episode also invited judges who

explicitly advocated an ideological role for literature and art. For instance, Shi Tongyu 时统宇, a

researcher from the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese Academy of

Social Sciences, commented:

Chinese cultural programs, including poetry programs, can include a small bridge over a flowing stream, romance before the flowers and under the moon, but also a mighty river flowing eastward, shining spears and armored horses, and what General Secretary Xi requested: “soldiers need to have courage and uprightness, works of literature and arts need to have flesh and bones.” Our shows shoulder the responsibility of leading the way for Chinese television programs and representing the advanced culture of Chinese television programs. (Han J. 2015a: Ep. 11)

This comment obviously prescribed a role for poetry and popular culture in the propagation of

state ideology. While its sloganeering style differs significantly from the affective articulations

of the poets, the singers, and the hosts, and its prescription might not be wholeheartedly accepted

by all the participants, it underlined poetry’s place in facilitating Sichuan Satellite Television’s

role as a conveyor of the state’s political will.

Poetry’s place in supporting Sichuan Satellite Television’s other role—as a business and

contributor to the country’s cultural economy—was also shown in the program. One might

imagine that poetry-related television programs would not be good for the bottom line, but that

was not necessarily the case. Around the time when the program was produced and broadcast,

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several poetry television programs, such as Good Poetry of China (Zhonghua hao shici 中华好

诗词, 2013), Wind and Cloud Meeting of Tang Poetry (Tangshi fengyun hui 唐诗风云会, 2015),

and Chinese Poetry Conference (Zhongguo shici dahui 中国诗词大会, 2016) had gained both

impressive ratings and massive acclaim. The fact that Sing a Poem for You was broadcast in

prime time on Saturday nights suggests Sichuan Satellite Television’s hope to transform poetry’s

symbolic value into economic profit. In the end, the show had a good response. In addition to

being praised by newspapers and online media, it also raised Sichuan Satellite Television’s

Saturday night prime time rating by 28.6% and accumulated over 200 million views online

(Xiaoshi he xiaoge 2016c).

Nevertheless, although the transferential mode of poetry crossover could be used in these

ways to serve ideological and commercial purposes, this by no means suggests that the process

was a case of top-down social engineering. Instead, it was a process of collaboration and

negotiation among distinct and overlapping needs and commitments of all the participating

parties. Generally speaking, Poetry Island and Sichuan Satellite Television eschewed either a

politically driven narrative or the pure amusement one associated with commercial popular

culture, and turned instead to the articulation of personal emotions. As a result, the shaping of

social values in both events was not oriented toward homogeneity, but was anchored in the

expression of personalities and individual agencies and the forging of interpersonal connections.

Poetry Island and Sichuan Satellite Television were themselves involved in the shaping of social

values from their own specific positions, which explains why they both tried to render their

events as “pure” and “sincere,” in spite of their apparently paradoxical display of ideological

agendas and commercial needs.

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Chen Zhishi 陈志实, president of Poetry Island and producer of We Poetize, claimed that

he wished to use the platform of Poetry Island to “restore and promote poetry’s sense of purity,

as well as its spiritual meaning” (Zhong/Huang 2014). Han Jiaozi, director of Sing a Poem for

You, also remarked, “seen from the concept of the program, introducing poetry into a variety

show is a risk. … smart audience members can tell from the first glance whether this program is

sincere, whether it is using poetry as a stunt” (Chang X. 2015). While we should be cautious

about taking their statements at face value, it is clear that they were aware of the general public’s

expectation for poetry to be pure, that audience members were not passive couch potatoes easily

fooled or represented, and that they were willing to meet the audience’s expectations.

Both events also adopted a discourse of responsibility and spontaneity. Zheng Yi, curator

of the We Poetize exhibition, stated, “As a curator, I always think that art exhibition is not all

about entertaining or comforting each other in a small coterie. It is a promotion of humanity and

an aesthetic education out of social responsibility” (Shige dao 2015d). In its social media, Poetry

Island called itself a “group of (self-identified) post-2000 buddies” driven by interest and

curiosity in poetry and in need of more volunteers (Shige dao 2015f). When Poetry Island

launched a crowdfunding event to gather 100,000 yuan for the We Poetize exhibition, it was

done in Huang Ying’s name (though she mentioned “her buddies” in the project description)

with an emotional account of how she was touched and changed by poetry (Huang Y. 2015).

Whether such claims of socio-cultural responsibility and individual spontaneity were genuine

expressions or gimmicks to claim a moral high ground, they demonstrated the cultural

enterprise’s exaltation of individual subjectivity and its articulation of its own socio-cultural

purpose in the process of meeting its ideological demands and commercial needs.

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Similarly, the production team of Sing a Poem for You also presented themselves as

responsible inheritors and promoters of traditional Chinese culture by attaching the singing of

poems in the program to a lineage of poetic genres that featured collaboration between poetry

texts and music, from The Book of Songs and Elegies of Chu to shi poetry of the Tang and ci

poetry of the Song (Han J. 2015a). Interestingly, though such a statement of pride in China’s

cultural past and sense of responsibility to continue and revive it clearly responded to the

consolidation of “cultural confidence” that Xi Jinping (2016) required, it was not a neat fit. Most

noticeably, in his discussion of “cultural confidence,” Xi mainly rested it on “Chinese excellent

traditional culture” (Zhonghua youxiu chuantong wenhua 中华优秀传统文化), rather than

contemporary literary works. In contrast, although Sing a Poem for You emphasized its

association with traditional practices, it mainly staged modern poetry by contemporary poets.

Rather than showing how traditional culture still related to contemporary life, as Xi prescribed,

the program justified its presentation of contemporary poetry by associating it with traditional

practices.

This presentation of modern poetry distinguished the program from other poetry

television programs around the same time, which all centered around classical poetry,

memorizing verses, and acquainting the audience with classical literature. It also distinguished

Sing a Poem for You from China Central Television’s own poetry program Everlasting Classics

(Jingdian yong liuchuan 经典咏流传), which came out later. Also featuring the singing of poetry

texts, adopting a form similar to a talent show, and including singers’ accounts of their personal

experiences and emotional resonances with the poems, Everlasting Classics predominantly

presented classical poetry, showcased how it could relate to contemporary life, and demonstrated

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what such relations can tell about the country’s technological, political, or economic

achievements. In these senses, it fit perfectly the goal of building a “cultural confidence.”

Compared with these programs, Sing a Poem for You showed an independent

commitment to contemporary poetry and aspired to something more than simply meeting

ideological standards. Moreover, as far as profit is concerned, presenting contemporary poetry

was higher risk than staging classical poetry, considering audiences’ familiarity with classical

poems and their relative approachability. But Sing a Poem for You did it anyway. The fact that it

chose contemporary poetry and then adopted a discourse that associated contemporary poetry

with traditional practices suggests that the production team was negotiating with the state and the

market through overlapping but not exactly similar needs and commitments. Through this web of

connections and differences, the program was also exerting its own agency.

In a similar vein, the poets and artists/singers were not simply subjugated to the state and

the market, nor were they left to pursue pure aesthetics. Instead, they also engaged in a

negotiation between their personal needs and desires and ideological and economic demands.

Take Liang Mang and Zhou Xiaoou’s “Dragon Boat” and the personal narratives surrounding it

for example. Although Liang appeared to adhere to patriotic propaganda, he never eulogized

state power or policies, either directly or indirectly. His devotion to country was firmly based in

individual compassion (e.g., his friends’ deeds in the earthquake relief). It might be true that this

devotion was still in tune with the state’s promotion of individual virtues, social responsibilities,

and whole-person development (e.g., Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party/ State

Council 2019), but Liang’s celebration of individual compassion for others could also be viewed

as an expression of humanist morality. Therefore, Liang’s handling of the patriotic theme

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suggested that state ideology was not monolithic, but a range of values that one could

consciously choose to relate to from one’s own experiences and perspectives.

Poets and artists/singers also took positions that were more on the contentious end,

ranging from Wang Xiaoni’s refusal to be represented by a higher order, such as the state, and

her deep-seated uneasiness with reality, to Zhong Dangxuan’s frustration over the tension

between dreams and realities that young people have to face. Rather than purely aesthetic-

oriented, however, their works and accounts were also linked to the politically-loaded keywords,

such as “representation,” “positive energy,” and “dream.” While Wang’s poems and account

might imply some confrontations with official discourse, Zhong’s sounded more like a self-

reflection than a complaint, a personal struggle story more than a rejection of the idea of

“personal struggle” (geren fendou 个人奋斗). Wang’s poems were also complicated by other

artists’ and audience’s voices, such as Bai Hua’s sharing Wang’s experience of insomnia but

appreciating its sharpening of sensations and one viewer’s advice for Wang to embrace the

beauty of the world. This array of interrelated but nuanced positions formed a continuum of

opinions that boosted mutual understandings and conversations rather than polarized oppositions.

It also constituted effective collaboration and negotiation with the state’s ideological discourse.

As far as personal gains are concerned, the transferential mode is far more complicated

than poets appropriating popular culture to expand poetry’s readership and gaining personal

reputation or than emerging artists and former stars borrowing poetry’s symbolic capital to

enter/return to the limelight. The precise ways in which poets worked with the artists/singers

were not necessarily dictated by market tastes, but conditioned by a plethora of very practical

factors: age, gender, social status, cultural memory, personality, personal experience, aesthetic

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style, material and conventionalized media characteristics, as well as coincidences and

contingencies. Therefore, either in cases where poems and artworks/music showcased their

respective strengths in harmonious cooperation, or in cases where one form predominated the

other with jarring discrepancies, or in cases where the cooperation appeared harmonious but

poetry in fact sacrificed some of its formal flexibility, intellectual depth, or idiosyncrasies to be

singable (for example, some poets occasionally customized their poems according to the music

style of their partners in Sing a Poem for You), it cannot be said that poetry was purely

commodified or tailored to the market. Rather, both the poems and the artworks/music were

results of situated collaboration and negotiation between the poets and artists/singers (with the

mediation of the organizers).31

Similarly, audiences were not unwittingly assimilated into ideological and economic

goals. First, many of them were quick to recognize places where state ideology started to creep

into the events. For example, at several places in the Sing a Poem for You program (such as when

Zhou Xiaoou was singing “Dragon Boat”), audience members sent in bullet subtitles suggesting

the teams go to China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala (e.g., Tengxun shipin 2016c),

the most spectacular and most official of variety shows in China. The association with the CCTV

Spring Festival Gala showed an endorsement of the quality of the performances but also revealed

a recognition of the performances’ ideological undertone, because the performances in the Gala,

though of high quality, are widely known for its imparting state ideological messages.

———————————— 31 In the case of We Poetize, the poetry texts (not their meanings) were not affected by artists’ creations.

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Second, although the itinerant exhibition only toured major cities and the television

program depended greatly on pop music fandom, suggesting that they mainly targeted a middle-

strata audience, the audience exhibited multiple needs and opinions and chose to respond to the

ideological or economic forces in their own ways. Although Sing a Poem for You obviously had

its ideological motivations, it only highlighted the more emotionally charged, such as love for

one’s country and family, youth and dreams, gratitude for others and memories of literary or

televisual classics. However, even within this range of values, the ones that triggered most

emotional responses from the audience were centered around unfulfilled romance, the passing of

time, and bondings and longings between family members. The lines most quoted among the

audience were not those prescribing certain feelings, but those describing common experiences

in contemporary Chinese life or universal human conditions, such as Liang Mang’s “Without

you cooking for me, I’ve been hungry for almost a year” 没你给我做饭我饿了快一年 (Xiaoshi

he xiaoge 2016e) and Chen Nianxi’s “That year I returned home empty handed/ only bringing

back a big sickness” 那一年我空手还乡/ 只带回大病一场 (Han J. 2015a: Ep. 3). Some

audience members sighed over these touching lines (e.g., Tengxun shipin 2016d). The judge

Shang Zhen also commented, “A poet’s main task is to say what everybody feels but cannot say,

and to say it more incisively” (Han J. 2015a: Ep. 8). While these comments sound old-fashioned,

they suggest that the audience was connecting to the poems through specific variations of

universal feelings. That the range of emotions touching them deeply seemed narrow suggests that

they were actively seeking outlets for their own emotions and make choices (consciously or

unconsciously) about what kinds of values and morals they would like to be reinforced through

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emotional resonances with the poems and music while filtering out others. In so doing, they

asserted their own agency in collaborating and negotiating with the ideological discourse.

Similarly, visitors also responded in their own ways to We Poetize’s participation in the

country’s cultural economy, demonstrating the collaboration and negotiation between their own

attitudes toward culture and the state’s desire to satisfy the people’s cultural needs and its plans

of turning the cultural industry into a pillar of the national economy (e.g., Ministry of Culture

2017). While there were those willing to purchase creative cultural products, spend money to

attend VIP pre-exhibitions, or buy tickets for local commercial events affiliated with the

exhibition, others took advantage of the free exhibitions, events, and workshops that We Poetize

offered to satisfy their own desire for a cultured lifestyle. The exhibition and its workshops were

good places to spend leisure time, but they were also suitable places for dating, parent-child

bonding time, or other everyday social activities. Without spending much money, they were

exposed to poetry and arts and could embed them into their social lives. Visitors commonly took

photos of the poems, artworks, poets, artists, and themselves at the exhibition, and posted them

on social media with one or two brief comments. These practices also showed that they were

indeed physically present at the events and thus betrayed their striving to appear cultured.

Meanwhile, those who spent money on the exhibition were not necessarily buying

products to accrue some of poetry’s symbolic value; rather, many of them invested money in the

exhibition out of a sense of responsibility to poetry. The We Poetize exhibition was partially

crowdfunded, but as Huang Ying observed, almost all those who chipped in did not care about

recognition, but simply felt it was something worth supporting (Zhao B. 2016). This simple wish

to promote poetry is not unlike the curator Zheng Yi’s discourse of responsibility and

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spontaneity; it emphasized the assertion of individual agency, rather than simply being

assimilated into a grander economic agenda. They were also actively reconciling personal needs

and wishes with ideological and economic demands through their sense of interconnectedness.

Third, the transferential mode in We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You also triggered

controversies among the audience about, for example, what the individual’s relationship with

others, the nation, or the world should be, or whether the Shanghainese singer Luo Zhongxu was

looking down on the poet Chen Nianxi because of his demolition worker identity, etc. Some of

these controversies reached deep down to the profound divides between Neoliberalist exaltation

of individualism and New Leftist emphasis on collectivism, the Neoliberal support for free

markets and aesthetic freedom and the New Leftist engagement with local life and social justice.

The fact that the audience formed an affective field of interconnected but nuanced opinions,

rather than falling into such polarized camps, indicates that they were collaborating and

negotiating with each other to build effective communications and seek possible solutions to

these controversial issues.

As shown above, the spectacle of the transferential mode in We Poetize and Sing a Poem

for You did not adhere to or convey a unified discourse that legitimized the existing postsocialist

condition, or deprive individual participants of independent thinking. On the one hand, state

ideological and economic discourses and practices featured a mixed array of values and interests

and showed no clear single “center.” On the other hand, cultural enterprises, media

companies/institutions, poets, artists/singers, and audiences actively joined hands to deal with the

postsocialist reality, by employing a discourse of responsibility and spontaneity, highlighting

morality and pragmatics, and forming webs of interconnected interests, commitments, and

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opinions over everyday issues. In such a process, interactions took place and relationships

formed; poetry related in tangible ways to individual lives and connected people with each other,

not through unanimity but through affinities and divergences.

Conclusion

In spite of the obvious distinctions between We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You,

bringing poetry/arts into popular culture and making poetry texts more approachable to the

general public ranked high on both of their agendas. Indeed, because the former was organized

by a cultural enterprise and included both abstract and popular arts, it appeared more

intellectually demanding and demonstrated more ideological flexibility. Produced and broadcast

by a provincial satellite television station and open to pop music fans and variety show lovers,

the latter had a heavier dose of ideological messaging and entertainment. Nevertheless, they both

took the approach of juxtaposing poetry texts and artworks/music based on those texts. They

both exemplified how to approach a poem through intermedial and interpersonal relationships. In

this process, the poets, artists/singers, the cultural enterprise, the production team, and the

audience members recontextualized the poetry texts. Their articulation of personal emotions not

only responded to the state ideological discourse and generated entertaining effects, but also

exerted individual agency and made poetry approachable in a socio-culturally relevant way.

Admittedly, talking about how to make poetry more approachable to the general public

today risks appearing narrow-minded, because many poets—especially the avant-garde—and

critics would rather leave contemporary Chinese poetry on the margins of society for the sake of

aesthetic autonomy, and they no longer desire the kind of comprehensibility that is mainly based

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on intuitive empathy (e.g., Yeh 1991; Van Crevel 2011). Nevertheless, in addition to hope

among culture businesses and media companies to connect poetry with everyday life and middle-

strata audience’s own desire for high culture, many poets (even among the avant-garde) still

anticipate reaching understanding readers beyond poetry circles, as is demonstrated in the many

poets who participate in the various poetry crossover events discussed in this chapter and

throughout the dissertation and other more public-facing events. As I have noticed on many

occasions, besides having their poems remediated by other artists, these poets were also judging,

through observation of behavior, if the audience members understood the poems. Whereas

intellectual comprehension of particular images, lines, or techniques were not necessarily

expected (for example, the poet Li Li did not bother to explain his “upside-down empty bowl”

image), this suggested that meaningful connections between the poems and the artists/performers

and the audience were still anticipated. To be more precise, it was not all about gaining

understanding of poetry texts, but about learning how to approach them. While modern poetry is,

of course, not restricted to the expression of emotions (especially when one considers the

plethora of poetry schools and blends of western “isms” and local issues), or the structured

feelings that characterize classical Chinese literature (Stalling 2011: 97), this does not mean that

poetry has to forsake what it is best at doing—touching hearts.

As is the case in most poetry border-crossing events, multiple types of crossover were

taking place in both We Poetize and Sing a Poem for You. While poetry texts and artworks/music

were juxtaposed in the transferential mode, seen from another perspective, the individual pairs of

poetry texts and artworks/music were integrated into the overall structures of the exhibition and

the talent show. In the case of Sing a Poem for You, the incorporation of poetry greatly

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challenged the conventions of the talent show genre, including the competition system, comment

styles, and the star making mechanism. Poetry’s impacts on composite media’s aesthetics and

social significances in such integrations will be addressed in the next chapter.

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Chapter 3: The Integrational Mode of Poetry Crossover

Among the many types of poetry crossover I discuss in this dissertation, the integrational

mode is the most radical. In this type of crossover, poetry (the source) is integrated during the

composition process into another more composite medium (the target) as an intrinsic part. On the

one hand, parts of the network called poetry, including poetry texts, the lives of poets, the

conventional material carriers of poetry texts (e.g., print magazines, computer screens, and poets’

voices), and institutions of publication, etc. become the content of the composite media products.

On the other hand, to accommodate characteristics conventionally associated more often with

poetry, such as conceptuality, lyricism, and multivocality, the integration of poetry often leads to

transformations in the structures, styles, generic conventions, aesthetics, and socio-cultural

significance of the target media. Because poetry text is highly susceptible to new meanings and

highly demanding in terms of expressive techniques, it compels its partnering media artists to

seek alternative ways to compose their works even as they try to maintain what their own media

are best at doing. Therefore, the integrational mode forms new interfaces between conventionally

distinct media products and explores both intermedial interactions and medial specificities. These

explorations are highly discernible, if equally controversial. However, by revolutionizing the

various media it works with, the integrational mode vigorously demonstrates poetry’s vitality.

The integrational mode of poetry crossover is particularly conspicuous in documentary

film and experimental theatre. Related productions not only appeared early on, but also acquired

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broad public exposure and critical attention at home and abroad. This chapter unravels poetry’s

transformative power through a scrutiny of the documentary film The Verse of Us (Wo de

shipian 我的诗篇, 2015, released as Iron Moon in the United States) and its accompanying series

of mini-docs, as well as the experimental theatre production Following Huang Gongwang on a

Visit to the Fuchun Mountains (Sui Huang Gongwang you Fuchun shan 随黄公望游富春山).

My analyses delineate the new interfaces formed between poetry and other media in these

crossover works and illustrate how these simultaneously immersive and distancing interfaces

explore both intermedial interactions and medial specificities. Unraveling how these interfaces

challenge the documentary film’s temporality and the experimental theatre’s spatiality, I

demonstrate that the integration of poetry enriches characteristics crucial to the target media,

such as film’s visuality and theatre’s theatricality, and thus in a sense returns them to their

respective origins. It also raises a media-awareness that turned the target media into something

new, something that incorporated poetry’s conceptuality and socio-cultural responsibility and

forms a dynamic community of subaltern or elite poets, media artists, and especially a middle-

strata audience, who learn to interact more proactively and respectfully. Such transformations

testify to poetry’s ongoing relevance in this mediated world.

The Verse of Us

In her discussion of medium specificity and intermediality in film, Hajnal Király (2010)

has brought to our attention two strands of cinematography since the 1990s: writer’s movies and

contemplative movies. Located at the popular or “midcult” end, the former usually represent the

process in which the writer struggles to write his/her work shown in the movie, or the process in

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which the director struggles to shoot the movie we are watching (e.g., John Madden’s 1996

period comedy drama Shakespeare in Love; Spike Jonze’s 2003 meta-film Adaptation).

Reflecting on these dynamic processes, these movies celebrate the reciprocal conditioning

between writing and observing. More prone to be arthouse films and mostly coming from East

Asia, the latter are often characterized by long takes with rich imagery, slow pace, and

minimalist narrative. These features turn the film into an unfolding picture32 and invite the

spectator to participate in the meaning-making process of the film with all the details included in

the picture and against the film’s socio-political context (e.g., Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 2006 feature

film Still Life [Sanxia haoren 三峡好人]). In both strands, Király (2010: 200) sees “a mediatic

gesture of self-awareness” that “is systematically overturning the strict delimitation between

literature and film.” While both strands accentuate the presence of the camera and imbue film

with the conceptuality and the sense of socio-cultural responsibility that are often associated with

literature,33 they also hail film’s visuality through a link to meaning-making codes from painting

(e.g., composition, frame, and perspective). As a result, they are pushing the boundary of cinema

while returning to its origin34—a sign of the maturation of the medium (Panofsky 1996: 47; cf.

Király 2010: 208).

———————————— 32 In Király’s words (2010: 200), these features “continuously turn the ‘running time’ of the narrative into ‘space,’ meaning that the film time is not mainly spent on story telling but on demonstrating sceneries or scenes.

33 Király (2010: 199-201) clarifies that though conceptuality of film has been present since the very beginnings of its history and its socio-cultural responsibility has also been in the rise, the importance here lies in the fact that these traits are now part of the film itself rather than part of external discourses, such as theories and manifestos.

34 Király (2010: 207) sees visuality as the origin of cinema, narrativity as a feature learned later.

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With its integration of poetry, the documentary film The Verse of Us actively engages

with both of Király’s cinematographic trends. Directed by the financial-reporter-turned director

Wu Feiyue 吴飞跃 and the poet and critic Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇, the film represents the lives and

works of six Chinese (migrant) worker poets. In many ways, the film stands out from other

writer movies, more specifically poet movies, which have appeared in increasing number in the

mainland and Taiwan. Most obviously, the (migrant) worker identity of the poets featured in the

film endows it with special social significance but poses challenges in its demonstration of

media-awareness, namely how the poems are written and how the film is made.

Unlike some poet’s or writer’s biographical documentaries that reveal how the

poems/novels we are watching have come into being through a contrast between the tedious

daily routines and the intellectual toil of the poet, on the one hand, and the richness in his/her

works, on the other,35 The Verse of Us represents36 the poems as a faithful self-reflection on hard

labor, dire working conditions, and poor social welfare that the (migrant) worker poets face

every day. In a sense, one does not have to determine if this is a film about poets’ lives or about

poetry, because the two are conflated as one—the poets write what they live. However, it leaves

the “how” question—how the poems are written—overlooked and difficult to address.

———————————— 35 See for example, Liu Kuan’s 刘宽 Everyday Miracles (Richang de qiji 日常的奇迹, 2018) of the poet Huang Canran 黄灿然; Lin Jingjie’s 林靖杰 The Man behind the Book (Xunzhao bei hai de ren 寻找背海的人, 2011) of Wang Wenxing 王文兴 in the bio-doc series The Inspired Island: Series of Eminent Writers from Taiwan (Tamen zai daoyu xiezuo: wenxue dashi xilie dianying 他们在岛屿写作：文学大师系列电影).

36 Although this representation might not be accurate to many (migrant) worker poets who write on extensive themes and topics, it is understandable that the directors have chosen to see the poet-text relationship this way to thematically organize the film.

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To some extent, the merging of poets’ lives and works in The Verse of Us resembles

some feature films that contextualize poets’ works with their lives, but instead of catering to the

audience’s voyeuristic curiosity about the Bohemian lifestyle of poets,37 this film calls for public

attention to an underprivileged group. Nonetheless, even in feature films (especially those in the

West), how the poet overcomes writer’s block often constitutes the main conflict of the drama.

By contrast, rendering writing as a natural and thus sincere expression, The Verse of Us

represents poems as something that flow smoothly, if not burst out, from the tip of the pen.

While this is a gesture toward stressing the authenticity of (migrant) workers’ poetry, it raises

more obstacles to answering the hidden “how” question.

As far as the shooting is concerned, unlike some documentary films that feature a

complicity between the camera and a travelling poet that witnesses social ills caused by China’s

postsocialist condition within the transnational market economy,38 the relationship between the

poets and the camera is more nuanced in this film. The (migrant) worker poets’ themselves being

the underclasses who suffer from the unbalanced economic development in postsocialist China,

their awareness of the presence of the camera, and the directors’ own sense of social justice and

commercial purposes, imbue the film with an extra layer of intermedial tension and reciprocity.

Meanwhile, The Verse of Us’s integration of poetry bears some of the core origin-

returning, boundary-pushing characteristics of Király’s “contemplative” movies (a portion of

which, such as Jia Zhangke’s 24 City [24 cheng ji 24 城记, 2008] and Bi Gan’s 毕赣 Kaili Blues

———————————— 37 See for example, Chen Liying’s 陈丽英 The Poet (Gucheng bie lian 顾城别恋, 1998).

38 See for example, Ju Anqi’s 雎安奇 Poet on a Business Trip (Shiren chuchai le 诗人出差了, 2015).

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[Lubian yecan 路边野餐, 2015], also creatively incorporate poetry). Although the film is not

devoid of dialogue and its narrative is well paced, which makes it different from typical movies

of this strain, it has a remarkable visual elegance. It shares with these movies a demand for the

directors and audience to make meanings out of the pictorial elements of the shots in reference to

their knowledge of (migrant) worker poetry texts and understanding of China’s postsocialist

reality. In fact, the imagery of the film is so rich that the spectator is left with less than enough

time to notice all the interesting details in the frame. As a result, the feeling of excess and the

surge of thoughts and responsibilities, which are accommodated by the extremely slow pace

typical of contemplative movies, are laid bare in this particular film. Hence, the seemingly

atypical contemplative movie actually does not diverge far from the essentials of the genre, and

serves well as a case that explores the intermedial interfaces and medial specificities of poetry

and documentary film.

Before I proceed with my analysis, a brief excursion into the discourse of (migrant)

worker poetry, or Dagong shige 打工诗歌, is warranted. While Dagong shige is the most

extensively used nomenclature for this body of poetry in China, it is sometimes also called

Nongmingong shige 农民工诗歌 or Gongren shige 工人诗歌, and variably rendered in English

as “labor poetry,” “workers’ poetry,” “migrant worker poetry,” or “battlers poetry” (van Crevel

2017b; van Crevel 2017-2018; Goodman 2017-2018). Keeping in mind the different socio-

cultural connotations of these terms and their translations, my choice of “(migrant) worker

poetry” here is not a perfect rendition but an expedient that displays the broad spectrum of this

body of poetry. Reaching out (sometimes retrospectively) to include poems by workers in all

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walks of life in contemporary China (e.g., Qin X. 2015), this discourse keeps poems by migrant

worker poets at the center.

Crowding into the cities from the countryside in search of employment, migrant workers

number in the hundreds of millions and have contributed immensely to the country’s economic

miracle, but find themselves at the social bottom suffering from a whole range of unique troubles

and worries. Usually having some level of education but no professional training in writing,

some of them teach themselves to write poetry. While they write about almost anything, some

prominent themes relate to their migrant worker lives, such as their dire working conditions,

unemployment and destitution, limitation of individual rights and personal expressions, social

and environmental injustice, and rupture of interpersonal relations and cultural heritage (Liu D.

2005; Xiaojing Zhou 2016; van Crevel 2017-2018). Initially gaining limited visibility in the

1990s, this body of poetry has progressively gained critical attention at home and abroad with the

rise of the Internet and become canonized in print publication. One earliest representative of

(migrant) worker poetry is Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼 (b. 1980), whose writing portrays the

hardship of exploited labor within the big picture of globalization, but also preserves human

dignity with assertions of femininity. With the screening of The Verse of Us and the publication

of eponymous anthologies of (migrant) worker poetry in Chinese and English, Wu and Qin

brought more (migrant) worker poets into public view.

The film duly fulfills the directors’ bifurcated goals of exposing the plight of the Chinese

working class and showcasing its “extraordinary creativity,” with a greater emphasis on the latter

(Zou/Qiu/Qin 2017). Having shot ten (migrant) worker poets altogether and made a mini-doc for

each, the directors picked six of them for the final film to present a representative picture. For the

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part of (migrant) workers’ lives, they manage to build a coherent narrative around exploring the

poets’ social dilemmas. Beginning with leaving their rural homes, turning to the difficulty of job

hunting in the cities, then diving into working conditions and leisure time experiences, then

pushing forward to the problem of unpaid wages, and finally addressing the threat or realization

of death, the film adeptly interweaves the fragments of the poets’ stories into a structured

narrative of shared hardship. Overall, the tone of the film is mildly critical, but not overly

provocative; empathetic, but not overly manipulative.

With regard to its treatment of the poets’ creative output, the film also painstakingly

delineates its styles and aesthetic merits by linking their works and their lives to show the

connection between life and poetry. In fact, the daily life shots of the film are sandwiched

between a staged (migrant) workers’ poetry recitation performance, which serves as the narrative

frame of the film, and voiced or typed verses that show up every now and then. This

interweaving of life and poems offers the audience bountiful opportunities to shuttle, and think

about the relationship, between the two. Meanwhile, the film also includes interviews with the

(migrant) worker poets in which they talk about what poetry means to them. As a common

practice of documentary film, the interviews not only explicitly address poetry’s social relevance

today but also offer explanations for the particular ways each of the poets writes. Besides

winning best documentary film awards at domestic and international film festivals and gaining

generally favorable reviews, the film, more encouragingly, triggered numerous viewers to

confess being touched by the poems (if not by the film itself). Moreover, some netizens

spontaneously endeavored to collect all the verses appearing in the film and searched for even

more (migrant) worker poetry (e.g., Anon. 2018b; Anon. 2020).

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However, the film’s remediation of poetry has also triggered confusion and complaints,

which suggests the radicalness of the poetry crossover taking place in the film. The radicalness

lies not in challenging audience comprehension, but in its stylistic experimentation. The most

representative two questions/criticisms were “Is this a film or a PowerPoint slideshow?” and “Is

this a documentary film or television poetry and prose?” (e.g., Anon. 2015b). The first question

primarily targeted the film’s extensive superimposition of poetry texts onto scenery shots. Filling

a static frame with a street or worksite scene and having verses typed into the empty space, these

shots look like PowerPoint slides with moving backgrounds (see, for example, Figure 6).

Figure 6: Poetry text superimposed onto a scenery shot.

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The second question mainly rises from the film’s pervasive use of reenactments of events and

images described in the poems. This strategy arouses the audience’s memory of the genre of

“television poetry and prose,” which often tries to match its plots and scenes with the spoken and

typed texts and is exemplified by China Central Television’s long-running program Television

Poetry and Prose (Dianshi shige sanwen 电视诗歌散文, 1998-2010). Both criticisms express

doubts about the directors’ imaginativeness in devising appropriate ways to remediate poetry and

the authenticity of the documentary film in its use of heavy directing. Nevertheless, looking

beyond the bias against slideshows and television poetry and prose, I find these two doubts about

the film’s stylistic experimentation quite revealing about the film’s effective exploration of

intermediality and medial specificities.

The Interrupted Times

As mentioned earlier, poetry’s integration into documentary film creates a slideshow- or

television poetry-like interface between poetry and documentary film in The Verse of Us. This

interface is simultaneously touching and confusing to the audience. The following section

addresses how such an interface challenges medial borders and reinforces medial specificities

through an analysis of its interruption of the film’s temporality. I argue that the film’s

superimposition of poetry texts on scenery shots and reenactments of poems and poem writing

tactfully pause and overlap with diegetic time. In so doing, the poets, the directors, and the

audience sink into the film diegesis, with its excessive visual details, and step out of it with a

heightened sense of media-awareness. For the (migrant) worker poets, by performing both their

daily lives and their awkwardness in front of the camera, they add new layers of meanings to

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their poems while continuing to shape their own personalities, a process that started with their

poetry writing. For the directors, by unraveling and representing the aesthetic quality of this body

of poetry through cinematic language and creating a parallel between the poets’ sense of

responsibility to write and their own sense of responsibility to see, they find a way to connect to

poetry and generate meanings about it. For the audience, by actively watching and making

meanings out the details in the film, and actively making connections between the (migrant)

worker poems/lives in the film and their own lives, they also learn to connect with others in more

profound ways. All in all, such an interface between poetry and film reinforces the film’s

visuality, expands its conceptuality, empowers those involved, and enhances the communication

among all participants.

Let us start with the superimposition of poetry texts on scenery shots in the film. The

technique appears extensively in the film, from the opening credits, through the poets’ personal

stories, and finally to the end of the film. Throughout the film, these “slides” either slow down or

pause the diegetic time of the film’s narrative. Since they leave plenty of time for viewers to take

in the verses or even pace their reading by displaying the verses line by line, the reading time of

the verses lengthens the duration of the shot and marks off a moment outside the narrative of the

film. In this sense, these “slides” are transposing poetry’s reading time into the film’s diegetic

time, offering perfect opportunities for contemplation of the film and/or of the poems. On the

one hand, the “slides” entice viewers to recollect what has been shown previously, set their

expectations for what is coming up, or appreciate the poet’s story in light of the verses. In other

words, the audience is allowed time to dive deeper into the diegesis. On the other hand, these

“slides,” which seemingly freeze diegetic time, generate the feeling that the poet’s fast-paced life

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is captured and cast into the still shape of the verses. These are occasions for the poetry text to

shine and to be savored.

Therefore, the frequent interruptions of diegetic time allow poetry to give insight into the

poet’s life; they also show how life becomes poetry, how poetry is higher than life, and what

gives this body of poetry its special quality. While the former effect is relatively easy to achieve

by effectively matching verses with scenes from the poet’s life, the second demonstrates a

mediatic self-awareness and is extremely challenging. It requires originality and techniques to

arrange the scenery shots in a way that illustrates the particular creativity of the poems and

sources to that creativity. These challenges, in the meantime, offer an opportunity for the

directors to display their own understandings of this body of poetry and persuade the audience.

Wu and Qin seized this opportunity.

In the film, scenery shots with verses superimposed are presented in reference to the

diegesis. The directors utilize sequences of filmed events, interviews with the poets, objects and

locations, and sounds accompanying the frames, etc. to work with the “slides” and unveil and

account for basic characteristics of this body of (migrant) worker poetry. For instance, not long

after the film begins, verses by various (migrant) worker poets and the film’s opening credits

appear alternately over a series of scenery shots. This could be considered as a heavy dose of

“slides.” All of the “slides” are extreme long shots of busy street scenes either home or abroad.

For the film, they are appropriate as establishing shots, but for the poetry text, the broad scope of

the shots is also an introduction to the transnational vision of the verses. The cityscape and

foreign sites suggest that a common feature of many (migrant) worker poems is the revelation

that the individual’s domestic labor serves the demand of a transnational market. The fast-

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moving miniature vehicles seen from above (i.e., busyness) and the blank spaces in the frames

(i.e., emptiness) suggest that what is also crucial to this body of poetry is reflections on the

values of this labor for individuals and for the world. This transnational vision is quite self-

evident in the quoted verses, such as Xie Xiangnan’s 谢湘南 (b. 1974) “Those five years of my

youth come out of the asshole of the machine/ and turn into a queue of elliptical Christmas toys/

to be sold to the blue-eyed children” 我青春的五年从机器的屁眼里出来/ 成为一个个椭圆形

的圣诞玩具/ 出售给蓝眼睛的孩子39 and Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “I busy myself every day/ to

peacefully arrange the whole world in a factory” 我每天劳碌不停/为了在一个工厂里和平地安

排好整个世界.40 These scenery shots visualize and intensify the confrontation of a Chinese

migrant worker and the global capitalist order highlighted in the poems.

Interactions between scenery shots with verses and the film’s diegesis are even more

prominent when it comes to poets’ personal stories. The directors make efforts to demonstrate

how the (migrant) worker life is transformed into poetry. Taking the demolition worker Chen

Nianxi 陈年喜 (b. 1970), whom the film quotes more extensively than any of the other poets

besides Xu Lizhi 许立志 (1990-2014), for example, the directors carefully record one of his

typical work days in the mine, from entering the tunnel, setting up equipment, burying dynamite,

blasting rocks, and examining ore, to exiting the tunnel, having a meal, taking a bath, and finally

writing poems and reading a magazine. Shots of Chen reciting his own poems at the (migrant)

workers’ poetry recitation performance and an interview with Chen are inserted into the middle

———————————— 39 From “Anecdotes from Front Lines” (Qianyan yishi 前沿轶事) with changes (Xie 2015).

40 From “Industrial Age” (Gongye shidai 工业时代) with minor changes (Zheng X. 2009: 57-58).

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of this sequence of his daily routines. Almost every routine is accompanied by a scenery shot

with his own verses. With thematic, sometimes even literal, correspondence between the selected

verses and the life scenes, these “slides” are not mere summaries of the different aspects of the

poet’s life. Working with the film diegesis, they capture the aesthetic features of Chen’s

writings—the conflation of the external work environment and his feelings, the contrast between

the numbing shocks in his life and his sensitive personality, and finally the paradox between

migrant labor and family life.

Following some shots of Chen staring into a valley before entering the mine and those of

him drilling in the tunnel, the film displays the lines “How many bursts and cracks in the depth

of the age/ An iron bone, discovered the secret of writing” 多少时代深处的炸与裂/ 一根铁

骨，找到了写作的秘意 (Figure 7).41 Originally a poem dedicated to the Russian writer

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), the verses are quoted here with added images of “bursts,”

“cracks,” and “iron” to show the directors’ intent to use Chen’s comment on Solzhenitsyn to

reflect on his own writing. Framing Chen and his coworker in a small spot at the far end of the

tunnel encircled by large spaces of darkness, the shot suggests that Chen is observing the world

through his work. The images of the demolition drill and the beam from a headlight merge with

the image of the poet’s bone in the poem, with the former probing the tunnel wall and the latter

the human soul.

———————————— 41 From “To Solzhenitsyn” (Zhi Suoerrenniqin 致索尔仁尼琴) with some changes (Chen 2015).

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Figure 7: Chen Nianxi drilling in the tunnel with his coworker.

Such a merging of external objects and sites with the poet’s visceral feelings gradually

comes to the fore when the film cuts to Chen’s recitation of his most well-known work “A

Record of Demolitions” (Zhalie zhi 炸裂志) and his account of feeling on the verge of double

outbursts after getting the news of his mother’s diagnosis of esophageal cancer after four months

of exhausting work. Here physical breakdown and emotional collapse are blended. Then the film

shows another quote projected over a shot of the tunnel: “Even the humblest bones have rivers

inside/ I choose the explosive power, to split the mountain and save my mother” 再低微的骨头

里也有江河/ 我选择爆力，劈山救母.42 The natural image of surging rivers and the explosive

———————————— 42 Attributed to “Fate” (Suming 宿命), a poem not included in Chen’s personal blog or anthology.

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power that is part of the poet’s job are once again embedded into his bones in the poem; his

demolition job is rendered as a way to financially support and save his mother in reality and to

metaphorically remove the burden on his mother.43 Here the poet derives emotional power from

his demolition work. Then this emotional power is embedded back into the image of the tunnel

in the scenery shot. Hence, the “slides” participate in the merging of the external and internal, the

physical and the emotional, which characterizes a great portion of Chen’s poetry.

The above two quotes also shed light on the contrast between Chen’s tough

work/language and his tender heart. In the quoted verses, the contrasts between the sensation of

the explosions and the solitude of the bone, the booming sounds of the blasts and the quietness of

writing, the sheer energy of demolition and the sensitivity to changes in family life, all

strengthen the emotions. The film does not miss the point. To capture this contrast, the film not

only accompanies the loud noises of the machines with background music and makes Chen’s

drilling look like he is engaged in battle, it also augments subtle sounds (like the clatters of the

metal gears and footsteps), focuses on visual details in the tunnel (like ore and gravel), and gives

close-ups to Chen’s facial expressions. These cinematic contrasts correspond to the verses,

rendering Chen as both a careful worker and warm person who has a full taste of what life brings

to him.

Another feature of Chen’s poetry is the paradox between his work and family life. His

choosing “explosive power” to “split the mountain and save my mother” is further expounded by

other footage and his other poems recited in the film. The fact that the record of his workday is

———————————— 43 This refers to the story of “Splitting the Mountain to Save Mother” (Pi shan jiu mu 劈山救母). In various opera and folklore traditions, the protagonist Chenxiang 沉香 literally split Mountain Hua to release his mother, a heavenly princess who was imprisoned beneath Mountain Hua as a penalty for being married to a mortal.

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preceded by the episode of him giving his paralyzed father a haircut at home and followed by his

talk about his marriage indicates that his work has always been linked to his family life. His “A

Record of Demolitions” and “Son” (Erzi 儿子) are full of dilemmas: “how much is cut off from

my middle age/ determines how much their [his parents’] old age can be extended” 我的中年裁

下多少/ 他们的晚年就能延长多少 (Chen N. 2013), “The three of us/ are like three legs/

propping up a table called family/ son, this separation of thousands of miles of mountains/ is just

the way things are” 我们一家三口/ 多像三条桌腿/ 支撑起一个叫家的桌子/ 儿子 这也是我们

这个万里河山目下/ 大体的结构, “I want you to put down your books and look at the world/

but I fear you would really see it”44 我想让你绕过书本看看人间/ 又怕你真的看清 (Chen N.

2011a; Chen N. 2016). His labor separates him from his family members while allowing him to

provide for them. The labor-intensive job that seems to be wasting his life sustains the lives of

his parents who gave him life. This reciprocity of life devoid of a sense of self-fulfillment,

demonstrates Chen’s self-sacrifice and filial devotion as a son, but it also leads to serious

questioning about the ultimate meaning of life. The truth of life might be too cruel to disclose,

but in writing about his work and life, he is indeed searching for truth and meaning. Such are the

paradoxes shared by numerous (migrant) workers and captured by those among them who write.

Chen shows a strong tendency to perceive his (migrant) worker life through the form of paradox

and the film captures this trait well.

Besides Chen’s paradoxes, contrasts, and conflation of work environment and visceral

feeling, other individual styles are also revealed in the film, including Wu Xia’s 邬霞 (b. 1981)

———————————— 44 Translation by Eleanor Goodman.

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pursuit of feminine beauty, female sexuality, and loving bonds between women, Lao Jing’s 老井

(b. 1968) rich but poignant imagination, and Guo Jinniu’s 郭金牛 (b. 1966) strong sense of irony

and responsibility (in the mini-doc).

As illustrated above, the scenery shots, verses, and film diegesis are meticulously

interwoven, so that the film seems to step into and out of the diegesis to delineate the aesthetic

features of the (migrant) worker poetry and showcase how (migrant) worker life is transformed

into poetry. These interwoven elements also invite the audience to participate in the process of

interpreting and appreciating this body of poetry. Either watching the film at one of its over

1,000 crowd-funded screenings (Qin X. 2017b) or through online streaming, the audience can

sink into the diegesis to discover details that inform us about the aesthetic features of the verses

on display. One viewer claimed, “there are so many details that need to be dug out gradually”

(Bulukelin you ke shu 2016), and another showed his attention to the details by saying, “I feared

that in a blink of an eye I will miss something” (Xiyu 2016). They represent many audience

members who practiced active viewing.

The details that individual audience members notice—be it symbolic or practical—point

out some aspects of (migrant) worker life that help the audience appreciate their poetry. For

example, during the scene where Chen Nianxi works in the tunnel, one online viewer sent a

bullet subtitle asking why Chen was not wearing a face mask. In response, someone else

answered in another bullet subtitle, “If he can afford that, he no longer has to do this kind of

work” (iQIYI 2018). Here the first viewer caught a practical detail that raised his safety

concerns, which were relevant to the health and life risks many (migrant) workers have to face.

The second viewer, through his answer, indicated that safety is costly: unless Chen could find a

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job both better paying and safer, he had to take the health risk and get whatever little financial

benefit the demolition work offered. While his assumption (in spite of his certain tone) might not

be an accurate reason for Chen’s not wearing a mask, he brought up the dilemma between health

and income and thus suggested the paradoxical impacts Chen’s work brought to him. This added

to the above-discussed paradoxes that characterize Chen’s poetry. Therefore, audience members

were cooperating with the directors in assessing (migrant) worker poetry through grasping the

poets’ life details and submerging into the diegesis.

Meanwhile, the film’s arrangement of scenery shots with verses also invites the audience

to step out of the diegesis to appreciate (migrant) worker poetry from the perspective of their

own lives. Because these shots freeze or prolong the diegetic time, they give the audience an

opportunity to notice their own reactions, their viewing environments, and their own living

conditions. These discoveries factor into their assessment of (migrant) worker poetry and allow

them to appreciate aesthetic features they particularly value. While this process is highly

individualized and unpredictable, it turned out that many viewers seized the opportunity to

appreciate the refined sensibility, concise language, and forthright attitude in this poetry that they

deemed as a lack in their own lives.

The scenery shots with verses reminded the audience of the here-and-now of the film

screenings in various ways: audience members took photos of their favorite verses (e.g., Jianghai

yi suoweng 2016), children read aloud the verses on the screen without considering other

audience members (e.g., Zeen 2017), and audience members started to notice the quality of the

projector because of the slow pace of the scenery shots and the grating sounds in the diegesis

(Shalala 2015), etc. Many audience members recounted online how these happenings at the

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screenings reminded them of their social distances from the (migrant) workers and the contrast

between their own living condition and that of the (migrant) worker poets (e.g., Jianghai yi

suoweng 2016; Zeen 2017). One viewer’s comment is very typical: “it easily reminded one of

the apparently prosperous but actually desolate age” (Shalala 2015). Putting this poetry against

the materially affluent but spiritually empty life of the middle-strata audience that revolves

around “investment and business restructuring, auction and collection, travel around the world,

divorce and cutting each other’s throats,” this viewer concluded, “though they [migrant worker

poets] are dressed in rags, speak with heavy accents, and barely make ends meet, with regards to

observations and insights on society, they are more sensitive, faithful, and direct than I am”

(Shalala 2015).

Here we see that this audience member’s opinions of (migrant) worker poetry were

firmly rooted in a reflection on her own situation. Because the verses provided something she

deemed lacking in herself and in Chinese society, she started to pay attention to this poetry and

to feel respect for the poets. Seen out of the context, the features she listed, such as sensitivity,

are not particularly distinctive from other kinds of poetry, but in contemporary China, where

some question if modern poetry is poetry at all, the audience’s celebration of these features

indicated its endorsement of (migrant) worker poetry as poetry. This poetry reflected and shaped

contemporary Chinese audience’s conception of what contemporary poetry should be like, and

this conception was defined against a life numbed by an obsession with earning and spending.

Therefore, just as the film demonstrates that (migrant) worker poetry both comes from and

transcends the life of commodity producers, the audience’s reactions suggest that appreciation of

this poetry also came from and sought something nobler than the consumer life.

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Another key element of the interface between poetry and documentary film featured in

The Verse of Us is the pervasive reenactments of scenes recounted in the poems that are often

accompanied by the poets’ recitation of their own works. More of a persuasive rather than

observational type of documentary film (Nichols 2001: 99-138), The Verse of Us uses

reenactments to enhance its aesthetics and socio-cultural significance without hurting its

authenticity. While reenactment is a common practice in documentary films, the reenactment of

(migrant) worker poems, which are full of autobiographical elements, creates interesting twists in

the diegetic time of the film. It conflates the time that the events and scenes inspiring the poets to

write actually took place (or happened in the poets’ mind),45 the time the poets wrote, the time

the poets recited the poems, and the time the poets performed the events and scenes in the poems

in front of the camera. Most importantly, the poets, the directors, and the audience are all aware

of these overlapping temporalities and the mediating role of poetry and documentary film in this

overlap. As a result, not only is the poets’ performance of their everyday life in the film informed

by a heightened sense of media-awareness, the production and perception of the film are also

characterized by a fusion of the directors’ and viewers’ emotional investment and intellectual

recognition of poetry and film’s mediating process.

For the poets, the cinematic reenactment of their personal experiences with the (migrant)

worker life recounted in their poems is a reclamation of ownership over these experiences and an

———————————— 45 For example, Chen Nianxi confessed that his “Haircut for father” (Gei fuqin lifa 给父亲理发) recounted a real and important life experience (Han 2015a); as described in her “Sundress” (Diaodaiqun 吊带裙), Wu Xia said she really developed emotional attachment to clothes she made and when she made dresses she would imagine about their future owners (CCTV 2015); the Yi poet Jike Ayou was often late for the new year sacrifice as described in his “Late Arrival” (Chidao 迟到) because Yi new year was in November, the busiest time for most factories (Qin X. 2019).

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exploration of the meanings of these experiences. Those who lived the (migrant) worker life and

who later wrote about it are now combined with those performing it; the (migrant) worker-poet-

performers have to delve into their earlier lives while at the same time stepping out to heed their

current presence in front of the camera. This connection between past and present and the

dynamic interaction among life, poetry, and film allow the poets to construct their authorship in

an ongoing process.

For example, the film reenacts Wu Xia’s “Sundress” (Diaodaiqun 吊带裙) twice—the

first time in its entirety and a second time when the ending lines are repeated. The reenactment is

accompanied by a reading of the poem, and the two parts are joined by an interview with Wu

about the poem. The following is the last stanza of the poem:

Soon when I get off work 而我要下班了 I’ll wash my sweaty uniform 我要洗一洗汗湿的厂服 and the sundress will be packed and shipped 吊带裙 它将被打包运出车间 to a fashionable store 走向某个时尚的店面 it will wait just for you 等待唯一的你 unknown girl 陌生的姑娘 I love you46 我爱你 (Wu Xia 2016)

The entire poem demonstrates an awareness of poetry writing as a highly personal process, in

which one writes for an imagined reader. The poem recounts the steps of Wu (“I”) ironing a

sundress, which is interspersed with her imagining of how her hard but thoughtful labor will

transform into someone else’s (“you”) beauty and romance. Whereas Wu might not be expecting

the future owner of the sundress to really have a chance to read this poem, and she might or

———————————— 46 The poem undergoes some minor changes when it appears in the film, which are not distinguishable in English translation. The text included here is the version in the film and the translation is from Eleanor Goodman.

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might not expect to have an actual reader at all, this mediation of the writing process initiates a

direct conversation between “I” and “you.” With the imagined addressee, Wu enjoys the chance

to express herself. Although the poem contrasts the labor of “I” and the enjoyment of “you,” the

overall tone is tender and caring. Wu makes full use of the contrasts to evoke her best self, rather

than allowing feelings of injustice, indignation, resentment, or cynicism to dominate. Although a

touch of self-pity can be seen in the image of her sweaty uniform, Wu ultimately makes her self-

sacrifice an expression of love. While accepting her identity as a female (migrant) worker, she

refuses to embrace the passive state of victimhood and is not to be deprived of the power to love.

Her explicit declaration of love to the unknown girl becomes a strong gesture of self-

empowerment.

In the filmed reenactment, Wu Xia enriches the work experience recounted in the poem

through an awareness of the camera and of her performance. Although the heavy-handed

directors magnify the movements of the iron, the steam, and the sweat that glues Wu’s hair to her

forehead to give her labor a sentimental quality and have Wu recite the declaration of love in the

last two lines of the poem directly into the camera, Wu still asserts her authorship through her

acting. Throughout the reenactment of the poem, as well as the inserted interview, Wu plays out

her discomfort about appearing in front of the camera, which highlights the confrontation

between shyness and persistence from the poem and is a meaningful visual detail in itself. While

ironing the sundress, Wu Xia adopts a rigid facial expression that vaguely resembles a smile, as

if she is struggling to physically show the emotions in the poem. During the interview, as she

complains about the gender-effacing design of the uniform and recounts her enjoyment of

dresses by wearing them in the restroom after lights out, she chuckles now and then, which

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smooths out the seriousness of her complaint and the embarrassment of revealing her “silly” acts.

Although she appears quite talkative, Wu generally avoids eye contact with her interviewers and

the camera. When she summons up a smile and the voice to speak to the camera, her smile

gradually freezes as she finishes the line, making her look especially awkward (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Wu Xia’s smile gradually freezes.

Wu’s acting clearly conveys the message that what she feels comfortable doing in poetry,

she is uncomfortable performing in the film, though she chooses to do it anyway. What is written

in the poem for an indeterminate reader, she now has to say to real people—the directors and the

cameramen, plus an anticipated audience for the film. However, these are still the words she

wants to say. Her awkwardness and persistence reveal that the mediation process of writing and

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acting is one that opens up the personal to the public. It betrays Wu’s deep-seated uneasiness

with conflicts between her personal beliefs and public opinions, and her desire to withdraw from

the public or prevail over it. Take her smiles, for instance; it is obvious that the directors give

special attention to them through closeups and extreme closeups to showcase the optimism of

Wu’s poetry, but Wu’s vivid smiles tell so much more. In various ways, they demonstrate her

perception of the conflict between the logic of capital and the pursuit of feminine beauty. Her

inability to give a full smile indicates the tension between the loving feelings inside her and the

physical exhaustion of her labor. Her chuckles at her attempts to dress up after lights out suggest

that she knows how silly this self-appreciating act looks in terms of the practical side of life.

However, she turns the tables by laughing at the design of the factory uniforms and thus

representing the profit-oriented clothing industry as itself alienating and silly. Although her

warm smile is likely what the directors wanted, her awkwardness suggests internal struggle. The

steadfast affirmation of feminine beauty, despite the suffocating environment in which she

labors, is shown as the source of her love for others highlighted in the poem.

Because Wu chuckles the same way when she talks about her infatuation with poetry, her

pursuit of feminine beauty seems to be analogous to her poetry writing. Although she recognizes

that poetry writing is often scoffed at in contemporary China, she persists in believing that this

apparently unnecessary thing is what is really worth pursuing. Here, Wu’s work and poetry

writing experiences are seamlessly interwoven into her shy but strong-willed personality. The

mediating process of poetry writing and filming not only continues to make meanings out of

Wu’s (migrant) labor and her poetry text, but also becomes a process of character demonstration

and building for Wu.

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As far as other poets in the film are concerned, they demonstrate a wide range of attitudes

toward the camera. Like Wu Xia, Wu Niaoniao 乌鸟鸟 (b. 1981) often looks awkward. He gives

apologetic smiles when reading and explaining his poetry at his job interviews, but his eyes shine

with earnestness. This uncomfortable combination mixes both guilt and insistence in his poetry

writing. Guo Jinniu, by contrast, appears confident and tends to grow defensive or even

contentious when rebutting criticism against (migrant) workers’ poetry writing. Their awkward

performance is a part of their authorship and offers natural and profound visual details to the

film.

For the directors, the reenactments of the poems and poem writing allow them to

experiment with cinematic conventions to reflect poetry’s conceptuality. Having the

reenactments visually match or associate with imagery in the poems, the directors adopt a

cinematographic style that relies more on framing than storytelling, more on demonstrating

everyday scenes than reexperiencing particular events. Although many might criticize the

deliberate manner of the reenactments (Anon. 2015b), they were usually shot in real-life rather

than artificially recreated settings (Zou/Qiu/Qin 2017; Qin X. 2019). Therefore, although the

scenes captured in the frames correspond to images in the poems, they usually reveal many more

details—that is, they not only visualize the poems but also enter into the meaning-making

process of the poems, celebrating both film’s power to make spectacles and the directors’ sense

of responsibility to advance the discourse of (migrant) worker poetry.

Instead of mechanically reproducing what is written in the poems, the reenactments of

poems are visually rich and thought-provoking. Most noticeably, many of them contain logical

impossibilities. For example, the film’s reenactment of the poem “Late Arrival” (Chidao 迟到)

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by the ethnic Yi 彝 poet Jike Ayou 吉克阿优 (b. 1985) shows the Yi new year sacrifice ritual

that the poet claims to have missed because he arrived home late from his work in Jiaxing city.

By placing Jike Ayou in such a ritual, the film recreates what the poem refutes. In Xu Lizhi’s

(2014) “I Know There Will Be One Day” (Wo zhidao hui you name yi tian 我知道会有那么一

天), the poet imagines the day when his dead body is found in his rented room. The film’s

reenactment cannot possibly be the bloody death in his room the poem envisions, because in fact

Xu would jump to his death. Even in cases where the film reenacts other daily routines, the shots

still betray a strong sense of implausibility. For instance, to reenact the explosions accounted in

Chen Nianxi’s “A Record of Demolitions,” the film gives a view of real blasts inside the tunnel

from a close distance. Obviously, this is the view from the camera (and its zoom function), not

that of the poet or the directors. The crane shots in the reenactment of Wu Niaoniao’s “Rhapsody

on the Advance of Heavy Snow” (Daxue yajing kuangxiangqu 大雪压境狂想曲) are similar.

Besides these illogicalities and the obvious sense of implausibility, there were other presumable

impossibilities that were overcome only with unexpected help, including all the obstacles in the

shooting of the film, ranging from a lack of funds to the difficulty in obtaining permission to

enter the mines (Qin X. 2017b; Zhou/Qiu/Qin 2017).

Rather than invalidating the authenticity of the reenactments, these impossibilities and

implausibilities serve to exalt the camera’s power to see. Although the camera can never

accurately replicate the poets’ visions and always risks limiting the audience’s imagination of the

poems, its strength lies in its ability to capture and demonstrate lavish details that are “showing,

unmasking, symbolically representing cultural, social, political reality,” as Király (2010: 201)

puts it. By approximating what is written in the poems while seeing beyond the poems, the film

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allows the directors to demonstrate their sense of responsibility as filmmakers in response to the

poets’ sense of responsibility to persist in writing.

In his “The Site of a Coalmine Accident” (Kuangnan yizhi 矿难遗址, 2015), Lao Jing 老

井 (b. 1968) addresses miners who lost their lives in mine explosions and are permanently buried

in the mine. By writing “fill all your memories, indignation and longings/ into my body/ I am

willing to … load all your broken dreams/ go all the way up, all the way to the surface of the

earth/ the place brimmed with sunshine, and then release them” 把你们所有的怀念、悲愤、渴

望/ 都装入我的体内吧/ 我愿……殓载上你们所有的残梦/ 一直往上走，一直走到地表/ 那

个阳光暴涨的地方，再把它们释放出来, Lao Jing imagines using his own body as a container

to symbolically carry his coworkers’ spirits out of the sealed mine shafts. Through this act of

writing, he fulfills his responsibility to appease the dead and expose and commemorate their

deaths. The reenactment of the poem has Lao Jing recite these lines into the camera while he is

being lifted up on the mine shaft elevator, which literally turns his act of rising to the surface of

the earth into a memorial and a spirit-rescuing ritual. This closeup shot of Lao Jing reciting the

lines is alternated with a long shot of the light above at the end of the mine shaft. As the elevator

rises, the teeny-tiny light grows amid the overwhelming darkness, with constant blurs caused by

the jolts of the elevator, until the iron structure of the shaft can be clearly seen when it arrives at

the top. The scene is extremely depressing; the hope and relief brought by the light is weighed

down by the suffocating darkness, the constant blurring, the presence of death, and the heavy

burden of the dead. The sensory details in the frame make the scene visually impressive and

emotionally disturbing.

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As the closeup shot indicates, the camera is on the elevator with Lao Jing; as such, the

view of the light can be seen as a joint vision of the poet and the directors. Through filming, the

directors are sharing Lao Jing’s responsibility to at least symbolically release the trapped spirits

of the dead. Moreover, the sight of the light then dissolves into a high-angle shot of high-rise

dormitories, which might or might not be the poet’s view after leaving the mine (Figure 9).

Figure 9: The scene of the tunnel light dissolving into the scene of the skyline. The striking similarity between the two shots suggests that even after rising to the surface of the

earth, one is still trapped in the bottom of an urban jungle. Here the poet’s responsibility to carry

the spirits of the dead and expose them to the sun through writing becomes a cognate of the

directors’ responsibility to carry him and (migrant) workers like him and expose their condition

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to the general public through filming. Therefore, in providing these sorts of visual details, the

directors not only endeavor to dive into and represent the poems, but also share and connect to

the poets’ sense of responsibility to reflect on and intervene into reality.

The film’s self-conscious reenactment of the poetry writing scenes also highlights the

reciprocity between writing and filming. Apart from the poets’ performance in front of the

camera discussed above, the film also highlights the act of writing. Poetry writing is represented

as simultaneously mundane and heroic. On the one hand, the reenactment shoots (migrant)

worker poets writing in various settings: Jike Ayou examining a hand-written version of his

“Late Arrival” on a train back to his hometown; Wu Xia typing on a computer in her cramped

rented apartment; Lao Jing scratching out characters on the ground in the coal mine, etc. By

contextualizing poetry writing in everyday life and work settings, the directors make poetry a

natural and integral part of life. On the other hand, the film also shoots the act of writing in ways

that present it as more confrontational, even heroic. For instance, one reenactment shows Chen

Nianxi writing “Son” in his chilly hut after a long day’s work (Figure 10). While the content of

the poem, the time of day, and the place of writing remind one of a letter from father to son, a

practical everyday act, the visual details of the scene suggest that poetry writing for migrant

workers is a struggle against all odds. The reenactment opens with a medium-long establishing

shot of Chen putting down words on paper and a voiceover of Chen reading the poem. The poet

is sitting on the edge of a temporary bed and uncomfortably bending over to reach his temporary

desk made of a board laid on top of piles of clutter. The lighting in the room is poor, with a

single light bulb dangling overhead. Such a crude setting and the lack of a chair and proper desk

suggest the strenuous effort it takes for a poor migrant worker to keep writing. Then the camera

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pans to show the empty room, with almost no furniture, littered with helmets and other

belongings. When the poet reenters the frame as his reading continues, he appears on the bed at

the other side of the room. The distance between the camera and the poet across the empty space

turns his reading and writing into lonely and humble acts. However, the camera quickly cuts

back to the poet with extreme closeups of his eyes and of his fingers turning the magazine pages,

suggesting that poetry can mean the world to this obscure individual. Through the contrasts

between the setting—an environment not exactly conducive to writing—and the actual reading

and writing acts, between the long shots and close-ups of the poet, the reenactment puts on a

heroic drama of the poet transcending his physical and psychological confinements to write.

Figure 10: Chen Nianxi writing in his hut.

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Such a visual tension between the mundane and the heroic reveals the directors’

mediating role between the poets and the audience. While siding with the poets to naturalize

poetry as something essential to life rather than as a luxury afforded only by an elite, they are

keenly aware of the hostile environments the poets inhabit and are ready to defamiliarize them to

engage the audience. Through these visual details, they are fulfilling their responsibility to

participate in the meaning-making process of (migrant) worker poetry.

Along with conveying the directors’ responsibility to disclose the reality of (migrant)

labor and bring attention to their poetic output, the excess of visual details also challenges the

audience to take a more active form of spectatorship. Rather than losing themselves in the

diegesis, it invites them to hunt for interesting details and relate them to the poetry text being

presented, to other related texts in the discourse of (migrant) worker poetry, and to their

knowledges and views of China’s current sociopolitical reality. In the process, the audience

becomes aware of the film medium and assumes a certain kind of responsibility as spectators. As

stated earlier, an active spectatorship is productive but unpredictable. Therefore, my analysis

here illustrates its mechanism rather than describing details of the audience members’

interpreting acts.

Taking the reenactment of Wu Xia’s “Sundress” for example, one viewer mentioned that

it begins with the image of Wu ironing the sundress, which is shot through the window of the

factory building (Bulukelin you ke shu 2016). The image of the window recurs several times

during the reenactment. As this viewer expressed a feeling of peeking (Bulukelin you ke shu

2016), and many other viewers described the film as a window through which one could observe

society and life (e.g., Ban ge ren 2017), the window frame within the frame of the film screen

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obviously symbolizes the film as a window to display Wu’s life and writing, and that Wu’s life

and writing opens up a window to display the reality of (migrant) labor.

The window sheds new light on the relationship between reality and imagination,

producer and consumer, (migrant) worker poets and middle-strata audiences. While many

viewers who appreciated the imagery correspondence between the poem and its film reenactment

sympathized with Wu and felt glad that she found some relief from life’s hardship through her

imagination of beauty (e.g., Manjia 2017), those who noticed the window image or considered

the film as a window also emphasized how the real vision of the beauty-seeking Wu contrasted

with their own imagination of assembly line workers like her (e.g., An L. 2016).

Most audience members found an irony in Wu’s making fashionable clothes while not

having a chance to wear them herself (e.g., Shen 2017). Therefore, her act of fantasizing the

unknown girl as a consumer surrogate of her producer self constitutes an effort to liberate herself

from the confinement of the factory uniform, restrictive regulations, and heavy work duties to

achieve feminine beauty. This is made even more obvious and powerful when Wu admits that

the “unknown girl” could be others or herself—indeed, in the end, she appears in a sundress in

the film. Seen in this way, Wu is using her imagination, writing, and performing to confront the

alienating effect of the assembly line work. Meanwhile, the window through which we see Wu

reenacting the poem suggests an alternative view of the poem. The viewer who mentioned the

window image also associated it with the window in the restroom that Wu used as a mirror to see

her own image wearing a sundress and expressed a feeling that the camera is as careful

(xiaoxinyiyi 小心翼翼) as Wu in appreciating her beauty (Bulukelin you ke shu 2016). Here the

viewer showed an awareness of the film medium and distanced himself from Wu. He directed

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our attention away from Wu’s imagination and invited us to see, respect, and protect her as a real

woman who seeks beauty despite all restrictions. Wu Xia’s real love of beauty is itself a victory

over the capitalist logic of the clothing industry that cultivates consumers’ sense of beauty while

denying its own laborers’ need of it. In the same vein, many audience members noticed the

different earrings that Wu wears in the reenactment, and described them as cheap but shiny (e.g.,

Shen 2017). While these earrings are not mentioned in the poem or the interview, they constitute

Wu’s real-life vision. Therefore, in addition to her beautiful imagination, it is also Wu’s undying

love of beauty itself that moves the audience and makes her beautiful in their eyes.

Interestingly, just as Wu sees her own reflection in the window, audience members also

sent self-reflexive bullet subtitles during shots of windows and used the film as a window to

reflect on their own lives (e.g., iQIYI 2018). With the image of the ironing Wu Xia and the

watching audience separated symbolically by the window and physically by the film screen,

many audience members confessed that they were just like Wu Xia—some shared her love of

sundresses and others faced similar forms of labor exploitation (e.g., Shalala 2015; Xiyu 2016).

Although Wu’s conflation of the unknown girl and herself is comforting, audience identification

with Wu can be unsettling. As one viewer commented, “‘Which is more important, life’s

pressure or life’s dignity?’ We are facing the same question. It is even harder for them [the

migrant workers]” (Shalala 2015). Some viewers went further by stating, “laboring is not easy,

but we are all laborers” (e.g., Lele666 2017). This comment recalls the catchphrase “laboring for

Socialism” (wei shehuizhuyi dagong 为社会主义打工), which shares the same word “dagong”

in “dagong shige” and applies to technically anybody who does not own a business. In contrast

to citizens’ nominal status as masters of their own country (The State Council of the People’s

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Republic of China 2018), the phrase suggests a sense of exploitation and alienation in the rapid

growth of the national economy and a lack of sense of public ownership that is pervasive across

social strata in postsocialist China. Therefore, a feeling of identification with Wu may prompt

audience’s self-reflections and raise concerns about the exploitative nature of capitalism in

China. At the same time, their act of seeing the problem also creates the possibility of forming

alliances with the (migrant) worker poets and the directors to address concerns. Images in

reenactments of other poems, such as the anti-jumping nets installed around the Foxconn factory

building, were also noticed by audience members and interpreted as a symbol of suppression of

human feelings and dignity that applied equally well for (migrant) workers and the audience

(e.g., Manjia 2017). Here again, audience members actively identified and allied with (migrant)

workers to address the common issue of alienation and the sense of being trapped rather than

owning their lives and their country.

These are just a few of the visual details actually noticed and discussed by viewers, but

there are many more that were not picked up on. For instance, in the interview that is inserted

between the two parts of the “Sundress” reenactment, the image of Wu Xia’s residence permit

shows up briefly when she scans it to enter her apartment building. Although it is a natural part

of the diegesis, the permit points to some core issues of Chinese migrant labor related to the

country’s household registration (huji 户籍) system. Before 2014, the state distributed different

social welfare to Chinese citizens based on their residency status (rural or non-rural). Due to

strict limits on changes in residency status, migrant workers could only legally live in the cities

with a temporary residence permit (replaced by residence permit after 2014). The temporary

permit granted them partial urban benefits, but access to subsidized housing, affordable

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healthcare, and educational resources, etc. was often not included (though cases vary in different

cities and some reforms have been implemented).47 Thus, the appearance of the permit in the

film points out a major predicament for migrant workers. Read against the poem, it explains that

the distance between Wu’s clothing factory and the “fashionable store” the sundress will be sold

in is not one from the rural to the urban, but one from a state of non-belonging to belongingness.

This social distance triggers Wu’s inner strength to love, as is demonstrated in the poem, while

prompting viewers to reflect on the common issue of belongingness Chinese citizens face in the

development process. Meanwhile, it also recalls verses that lament the absurdity of the domestic

migration restrictions, such as these lines from Guo Jinniu (2014: 74): “Motherland, issued me a

temporary residence permit/ Motherland, accepts my submission of residence fees” 祖国，给我

办了一张暂住证/ 祖国，接纳我缴交的暂住费. The ironic residency limbo of migrant workers

in their own country exemplifies the lack of a sense of belonging in China.

The details I have selected here are a few out of a myriad. Audience’s actual responses

and potential readings I offer here are also just a few out of a myriad of possibilities. What

remains consistent, though, is that the excessive visuality of the film encourages the audience to

assume a spectatorial responsibility. Some of them responded and figured out ways to relate to

the (migrant) worker poets by actively digging out visual details and setting them against the

backdrop of their own lives and reading experiences.

Hence, in the film’s visually rich reenactment of poems and poetry writing, the (migrant)

worker poets, the directors, and the audience all exert their agency to form a dynamic communal

———————————— 47 More details about China’s household registration system can be seen in researches such as Chan 2010.

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response to China’s postsocialist reality. Like the film’s superimposition of verses onto scenery

shots, the reenactment’s celebration of visuality and cultivation of conceptuality and

responsibility highlight the specificity of documentary film and push its boundaries through the

incorporation of poetry. While in this case poetry’s transformation of the documentary film

mainly lies in its cinematic style, in other cases the integration of poetry transforms the structure

of the target media product, such as the example I discuss in the following section.

Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the Fuchun Mountains

The experimental theatre production Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the

Fuchun Mountains (Following hereafter) is a distinctive case in the current poetry crossover

trend for both its conscious thematization of intermedial interactions and its radical

experimentalism. Directed by Chen Si’an 陈思安 and scripted by Zhou Zan 周瓒, the theatre

production is based on Zhai Yongming’s namesake long poem. The poem itself is inspired by

Yuan dynasty painter Huang Gongwang’s 黄公望 (1269-1354) magnum opus “Dwelling in the

Fuchun Mountains” (Fuchun shan ju tu 富春山居图) and the fate of this scroll painting.

From landscape painting to poem to theatre, not only is the mutual fertilization between

media explicitly addressed, noticeable parallels also exist in the compositional process of the

artworks. For the landscape painting, instead of having a preconceived idea of its general layout,

Huang Gongwang adopted a method of gradual accruement—continually roaming the mountains

over a three-year period and then abstracting what he saw onto the painting. Similarly, Zhai also

kept weaving life experiences and social events into her poem over a period of three to four years

rather than starting with well-planned content and structure in mind (Zhai/Leng 2016). For its

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part, the staging of the poetry theatre also underwent constant revision over a period of three

years, from 2014 to 2017, based on the new lines the poet added to the poem and the different

temperaments and abilities of cast members. As the staging was started before the poem was

completed, the poet added a new section to the poem that was based on her viewing of the initial

version of the experimental theatre production and that was then incorporated into later versions

of the theatrical piece. Such twists and turns in the “growing” process of the poem and the

experimental theatre allowed for multiple layers of remediation and sophisticated cross feed

between the media.48

While traces of intermedial interactions can be found everywhere in this theatrical

production, poetry crossover makes the most significant difference in its structure, which further

influences its style and spectatorship. Admittedly, the practice of integrating poetry into theatre

has been around a long time. Unlike traditional operas in China and verse dramas in Europe and

America, which versify parts or the entirety of the play without challenging the basic structure of

drama, poetry theatre (shige juchang 诗歌剧场), to which Following belongs, aims at

transgressing dramaturgical conventions or, more radically, loosening the bond between drama

text and theatre practice. It explores a new relationship between poetic linguistic complexity and

theatricality.

In this sense, Following took a postdramatic route that is manifested in other poetry-

based experimental theatre works in twenty-first century China, such as Meng Jinghui’s 孟京辉

———————————— 48 My analysis of the poetry theatre production in this dissertation is mainly based on its 2015 version that has been staged four times in Beijing. This version has all the artistic sophistication of the production by including Zhai’s newly added section and making drastic changes to the previous version. Meanwhile, it still bears an amateurish appearance before starring established performers, which is characteristic of poets’ theatre.

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Flowers in the Mirror, Moon on the Water (Jing hua shui yue 镜花水月, 2006), which is based

on poems by Xi Chuan, and in post-World War II American poets’ theatre in which poets wrote

the scripts, directed, and/or performed onstage, or employed poetic language in the play as a

form of antirealist social critique (Bean 2019: 8-10). Like these works, Following abandons

many of the elements we associate with drama, but corresponds to and makes use of poetry in

innovative ways. However, it differs from Meng Jinghui’s liberal improvisation of actions and

speeches and inclusion of sculpture and installation art on stage loosely based on the spirit of Xi

Chuan’s poems (Chen et al. 2014; Ferrari 2016), by sticking firmly to the poetry lines and the

poem’s linguistic characteristics in its integration of multimedia. Meanwhile, unlike the

American poets’ incorporation of poetic language (the difference in socio-cultural environment

aside), Following focuses on the remediation of one particular poem. In this sense, it is even

different from other poetry theatre works by Zhou Zan and her friends in the Ladybug Theatre

(Piaochong jushe 瓢虫剧社),49 which usually assemble verses from different authors (e.g., The

Woman Who Attempted to Disrupt the Ceremony [Qitu pohuai yishi de nüren 企图破坏仪式的

女人, 2010] and Riding a Roller-Coaster to Fly toward the Future [Chengzuo guoshanche

feixiang weilai 乘坐过山车飞向未来, 2011] directed by Cao Kefei 曹克非). In other words,

although it resembles other contemporary practices of integrating poetry into theatre, Following

———————————— 49 Zhou Zan co-founded the Ladybird Theatre with Cao Kefei in 2008. It produces experimental theatre works that attempt to transgress various boundaries. Before that, Zhou co-founded the women’s poetry journal Wings (Yi 翼) with Zhai Yongming in 1998, which promotes works by young women poets and introduces women’s writings and criticism from all over the world. Zhou’s friendship with both the Wings poets and members of the Ladybird Theatre enabled multiple stagings of works by the Wings poets.

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is special in really putting one poem under the spotlight—being faithful to the content of one

poem and making the poem the backbone of its structure.

Unfortunately, despite the public exposure and critical attention the production has

received, poetry’s impact on the structure of the theatre production has not been sufficiently

addressed. Its reception among the general public is polarized: enthusiasts appreciated its sensory

richness and philosophical power; detractors condemned its medley of formal innovations that

overshadows the content (e.g., Anon. 2014a). Whereas both reactions indicate the challenges

faced by the general public in understanding the poem and unraveling the connection between

the poem and the experimental theatre’s structure, scholarly criticism is also filled with blindness

and misjudgments. Although most critics acknowledge the production’s structural

experimentation, they still reproach it for lacking elements of traditional drama (e.g., Chang R.

2017; Jiang X. 2017), for its overdose of poetry lines spoken by the performers (e.g., Chang R.

2017; Luo 2017), and for its overwhelming potpourri of visual transferences of the poetry lines

that dismembers the poem and reduces the imaginative space (e.g., Xin Y. 2016; Luo 2017; Ma

X. 2017). Some critics have even disqualified this production as theatre and label it “situational

poetry recitation” (qingjing shi langsong 情景诗朗诵; Ding M. 2017: 148) or “theatre poetry”

(juchang shi 剧场诗; Wu S. 2017: 33).

To respond to such misconceptions of this poetry theatre production and to break away

from the critical model that confines our understanding of contemporary Chinese poetry’s

integration into other media in general, this section illustrates how the integration of poetry into

theatre transforms the very structure of Following. Starting from what elements are deliberately

left out, moving on to what elements are present, and focusing on how they are arranged, my

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analyses show that the production’s innovative remediation of poetry’s linguistic complexity

both pushes the medial borders of theatre while returning to its specificities.

For typical audiences of traditional/dramatic theatre, the aesthetic experience they seek

first and foremost is dramatic conflicts (and resolutions). This also lies at the heart of dramatic

theories from Aristotle to Hegel (Lehmann 2006: 35). In text, dramatic conflicts are often seen in

the form of contention between ethical positions in a fictive cosmos that symbolizes the real

world. They drive the plots that are woven by characters’ actions, speeches (predominantly

dialogues), and thoughts. Here we see a moving story and a well-configured relationship

between the virtual and the actual. When applied to theatre, dramatic conflicts are realized

through actors’ imitation of characters’ actions recounted in the story. While the moving story is

still in place, the illusion created by mimesis and the fact that performance and spectatorship are

taking place face-to-face add another layer of division/connection between the virtual and the

actual.50 Seen from the aspects of the moving story and the “make-believe,” Following is devoid

of dramatic conflicts and thus what is normally understood as theatricality. Aiming at

remediating poetry, which is often lyrical (though not without narrative or dramatic elements),

the production abandons a clear plotline (or even a smooth chain of elements), adopts highly

abstract characterization, and replaces representational actions with symbolic or eccentric

———————————— 50 My view of dramatic conflicts relies heavily on Hans-Thies Lehmann’s (2006) understanding of dramatic theatre but also differs significantly from it. Lehmann (2006: 21-22, 99-107) sees that the main target of dramatic theatre is making an illusion and claims that postdramatic theatre, instead, allows the real to break into the fictive. In contrast, I believe that the interplay of the fictive and the real has been in the theatre from the very start. This is in tune with Richard Schechner’s (1998: 162) observation that “Theatre, to be effective, must maintain its double or incomplete presence as a here-and-now performance of there-and-then events.” Therefore, I maintain that the contribution of postdramatic theatre mainly lies in its reconfiguration of the relationship between the fictive and the real, or what Richard Schechner (1998: 163-167) views as the blurred boundary between aesthetic drama and social drama, art and life.

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movements, and dialogues with lines from the poem. In addition to the absence of these key

dramatic elements, multiple forms of staging, such as modern dance, plunderphonics music,

song, image projection, cross talk (xiangsheng 相声), and shadow play, are employed in the

production, which disrupt the coherent totality of a diegetic world that dramatic theatre often

strives to construct. No wonder many theatregoers and drama critics perceived it as

incomprehensible fragments of empty formal experimentation by.

Nonetheless, as “postdramatic theatre” (Lehmann’s term), Following has everything that

is crucial to theatricality. As far as the drama text is concerned, while dramatic conflicts drive the

plots, what makes the story appealing is the process of transformation (e.g., Schechner 1998:

159-167), especially the changes in characters’ identities, physicality, and views (e.g., Lehmann

2006: 77). These twists and turns, which are achieved by devices such as magic, disguises, and

revelations of information (Lehmann 2006: 77), heighten the readers’ sensations and provoke

their thoughts. In other words, the point of drama’s theatricality lies in savoring and reacting to

the surprises of changes rather than simply comprehending the plots. While changes occur to the

characters in the drama story, in the theatre space, they may also occur to the performers and

spectators (Schechner 1998: 163), altering their appearances, roles, moods, consciousness,

positions, perspectives, and relations. Lehmann’s (2006: 77) example of performers’ mask

wearing is very revealing: “The pleasure in dissimilating oneself under the mask is paired with

another, no less uncanny pleasure: how the world changes in one’s gaze looking out of the mask,

how it suddenly becomes strange when seen from ‘elsewhere.’” Therefore, it is transformation,

rather than a mimesis of actions, that enables theatre to generate both pleasure and insight.

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Compared with an understanding of theatricality based on dramatic conflicts, this

postdramatic understanding of theatricality as transformation opens up a space for other media,

such as poetry, to fill in as alternative source of transformation and fuel for theatre. This has two

important implications: first, since transformation can take place outside the story, the story’s

predominance in theatre is no longer secure; second, as the transformation includes changes in

the positions and perspectives of the performers and spectators, it allows them to travel through

the fictive cosmos and the real performance space, blurring the boundary between the two.

Therefore, a theatre of transformation explores changes in the theatre space and weakens the

story that rules the theatre of dramatic conflict. Meanwhile, it pushes forward the reconfiguration

of the fictive and the real that has always been present in a theatre of dramatic conflict. Hence, a

postdramatic theatre constitutes an effective investigation into the nature and components of

theatricality.

Following structures its theatricality through the transformation of its characters,

performers, and audience, which is made possible by the collision of the pictorial, poetic, and

theatrical spaces and firmly grounded in the linguistic complexity of Zhai Yongming’s poem.

The poem consists of thirty sections and a prologue that feature the poet’s shuttling between

Huang Gongwang’s scroll painting and contemporary Chinese life—a back and forth process

that enables the poet to see and ponder various artistic topics (e.g., inspiration and compositional

process, mutual breeding between painting and poetry, relation between arts and criticism, and

painting’s and poetry’s social functions), social issues (e.g., gender relations, international and

domestic relations, commercialization, ecology, and media culture), and life’s ultimate questions

(e.g., mental illness, memory, death, and transcendence). In Zhai’s open-ended compositional

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process mentioned earlier, the poem does not adhere to an agenda but keeps connecting new

events in her life to the painting. In such a process, she revisits her topics, issues, and questions,

and each time she revisits them, she adds either a new dimension or more complexity. As a

result, the poem accumulates richness and weight, gradually forming a spiral structure that leads

to deeper thoughts and emotions.

The poet’s travel between the painting and reality is loaded with changes in the poet’s

identity, position, and perspective. For example, she can be a viewer outside the object of the

scroll painting with a retrospective look from the present; she can be the poet who enters the

virtual landscape of the painting and anticipates from the past what is sure to happen in the

future; she can be a collector with an unfulfilled wish to keep the painting forever; or a ruthless

commentator on the politics associated with the painting’s collection, etc.

The theatricality of these many changes is intensified by the rapidity of transitions

between the painting and contemporary life, which is made possible by the syntactic flexibility

of poetic language. For instance, in verses such as “1350, the handscroll is the cinema/ you

unfold it before me right from the beginning” 一三五〇年，手卷即电影/ 你引首向我展开,

“Passing the thumb-sized title/ entering the bony heart of the painting/ I become that figure dark

or pale/ climbing up and down amid the mountains” 走过拇指大小的画题/ 走进瘦骨嶙峋的画

心/ 我变成那个浓淡人儿/ 俯仰山中, and “Under heaven is just under heaven/ never the world”

天下即天下/ 并不世界 (Zhai 2015b: Section 3), the poet navigates effortlessly through the past

and the present, the real and the virtual, viewing and touring, outside and inside the painting,

different media and worldviews, within a single line or a couple of lines of the poem.

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In some cases, the sequences of rapid transitions between spaces and perspectives are

turned into the merging of spaces and perspectives. Because Zhai Yongming frequently inserts

heard speeches into her own account—something that can be achieved neatly with the use of line

breaks—she often creates a cacophony of sounds. For instance, in Section 9, the account of her

viewing experience and contemplation of the painting on one occasion is interspersed with

expressions of contemporary people’s desires, such as “I want a cup of black coffee” 我想要一

杯黑咖啡 and “I want to make a call to Beijing” 我想要打电话到北京 (Zhai 2015b: Section 9).

If these insertions do not necessarily interrupt the poet’s account, they constitute the background

noises that encircle the poet’s viewing and contemplating process. As a result, the poet’s

imagined travel in the painting and its history is mixed with her immediate contemporary

environment. Therefore, the transformation of spaces in the poem allows the poet to offer fresh

revelations about the complexity of contemporary Chinese life.

To highlight and further develop this theatricality of Zhai’s poem on stage, the

experimental theatre conflates the pictorial, poetic, and theatrical spaces, so that not only the

characters but also the performers and spectators undergo transformation and face the ambiguity

between the fictive and the real. Its delineation of the transformation and simultaneity of spaces

is done through symbolic uses of stage props and settings, embodiment of characters and

choreography, spatial relations between the participants in the theatre, as well as in the

articulation of poetic lines. As a result, the characters’ intermedial space and time travel in the

poem starts to involve new issues as it metamorphoses in the theatre; the performers gain new

understandings of the poem through the kinetic experience of the performance; the audience is

orchestrated into the performance and given the chance to choose their roles and thus their ways

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of engaging with the social reality the poem is depicting. The whole community of those present

at the theatre (consciously or unwittingly) renew the meaning of theatricality and the relationship

between poetry and theatricality, testifying to the vitality of poetry.

Collided Spaces

This section unravels Following’s structure of theatricality by illustrating the changes

occurring to its characters, performers, and spectators in its staging of the collision of pictorial

and poetic spaces and the collision of poetic and theatrical spaces. Corresponding to and making

use of poetry’s linguistic complexity, these changes downplay the plot while celebrating the

transformation, distance the performers and audience from the fictive world and the

representational aspect of theatre while immersing them in the presentation of transformation and

what actually happens at the performance event. As the production provides an alternative way

for an interdisciplinary team of artists and the general public to encounter poetry, its innovative

integration of poetry also lends a new appearance to theatre’s old thrill and social relevance.

As the poet’s travel between the painting and her own social reality advances throughout

the poem, the staging of the collision between the pictorial and the poetic spaces also persists

through the theatre production. This is done in an anti-representational and highly symbolic

fashion through the production’s use of props, stage setting, cast, and choreography. To give a

taste of the poem, I present a translation of its first section here:

1350, the handscroll is the cinema you unfold it before me right from the beginning Ink and scenery move so slowly The camera pans, the shots transit between the fingers and the muscles of the hands

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Passing the thumb-sized title entering the bony heart of the painting I become that figure dark or pale climbing up and down amid the mountains following Huang Gongwang looking for the Master Wuyong visiting the Fuchun Mountains That year, he was almost eighty “Before the falling leaves rustle people are also desolate Follow me through the six pieces of rice paper, fish at this place then this will no longer be dawns and dusks of an old recluse” With a pile of A4 paper, a blue ball-point pen I break into the cold beauty of the remaining mountains The falling leaves are desolate So am I The remaining mountains are aging So am I 一三五〇年，手卷即电影 你引首向我展开 墨与景 缓缓移动 镜头推移、转换 在手指和掌肌之间 走过拇指大小的画题 走进瘦骨嶙峋的画心 我变成那个浓淡人儿 俯仰山中 随黄公望 寻无用师 访富春山 那一年，他年近八十 “不待落木萧萧 人亦萧条 随我走完六张宣纸，垂钓此地 那便不是桑榆晨昏” 我携一摞 A4白纸，蓝色圆珠笔 闯进剩山冷艳之气 落叶萧萧 我亦萧条 剩山将老 我亦将老 (Zhai 2015b: Section 1)

Recounting the poet’s travel in and out of the landscape painting with a plethora of dazzling

changes, the poem dexterously interweaves two groups of images: the material and the corporeal,

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on the one hand (such as the ink, the handscroll, the rice paper, the A4 paper, the ballpoint pen,

the camera, the fingers, the hand muscles and the bony heart), and the virtual, on the other (such

as the scenery, the mountains, the falling leaves, the acts of visiting and fishing, and the

encounter between the painter and the poet). As these images are often the material carriers and

meaningful motifs of painting and poetry, Zhai Yongming demonstrates a strong consciousness

of intermedial interactions and induces a full-fledged collision between the pictorial and poetic

spaces that is both mental and physical.

Such an awareness of intermedial relations was reproduced symbolically in the theatre.

Although scenes of the performance are open to interpretation, just like poetry’s multivocality,

traces of symbolism were conspicuous. A4 paper, blank cloth scrolls, and a rear screen had a

strong presence. Having the actress who played the poet walk on a lighted path paved by A4

paper placed on the dark stage, the production offered an image of poetry as a vehicle for

individuals to understand, feel, and change the cosmos and thus the landscape painting. As the

male dancer playing Huang Gongwang moved energetically between two parallel cloth scrolls or

struggled between two crisscrossed cloth scrolls, his performance suggested that the painter was

arduously abiding by the aesthetic and cultural conventions of landscape painting while

attempting to gain for it stronger expressive power (Figure 11).

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Figure 11: Male dancer dancing energetically between two crisscrossed cloth scrolls. Stage still shot by Zhang Yilei 张艺蕾. Photo source: Chen Si’an. URL (accessed 8/15/2020): http://www.chensi-an.com/theatre#gallery_9-13. The cloth scrolls also wrapped around the torso of the actress playing the poet, but instead of

being trapped by them, she dragged them along as she moved on the stage. This choreography

indicated that Zhai’s interaction with landscape painting through poetry writing profoundly

altered the perception, meaning, and social significance of the painting. The rear screen often

separated the actress playing the poet from the other performers, or separated dancers playing the

poet and the painter, but because the screen was made of soft translucent fabric, this separation

was never clear-cut. Not only could the performers see through it and interact with each other,

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when they touched it the surface of the screen transformed into beautiful flower-like ripples

(Figure 12). Such a flexible boundary aptly symbolizes the interrelation between painting and

poetry, as well as the creative potential of intermedial crossover practices.

Figure 12: Dancers interacting with each other across the translucent rear screen. Stage still shot by Zhang Yilei. Photo source: Chen Si’an. URL (accessed 8/15/2020): https://www.douban.com/event/photo/2275297779/.

In a similar vein, the casting and choreography also featured symbolism. Just as Huang

Gongwang’s “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” never appeared in the performance in any

form, the characters of Zhai Yongming and Huang Gongwang were never explicitly identified,

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and the roles of the poet and the painter were never much more than tokens. In response to the

poet’s highly changeable identity as she navigates through the pictorial and poetic spaces, the

performers were not assigned fixed roles; instead, they smoothly shifted roles as the need arose.

For instance, in Act 1 Scene 2, the female dancer Peng Xun 彭珣 played the poet when she

danced on the cloth scroll with the male dancer Wu Xiaobo 吴晓波, who played the painter.

When it came to Wu’s solo dance, Peng held the cloth scrolls for him with other performers, who

may be seen either as (almost literally) upholders of painterly conventions or stage clerks. The

actress Li Junlan 李君兰 then succeeded Wu in playing the poet, while Peng kept holding the

cloth scrolls. This dynamism in the casting worked against the norms of a naturalist, illusionist

theatre, but captured the fluidity of identity that characterizes the poem.

The most obvious symbolism in the choreography was the heterosexual pas de deux,

which captured the interplay between the contemporary women poet and the Yuan dynasty male

painter. As the dancers walked their fingers along each other’s bodies, mirrored each other’s

moves, walked on horizontal and vertical planes respectively,51 met or missed each other, the

performance delineated the intermedial relation between poetry and painting as interdependent,

sharing common characteristics, mutually complimentary and yet significantly different. All

these symbols made the staging of the colliding spaces of poetry and painting simultaneously

concrete (with all the materiality and corporeality) and abstract (with all the evident or enigmatic

implications).

———————————— 51 The female dancer walked on the vertical plane as she was held by the male dancer. See Figure 11 for example.

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This simultaneous concreteness and abstractness added a new layer of transformation to

the poem’s characters while highlighting theatre’s here-and-now. Taking Section 1 of the poem

quoted above as an example, details such as A4 paper, aging, cinema, and Huang’s (imagined)

words, all point to the “I” as referring to Zhai Yongming herself, an aging woman poet in the

present day who starts out as a viewer outside the painting and moves on to project herself into

Huang’s painted landscape and sees it through an imaginary camera frame with both empathy

and the ambition to re-negotiate the norms of landscape painting. When “I” is a viewer outside

the painting, as she is elsewhere in the poem, she engages with the discourse of painting

critiques, theories, and manuals by frequently referring to painting techniques, perspectives,

compositions, and recurring motifs (e.g., Sections 2 and 3). However, when “I” transforms into a

figure amid the landscape beheld by the painter, she appropriates the painter’s view and

showcases her own particular way of experiencing the landscape. Outside the painting, she

directs her reader’s gaze and facilitates his/her understanding of the painterly images; inside the

painting, she renews the values and the image coding system that have been shared in classical

painting and poetry.

Moving amid the painted landscape as a contemporary woman poet and gazing around it,

Zhai takes the opportunity to make new meanings out of it by bringing in contemporary issues

such as gender relations, ecological concerns, virtual reality technologies, the commercial value

of landscape, and much more. Taking the gender issue for example, Zhai’s roaming amid the

painted landscape both elicits and revamps the motif of dwelling and travelling in the mountains

commonly seen in landscape painting and poetry. Frequently referring to woodcutters,

fishermen, hermits, and Daoist priests that regularly appear in landscape painting and poetry and

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making the imagined figure of Huang Gongwang the ultimate representation of them, Zhai

highlights landscape’s conventional association with reclusion (versus officialdom), poverty

(versus privilege), and the provinces (versus the capital) (Sturman 1995: 53). In so doing, she

renders the motif of dwelling and travelling in the mountains a form of moral purification and a

political protest against the ruling court. However, Zhai’s making herself a figure roaming in the

painted landscape becomes a form of empowerment of women. As she states in the poem, “I

walk amid the clouds and waters in the image of a woman/ make truck and dolly moves with the

montage of a woman/ see the time being far and near with the vision of a woman” 我以女人的

形象走在云水间/ 以女人的蒙太奇平拉推移/ 以女人的视觉看时间忽远忽近 (Zhai 2015b:

Section 21), she consciously imagines making a presence in the painted landscape as a woman.

In so doing, she changes the political connotation of landscape to one that concerns gender

equality, challenges the exclusion of women figures in the norms of landscape painting, and

travels through time to intervene into the traditional domestic confinement that denied (though

not absolutely) gentry women physical mobility outside their boudoirs.

Moreover, amid the landscape beheld by Huang, Zhai perceives sceneries very different

from the painter. Apart from trees and rocks, meandering paths and streams, donkeys and fishing

terraces (Zhai 2015b: Section 10) typical of landscape painting, Zhai also looks for towering

plants and exotic herbs, fragrant flowers and chirping birds, dancing butterflies and smiling foxes

(Zhai 2015b: Sections 16, 19, 24). While she retains the sense of spiritual nourishment and

physical refuge in these natural images she captures, she also discerns the fauna and flora as

having their own genders and employs their gender connotations (e.g., she describes flowers as

revealing their sexes, and she includes the images of the foxes, which are often metaphors of

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fairies and enchanting beauties outside the family structure). This discernment not only allows

her to reiterate the bond between women and nature and thus legitimize her appearance in the

painted landscape, but also adds another layer of intimacy to the relationship between the

traveler and the landscape.

Furthermore, as Zhai positions herself as a traveler on a visit to Huang’s painted

landscape, as a woman poet she actively places herself in a respectful but unconstrained

relationship with the male painter. On the one hand, her constant shifting of images and themes

resembles and pays homage to the multi-point perspective (sandian toushi 散点透视, also

known as cavalier perspective) widely adopted by Huang and other Chinese landscape painters

(versus linear perspective from a fixed point in western painting). On the other hand, by

following Huang, Zhai also uses his authorship and companionship to grant herself access to the

painted landscape and forms her own views by manipulating his memory of the landscape.

Therefore, while alluding to the motif of dwelling and travelling in the mountains, Zhai creates a

variant that serves her own feminist agenda.

In the experimental theatre, the character “I” and her projection into the painted

landscape were given a material form through the young bodies of the performers. While the

embodiment itself was a transformation of the character that engaged the performers and

attracted audience attention, it also transformed the questions “I” is addressing in the poem.

Coming back to the gender issue, Zhai’s discursive engagement with the painterly and poetic

imagery coding system had to confront its counterpart in the theatre. Most importantly, the

staged embodiment of the character “I” transformed her from a moving, observing, and writing

subject into both a performing subject and an object of the audience’s gaze. The physical

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mobility of “I” in the poem was materialized in the performers’ moves and their spatial

interaction with the props and settings; her relationship with the male painter was embodied in

the relationship between the dancers in the heterosexual pas de deux; her perception of the

landscape might not be fully visualized on stage but the issue of the audience’s perception of her

arose.

To extend the empowerment of “I” as a woman, “I” showed up everywhere in the theatre

(e.g., occupying center stage, withdrawing behind the translucent rear screen, and sitting in the

auditorium), actively engaged with the props (as described earlier), and made assertive moves

that at once emphasized the softness of the feminine body and required great muscular control.

The heterosexual pas de deux, although tinting the interaction between the contemporary woman

poet and the Yuan male painter with a romantic or even erotic touch, also negotiated with gender

hierarchies. As the male dancer guided the female dancer’s gestures, grabbed her hands, and

lifted her up, movements that are conventional in a heterosexual pas de deux, “I” was put under

Huang’s power, but “I” by no means submitted to his authority. First and foremost, the female

dancer was usually the one to initiate the interaction between the two. Her active seeking of the

male dancer celebrated the agency of “I.” Then, in her pursuit of the male dancer, the female

dancer performed identical or reciprocal moves, which granted “I” equal status with the male

painter in their relationship. Finally, even when the female dancer was under her partner’s

guidance and appeared intoxicated by his movements, she made attempts to deviate from his

lead. For instance, when the male dancer grabbed her hands and stretched them to the left and the

right, she did not simply follow; instead, she glued her feet to the floor without budging and

detached her body from his through the pliable movements of her waist. Such a deviation

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allowed the female dancer to assert her subjectivity and transform gender relations—this

paralleled Zhai’s appropriating the motif of dwelling and travelling in the mountains to empower

women and her paying homage to Huang while reshaping his perception of the landscape.

The spectatorship in the performance also played into the empowerment of “I” as a

woman. Although the looking “I” was inevitably transformed into an “I” being looked at, the

choreography prevented the female body from being objectified. As far as the male dancer’s look

is concerned, instead of gazing at the female dancer and thus directing the audience’s gaze onto

the female body, as is often the case in classical ballet, the male dancer mostly looked at the

cloth scrolls and the rear screen, or looked into the air to direct the audience’s attention to the

imaginary landscape and the intermedial space between painting and poetry. The female dancer

also engaged in forms of looking that took attention away from her body as an object. Rather

than passively looking away and thus inviting the audience’s active gaze upon her, her eyes

sought out the audience and also looked up to direct its attention to the imaginary landscape. As

far as the choreography is concerned, although the female dancer was often lifted up, she did not

perform in ways that sought to attract the audience’s gaze upon her body. Instead, she made slow

and simple moves so as to direct the audience’s attention to the shapes and forms constituted by

both dancers and the props as a whole.

As far as the narrative structure and the viewing space are concerned, due to the

minimalization of the narrative and the anti-representational style of the staging, the theatrical

structure did not allow the audience to disappear into a diegetic world; it also disrupted the

voyeuristic gaze on the female body that thrives in narratives of male salvation (Mulvey 1976:

13). Moreover, with the staging of the poem being simultaneously abstract and concrete, it

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challenged the audience’s intellect to decode its symbolism and their sensorium to take in the

overwhelming details in the multimedia performance. It also distanced the audience from any

fictional world and kept reminding them that a performance was going on and that they were

spectators of it. As they were kept busy following the performers’ moves, changes of props and

settings, projected words and images, as well as the soundscape, which took their gazes and

attentions in multiple directions, the audience was prevented from fetishizing the female body

(Mulvey 1976: 14). Furthermore, on the small stage, it was difficult to view the female body in

the pas de deux in isolation. With other performers or moving objects sharing the stage, with the

audience and the performers getting (sometimes) embarrassingly close, and with the awareness

of the presence of the poet (at the first staging) and other audience members, the audience had to

pay more attention to the here-and-now. Gazes were increasingly replaced by quick glances.

Here we see that Zhai’s discursive empowerment of women took on an additional

corporeal dimension when the juxtaposition of pictorial and poetic spaces occurred in theatre.

While the performance transformed the character “I” and drew attention to the presence and

presentation of theatre, the integration of poetry also allowed the performance to explore new

ways to handle gender relations in theatre. It both investigated the nature of theatricality and

negotiated the social relations involved in the mediating process of theatre. In this sense, poetry

indeed is “stimulating the vitality of theatre” 刺激剧场活力 (Shi/Zhou 2016).

In addition to staging a collision between pictorial and poetic spaces, the theatre

production also presented the collision of poetic and theatrical spaces. With the theatre

corresponding to and making use of the poem’s content and form, this performance event also

transformed both the performers and the audience. As for the performers, though they did not

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normally read poetry, to put on the performance, they had to read and memorize Zhai’s poem,

and listen to the director’s and the script writer’s explanation of the background of the poem

(Peng X. 2020); during the processes of choreographing and performing, they gained new

understandings of the poem by repeatedly “becoming” the characters in the poem; even after the

completion of the performance, poetry texts continued to be recalled and to affect the

performers’ views of life events (Peng X. 2020).

Act 3 Scene 2, which staged Section 19 of the poem, exemplified the process of the

dancer Peng Xun’s deepened understanding of the poem through the theatre performance and

thus her transformation. The section deals with the paradox between poetic creativity and the

death of the poet through a memorial of the woman poet Ma Yan 马雁, who is said to have died

young from depression (Zhai 2015b: Section 19). The language of the original poem is

meticulously structured, which is best manifested in stanzas such as:

Distress has already been dispelled by distress just as well-being is to be worn out by well-being The whole life, is to be refined repeatedly so that the end is no longer essential …. Just like melancholy and melancholia the rose and the rose stem the rose enchants the stem prickles melancholy is dainty melancholia is deadly Both of them give birth to poetry Both are dangerous In myths, we have heard too much about the lures and temptations 痛苦已被痛苦消解 正如幸福终被幸福磨损 一生，用来反复淬炼 以至于终点变得可有可无 ……

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就像忧郁和忧郁症 玫瑰与玫瑰枝 玫瑰迷幻 枝干刺人 忧郁轻盈 忧郁症致命 二者都扶持诗意滋生 二者都危险 神话中，我们听到太多太长的 动人诱惑 (Zhai 2015b: Section 19)

Though these lines are written in free verse with varied lengths, they show a strong sense of

structure. The impact of depression on Ma Yan and her poetry is compacted into the parallel

between distress and well-being, the dialectic between the repetition of distress and well-being

and the undermining of them, and the word play and contrast between melancholy and

melancholia, the rose and the rose stem. These highly structured stanzas suggest that depression

repeatedly intensifies one’s feelings toward life to the point that one gets used to or even tired of

them. This experience of intensity and repetition inspires the poet Ma Yan to write out her

special insights but at the same time makes a long life meaningless—she already has her share of

life when she is still young. Bearing the same quality as common poetic images and

temperaments but more extreme, depression boosts poetic accomplishment but destroys the poet.

Unlike other typical observations of poets’ death or insanity (e.g., Yeh 1996; Wang Yuechuan

1996; Rauhala 2020), which often attributes the poet’s demise to the marginalization of poetry in

contemporary China’s commercial economy (such as the cases of Haizi, Ge Mai, and Gu Cheng)

or global capitalist exploitation (such as the case of Xu Lizhi), Zhai does not contribute yet

another social criticism; instead, she faces her own emotional disturbance over the cluster of

mental illness, poetry, and the poet’s death, while seeking reconciliation through poetry’s

potential for transcendence.

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This section of the poem was staged with Li Junlan playing the woman poet speaker

(referring to Zhai Yongming) and Peng Xun dancing as the woman poet who died young

(referring to Ma Yan). While Peng’s dance and Li’s recitation of the lines were coordinated in

such a way that the rhythm of the dance corresponded to that of the poem, the dance also

displayed the same sense of paradox and structure that characterize the poem. Peng’s dance was

a series of futile yet forceful struggles against a deathly silence and stillness. She muffled her

voice with cupped hands while trying desperately to shout, pushed herself on the face and pulled

herself in all directions by the nape of her neck, and wrote on the floor with her hair and dragged

the hair as she made an exit from the stage, etc. These dance moves featured noticeable contrasts

and parallels, and symbolized the paradox that initiative and passivity reside in the same body,

that the poet’s involuntary acts yield unexpected views on life and world, and that the source of

creativity is also the source of vulnerability. Performing the dance, Peng Xun, who is also a

choreographer, “became” Ma Yan and comprehended and interpreted the poem through the

structured symbolism.

Nonetheless, Peng’s understanding of the poem and thus her transformation was not

solely based on the kinetic paradox in the choreography’s symbolism. She also “became” the

woman poet who died young and approached Zhai’s memorial poem through the bodily

experience of the dance. In fact, bodily experience served as a substantial way for Peng to

empathize with the character she played both in the choreographing process and the repeated

performances. As Peng (2020) revealed in my interview with her, what appeared to be highly

structured symbolism in the choreography was not purely intellectually designed. Major dance

moves performed on the stage were selected by the director from moves that the performers

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improvised during rehearsals. They would also deliberately leave some space for improvisation

and less semantically transparent dance moves in actual performances. In recounting the

improvising process, Peng (2020) said, “The verses gave me emotions and power. Key words in

the verses that thrilled me would beam lights in my mind, and these lights would prompt my

body to form certain dance moves.” Linking words and dance moves with the mystical “lights,”

Peng emphasized the unconscious connection between her body movements and the emotions

she drew from the character in the poem. Rather than merely visualizing the late poet’s struggle

with depression and the sense of paradox heightened by the poetic language through symbolism,

she used her body to release the energy the poem aroused in her. Peng’s statement here suggests

that she processed and interpreted the poem through her bodily reaction to it.

Meanwhile, repeatedly performing the dance also enriched the dancer’s feelings of her

own body, which refined her understandings of the character she played. As Peng performed the

pushing, dragging, twisting, stretching, and balancing acts, fluxes and collisions of forces really

formed within her muscles, causing feelings of tension, exhaustion, or soreness. The fact that she

was able to unleash her energy through her body also made her feel relief and pleasure (shuang

爽; Peng X. 2020). These forces and feelings helped Peng to develop senses of power and

powerlessness, dignity and violence, struggle and freedom that she considered as her character’s

rather than her own (Peng X. 2020). As Peng (2020) said, “in my mind, the process in which the

dance movements generated forces and feelings in me is the same as the process in which the

late poet was pushed and dragged by what she had to endure. These forces were the way I tried

to feel what the late poet felt.” Corresponding well with recent research in embodied cognition,

somatic psychology, and somatic practices in dance (e.g., Eddy 2002), which suggest that

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corporeal experiences affect our minds, Peng’s remarks show that her bodily experience of the

dance in the theatre performance shaped her feelings and emotions, and further influenced her

understanding and imagination of Ma Yan.

Moreover, Peng’s bodily experience of the dance was not static. The interaction between

her body and the theatre environment (e.g., performance time, distance to the audience, age

composition of the audience, background music, lighting, etc.) of a specific performance gave

her different feelings, which also added new layers to her empathy with the late poet. For

example, in the last of the four performances staged in Beijing in 2015, where the audience was

most responsive, Peng’s dance showed the most mistakes but also most vivid facial expressions.

Considering the intensity of the four consecutive performances over four nights, it is

understandable how her fatigue and soreness grew and how the accumulation of these feelings

embodied the tiredness and pain of the “repeated refinement” described in the poem. In fact,

Peng danced so devotedly that night that her eyes brimmed with tears, which were unseen in the

previous performances. By this point, she had been transformed from someone who did not read

poetry to one who was deeply touched by the poem and who touched the audience with the

kinesthesia of her dance.

Therefore, just as it misses the point to give a representational or symbolic interpretation

of Peng’s tears, her “becoming” the character and her understanding of the poem did not come

purely from some intellectual process, but from the physical experience of the dance in the

theatre performance. The world of the poem and the performance event met in the body of the

dancer. Again, we see how by exploring concerns of performance practices, the poetry theatre

production connected the fictive and the real and negotiated the boundary between them.

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Therefore, Peng’s transformation gave rise to a strong sense of theatricality that point to the here-

and-now of the theatre.

The experimental theatre production also transformed the audience by challenging their

intellect and viewing behaviors. The merging of the poetic and the theatrical spaces pushed them

to make a choice between being passive spectators or active participants who could contribute to

or confront the poem. Act 1 Scene 3 and the ending of the theatre production are telling

examples. This first scene opened with a cacophony of sounds. Li Junlan, as the woman poet,

recited Section 17 of the poem (on the distinction between modern and classical poetry) from

behind the rear screen. Other performers, either as themselves or as ordinary people, lounged on

the stage and read aloud everyday texts, such as product reviews, news feeds, and text messages,

from the bright screens of their smartphones. Then, as Li walked out from behind the rear screen,

she started to recite part of Section 27 of the poem and enacted some short exchanges in the

section with the other performers:

None of them reads poetry the director said None of them reads poetry however they pulled and dragged each other to enter the interior of poetry ascending heaven and descending earth randomly throwing out those ready-to-fly verses I only read… said the girl In the auditorium someone was trying to tell her sex The lad was manly and upright with whiskers on his pale face The blue zhiduo robe set off his handsomeness “I don’t read poetry.” “Why?” “No reason!” … Now none of them reads poetry the director says but they are going to interpret a poem They are going to ask and answer They interrogate the audience with their bodies How to read contemporary poetry?

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他们都不读诗 导演说 他们都不读诗 但是 他们互相拉扯进诗歌内部 上天入地 胡乱抛出那些正待起飞的诗行 我只读……女孩说 观众席上有人正在辨认她的性别 男孩阳刚正气 面白有须 蓝布直裰呈出他的英俊 “我不读诗。” “为什么？” “不为什么！” …… 现在 他们都不读诗 导演说 但他们要阐释一首诗 他们要提问 也要回答 他们用肢体拷问观众 怎样阅读当代诗？(Zhai 2015b: np)

Subsequently, all the performers lined up along the edge of the stage, facing the audience and

throwing these questions at them in unison:

Are YOU ready? YOU! How do we read contemporary poetry? It is related to how we understand contemporary art! How do we understand contemporary art? It is related to how we understand contemporary reality! How do we understand contemporary reality? It is related to how we understand the pitch-dark, utterly messy, and problem-loaded fast knot of modernity! 准备好了吗？你们！ 我们怎样阅读当代诗？ 涉及到我们怎样理解当代艺术！ 我们怎样理解当代艺术？ 涉及到我们怎样理解当代现实！ 我们怎样理解当代现实？ 涉及到我们怎样理解漆黑一团 乱麻一捆、问题一堆的现代性死结！ (Zhai 2015b: np)

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Similar to this interrogation, in the final scene of the performance, all the performers walked into

the auditorium, asking the questions that had been asked in the opening scene: “Fifty years later,

who will I become?/ A hundred years later, who will become me?” 五十年后我将变成谁？/ 一

百年后谁又成为我？ (Zhai 2015b: Prologue). When they reached the end of the performance

hall, they turned around and beheld the now empty stage.

As mentioned earlier, this scene staged the section of the poem that recounts a previous

staging of the poem. The multiple layers of remediation created great ambiguity between the

fictive and the real, the there-and-then and the here-and-now. Because the poem contains general

descriptions of the earlier performance, which were applicable as well to the present performance

(such as the facts that the performers do not read poetry and that pulling and dragging

movements abounded in the performance), the poetry lines Li uttered could be pointing at the

here-and-now. Meanwhile, because the poem also contains specific details that were no longer

accurate after the major revisions made to the current version of the theatre production (for

example, the portrayal of the performers’ physical appearances no longer applied as the cast had

changed), the lines Li uttered also pointed at some there-and-then. Consequently, the performers

were partly being themselves as performers and partly acting as their former selves or former

performers of the theatre production. Due to the multivocality of the poem, the director’s claim

that “none of them reads poetry” can be applied to the performers or extended to the general

public. As other researchers (e.g., Xing 2017) have also observed, cellphone screens lighted up

every now and then in the auditorium, suggesting that the performers were mocking the audience

or that the audience was carrying out something in the poem and in the performance by just

being themselves. Therefore, the performance could be referring both to a situation that the poet

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had observed in the past somewhere else and to incidents taking place here and now. Such an

overlap of time and space confused the boundary between the virtual and the actual, and thus

geared the theatre toward new forms of social engagement.

For the audience, such an ambiguity between poetic and theatrical spaces, there-and-then

and here-and-now, acting and living compelled them to choose their positions and roles.

Intellectually, as the performers threw thought-provoking questions at them face-to-face in an

imposing manner that was reinforced by the repetitions, parallelism, and rapid progressions in

the poetry lines, the audience had to decide if the performers were addressing some fictive

“YOU” or really meant to challenge them. They had to decide if they wanted to distance

themselves from the challenge by being passive spectators or to be actively involved and really

start to think. Behaviorally, as the performers physically approached the audience and mingled

with them, the audience had to choose if they would treat the physical interactions with them as

artistic expressions or real-life events. They had to choose between staying in their viewing

comfort zone or venturing into a new mode of theatre participation and responding to or even

exchanging identities with the performers. Their choices reflected their attitudes toward the

production’s medial innovation and constituted the ways they dealt with the reality that “none of

them reads poetry” recounted in the poem.

The scene where performers read from their screens mitigated against the audience being

passive spectators, even those who preferred to be. While there was always the opportunity for

the audience to continue or change their habit of reading in fragments on social media outside the

performance and thus form a response to the poem, their on-the-spot reactions were also

incorporated into the performance. Audience members who routinely checked their phones

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inadvertently joined the performers by acting the same and confirmed that what the poem says

about them was true. Those who kept playing with their phones at the performance out of

boredom despite the sight of the performers’ acts were silently expressing their incomprehension

of or dissatisfaction with the poem and the performance, a justification of their reading habits

and a resistance against the poem and the performance’s challenge for them to read poetry. Still

others used their phones to take photos of the performance and share their favorite verses on

social media. In so doing, they were, wittingly or unwittingly, fitting poetry into their

fragmentary reading behaviors, which might help the dissemination of poetry but also

“dismember” the poem and thus contributed another response it. For those who remained

focused on the performance, they faced a (perhaps intended) paradox: they were

reading/watching a poetry theatre performance that mocked their not reading poetry, and they

were setting apart a time and space to experience a long poem that reminded them of their

reading in fragments. By attending and focusing on the performance, they did not contradict

what the poem describes about them but brought about changes in their reading habits that the

poet and the theatre production team might have anticipated. No matter how one reacted to the

performance, s/he was participating in it and making new meanings out of it.

On other occasions, the performance succeeded in challenging the audience’s minds. For

instance, at the end of Act 1 Scene 3, the performers questioned the audience about how to read

contemporary Chinese poetry. Because the performers stood very close to the first row of the

seated audience, appeared almost towering, and created a pressing atmosphere, the audience had

to choose whether or not to make eye contact with them. Most importantly, they had to decide if

they wanted to really ponder the question or shy away from it. However, probably because there

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was no easy answer, the performers did not actually push them for answers on the spot but

allowed the question to linger throughout and after the performance. As soon as the performers

finished their lines, the lights in the performance hall went out, leaving some quiet time for

contemplation. Many audience members also put on a serious facial expression throughout the

performance and contributed thoughts afterward.

Interestingly, while some audience members decided to accept their own limitations and

totally give up contemporary poetry (e.g., Anon. 2014a), quite a few suggested that the

integration of poetry into theatre exemplified in this performance was a good way to “read”

contemporary poetry (e.g., Anon. 2014a; Huqia 2016). They not only claimed that the multiple

art forms and sensory experiences in the performance made poetry more tangible, calmed their

hearts, and prepared them to savor the poetry text; they also suggested that the painting, the

poem, and the performance explained each other and thus offered multiple channels of

understanding. Meanwhile, others indirectly addressed the question of how to read contemporary

Chinese poetry by demonstrating understandings of the poem from a personal perspective.

Acknowledging the concreteness and abstractness of the poem, they related the poet’s broad

concern with contemporary social issues, such as smog, housing, and educational resources, to

their own lives and used the poem as a caution against losing themselves in the everyday struggle

for a better material life (e.g., Hai X. 2017). General or detailed, these feedbacks demonstrated

that audience members had been stimulated to think about how to read poetry and even echoed

the poem and performance’s point that contemporary Chinese poetry, arts, and reality are

interrelated.

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Similarly, when the performers left the stage and walked into the auditorium, asking

“Fifty years later, who will I become?/ A hundred years later, who will become me,” the

audience had to decide if they would treat the questions as just another component of the

performance and not give a response, or take the questions as a real challenge to respond to. That

the performers were physically among the audience obviously indicated an attempt to break

down the boundary between the intellectual world and the audience. Meanwhile, it invited the

audience to identify with the performers and join the performers in interpreting Zhai’s poem and

experiencing the identity transformations recounted in the poem and in the theatre space. Some

turned down the invitation and resumed a passive spectatorship by keeping their normal viewing

position while slightly leaning to one side to let the performers pass, others accepted the

invitation by watching the performers as they moved among the audience and following their

gazes as they looked back at the stage. By accepting the performers and copying their gazes, to

some extent they exchanged identities with the performers. As some audience members recalled,

“This immersive method was like a relay race of creation. The painter passed the baton to the

poet, the poet to the director, the director to the audience. Finally, the audience have to take

along what they thought to face life, to face the poetry, theatre, and self in life” (Huqia 2016).

Here the audience member eliminated the separation between theatre performance and real life

and accepted his role of a creator of art.

While nobody articulated answers to the questions “Fifty years later, who will I become?/

A hundred years later, who will become me?” on the spot, many responded in retrospect. Based

on their contemplation on the relationship among nature, social life, and human emotions, among

painting, poetry, and theatre, and between past and present, some celebrated individual

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subjectivity and claimed “I am who I am,” some tried to find life’s patterns and identified

themselves with characters and objects in the painting, the long poem, and the performance, and

others simply expressed being deeply touched by the questions but unable to verbalize an answer

(e.g., Tangtou xiaoxue Iread lianmeng 2017). By giving such responses, they were endorsing the

performers’ questions as a real-life challenge and adopting an active form of spectatorship and

engaging deeply with the performance. Therefore, for the audience, as much as for the characters

and performers, transformation of identity and perspective were realized in the theatre.

With regard to the transformation of characters, performers, and audience, as well as the

ambiguity between the fictive and the real, one should keep in mind that this effect was not

solely realized through the theatre production’s correspondence to the linguistic features of the

poem but also through the direct employment of the poem, lines of which made up the majority

of the speech in the performance. This is most obvious in the contrast between the poetic

language part and prose language part in Act 2 Scene 2. While the prose language part dealt with

the process of how the scroll painting passed through many hands and places over the years, the

poetry part focused more on the imagined process of how the landscape painting was gradually

created. The prose part, which employed a smooth narrative, familiar characterization, and the

stylistic articulation of dialogues, adhered to representational conventions and led the audience

comfortably into the world of the story. By contrast, the poetry part, with language “thickened”

by specially arranged sounds, rhythms, and multivocality (Bean 2019: 10), reminded the

audience of the performativity of the event and of the illusory world created. Moreover, as if to

mirror the poem’s imagined real-time “live experience” (linchang jingyan 临场经验, Zhai

2015b: Section 10) of painting, the performers offered a live performance of the poem that took a

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variety of forms, from television documentary voiceover, revolutionary-style poetry recitation,

storytelling, dramatic monologue, cross talk, etc. This plethora of styles broke the sense of

totality that a fictive world requires and thus again emphasized the performance itself. Last but

not least, compared with the prose part, which was carried out in the form of a shadow play, the

poetry part had the performers’ bodies in plain sight. Such a contrast seemed to suggest that

whereas everyday prosaic conversations and representations were illusory shadows, poetry was

direct and true.52 Therefore, the reciting of poetry in the performance also enabled the performers

and the audience to travel between the there-and-then of the represented world and the here-and-

now of the performance event. Their identities and perspectives were transformed in the process.

Like the poet, they “must have multiple lives/ every life travelling through every layer of

landscape” 必然拥有多重生命/ 每重生命都走遍每重山水 (Zhai 2015b: Section 9).

Returning to the controversy over whether Following is a “situational poetry recitation,”

a piece of “theatre poetry,” or indeed a work of poetry theatre as the production team claims, my

analyses of the work’s structure of theatricality leans toward the latter. Instead of being confined

by the memory of the more familiar genres, such as the official-style poetry recitation

accompanied by music, and investigating how poetry got “decorated” (Shi/Zhou 2016;

Fu/Chen/Zhou 2017) with theatrical elements, critics of this work should consider what poetry

has contributed to the theatre. By exploiting poetry’s linguistic complexity, the production’s

innovative integration of poetry generated numerous transformations in the poem’s characters,

the performers, and the audience. These transformations explored the basic appeal of the medium

———————————— 52 This is similar to some uses of the poetic language in American poets’ theatre in Heidi R. Bean’s (2019: 23) discussion.

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of theatre. In the meantime, as the interaction between poetry and theatre profoundly changed the

structure, style, and spectatorship of the production, the mutual remediation of poetry and theatre

also allowed the production to turn to the metatheatrical, eliminating the clear boundary between

what the poem recounts, what the theatre production represented, and what was really happening

in the theatre space. Dislodging theatregoers from the fictive world of drama, the performance

immersed them in the live scene of the real event. In so doing, it provoked their thoughts,

challenged their viewing behaviors, and thus confronted their lifestyle, infusing theatre with

another layer of social relevance. In invigorating theatre, poetry has manifested its own unique

strength and vitality.

Conclusion

Through the cases of The Verse of Us and Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the

Fuchun Mountains, I have demonstrated that the integration of poetry into documentary film and

experimental theatre has, on the one hand, generated highly controversial interfaces between

poetry and the other media and, on the other, effectively explored medial specificities and

extended medial capacities. This type of poetry crossover reflects on the medial conventions (at

the levels of composition, performance, and spectatorship) it both elicits and challenges and on

the logic behind them. As a result, the highly experimental works often use poetry to address

meta-level issues related to other media, such as the visuality of film, the transformation of

theatre, the paradox of authenticity and reenactment in documentary film, and the boundary

between the representational and the real in experimental theatre. Simultaneously, poetry’s own

characteristics, such as multivocality, lyricism, transcendence, and social responsibility, are also

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manifested. Like the cases discussed in earlier chapters, the joint presentation of poetry and other

media in The Verse of Us and Following also provide an opportunity for self-reflection, offer an

overload of information and sensorial stimuli, and create experiences that feel and are both

immediate and hypermediated. However, more than any of the other types of crossover discussed

in this dissertation, it highlights intermediality and celebrates poetry’s unique strengths and

transformative power.

The Verse of Us and Following, both having adopted an integrational mode of poetry

crossover, obviously presented very different kinds of poetry. Though (migrant) worker poetry

and Zhai’s long poem are both firmly rooted in personal experiences, they each address distinct

dimensions of the postsocialist reality in contemporary China. Whereas the former tackles

dilemmas related to migrant labor and the exploitation and struggles of the underclasses, the

latter touches on a wide range of topics that concern the middle strata and elites. The (migrant)

worker poetry presented in the documentary film often demonstrates the pains keenly felt by the

underprivileged through illustrations of extreme life conditions (e.g., perilous work conditions,

long-term physical exhaustion, and denial of basic human rights) that the speaker “I” has to face.

The pains are then assuaged or intensified by the imaginations s/he derives from the real-life

situation. In contrast, social problems that disturb the speaker “I” in Zhai’s long poem and by

inference those who appear to be the beneficiaries of the current economic system often are not

rendered as sharp pains but as a hidden malaise that is vaguely felt but is no less serious or real.

This malaise is often revealed through innovative allusions to themes and tropes employed in

traditional Chinese and western literature and arts (e.g., Zhai uses the motif of dwelling and

traveling in the mountains in various ways to contemplate various contemporary issues,

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including redressing gender relations, depicting environmental pollution, satirizing the

commercialization of landscape in real estate, facilitating an escape from insatiable consumer

desires and political ambitions, and commenting on young people’s indulgence in the virtual

reality of the Internet, etc.). While both types of poetry mix the quotidian and the transcendental,

(migrant) worker poetry’s use of plain language, appeal for social equality, and sense of the

collective render it a poetry of the grassroots, and Zhai’s preference for linguistic

experimentation, concern about the rampant exaltation of materialism, and emphasis on

individual expression position her work as elite poetry.

The documentary film and the experimental theatre seemed to hold intersecting visions of

poetry’s social role. Rather than rendering poetry as a luxury item of the affluent, an exclusive

privilege of the well-educated, or a field devoted to the highbrow, the film tracked the

transformation from life to poetry and portrayed poetry as an everyday thing—a handy outlet of

emotions and creativities, a source of support, and a means to record the life experiences of

ordinary people. The theatre production, by contrast, explores the intellectual depth and technical

dexterity that poetry can reach. Unsurprisingly, a marginalization of poetry in contemporary

Chinese cultural life can be felt in both cases (even more so in Following). Whereas The Verse of

Us fought back by digging out poetry from the most unlikely corners of society and suggested

that poetry is more robust than most people imagine, Following attempted to secure poetry’s

vital status in the cultural scene by stressing its experimentalism and transformative power over

other media and thus reminded the audience that poetry is worthy of the respect it has long

garnered. Put together, the two cases demonstrate both how simple and how difficult it can be to

compose a poem with no fixed patterns of prosody, given registers of language, or a prescribed

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repertoire of topics, and how simple and difficult it can be to read it. This revelation resists any

easy impression of contemporary Chinese poetry; instead, it comes across as an inclusive, multi-

dimensional, and vast entity that the general public can relate to in a plethora of ways.

Meanwhile, though The Verse of Us targeted at broader audience groups and Following

appealed to the more sophisticated, the integration of poetry in both attempted to elicit an active

spectatorship through innovations in the mediation process of the documentary film and the

experimental theatre. Inviting viewers to generate meanings out of the scenery scenes with verses

and reenactments of poems or poem writing scenes, to give behavioral or textual responses to

performers’ questions and interactive acts, the cases not only reshaped cinema or theatre

protocols but actually sharpened the viewers’ sensibility to life experiences and artistic

expressions. This sensibility was extremely important to many viewers because it was exactly

what they lacked in their fast-paced producer and consumer lives (e.g., Shalala 2015) and what

they believed to be an antidote to the numbness caused by the blind pursuit of material gains and

submission to authority (e.g., Hai X. 2017). Seen from this perspective, the integration of poetry

in these cases did enabled poetry to actually play its social function of stirring human souls and

engaging with the specific socio-cultural milieu of twenty-first-century China.

As far as social relations are concerned, the integrational mode of poetry crossover in

these two cases provided a chance to form alliances of poets, interdisciplinary teams of artists

and performers, cultural brokers, middle-strata audiences, and other anonymous supporters, even

though solutions to social problems may be beyond any of the individuals or institutions

involved. The integration of poetry into other media also suggested alternative ways of

looking—glances shifting between my reality and someone else’s reality, my efforts and

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someone else’s talents—to develop mutual understanding, appreciation, and respect. Like other

poetry crossover practices, the integrational mode manifests poetry’s social relevance by helping

people relate to poetry and relate to each other through poetry.

Thus far, I have charted out the various intermedial strategies employed in contemporary

Chinese poetry’s border-crossing practices, and how they contribute new experiences, meanings,

and aesthetic and social significances. The following chapter takes a different angle to look at the

poetry crossover trend in contemporary China by using it as a critical lens. As has been shown in

the analysis of Following, the materiality of the stage props and settings, and the performers’

bodily conditions, capabilities, and experiences, inspired the production team’s understanding of

medial specificities and intermedial relations, physically made the crossover possible, and

enabled poetry to release its transformative power. With the advancement and popularization of

technological platforms, the breach of medial conventions is more likely to take place even if a

crossover is not consciously sought or explicitly claimed. Therefore, it is important to examine

how crossover affects the production, perception, interpretation, and evaluation of poetry in

general. Meanwhile, we are pressed to see the role material objects, technologies, and human

bodies play in the crossover. The next chapter highlights the interplay between human agency

and technological and corporeal conditioning in poetry crossover that is not promoted as such

and that is more technologically savvy than radically experimental. Considering technologically

and corporeally mediated poetry writing and reading as crossover practices, it shows that poetry

crossover is extensive, and a crossover perspective produces a fuller and more accurate view of

the poetry under scrutiny. Just as Following’s performance space, settings, and props, etc. help to

disrupt the audience’s gaze and thus intervene into the gender relations in the theatre space,

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technologies are by no means value neutral. The next chapter illustrates how they help to fuel

poetry crossover’s social engagement.

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Chapter 4: Poetry Crossover as a Critical Lens

As mentioned earlier, developments in information and communication technology,

especially the Internet, has made the crossover of medial borders ever easier and made poetry

crossover in contemporary China more pervasive. This suggests that poetry crossover can be

used as a critical lens that helps critics and scholars produce insights into the meaning-making

mechanism, aesthetic characteristics, and socio-cultural significance of particular bodies of

poetry, and into the impacts that new mass media bring to the writing, reading, and appraising of

those poetries. Given women poets’ and artists’ active role in the trend of poetry border-crossing

experimentation and transmission in contemporary China, this chapter focuses on contemporary

Chinese women’s online poetry, especially the technologically-savvy poetry blog of the

emerging woman poet Li Cheng’en’s 李成恩.

Contemporary Chinese women’s poetry has, like almost everything else, jumped on the

bandwagon of the Internet. Women poets, especially those newly emerging on the poetry scene,

often write poetry online first, circulate it on China-based servers, and mean to have it read on

screen. I call this massive body of poetry “women’s online poetry in China.”53 It appears in

nearly every possible mass communicative web or mobile application, ranging from the earlier

———————————— 53 My definition of online poetry is distinct from electronic poetry, which usually challenges the linear form of the poetic text with computer programming. My focus in this chapter is on the “online” feature of poetry, which is by itself intriguing and fraught with implications. For a detailed explanation of Internet, electronic, and online literature, see Michel Hockx 2015:4-8.

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E-magazines, BBS (bulletin board system) forums, portal websites, and personal blogs, to the

more recent Weibo microblogs and WeChat official accounts, etc. Online distribution can bring a

woman poet fame and recognition. The bustling scene of women’s online poetry in China raises

some questions: How does women poets’ and other netizens’ engagement54 with the Internet and

Internet-based media genres affect the ways Chinese women write poetry and how their poetry

produces meanings? What are some of the particular characteristics of this body of poetry? How

do these characteristics converse with preexisting discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s

poetry?

Unfortunately, women’s online poetry has been neglected in both Chinese and English

language scholarship, despite the fact that it has existed now for over two decades. Scholars of

contemporary Chinese women’s poetry, such as Jeanne Hong Zhang (2008) and Julia C. Lin

(Lin/Kaldis 2009), tend to limit their interest to canonizing major poets and works and

identifying the development of women’s poetic discourse. They primarily focus on poets who

were already established by the turn of this century, such as Shu Ting 舒婷, Zhai Yongming 翟

永明, and Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, rather than emerging poets who started their writing careers on

the Internet in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, scholars of Internet poetry in China,

such as Heather Inwood (2014) and Michel Hockx (2004, 2015), have mainly focused on poets’

and poetry communities’ creative use of the Internet in social interactions to make their poetry

meaningful, to have their poetics accepted, and to establish their poethood. However, they have

———————————— 54 By “engagement,” I do not imply the Internet has some type of free will to interact with users. Instead, I aim to focus attention on the possibilities and limitations that arise from the Internet and our Internet practices. While not suggesting technological determinism, I nonetheless argue that technical configuration should be taken into consideration along with human intentionality.

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not shed particular light on women poets’ writings and activities as a discourse. In other words,

they have not gathered together an open-ended body of poetry written by contemporary Chinese

women, as well as its critical metatext, which includes shared vocabularies, consensuses or

disagreements on ideas and values, and which is shaped by the bodily, technological, and socio-

cultural contexts of contemporary China.55

Critics and scholars have paid close attention to the phenomenon of large numbers of

young, educated, white-collar Chinese women starting to write poetry on their personal blogs,

forming their own writing styles (often accompanied with the posting of self-images) and

attracting wide online readership—the so-called “Neo-beauty writing” (Xinhongyan xiezuo 新红

颜写作).56 However, they have been more keen to debate the accuracy of the term “Neo-beauty

writing” and the validity of the naming act itself than to provide insights into the characteristics

of women’s online poetry in China (e.g., Bi 2010; Li/Zhang 2010; Zhang L. 2010; Gong 2010;

Jiang F. 2010). When they do investigate the features of this body of poetry (usually for the

purposes of legitimizing their chosen appellation of “Neo-beauty writing”), they tend to adopt a

kind of censoring mechanism, limiting their scope, for example, to “petty-bourgeois” women

(Zhou Z. 2011), or to female migrant workers. Most important, they are prone to

underestimate—or overlook altogether—how the mediation of the Internet contributes to the

———————————— 55 My use of the term “discourse” here is inspired by the ideas of Michel Foucault (2004) and Maghiel Van Crevel (2011).

56 Li/Zhang 2010: 4. The term Xinhongyan xiezuo was created by critics Li Shaojun 李少君 and Zhang Deming 张德明 in 2010. The Chinese word hongyan 红颜 literally means “rosy cheeks,” but has a number of meanings ranging from beautiful women, beautiful face, youth, ruddy complexion, and confidante to femme fatale. I have taken the liberty of glossing it as “beautiful women,” because the creators of the term Xinhongyan tend to use this word as a general reference to women with a tint of classical Chinese literature, which is also a characteristic of the writings by the women poets Li and Zhang are concerned with.

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content, aesthetics, and social significance of women’s writing, by either celebrating the blog

solely as an alternative publication venue where women can write with more freedom, or

condemning it as an agent of the male gaze that encourages female bloggers to use their personal

photos and accounts of their private lives rather than their poetry to attract Internet voyeurs and

thus objectifies the female body and marginalizes the importance of the poetry (e.g., Huo 2010;

He 2010).

This chapter constitutes an intervention into the ongoing neglect, bias, and

methodological limits that have thus far characterized the analysis and understanding of

women’s online poetry in China from the perspective of poetry crossover. Instead of perceiving

this body of poetry solely as a conglomeration of poetry texts and the Internet as something

external, I see poems, the Internet, poets’ bodies and writing-related activities, and discursive

and performative practices of other involved individuals and institutions, etc., as intersecting,

integral elements of the poetry medium. Instead of regarding poetry as a self-contained entity

and thus turning a blind eye to the greatest strength of women’s online poetry in China—how it

renews the discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry through Internet-facilitated

intermedial interaction—I examine it from the broader scope of poetry crossover to reveal

specific strategies women poets adopt to empower the female author, which have not been

explored in the existing scholarship.

My analysis of women’s online poetry focuses on Li Cheng’en’s personal poetry blog.

My approach can be described as a dialogue with two strands of scholarship. The first is the

feminist criticism of technology (Haraway 1991; Plant 1997; Wajcman 2004), a.k.a.

“technofeminism” (Wajcman 2004), which unravels and reshapes the gender power relations

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embedded in and shaped by the design and application of technology in specific socio-cultural

contexts. The second is the discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry (Jeanne Hong

Zhang 2008; Lin/Kaldis 2009), which has covered topics such as the rediscovery of femininity

after the brief but profound erasure of gender difference in the Mao era, the raising of a

consciousness of female subjectivity and sexuality, and the exaltation of women’s individualized

writing over the past four decades. In this chapter, I argue that technology such as the Internet

and media genres such as the blog are not value neutral but fraught with gendered power

struggles. In analyzing Li Cheng’en’s online poetry, I illustrate one possibility of how

contemporary Chinese women poets’ engagement with the Internet and the blog in the

production and circulation of their work can redress the hierarchical oppression of women and

the depreciation of their writing. In the face of various forms of sexism already tied to the

Internet and the blog, Li Cheng’en’s merging of poetry writing and blogging advanced her

feminist agenda by highlighting aspects of the blog that redefine and value feminine traits, limit

the voyeuristic gaze on the female body and redirect attention to her poetry, and reshape

interpersonal power relations. In so doing, she not only crosses the borders between technology

and bodily and social experience, between poetry and blog, but also crosses the boundaries

between authority haves and authority have-nots, producer and consumer, self and other, part and

whole, opening up a space for female authors to thrive.

Contemporary Chinese Women’s Poetry, the Cyborg Woman, and Horizontal Reading

The discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry in the past four decades has,

within the constraints of patriarchal socio-political and media dynamics, striven to redress the

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oppression of women and restore complexity to the meanings of womanhood. Compared with

women poets in imperial China, who drew from codified traits of femininity to create a large

corpus of poetry but possessed limited opportunity to have their works transmitted and their

names known to their contemporaries or to posterity, women poets in the post-1949 era enjoyed

much more access to publication through Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organs, because the

liberation of women was incorporated into the party discourse of nation building and

modernization. However, because gender equality was subsumed under nationalism, women’s

poetry was rarely gender-specific and sometimes even masculinized, a characteristic revealed in

women poets’ sharing of similar or identical themes and tones with their male colleagues

(Lin/Kaldis 2009: xlv; Dooling 2005: 23-25; H. Liu 1993: 35). The late 1970s witnessed a

rediscovery of femininity and a reshaping of gender relations after the Mao-era erasure of gender

difference and masculinization, with the re-embracing of the individual and with the emergence

of unofficial poetry journals (Jeanne Hong Zhang 2008: 38; Van Crevel 2011: 5-7). In the latter

half of the 1980s, female subjectivity—the conscious articulation of gender-based experiences

and perspectives, and the exertion of agency in women’s self-actualization and social impacts—

was exalted in women’s confessional style poetry,57 against the backdrop of economic reforms,

China’s opening up to the West, and the importation of western feminist theories. The 1990s saw

———————————— 57 Contemporary Chinese women’s confessional style poetry, or zibai shi 自白诗, is a branch that develops upon women poets’ active reception of Chinese translations of American Confessional Poetry and their own native experiences. It articulates distinct female experiences and perspectives, especially bodily experiences that were previously taboo or considered unmentionable, to redress the absence, oppression, and exploitation of women in the male-dominated discourse of Chinese poetry. Though Zhai Yongming initiated it as an individual quest with her Women 女人 poem series and its preface “Black Night Consciousness” 黑夜的意识, it turned into a collective effort as other women poets, such as Tang Yaping 唐亚平 and Yi Lei 伊蕾, followed. For more women’s confessional style poetry, see Day 1995; Zhou Z. 2008.

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the pursuit of women’s individualized writings (versus the collective writing of confessional

style poetry in the 1980s) and stylistic experimentation (versus the exploration of themes,

especially the female body, in the 1980s), as the avant-garde poetry scene in China underwent a

general shift from what to write to how to write. This was in part a response to the political

restraints and the sudden prominence given to economic development and material gain (Jeanne

Hong Zhang 2008: 25, 95-105; Van Crevel 2011: 13-14). Whereas both 1980s and 1990s

women’s poetry was published in poetry journals and in personal poetry collections, the

women’s poetry scene remained fragmentary; the situation showed little signs of improving in

the new century (Zhou Z. 2011).58

It is against this backdrop that women’s online poetry comes into view. Entering the new

century, both established and emerging women poets, both as individuals and members of small

circles, have gained a new momentum from the Internet to continue thematic and stylistic

experimentation in the expression of gendered experiences and perspectives. Thematically, the

experiences they address tend to be related to their personal socio-economic circumstances and

are not necessarily controversial; stylistically, though their writings can be highly idiosyncratic

and diverse, many of them attempt to establish new connections to classical poetry in terms of

language, literary tropes, and shared or nuanced sensibilities. However, despite the seemingly

egalitarian features of the Internet, such as accessibility, instantaneity, and interactivity, writing

poems online does not automatically empower women authors. Women poets’ unenviable

publication experience with print technologies and institutions/industries in the past decades

———————————— 58 For shifts of trends in contemporary Chinese women’s poetic discourse, see Jeanne Hong Zhang 2008; Lin/Kaldis 2009. My periodization here by no means indicates a progressive, unanimous evolution of concerns, but shows rough times when certain concerns were more prominent than others.

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suggests that the Internet as a technology may not be drastically different from print, in that the

Internet is also imbued with patriarchal ideologies and practices (such as the isolation of

women’s online poetry as if it is a substandard subgroup of Chinese online poetry in general and

criticisms of women’s online poetry dominated by male critics and their aesthetic criteria,

exemplified in the naming act of and debate over the term “Neo-beauty writing”). The state-

sanctioned, market-driven commercial design and operation of the Internet in the PRC makes the

situation even more complicated. Nevertheless, by taking into account the Internet’s by-no-

means gender-neutral mediation of women’s poetry writing and women poets’ agency in

negotiating gender identity and authorship, we still have many reasons for optimism.

Feminist theories of technology in the past three decades provide useful inspirations to

understand how the Internet and lived experience of women poets intersect with each other and

together contribute to women’s online poetry in China, how this poetry as a hybrid of technology

and human corporeality and agency interact with other media, and how women poets advance

their feminist agenda through intermedial interaction. This strand of feminist theory sees

technology and gender as mutually constructive (Wajcman 2004; 2010: 149), and this perception

is exemplified by Donna Haraway’s (1991) influential conceptualization of the “cyborg,” a

hybrid of organism and machine, material reality and fiction/imagination, lived social experience

and ideology (Haraway 1991: 149). Rather than conceiving the female body as an organic whole

or incorporating all women’s lived social and bodily realities into a totalizing theory of women’s

oppression based on exploitation of their reproductive labor, sexual appropriation, or any other

essential cause, Haraway envisions a woman as a cyborg, whose body is an open-ended

assemblage of biological and technological components that is perpetually mutable and whose

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lived experience is to form rhizomatic connections with other individuals’ lived experience based

on all kinds of affinities and associations. As a result, as women actively and skillfully embrace

technology, gender can cease to be a cause for universal oppression of women or a reason for

some women’s domination over others within the unity of all women.

The cyborg metaphor sheds light on women’s online poetry in China. While Haraway

(1991: 152-153, 164, 175) compares using technology (especially microelectronics and

biotechnology) to writing in that both translate lived bodily and social realities into codes,

Chinese women poets’ online writing actually merges the acts of writing and using technology,

the human body and digital devices, individuals’ bodily and social reality, literary conventions,

and rules of the virtual world of the Internet (as well as breaches or renewals of them).

Meanwhile, because women’s online poetry in China shares Internet technology with a plethora

of other media, as soon as it merges with the Internet, it also intersects with those media, among

which is the blog, a web-based genre that hybridizes existing traditional and digital media,

ranging from diaries and photo albums to press publication and email exchanges, etc. (Herring et

al. 2004). The merging of poetry writing and blogging acts, the blending of social, corporeal,

technological, and literary components, and the interaction of medial characteristics provide a

dynamic space for women poets to reimagine and reshape female identities, gender relations, and

their own status as female authors.

When it comes to Li Cheng’en’s practice of running her personal poetry blog in the

context of preexisting discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry, this emerging woman

poet contributes a kind of cyborg writing. To write and to manage a personal blog takes time and

energy, keeping poets/bloggers in front of the screen for long stretches of time. The process of

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generating and organizing content on one’s personal poetry blog may bring a sense of self-

fulfillment. The attention that the poetry blog attracts can also be addictive and the regular

update of blog posts can be habit-forming. Considering a woman poet/blogger’s physical,

habitual, emotional, and socio-cultural attachment to the Internet and its supporting digital

devices, it can be justifiably asserted that the Internet becomes an extension of the female body

and cybernetic connections conflate with her lived social relations—I would say that the woman

poet blogger becomes a cyborg. As poetry writing and blogging becomes inseparable in the

process of running the personal poetry blog, this cyborg serves as a nodal point of the

intersecting networks of blog and women’s online poetry in China.

Seen from this perspective, actively and skillfully running a personal poetry blog can be a

female empowering act. Whereas sexist ideology can extend to or even be reinforced by

information and communication technology—via the depreciation of skill-intensive work mostly

done by women (such as the making of computer chips with women’s nimble fingers), the

violation of privacy and intrusion of the female body enabled by technologies of visualization,

and the silencing of women who are technology-illiterate (Haraway 1991: 166-169)—the

technology-savvy woman poet/blogger wields her cyborg power by merging with the Internet

and blending poetry writing and blogging to redefine and rearticulate the meanings of

womanhood, to negotiate her corporeal boundary and public image, and to armor herself against

oppression and victimization. Nonetheless, unlike Haraway’s unfettered optimism over the

cyborg woman’s ability to imagine and create distinct new socio-cultural worlds, or Sadie Plant’s

(1997: 37-44, 115-123, 185-191) celebration of information and communication technology’s

compatibility with traditional feminine traits and of women as the “advanced players” of the

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technology-facilitated economic game, or Judy Wajcman’s (2010) social-constructive approach

that grounds a woman’s agency more on her socio-economic circumstances, my approach

stresses both a woman’s agency and the conditioning effects of medial conventions, including

social environments, aesthetic standards, and the materiality, or “thingness,” of technology that

exists beyond any person’s will but is open to manipulation.

To facilitate my investigation of the synergies between women authors and the Internet

and the interaction between poetry writing and blogging, I explore Li Cheng’en’s online poetry

using “horizontal reading,” a method developed by Michel Hockx for reading modern Chinese

literary journals that pays considerable attention to “the spatial relation between texts published

in the same issue of the same journal” (Hockx 2011: 118). I use it here to explore the spatial

relation between different texts and images presented on the same blog page. A temporal

dimension is added to the spatial relation in the case of blog, owing to the updating of blog

entries that alters the spatial arrangement of the texts and images. Hockx originally uses this

method of “horizontal reading” in order to treat the literary journal as a unity of co-authored texts

rather than a context for the publication of individual texts. In so doing, he is able to downplay

the author as a dominating and elevated figure and re-access “the literary and cultural value of

the texts involved” (Hockx 2011: 119) in the literary field of Republican China. Likewise, my

digitally-based take on horizontal reading, instead of lifting certain poetry texts out of the blog or

treating them as independent works within the context of a blog, allows for a more holistic view

and thick description of a woman poet’s blog as a co-authored unity, including her own poems,

critical essays, random autobiographical notes, photos, and reposts of other people’s blog entries.

In so doing, the woman poet’s lived experience and social relations becomes mediated by the

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Internet, her writings mix with the structure of the blog, the boundary of authorship begins to

blur, and the distinction between a dominant authorial voice and the dominated individuals (the

passively represented or judged ones) also collapses. This hybridity resonates with Haraway’s

notion of the cyborg, and I use it to adapt her theory to the era of the blog.

Li Cheng’en’s Online Poetry

I investigate women’s online poetry in China through a close scrutiny of Li Cheng’en’s

blog, not because I see her as the most promising young woman poet in China today, but because

she, as an extremely shrewd blogger who makes full use of the components, services, and

underlying values of the blog, represents a massive body of women poets who take advantage of

the blog or other Internet-facilitated genres to support their writings. She is among the best

examples of how an engagement with the Internet can play an essential role in the inception and

solidification of a woman’s poethood, as well as in the formation and interpretation of her poetic

style.59

Born in 1983 in Lingbi County, Anhui Province, near a tributary of the Bian River, Li

Cheng’en majored in film directing in college, worked at China Central Television (CCTV) for a

while, and then relocated to the outskirts of Beijing to teach and make independent documentary

films (Li Cheng’en 2007b; 2007c; 2008a; 2009b; Qiu H. 2008). Although she started writing

poems as early as her middle school years, she entered the poetry scene around 2007 by posting

———————————— 59 Although Li Cheng’en’s activities in online poetry communities and the gate-keeping mechanism of these communities have also played an important role in building Li Cheng’en’s poethood and defending her poetics, online community participation is beyond the scope of this chapter. I mainly focus on Li Cheng’en’s poetry texts in their immediate media environment.

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her poems on online poetry forums, such as Tianya Poetry Society 天涯诗会, New Han Poetry

新汉诗 and Kaqiu forum 卡丘论坛, and simultaneously managing her own personal poetry blog

at Sina.com (Li/Liu 2011; Li/Dong 2016). A large number of Li Cheng’en’s poems were first

posted online before being published in print. This body of poetry is a rich source for my

examination of possible synergies between women and the Internet. I have chosen to focus

exclusively on the blog in analyzing Li Cheng’en’s online poetic output because of its

importance to the author. Though Li Cheng’en started blogging and communicating on forums at

roughly the same time, she has continued to blog over a longer period of time.60 This suggests

the blog’s persistent usefulness to her. Meanwhile, blogs are relatively stable, compared to online

poetry forums. Whereas two of the three forums that Li Cheng’en once frequented are no longer

accessible, and on the Tianya Poetry Society forum that remains operating, posts that once

contextualized her poems are no longer traceable (though her poetry posts are archived), Li

Cheng’en’s blog on Sina.com.cn is still functioning. The change of layout on her blog is mostly

accumulative, and thus leaves the contexts of her posted poems more or less observable.61

Moreover, when Li Cheng’en started writing online around 2007, discussion forums in China

were on the verge of decline and interest was shifting to the blog (Inwood 2014: 51; CNNIC

2007a: 39). Today, as the blog is gradually giving way to yet newer communication genres

———————————— 60 As of the time when this chapter is being written, the first existing post on Li Cheng’en’s Sina blog that is visible to the public appeared on October 10, 2006, and Li Cheng’en’s account on Tianya Poetry Society was registered on August 9, 2007. Whereas Li Cheng’en was last active on Tianya Poetry Society on June 22, 2014, she continues to post on her Sina blog.

61 Though the layout of the blog is relatively more stable than that of the discussion forum, this stability should not be overestimated, because posts can be deleted by both the author and web editors, and the author also has the right to change the viewing authorization of the posts (which means posts originally visible to the public can become private posts and vice versa).

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(CNNIC 2014: 34), it is imperative to track the synergies between the blog and women’s poetry

writing from the time of the blog’s prime (2005-2014).

Scholars and commentators primarily characterize Li Cheng’en’s poetry as distinctively

feminist (Qian 2008; An 2009; Li S. 2009; Zhang Xiaoqin 2015), highly emotional (Hengxing

Yanzhi 2009), intricately tied to places (Fa 2008; Song 2008; Daqing Wangshiruyan 2013), and

filled with cinematic qualities (Qiu H. 2008; Xu H. 2008; Qian 2008). These scholars and

commentators have mostly come to know her and her poetry in three ways: meeting her in

person at poetry related events (Song 2008; Hengxing Yanzhi 2009; Xiao 2009); reading her

published poetry collections (Ding C. 2010; Zhuang 2012; Li Z. 2016); and reading her personal

blog or online forum posts (Xiezuo Tongmenghui 2007; Xu H. 2008; Deng 2013). However,

even those who claim that they wrote their commentaries after reading Li Cheng’en’s blog have

barely touched on the blog’s impacts on her poetry.62

I argue that Li Cheng’en’s blogging practice plays a pivotal role in the negotiation of her

identity as a woman author. It has fundamentally affected the way she writes and the way her

poetry produces meanings. Her blogging practice enables her to engage with the tradition of

women’s writing through the “personal” dimension of the blog, to make meanings by

juxtaposing the poetic text and other online components, and to ally her with others through

peer-to-peer interactions based on affinities and associations. In so doing, she invokes age-old

issues in the discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry and sheds new light on them.

Particularly, she explores new forms of femininity in relation to traditionally conceived female

———————————— 62 Li Cheng’en’s identity (including sex) has been verified by the Sina blog and the verification is marked by a golden “V” under the title of her blog.

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roles and feminine features, negotiates ways in which the woman author is perceived, and asserts

female authorial subjectivity without producing new hierarchical relations among individuals.

Using Li Cheng’en’s case, I illustrate that the synergies between women authors and the Internet

push women’s corporeal and social boundaries, profoundly contributing to the discourse of

contemporary Chinese women’s poetry.

The Personal and the Feminine

This section deals with how the interaction between Li Cheng’en’s online poetry and

Sina blog’s emphasis on the personal facilitates her negotiation and articulation of a feminine

voice in conversation with preexisting discourses of women’s poetry.

Li Cheng’en’s online poetry is highly personal, with lyrical expression of inner feelings

based on everyday experiences. Quite a few poems, such as “My Names” 我的名字, “High

Tower Town: Li Cheng’en” 高楼镇·李成恩, “Collarbones Are Like Raindrops” 锁骨如雨,

“Lone Mountain Camp: Plants” 孤山营·植物 and “The Bian River: Concubine Yu” 汴河·虞

姬, are self-referential, not only invoking her own name but also recording her own life events,

including making documentary films of her hometown (the location of the ancient battlefield

Gaixia 垓下, where the legendary Concubine Yu is said to have committed suicide), working at

Lone Mountain Camp on the outskirts of Beijing, and converting to Tibetan Buddhism (which is

related to her experience of doing fieldwork in Yushu, in Qinghai, for her poetry collection

Butter Lamps 酥油灯).

The emotional content expressed in these poems derives from Li Cheng’en’s life and

bears her idiosyncratic sense of displacement. For example, her reminiscence of Concubine Yu

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and the distant past of the Bian River is specific to her personal experience of the distance

between Beijing, where she works, and her native town, where she returns to make a

documentary film (spatial); the distances among her hometown filmed in the present, what it was

like in her childhood, and what it was like in Concubine Yu’s time (temporal); the distances

among Li Cheng’en the displaced filmmaker, her townsmen, and Concubine Yu (interpersonal);

and the distances among Li Cheng’en the filmmaker, her camera, and everything her camera

captures (medial). Such a personal expression of emotions recurs in her other poems as well.

Li Cheng’en’s non-poetic writings posted on her blog also unabashedly celebrate the

personal. She repeatedly stresses the importance of personal experiences and feelings and

identifies her personal feelings with her poetry, by proclaiming, “my poems are all about my

feelings” (Li Cheng’en 2013a), “what I write is no more than my life” (Li Cheng’en 2010b). In

other words, the personal characteristic of Li Cheng’en’s online poetry is supported by her other

writings on the blog.

Writing personally, or what can be called autobiographical lyricism, has long been

associated with the feminine (Fong 2008: 9-11; Lin/Kaldis 2009: xvii; Jeanne Hong Zhang 2008:

10).63 When it is associated with the feminine as different from and complementary to the

masculine—a voice that both women and men can assume—it is often held to be positive and

credited with being delicate and restrained. However, when it is associated with women’s

writings, its essential femaleness is often regarded as inferior and too easily dismissed as a

limitation and attacked for being narrow, shallow, fragmentary, narcissistic, and lacking the

———————————— 63 Though my analysis here focuses on writing personally, I by no means indicate this is the only feminine mode of writing.

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depth, magnitude, objectivity, and historical sense shown in writings by men (Zhong C. 2005;

Jeanne Hong Zhang 2008: 10).64 Against this backdrop, Li Cheng’en’s blogging practice, which

presents her poems as blog posts, reevaluates and renews women’s personal writing.

The blog in China has a structure that celebrates the personal with both human and

technological supports. Sina blog (Xinlang boke 新浪博客), on which Li Cheng’en runs her

personal poetry blog, is affiliated with Sina.com, one of China’s three major Internet portals.

Sina Corporation and its web editors popularized the blogging practice (to increase the site’s

information traffic and thus attract advertisement) by rendering the blog “a remediated genre of

the traditional diary, designed to chronicle personal experiences” (Guo S. 2016: 417). Sina not

only hosted a series of blog contests to encourage individual expression (Guo S. 2016: 417), it

also claimed to be “the most touching blog site, the most self-representing grassroots blog site”

(Sina Blog 2017). Corresponding to the blog designers’ intention to make the blog personal,

users’ actual blogging practice is also highly personal. A research report done by China Internet

Network Information Center in 2007 demonstrates that 47% of user-generated blog content is

personal confessions or records, 41% is accounts of personal daily activities, the top two major

usages of the blog. These are also the two most read categories, receiving 43% and 42% of the

total surveyed blog readership, respectively (CNNIC 2007b: 18, 32; ref. Sima/Pusley 2010: 288-

289).

Technologically, the blogosphere features flows of information that is simultaneously

asymmetrical and symmetrical among bloggers and blog readers. This structure of information

———————————— 64 For more detailed analysis of the feminine and the masculine as relational structure and as essential gendering, see Wendy Larson’s (1998: 32-43) overview of the yin/yang system in premodern China.

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flow calls for the exaltation of the self. On the one hand, for an individual blog, it usually has a

webpage with a permanent URL address and allows the blog owner to provide information in a

variety of forms. The blog owner is also granted the privilege of filtering the information left by

visitors. This is distinct from other online architectures, such as discussion forums, where

registered members follow and/or contribute to a topic thread, and share equal rights and abide

by the same rules under the regulation of a few moderators. Compared with the topic-centered

discussion forum, where attention is mainly given to specified topics and participants are equally

supported and restrained,65 the asymmetrical structure of information flow on a blog is highly

blogger-oriented and therefore more suitable for self-expression. On the other hand, because

anyone with access to the Internet, be it a celebrity or a grassroots individual, can be a blog

owner, the blogosphere as a whole exhibits some structural symmetry from one blog to another.

However, such symmetry does not automatically lead to egalitarianism. That everyone can

display herself/himself on a blog does not necessarily mean that everyone will be equally seen.

As a result, an intense competition for attention arises. Therefore, in tune with commercial

websites’ promotion of the personal and blog users’ interest in the personal, the blogosphere’s

structural support for personality construction and demand for self-image management also

makes the personal into one of the blog’s generic conventions.

The blog’s inherent celebration of the personal sheds a new light on the personal,

feminine characteristic of Li Cheng’en’s online poetry. By presenting her poems as blog posts,

she seamlessly merges the personal as a feminine voice with the personal as one of the blog’s

———————————— 65 This does not necessarily mean that some individuals cannot attract more attention than others on discussion forums, but that they can do so in ways less dependent on technology, such as high level of activeness, long time spent on the forum, and high quality of discussion, etc.

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generic conventions. Such a merging effectively contextualizes the feminine as a relational

position and a biologically-based gender construction with the postsocialist Chinese media scene

and the meanings it bears. On the one hand, the blog’s generic conventions seem to uphold the

feminine. Because being personal on a blog conforms to Sina blog’s technological designs and

its owners’ intentions, it can no longer be easily dismissed as a limitation, for either a man

writing in a feminine mode or for a woman. The blog format suggests that one can be feminine,

and should be appreciated for doing so. Factors behind the commercial drive and the actual usage

of the blog—the state-sanctioned shift of attention from class struggle to economic development,

and the debacle of the communist collectives and the re-welcoming of the individual that fanned

a desire for self-expression among youth of China’s post-1980 generation (Sima/Pugsley

2010)—attached even more significance to the feminine and made it valued as an intrinsic part

of the ethos of the time. On the other hand, the merging of the feminine and the personal blog

opens up a discursive space that reshapes the form and content of the feminine. The kinds of

personal expression found on the postsocialist Chinese blogosphere expand the possible ways of

being feminine and resist the essentialization of the feminine, and thus make it difficult to

oppress the feminine and women as a whole. In what follows, I elaborate on this latter point with

close readings of two of Li Cheng’en’s posted poems.

Li Cheng’en’s personal writing and articulation of a feminine voice involves the

expression of new experiences/ unnoticed body parts and the re-appropriation of codified images

associated with femininity. Both approaches have been taken by women poets before her, but her

interaction with the blog enables her to do it differently. Her poem “Lone Mountain Camp:

Moonlight” 孤山营：月光 reads:

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A land filled with moonlight, the sight of which makes me dizzy A land filled with moonlight, seems to be my words lost in a sleepwalk Lone Mountain Camp, it is words about you that I disclose tonight In ancient times, Lone Mountain Camp’s moonlit land must have been illegal Back then, I was still in the city. At Lone Mountain Camp, this small village the moonlight is clean. Since ancient times, where the moon shines brightest there must be sleepless women like me. At Lone Mountain Camp, I get dizzy by the moonlight, under which I fly My wings flap gently, Lone Mountain Camp is on the move as well Birds in slumber and horses in the stable, wake up startled Staring at me, they are surprised at first: how come a womanly woman in the

daytime flies up like the moonlight in the nighttime? Then, they all laugh. I think they are dreaming Lone Mountain Camp, a land filled with moonlight, but I’m exceptionally sober The one with a dizzy head must be another villager 一地的月光，我看了就头晕 一地的月光，仿佛是我梦游时遗落的词语 孤山营，关于你的词语今夜我向外透露 在古代，孤山营一地的月光肯定是违法的 那时我还在城里。孤山营这个小村落 月光干净，自古以来，月光照得最亮的地方 必有像我这样失眠的女子，我在孤山营 被月光照晕了头。在月光下飞翔 我的翅膀轻轻开合，孤山营也动起来 睡梦里的群鸟与马厩里的马，惊醒了 他们望着我，先是惊讶，白天还是一个好好的女子 怎么到了夜里就像月光一样飞起来了？ 然后，他们都笑了。我想他们在做梦 孤山营，一地的月光，但我异常清醒 头晕的是另一个村民 (Li Cheng’en 2007c)

Although it deals with the common theme of insomnia through a series of familiar images from

Chinese classical poetry, women’s confessional style poetry, and western women’s poetry—

moonlight, flight, wings, dreams, night, dizziness, and woman—this poem bears Li Cheng’en’s

personal mark. For someone like Li Cheng’en, who has a clear ambition for a writing career, the

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blog’s celebration of the personal and its demand for skillful management of one’s self-image in

the fierce competition for attention means that she has to make careful choices about what kind

of personal experiences to represent in her poems. The experience of insomnia is intimate

enough to express one’s inner feelings, but not so intimate as to expose her private life.

Writing about insomnia, this poem documents Li Cheng’en’s personal experience of

moving to Lone Mountain Camp, which is located on the outskirts of Beijing, to pursue a career.

By mentioning this journey, she confesses at least two things: first, she was drawn, like many

other intellectuals, by the work opportunities to drift toward Beijing (Beipiao 北漂); second, she

arrived “in the city” but eventually gave up and retreated to its rural outskirts. Other accounts

(e.g., Li Cheng’en 2009b) on her blog show that this decision may be related to her earlier

experience of venturing into the entertainment industry and quitting soon to avoid sexual

harassment and to preserve her clear mind and conscience, just like the clean but “illegal”

moonlight. For this poem, and five others posted with it, to write about Li Cheng’en’s life at

Lone Mountain Camp at all is an expression of contentment. In this sense, Li Cheng’en is using

the blog as an outlet to defend her personal choice in her career development. What is important

about this point is that the blog exists precisely to be such an outlet, that career choice is a major

concern for the post-1980 generation, and that contemporary Chinese women experience it

differently from men. Therefore, Li Cheng’en makes full use of the blog to open up the topic of a

woman’s personal career choice, enriching the meanings of being a female writer with a unique

personal experience.

In addition to the exploration of a woman’s experiences, this poem’s re-codification of

images is also mediated through the blog. While Li Cheng’en’s association between the feminine

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and the moon, lightness, and lunacy is conventional in Chinese and western poetic traditions, and

her association between women and flight is symptomatic of feminist struggle for women’s

liberation,66 the connection between women, moonlight, and sober thinking that she establishes

is distinctive. In her well-known poem “Insomnia” (1951), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) keeps

the association between moon and unrequited love but reverses the connotations of the moon

through the device of a mirror with its inverted reflections (Bishop 1999: 21). In confessional

style poems by Chinese women poets, such as Zhai Yongming, Tang Yaping, and others in the

mid-1980s, the dark night, instead of the moon, is used extensively as a metaphor of female

private parts, sexual desires, and perspectives, and thus systematically redefined as a means of

self-awakening and a mysterious source of rebellious power to the patriarchal order.67 Unlike

these approaches, Li Cheng’en links moonlight with women’s sober thinking and does so

through the relativism of the poet’s eyes and the judgmental eyes of Lone Mountain Camp’s

local animals. From the perspective of the animals, the moonlight and the woman poet in the

night are associated with abnormalcy and dizziness; but the poet sees the animals as dreaming

and thus invalidates their assessment and attaches a new connotation of sober thinking to the

moonlight. The localness of birds and horses to Lone Mountain Camp highlights the personal

aspect in this poem. The confrontation of the animals’ eyes and the woman poet’s eyes serves as

an apt metaphor for blogging; while the confrontation resembles the interactivity on the blog, the

animals’ eyes, as avatars of other villagers’ eyes, remind one of the blog’s technologically

———————————— 66 For a detailed analysis of the metaphor of flight in contemporary Chinese women’s poetry, see Jeanne Hong Zhang 2008: 233-257.

67 See Jeanne Hong Zhang 2008: 165-197.

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mediated world. The woman poet’s control of the final interpretation of the animals’ judgment

suggests the privilege that the blogger enjoys over blog readers. Therefore, Li Cheng’en’s

interaction with the blog effectively affects her choice of personal experiences and the ways in

which her codified images produce meanings, enriching and reevaluating the feminine.

In another highly self-reflexive poem titled “Collarbones Are Like Raindrops” 锁骨如雨,

which Li Cheng’en first posted on her blog on October 31, 2009 and reposted after it was

published in the Green Wind 绿风 magazine in 2013, her writing’s interaction with the blog also

facilitates her exploration of body parts—the collarbones—and the re-appropriation of codified

feminine images—the talented woman reading deep in the night.

Cold raindrops, you hungry tiny beasts are coming each raising your sparkling chin This is Beijing in October, deep into the night, deep in autumn Tiny beasts deep in the collarbones raise sparkling chins The chin of the chilly wind bites the lips of dead twigs stammering out the truth— Autumn is getting deeper, tiny beasts hiding deep in the collarbones all raise their heads staring at me: Cheng’en is kind, but the collarbones are like raindrops worn away by rain and winds On the year-end accounts a struggle against autumn bugs and a rain that slips into the night with the wind meet on the collarbones Deep into the night, deep into autumn I hold a lamp to do late-night reading Cold raindrops coming unto my face, like tiny beasts like headless horses abandoning specious heads gaining the four hooves from the tiny beasts stepping on my collarbones Cheng’en is kind, but the collarbones are like raindrops 冷雨你这群饥饿的小兽扑过来 一个个抬起闪亮的下巴 这是十月的北京，深秋的深夜

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锁骨深处的小兽 抬起闪亮的下巴 寒风的下巴咬着枯枝的嘴唇 说出结结巴巴的真话―― 秋深了，锁骨深处暗藏的小兽 纷纷抬起头 望着我：成恩善良，但锁骨如雨 任雨打风吹去 在岁末年终清算旧帐 一场清算秋虫的斗争与一场随风潜入夜的雨 在锁骨上相遇 深秋的深夜 我掌灯夜读 冷雨扑面而来，像小兽 像失去头颅的马匹，丢弃了似是而非的头 获得了小兽的四个蹄子 踩着我的锁骨 成恩善良，但锁骨如雨 (Li Cheng’en 2009c)

The self-reflexivity in this poem not only shows in Li Cheng’en’s invoking her own name and

mentioning Beijing where she studied and worked, but also in the consistency of the time Li

mentions in the poem: the deep autumn she describes; the date “October 31, 2009” she includes

at the bottom of the poem; and the time “23:53:05 of October 31, 2009” generated by Sina blog.

This consistency suggests that this poem is documenting her personal life in a real-time manner.

Li Cheng’en’s choice to write about her collarbones is meaningful. Collarbones are

different from other marginal female body parts or attachments, such as slender fingers, painted

fingernails, clothes, and makeup, which women poets in premodern China often wrote about and

which implicitly express female sexual passion (Robertson 1992). They are also different from

other “unmentionable” female body parts, waste products, or bodily experiences, such as the

vagina, menstrual blood, orgasm, and childbearing, which contemporary Chinese women poets

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explored in the mid-1980s. Collarbones suggest feminine beauty without being sexually taboo.

Female collarbones are regarded as sexy when they are prominent or deep, and they are more

prominent when the female body is slender (e.g., Wang Yixing 2013). However, they can also be

more prominent when one hunches his/her shoulders in reacting to coldness. Hence, in extending

special attention to her collarbones, Li Cheng’en accepts the feminine ideal of slenderness, but

revises it by attaching to it a woman’s ability to withstand coldness and metaphorically the

harshness of an independent life.

Li Cheng’en’s choice of writing about her collarbones not only avoids repeating what her

predecessors have done, but also corresponds to the blog’s emphasis on the personal and her use

of the blog to reinforce the personal characteristic of her poems. Like her writing about her

personal career choice in “Lone Mountain Camp,” her depiction of her collarbones in a poem on

late-night reading is a gesture of public management of her personal image. It is meticulously

calculated to be intimate, but not to the extent of publicizing her deeper private life. Li Cheng’en

has to walk a fine line on her blog: apparently wishing to obtain and sustain online attention by

the authenticity and authority of her writing rather than with sensational accounts of her private

life.68 As a result, the exploration of female experiences and body parts in Li Cheng’en’s online

poetry is extremely careful, informing features of the blog and topics already covered by her

forerunners.

———————————— 68 Although it is impossible to pin down the poet’s intention, it is to some extent reflected in her online practice. Her wish for attention is clearly demonstrated in her self-promotion on the blog; her exaltation of authenticity is also revealed in her preference for self-reference; and her desire for authority is indicated in her reposting this poem after its publication to valorize it with the authority of a print medium.

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Li Cheng’en’s idiosyncratic use of images in this poem also converses with preexisting

representations of women. The act of her reading in the late night generally abides by the trope

of “the talented women” (cainü 才女) in Chinese classical poetry and bears resemblance to the

opening lines of a lyric poem “To the Melody of ‘Rivers and Mountains Like This’” 如此江山

by Qiu Jin 秋瑾, the late-Qing female revolutionary to whom Li Cheng’en often compares

herself: “In the lonely study Xie Daoyun recites the Rhapsody of Sorrow:/ How desolate, as the

incessant rain drips down from the roof!” 萧斋谢女吟秋赋，潇潇滴檐剩雨 (Idema/Grant 2004:

785). Both Li Cheng’en and the Jin Dynasty woman poet Xie Daoyun 谢道韫, whom Qiu Jin

references and identifies with in her poem, are depicted as reading/reciting alone when it is

raining outside. However, whereas rain dripping down from the roof forms a curtain that isolates

Qiu Jin and symbolizes her being trapped and cut off from her homeland, rain runs into the room

and onto Li Cheng’en’s face. Instead of representing physical separation or domestic

confinement, rain in Li’s poem suggests that she is connected with and confronting the outside

world, through social life and the mediation of the blog. Different from most talented women in

the past, whose writings were often reserved only for close family members, or from the

revolutionary Qiu Jin, who is concerned about the fate of the nation, Li Cheng’en’s public blog

post indicates a story of a woman’s personal career struggle in postsocialist China, the

difficulties accompanying an independent life both online and offline, and her will and ability to

preserve her moral purity and to conquer. Whereas women and the feminine are conventionally

associated with water, softness, and tenderness, and rain and winds often symbolize the

ruthlessness of passing time and the vicissitudes of dynastic change, Li Cheng’en identifies her

collarbones with the beast-like raindrops—one form of water. Such an identification nullifies the

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opposition of her and the outside world, pulls her out of the pit of the victimized, and enables her

to be part of the world. Such a reshuffling of images and connotations also allows Li Cheng’en to

incorporate the toughness and wildness of the raindrops into the tenderness of water, boldness

into the feminine. In other words, she points to a feminine way of being bold in contemporary

Chinese society and envisions how femininity can coexist with career ambitions.

Li Cheng’en’s employment of collarbones and raindrops to negotiate the meanings of the

feminine is not unlike what women poets did in the rediscovery of the feminine after the Mao-era

erasure of gender difference. A good example is Shu Ting’s canonized poem “To the Oak” 致橡

树 (1977), which uses the contrast between a blooming kapok tree and the oak to highlight

gender difference while incorporating a call for gender equality into the feminine ideal (Shu T.

1987: 254). Nonetheless, unlike the universal call for gender equality embedded in the kapok

tree, the bold feminine embedded in Li Cheng’en’s raindrop-like collarbones is situated and

personal, contributing to the construction of her online character. The real-time manner of the

writing of this poem also adds a layer of meaning to the encounter between Li Cheng’en’s

collarbones and the cold raindrops: this writing is not isolated, but posted on social media.

The Visual and the Female Subjectivity

In her “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway (1991: 169) surveys multiple forms of

oppression of women, resulting from the mixture of sexist ideologies and advanced technologies.

One of them is the transgression of women’s bodily boundaries by advanced imaging

technologies, supported by “a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic

communications system.” For Haraway, this is particularly true in medical situations, where

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women’s bodies undergo “visualization” and “intervention” (Haraway 1991: 169) for

reproduction-related purposes. Although Haraway is specifically concerned with the medical

procedures, technologically-mediated visualization has much broader implications for women’s

lives. Because visualization-related technologies, such as glasses, ultrasound, X-ray computed

tomography, camera, e-reader, and eye-tracking technology, have penetrated so deeply into

everyday life and profoundly altered people’s views and the ways people look/read, they can be

justifiably said to be an extension of the human eyes/“I.” Along the same vein, the Internet in

general, and the Internet-based media genre blog in particular, also contributes to what people

can/cannot see and how they see. While female poet bloggers may voluntarily or involuntarily

fall prey to the male gaze online, which some critics are concerned about (e.g., Huo 2010; He

2010), they may also actively embrace the blog to build a female subjectivity. In Li Cheng’en’s

case, her scrupulous manipulation of the visual aspect of the blog, including page setup and

inserted pictures, enables her to negotiate where her bodily boundaries lie as a female author and

the ways in which her poems should be read.

Li Cheng’en’s efforts to manipulate the visual dimensions of the blog is clearly

demonstrated in the thoughtful design of her homepage. The page setup of Sina blog provides

three major types of choice: theme, layout, and widgets. The theme setting allows users to

customize the color scheme, background image, header image, and menu image, or to select

from a pool of preset templates. The layout setting offers five different forms of column division,

and the widgets setting allows users to add up to twenty-five customized or default widgets. The

customized widgets can be either lists or texts. Li Cheng’en uses such tools to shape people’s

perception of her blog and poems.

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The design of Li Cheng’en’s homepage demonstrates a strong sense of self-assertion. As

I write, the theme of Li Cheng’en’s blog is “Happy Year of the Horse” 马年快乐,69 which is

already outdated. However, the header image of the theme echoes Li Cheng’en’s feminist

poetics, which simultaneous appreciates and transcends norms of female beauty. Generated by

computer graphics, the header image features a beautiful, slender woman wearing contemporary

makeup and a traditional Manchu-style wedding gown, and sets her against a background made

up of ink marks, calligraphy, and computer generated floral patterns (Figure 13).

Figure 13: Top part of Li Cheng’en’s Sina blog homepage.

———————————— 69 The most recent year of horse is 2014.

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The header image’s appropriation of the traditional wedding gown as a new year outfit, as well

as its mixture of contemporary and traditional elements in the woman figure and the background,

corresponds to Li Cheng’en’s skillful management of her public image through appropriating

gender roles and traditional representations of women in her writing and blogging practices.

Therefore, the woman figure in the head image can be seen as a digital avatar of Li Cheng’en. It

makes a huge visual impact in the upper right corner and allows Li Cheng’en to make a strong

mediated presence as soon as the webpage is loaded.

Beneath the header image are a side bar on the left and the main column of blog entries

on the right. The blog entries are a mix of genres, including poems, essays, film reviews,

interviews, book information, random notes, and others’ commentaries of Li Cheng’en’s poems.

Parts of each of the ten most recent entries—usually the title, tags, a picture, and the first several

lines—are displayed in the main column to elicit clicks to the full entries. In the side bar, Li

Cheng’en places nineteen widgets, ranging from the basic ones, such as a personal profile, a

miniature music player, a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) subscriber, a link to her Sina weibo

account, and a miniature photo slideshow, to the customized ones, including links to her poetry

columns on external websites, an announcement, a list of online bookstores that sell her books,

an instruction on purchasing signed copies of her books through mail, publication information of

her poetry and essay collections in reverse chronological order, and a self-introduction in

English.

Li Cheng’en’s use of the widgets shows the great effort she puts into self-promotion and

her eagerness to be recognized as a serious poet with a feminist bent. She uses quite a few

customized text widgets, a practice not commonly seen on established poets’ blogs. This means

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that she is not only a tech-savvy blogger, but is also making extra effort to build her self-image.

Besides putting up advertisements for her poetry and essay collections in the customized text

widgets, one outstanding feature of Li Cheng’en’s widgets usage is her employment of multiple

forms of self-introduction, including a self-introduction in metaphorical language, a statement of

her “Rougeist” (Yanzhizhuyi 胭脂主义) poetics, and a standard self-introduction with a list of

her publications in her tri-part announcement, as well as a self-introduction in English. The

multiple forms of self-introduction indicate Li Cheng’en’s attempts to make a strong presence by

displaying different aspects of her writing and speaking to different groups of people.

The multiple self-introductions fulfill different functions in shaping visitors’ perception

of Li Cheng’en, the woman poet, and her poems. The metaphorical self-introduction in Li

Cheng’en’s homepage announcement allows her to take a position in the online contemporary

Chinese literary field:70

Li Cheng’en, a woman knight-errant travelling through texts. With the mask of poetry, the knife of essays, on the horse of novels, I flash across the rivers and lakes of the blog. The robbers I killed have become the rich with fat heads and big ears, and the benefactors who once saved my life have all starved to death—this is the world of rivers and lakes. Therefore, I often cannot help falling into deep sorrow. To the clicking sounds of the keyboard, I whip my horse toward the end of the world, day and night, never turning back.

This is me, Li Cheng’en, the textual knight-errant!

李成恩，文字中穿行的女侠客，以诗歌蒙面，随笔如刀，跨着小说的

快马从博客的江湖一闪而过，我杀死的强盗如今都成了肥头大耳的富翁，而

救过我的恩人如今都已饿死，这就是江湖。所以，我时常陷入悲伤中不能自

拔，在键盘的达达声中朝着尘世的尽头打马向前，日夜兼程，永不回头...... 这就是我，文字侠客李成恩！

———————————— 70 I use the concept of “literary field” in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993: 29) sense of “structural relations—invisible, or visible only through their effects—between social positions that are both occupied and manipulated by social agents which may be isolated individuals, groups or institutions.”

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By comparing the blog platform to the swordsmen’s world of rivers and lakes (jianghu 江湖)—a

mythical world hidden in the mundane world, a world of martial arts in which the rule of the

central government is overridden by the unwritten ethical codes of outlaw fraternity (Nepstad

2003: 48-49)71—and by presenting jianghu as a place where robbers rise up to become the

nouveau riche and true heroes are down and out, Li Cheng’en recognizes the blog’s own generic

conventions, its advocacy of contention between coteries, and its overall opposition to the world

of politics and economics. Rather than a precise depiction of the blog, Li Cheng’en’s jianghu

metaphor is her own perception of the blog platform, or more accurately, her perception and

presentation of herself as an agent in the blogosphere. By making herself into a woman knight-

errant epitomizing the spirit of jianghu, Li Cheng’en joins the camp of true heroes and takes a

position autonomous from the political and the economic to win symbolic capital. She stresses

the importance of this position by describing herself as a lone swordswoman, as the others in her

camp have “starved to death” (e si 饿死). Meanwhile, Li Cheng’en’s jianghu metaphor also

shadows the Chinese literary field, especially the online poetry scene, in that this paragraph is

loaded with literary allusions. In addition to its martial arts associations, the word jianghu also

alludes to the online poetry forum Shi jianghu (Poetry rivers and lakes诗江湖), a polemic-laden

and position-taking platform of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and the image of heroes starving to

death alludes to Yi Sha’s 伊沙 1990 poem “Starve the Poets” 饿死诗人 and its eponymous

poetry collection. Therefore, Li Cheng’en is not only using this metaphorical self-introduction to

———————————— 71 Peter Nepstad (2003: 48-49) summarizes the essence of jianghu as “fighting fair, respecting your opponent, and celebrating the shared bond that comes of living in the fraternity of the rivers and lakes.”

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take an autonomous position in the blogosphere, but also using it to shape herself as a true poet

in the Chinese online poetry scene.

The second part of the announcement on Li Cheng’en’s blog homepage is the statement

of her poetics, which justifies the way she writes and gives direct instructions on how her poems

are meant to be approached. Though it does not justify or guarantee absolute authorial control

over the text, it demonstrates Li Cheng’en’s active participation in the shaping of her readers’

responses. One excerpt of the statement reads:

Rougeism—opposes the patriarchal society’s over-consumption of culture, advocates a return to the feminine, classical, and traditional way of poetry writing, and advocates a return to aesthetic principles that ought to belong to Feminism [Nüxingzhuyi]. 胭脂主义——反对男权社会过度的文化消费，主张回到女性的、古典的、传

统的诗歌写作中来，主张回到属于女性主义所应有的审美原则上来。

Calling her poetics “Rougeism” (Yanzhizhuyi 胭脂主义), Li Cheng’en demands attention to

gender differences and gendered aesthetics in her poetry with a tint of classical poetry and a

personal style. She is careful in choosing the term nüxingzhuyi 女性主义 rather than

nüquanzhuyi 女权主义 as the translation for “feminism” (in the paragraph that follows this

excerpt, she even clarifies that the former is not equal to the latter), and thus specifies the brand

of feminism that she adopts—one that raises the consciousness of gender differences rather than

simply striving for equal rights between genders.72 By advocating a departure from “the

patriarchal society’s over-consumption of culture,” Li Cheng’en is not actually establishing

binaries between culture and nature and reinforcing the associations between men and culture,

———————————— 72 For the Chinese translations of “Feminism,” their connotations, and women authors’ attitudes toward them, see H. Liu 1993: 36.

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women and nature. Instead, she denounces an excessive reliance on “rhetoric” (xiuci 修辞),

“verbose official speeches” (jiuchanbuxiu de zhici 纠缠不休的致辞), and pretentious talks

tailored to “grand scenes” (changmian 场面) (Li Cheng’en 2009d), which hinders the natural

expression of authentic personal experience. Whereas such an over-consumption of culture

undermines the writings of both men and women authors, it affects women’s writings more,

because women’s gender-specific languages and experiences are often obliterated in the male-

dominated literary discourse. Therefore, by opposing patriarchal society’s excessive cultural

consumption, Li Cheng’en is proposing natural and authentic writings that are intrinsically

gendered.

Then she moves on to make a connection between women’s writings and classical poetry

and western feminist aesthetics. In so doing, she not only promotes writing that reflects gender

differences and thus encourages reading of such differences in her own poetry, but also

endeavors to legitimize such gendered writings with the symbolic capital of tradition (which is

retrospectively constructed) and western critical theory—a metatextual attempt to negotiate the

interpretation and assessment of her poetry. Her choice of “rouge” (yanzhi 胭脂), a type of

cosmetics used in ancient times, to name her poetics, is more symbolic than straightforward,

rendering her aesthetic pursuit a personal quest rather than a universal standard (Li Cheng’en

2011c). Such a naming act corresponds well with her general writing style and the generic

conventions of the blog, which emphasize the personal, and is consistent with the image of an

emerging poet she strives to construct.

The last part of the same announcement lists Li Cheng’en’s publications and is relatively

conventional for a self-introduction. It testifies to Li Cheng’en’s productivity as an author and

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demonstrates her desire to direct her readers’ attention to actual texts. If this part directly asserts

Li Cheng’en’s identity as a woman author through her works, her self-introduction in English

near the bottom of the homepage fulfills the same task by presenting her in intricate relationship

with authorities, and this particular self-assertion only seems appropriate in a non-native

language from an emerging poet. Besides her publications, in this English self-introduction, Li

Cheng’en does not hesitate to list the official writers’ associations she has joined, the awards she

has won, and the ranking lists she tops. In contemporary China, it is not always a good idea to

gain personal recognition by eliciting such authorities, especially provincial or state level

writers’ associations, which are often challenged as embodiments of political correctness and

corruption. However, appearing in English and seemingly written to attract an English-speaking

readership, this self-introduction highlights the English-Chinese linguistic and cultural barrier.

Such a barrier justifies Li Cheng’en’s use of the authorities as an expedient way to overcome the

barrier and to assert herself to non-native readers. More importantly, to Chinese readers fluent in

English, this barrier allows Li Cheng’en to borrow the symbolic value of institutional authority

while overlooking its tarnished reputation, which most English language readers would not be

aware of anyway. Meanwhile, unlike established poets, whose affiliation with writers’

associations may raise public suspicion of corruption that can lead to attacks on their works,73 Li

Cheng’en’s status as an emerging poet and obvious need for recognition also downplays the

negative connotations of these authorities and allows her to use them to boost her personal

———————————— 73 For example, the woman poet Zhao Lihua’s 赵丽华 affiliation with Chinese Writers’ Association, her publication on the association’s poetry journals, and her service on the judging committees of the association’s literary awards, became a target of ridicule in the online spoofing of her poetry in 2006. For a detailed account of the spoofing incident and insights into the main drive of the incident, see Inwood 2014: 159-163, 166-167.

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image—she handles the delicacies in Chinese public’s perception of the poetry scene well in her

image-management.

While Li Cheng’en manipulates the multiple self-introductions in the widgets to shape

blog visitors’ perception of her and her poems, the layout of Li Cheng’en’s blog homepage

visually highlights the self-introductions, amplifying their self-assertion function. In contrast to

the blog’s main entries in the right-hand column, which update periodically and appear with

most recent post first, the widgets in the left-hand side bar seldom change and show no record of

time of modification, leaving the self-introductions relatively static on the page. This contrast of

motion (blog posts) and stability (self-introductory widgets) suggests that the latter are

“permanent” guidelines for how to understand the poems that keep passing by in the former. As

a result, blog visitors are visually lured to read Li Cheng’en’s posted poems through her eyes/I. It

is even more so for visitors who are not familiar with Li Cheng’en and do not regularly follow

her updates, because unlike Li Cheng’en’s blog followers who often read the most recent

updates, they have to scroll farther down the page to read more blog entries to get to know the

author, and the farther they scroll down, the more of Li Cheng’en’s self-statements enter their

vision. Therefore, the page design of Li Cheng’en’s blog expands her female subjectivity by

making it visually prominent.

Another outstanding (though not unprecedented) visual aspect of the blog, of which Li

Cheng’en takes advantage, is its convenient inclusion of pictures in the posts. If Li Cheng’en’s

articulation of female body parts and bodily experiences in her online poetry is an act of

embodiment, and her careful choice of the specific body parts and bodily experiences to write

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about is an attempt to define her bodily boundary and to control her online visibility as a woman

and an author, her posting of personal photos fulfills similar purposes even more obviously.

The blog’s online connectivity, along with digital cameras and mobile phones with built-

in cameras, allows a significant change of netizens’ visions of each other, potentially

transcending physical obstacles or distances between individuals. To post one’s self-image is to

make a mediated presence online and to negotiate public perception of that presence. Photos of

Li Cheng’en on her blog, taken by herself or by others, staged or snapshots, usually showcase a

mild but confident smile on her beautiful face and a slender body well clad in fashionable clothes

or costumes—these photos are acts of embodiment. Just as with her poetry, Li Cheng’en

practices firm control over what to disclose and what not to. Whereas she has no qualms about

exposing her beautiful face, white skin, long neck, and small waist, etc., captured in the open or

at public events, she seldom caters to the male gaze or manipulates it by intentionally luring the

audience with sexy poses in private scenes. Besides negotiating her bodily boundary through

control of the visibility of her body, her facial expressions, bodily gestures, and clothes even

suggest how her body in the photos should be interpreted. Generally speaking, she expresses a

sense of satisfaction and appreciation of her own body. Her celebration of her female body as it

is does not deliberately avoid patriarchal norms of female beauty; instead, she resists the

objectifying power of these norms by demonstrating a free choice that allows her to avoid being

stereotyped and pigeonholed by them.

A series of photos from Li Cheng’en’s (2013b) post “A Trip to the Tibetan Regions

(Continued)” 藏区行（二）, which includes a photo that she used for her blog profile, serve as

good examples. The majority of photos in this series position Li Cheng’en’s body against the

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vast grasslands of Tibet, not only showing her physical mobility as an urban woman, but also

allowing her to make a public presence both onsite and online. In these photos, Li Cheng’en is

dressed in multiple sets of traditional Tibetan women’s costumes, featuring long gowns and

headdresses. She either assumes a standing or reclining position to display the costumes, or

pretends she is performing the daily housework of a Tibetan woman, such as cooking, weaving

and shepherding horses and yaks. Although the costume wearing, pose striking, and photo taking

can be seen as part of the local tourist project, Li Cheng’en manages to use these activities to

produce extra meanings.

By displaying the costumes, she demonstrates confidence in her beautiful face and

slender body, the contour of which is clearly delineated by the long gowns. By pretending she is

performing typical Tibetan housework, she not only uses her female body as a medium to

imagine and experience the life of a Tibetan,74 but also willingly accepts diligence in domestic

work as a female virtue. However, Li Cheng’en’s celebration of slenderness as a type of female

beauty and diligence in domestic work as a female virtue does not necessarily suggest that she

endorses the patriarchal gender hierarchy that subjugates women to the male gaze and confines

women to the domestic realm. Instead, she explores the rich possibilities of womanhood without

deliberately circumventing these norms of female beauty and virtue. Rather than rebelling

against the norms as a victim, she upholds her subjectivity by living beyond the norms.

This is most clearly demonstrated in Li Cheng’en’s playing the role of a Tibetan woman

while keeping a sense of detachment from that role. She manages to do so by wearing a playful

———————————— 74 China is comprised of the Han 汉 ethnic majority group and fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups, including the Tibetans 藏.

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look on her face, which reminds viewers of the tourist context in which the photos were

produced. Her playfulness is most conspicuous in several pairs of photos that are nearly identical

to each other, except for slight difference in Li Cheng’en’s facial expression or posture. One pair

presents Li Cheng’en weaving on a loom outside a black tent (Figure 14).

Figure 14: A pair of photos of Li Cheng’en weaving outside a black tent in Tibetan costumes, with Li appearing focused on her work in photo one (top) and squinting at the photographer in photo two (bottom).

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In photo one, she appears focused on her work, despite the staged gentle smile on her face. By

contrast, the second photo captures her squinting at the photographer, whose shadow appears in

the lower-left corner of the photo. The cheerful interaction between Li Cheng’en and the implied

photographer highlighted through the juxtaposition of the two nearly identical photos pulls her

out of the mise-en-scène of the Tibetan housework in pastoral areas and forefronts the tourist

setting. It accentuates the staginess of the photos and hints at the incompatibility between Li’s

Han female body and Tibetan life. Such a revelation suggests Li’s own recognition that her

superficial, exoticizing (mis)representation of Tibetan women inevitably produces stereotypes

and indicates that her own physical beauty and mobility also fits some other stereotypes.

Imitating a Tibetan woman’s everyday life while detaching from it by candidly exposing her own

identity as a Han woman urbanite, Li Cheng’en appropriates the stereotypes and travels in-

between the two identities. In so doing, she seeks other possible ways of living a woman’s life

through her tourist experience. Simultaneously appreciating and transcending any assigned form

of female beauty and virtue, Li Cheng’en builds a female subjectivity by outstripping patriarchal

norms and by negotiating how her female body should be perceived.

Li Cheng’en’s photographic self-images, juxtaposed with her poems in one post or

interspersed among poetry posts, play a crucial role in the interpretation of her poems as well.

Their meaning-making potential is evidenced by the strong and deliberate ties between the

photos and the poems. For instance, the aforementioned series of photos from “A Trip to the

Tibetan Regions (Continued)” are deeply intertwined with Li Cheng’en’s poems on Tibetan life

and religious culture. She started her Tibet poems with several pieces on a strong earthquake that

hit Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province in April 2010 and cost many

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lives and caused severe damage (Li Cheng’en 2010c; 2010d; 2010e; 2010f). The poems were

posted on her blog shortly after the disaster took place. In the following three years, Li Cheng’en

launched a poetry project on Yushu disaster response and aspects of Tibetan spiritual life, which

later evolved into the poetry collection Butter Lamps. Over the years, she kept her blog visitors

posted on her new poems and the background information of her writing, including the support

she obtained from the Chinese Writers Association 中国作家协会 and the fieldwork she had

done (Ma L. 2012; Zhongguo zuojia wang 2013). This series of photos were posted before her

Tibet poems were published in poetry journals and before the poetry collection Butter Lamps

appeared in 2014. This timing suggests that these photographic self-images are meant to shape

the reading of her poems. Moreover, these photos were used as illustrations of and background

pictures for her Tibet poems when they were published in print journals, such as Poetry Monthly

诗歌月刊. The print media’s emulation of the blog, in terms of the massive inclusion of photos

in the presentation of poetry, bespeaks both the journal editors’ and the poet’s acknowledgement

of the eye-catching and meaning-making functions of these photos. Furthermore, after the

publication of some of Li Cheng’en’s Tibet poems in Poetry Monthly, she posted photos of the

journal pages with her poems, along with the cover image of the journal, and texts of three of the

published poems (Li Cheng’en 2014a). It is worth mentioning that the journal pages that Li

Cheng’en selected to reproduce are those that bear her photographic self-images (Figure 15).

Such a journey of these photos—from the blog, to the poetry journal, and back to the blog as

photos of photos—suggests that they are an indispensable meaning-making element of Li

Cheng’en’s poetry.

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Figure 15: Li Cheng’en’s poems and personal photos published in a poetry journal in print.

When it comes to the nature of the relationship between Li Cheng’en’s specific

photographic self-images and poems, it varies case by case, and the immense productivity of

meanings lying in the mix and match of the photos and poems is the most mesmerizing aspect of

this relationship. However, for each of Li Cheng’en’s poems, the representational power of

photos brings in the author’s authentic personal experiences and makes her and her female body

a reference point for the interpretation of the poem. To give an example, I illustrate here how

photos of Li Cheng’en in her post “A Trip to the Tibetan Regions (Continued)” mentioned above

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contribute to the reading of her poem “Grasslands Notes I” 草原笔记一 (Li Cheng’en 2011b).

The middle three stanzas of the poem are as follows:

I go to the tent of a herdsman’s family There is a white bearded elder who looks like the vast grasslands. On the stove, it is steaming. I like that scattered steam of the grasslands. The touchable time of the grasslands quietly floats around I have sensitive joy and sensitive hearing My body is also like a land of green, secretly overflowing my body. I hear me and the grasslands as one. Here is one family, sitting in a circle under the sun, listening to the wind blow listening to the footsteps of a stranger break into the tent I am a stranger to the grasslands, a sensitive stranger Spring appears somewhat unmoved, as it is not a stranger to the grasslands. I appreciate the tender and timid feeling of the first meeting, just like the verses I jot down scattered under the sun of the grasslands, glittering 我走向一户牧民家的帐篷 他家里有白胡须的长者 样子像辽阔的草原，炉子上 冒出热气，我喜欢那样散乱的 草原的热气，草原伸手可触的时光 静静飘荡 我有着敏感的快乐与敏感的听觉 我的身体也像一地的绿色，悄悄溢出了 我的身体。我听见我与草原混为一体了 这是一家人，围坐在阳光下，听风吹过 听陌生人的脚步闯进了帐篷 我是草原的陌生人，敏感的陌生人 春天反倒显得有些迟钝，它可不是 草原的陌生人，我珍惜见面时那柔软 而胆怯的感觉，仿佛我随手记下的诗句 散乱在草原的阳光下，闪闪发光

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The centrality of the “I” is prominent throughout the poem. Li Cheng’en is not writing

about the grasslands and the residents per se, but the grasslands experienced through the body

and sensations of the female poet. Her relationship with the grasslands is almost perplexing at

first glance. Whereas the grasslands are initially identified with the patriarch of a herdsman’s

family in the first stanza, the second stanza moves on to identify the body of the young female

poet with the grasslands. While both the patriarch and the female poet are associated with the

vastness of the grasslands, the former is likened to the grasslands because he shares the passing

time of the grasslands, which is represented by his white beard and the white steam rising from

the stove, and the latter is linked to the grasslands because she shares the grasslands’ vitality

represented by its greenness. This dynamic identification of people with the grasslands almost

grants the female poet a share of the grasslands no less than the patriarch. However, her

identification with the grasslands is far from stable. When the second stanza describes her

sensitive hearing and the herdsman family listening to the blowing wind and the stranger’s

footsteps, the lines engender an illusion that she is one of the family members listening. Then the

beginning of the following stanza suddenly reveals that “I” is the stranger being listened to, thus

distancing the female poet from the grasslands. Nonetheless, such a distance is soon reduced;

toward the end, the feelings and verses of “I” are incorporated back into the grasslands.

Obviously, the female poet’s relationship with the grasslands is fraught with mysterious

twists and turns as the account unfolds. However, Li Cheng’en’s simultaneous engagement with

and detachment from a Tibetan woman’s life demonstrated in her photographic self-images in

“A Trip to the Tibetan Regions (Continued)” provides crucial clues to reading these unexpected

twists and turns. Above all, the very existence of these photos testifies to Li Cheng’en’s

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physically being on the grasslands at least at some point in her life. This is an important fact that

justifies a personal reading of the poem. Then the mystery of the perplexing relationship between

the female poet and the grasslands begins to unravel. The initial association between the

grasslands and the patriarch shows Li Cheng’en’s awareness that an authentic pastoral life

belongs to someone else. However, she is able to get a feel for it by situating herself into the

pastoral scenario through her keen bodily sensations, such as sensitive hearing and feeling, a

process not unlike her dressing up as a Tibetan woman and pretending to run a Tibetan

household in her photo series. Nonetheless, similar to the playful expressions on her face that

detach her from the role-play in the photos, Li Cheng’en is clearheaded enough to remember that

her fleeting taste of the pastoral life is limited. She never really lives such a life, and cannot be

trapped by it. What she actually owns is her personal experience of an encounter with different

lives, which becomes “the verses I jot down” 我随手记下的诗句, this self-reflexive poem under

examination. Li Cheng’en’s photographic self-images help us unravel the poem’s flow of

thought. Like the photo series’ exploration of the rich meanings of womanhood, the poem

acknowledges the embodied nature of cross-cultural encounter and handles differences with

respect (“tender and timid feeling” 柔软而胆怯的感觉).

In addition to explicating, or altering, the female poet’s intriguing relationship with the

grasslands, the photo series also directly address the poem’s view of the female body. For

example, the lines “My body is also like the land of green, secretly overflowing/ my body” 我的

身体也像一地的绿色，悄悄溢出了/ 我的身体 are ambiguous in meaning. Is it the greenness

or the body itself that overflows the body? One possible reading is that the greenness of the

grasslands is so vast that it overflows the body, and another is that the body is stretched by the

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vast grasslands and thus overflows its previous form. It is even possible that the ambiguity is

deliberately kept to encompass both readings. However, considering the photo series’ enrichment

of womanhood by experiencing a different life and its simultaneous appreciation and

transcendence of norms of female beauty and virtue, the stretched body in the second reading

bears special significance. Here, Li Cheng’en is using the grasslands to enrich her own bodily

experiences while keeping an eye on her original body, which is overflowing but still shedding

new light on the pastoral life from the perspective of urban sensibilities. This is but one example

where Li Cheng’en’s photographic self-images become an intrinsic meaning-making element of

her poetry, but the explanatory power of the photos applies to her other poems as well. In using

the photos, Li Cheng’en experiments with the technologically mediated human visions, exerts

agency in negotiating the reading of her female body and her poems, and thus upholds her

female subjectivity.

As a matter of fact, the interplay of the visual and female subjectivity is not

unprecedented in contemporary Chinese women’s poetry praxis and theorization. In terms of

praxis, women’s confessional style poetry of the 1980s, for example, is fraught with empowering

female glances, such as a secretive glance that is able to drain away another person’s energy, a

prospect from behind the window that is receptive to everything, and eyes that defy another

person looking directly at them.75 In terms of theorization, Zhai Yongming declares in her

———————————— 75 These images come from the following verses respectively: “The woman in the black gown comes carrying the night/ her darting, secretive glance exhausts me” 穿黑裙的女人夤夜而来/ 她秘密的一瞥使我精疲力竭 (“Premonition” 预感 in Zhai Yongming 2008a, tr. Michael Day); “Looking out of this window/ you know, you have everything” 从此窗望出去/ 你知道 应有尽有 (“American Women’s Magazine” 美国妇女杂志 in Lu Yimin 陆忆敏 2015: 3); “Midnight, after the sound of the ebb faded away/ your avoiding eyes remained” 午夜，退潮的声音过去后/ 剩下你回避的目光 (“Women” 女人 in Hai Nan 海男 2017).

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important essay “Black Night Consciousness” 黑夜的意识 that “As half of the human race, the

female sex is faced at birth with an entirely different world [from that of the male sex]. Her first

glimpse of the world is necessarily tinged by her feelings and perception, even by a secret

psychology of resistance.”76 Both the poetry texts and metatext suggest that a woman’s ability to

look at the world with her own eyes, and to present herself in ways that negotiate with the world

how she should be perceived, entails a female subjectivity.

Li Cheng’en’s poetry exerts a female subjectivity through powerful looks and self-

presentations, but what sets her efforts apart from those of her predecessors is that she not only

does it textually, she also embraces the conventions of the blog genre. This is not to say that

poetry published in print does not make use of features of the print medium at all,77 but that Li

Cheng’en’s manipulation of the visual aspect of the digital medium stands out significantly, most

obviously in the spatial dynamic between her self-statements and poetry texts and the cross-

media reproduction of her photographic self-images juxtaposed with poems. By exploring the

interplay of the visual and female subjectivity, Li Cheng’en integrates the blog and the female

perception/presentation and uses the former to enhance the empowering effects of the latter.

The Networked and Female Authorship

One concern that many women poets have shared since the 1990s is how to continue

addressing the persistent patriarchal oppression of women and depreciation of their poetry, while

———————————— 76 Michael Day’s translation in Zhai 2008a, my own emphasis.

77 Indeed, poetry anthologies tend to include more photographic images of poets and poetry-related events in recent years (Inwood 2014: 102).

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not generating new forms of domination among women. On the one hand, despite women poets’

continued efforts to stress the interrelationship between gender and writing, gender differences

and relations are not usually seen as a condition that shapes and is shaped by poets’ entire

oeuvre. Instead, the woman question is frequently reduced to one poetic theme among many

others, and women’s poetry is treated as a substandard subcategory of Chinese poetry.78 On the

other hand, women poets have to avoid replicating works in the confessional style (Zhai 1989:

11; Dai et al. 2000: 95), and to be wary of (mis)representing other women.79 In reaction to this

concern, along with other factors mentioned in the introductory section of this chapter, some

women poets turned from explicitly addressing gender experiences to expanding to other topics

and experimenting with writing techniques (Jeanne Hong Zhang 2008: 25, 92-105), while not

abandoning the mutual constitution between language and gender experiences, psychologies and

perspectives. At the same time, women poets continued both to seek individual styles and the

expression of individual experiences and to embrace the community of women’s poetry journals

(Dai et al. 2000: 114-117).

With the advent of new information and communication technologies, whose very names

(Internet, or World Wide Web) literally foreground the web of information connections and thus

the (by-no-means neutral) mediation of the web of interpersonal connections, new possibilities

———————————— 78 For example, some male critics’ misreading of female consciousness reduces women’s poetry to the claim of a female identity (Zhai 2008b: 116; Dai et al. 2000: 95). When a woman poet is praised, she is often compared with other women poets rather than poets in general, and her poetry may even be praised for being not like something from a woman’s hand (e.g., Huang/Bu 2003: 81; Zhai 2008c: 21). The underlying message is that women’s poetry is a small, inferior segment of the general (male-dominated) poetry scene.

79 Although from the beginning Chinese women’s confessional style poetry paid great attention to individual experiences, it still seeks to represent socio-historical experiences of women as a collective (demonstrated in works such as Zhai Yongming’s poem series Peaceful Village 静安庄). Therefore, the tension/connection between the individual and the collective, and among individuals become inevitable.

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and strategies of dealing with relations across and within genders in poetry and poetry criticism

have arisen. As far as writing is concerned, one of the most contested fields the Internet enters

into is that of authorship. Jing Wang’s (2011) observation about prosumers and cocreation is

relevant: being networked, the roles of Internet users have been fundamentally changed from

passive consumers (of commodities or information) to proactive creators who participate in the

production process of/with what they consume—they become “prosumers,” who are the new

trendsetters.80 Although Jing Wang’s observation primarily concerns amateurs with advanced

digital literacy, the concept of the prosumer can be applied equally well to the technologically-

savvy poet Li Cheng’en, who blogs through reposting and reproduction.

If one considers poetry as a self-contained entity that can be published in multiple

platforms, the notion of authorship remains unchallenged.81 However, if one sees the poet’s

personal poetry blog as a unit, poetry and surrounding texts and images as user generated content

(UGC) conforming to the blog’s generic conventions, and the poet as the consumer of Sina’s

blog service, this perspective points to a different space of meaning making, where the poet’s

authorship is destabilized, thus requiring a radical reexamination of the poetry. Is the personal

poetry blog authored by the poet or coauthored by the poet and Sina Corporation or the Sina blog

platform? Whereas much has been discussed in the previous sections regarding the intersection

———————————— 80 The concept of the prosumer, or the consumer-cum-producer, was first brought up by Alvin Toffler in 1984, referring to the consumer who participates in the production or service process, and thus blurs the boundary between consumption and production/service and brings the latter into the former. The prosumer is exemplified by the do-it-yourselfers. Toffler (1984: 288) claims that the rise of the prosumer profoundly alters the society’s economic structure by bringing “the end of marketization”—“a civilization that is dependent on the market but is no longer consumed by the need to build, extend, elaborate, and integrate this structure.”

81 Though the poet’s intertextual references may theoretically complicate the authorship issue even before the dawn of the Internet, poems can still safely bear the poet’s name in practice without eliciting copyright problems.

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of Li Cheng’en’s poetry writing and Sina blog’s generic conventions and web design, further

complicating the question in Li Cheng’en’s case is that the reposting of others’ commentaries on

her poetry and others’ interviews with her constitutes a significant portion of her blog posts

(reaching more than 15%, by rough estimate),82 and that quite a number of her posted poems are

juxtaposed with texts and photographs that Li Cheng’en has accessed online. As a result, one

more question emerges: should the blog be considered coauthored by multiple individuals and

institutions or edited by the poet? Taking the ongoing discourse of contemporary Chinese

women’s poetry into account, one can ultimately raise the question: how do these questions, or

the apparent loss of authorial control indicated by these questions, contribute to women poets’

rejection of the wholesale depreciation of their works and avoid their own domination over other

women or individuals?

I would suggest that one possible way to answer this question is to see the destabilization

of single authorship as an elimination of the boundaries between part and whole, the individual

and the collective, the subject and the object, and thus to dispel the myths of any form either of

universal truth or relativism and to establish a network of what Donna Haraway (1991) calls

“situated knowledges”: visions generated from embodied, mediated, and particular nodes in

“webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology”

(Haraway 1991: 191), visions that admittedly produce only partial understandings of “very

different—and power-differentiated—communities” (Haraway 1991: 187), yet visions that call

———————————— 82 About half of the posts on Li Cheng’en’s blog are poems, about twenty percent are announcements of her poetry publication or award winning, about ten percent are her notes on poetry and film, and the rest are miscellaneous notes or other reposts. I do not include blog viewers’ comments here because Li Cheng’en has disabled this function.

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for responsibility in seeing and enabling practices from specific positions. In other words,

challenging single authorship points to situated accounts rather than narratives from a God’s-eye

view or devoid of values, accounts that are undeniably limited but aim at connections and

objectivity. For contemporary Chinese women’s poetry, such accounts seek to dispense with

notions of a genderless writing that trivializes women’s gender-specific writings, to delve into

the numerous dimensions of women’s poetry, and to put women into fruitful conversations with

the world and with each other.

The commentaries that Li Cheng’en lavishly reposts are by poets, critics, and poetry

journal editors, and treat various aspects of her poetry. The commenters include: the woman poet

An Qi 安琪, an important figure in the discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry,

whose poetry matured after the prime days of the confessional style poetry and before the takeoff

of the Internet; Zhang Deming, one of the coiners of the term “Neo-beauty” writing; Fa Xing 发

星, poet and critic who theorized the concept of “regional poetry writing” 地域诗歌写作, which

emphasizes the connection between poetry writing and distinctive local cultures; Tang Xiaodu 唐

晓渡 and Cheng Guangwei 程光炜, both established critics of contemporary Chinese poetry;

Ding Cheng 丁成, Yang Qingxiang 杨庆祥, and Xiao Shui 肖水, all post-1980s poets; Yu Jian

于坚, Zang Di 臧棣, and Wang Jiaxin 王家新, some leading figures in contemporary Chinese

poetry scene, to name a few.

The commenters examine Li Cheng’en’s poetry according to their own fields of expertise

or areas of concern. As a result, her poetry takes on a multifaceted character, including a feminist

consciousness, cinematic techniques, strong ties to local cultures, an encounter between the

classical and the modern, and a mix of history and everyday life. Such a wide spectrum of

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features suggests that although the impact of gender experiences can be found throughout Li

Cheng’en’s poems, a woman poet’s writings are more than an expression of her gender identity.

Meanwhile, these commentaries not only establish common poetic pursuits between Li Cheng’en

and the commenters, but also attempt to group Li Cheng’en with other poets, such as other

women poets, Neo-beauty poets, post-1980 poets, regional poets, etc. Interestingly, some

commenters have expressed their uneasiness with such grouping. For example, Xiong Yan 熊焱

(2010) calls her an “exception” (yishu 异数), who does not follow young poets’ common

practice of joining a clique to fish for fame, but “writes quietly and effectively” (anjing er

youxiao de xiezuo 安静而有效的写作); Han Dong 韩东 calls her a lone wolf (chi dushi de 吃独

食的, literally meaning eating alone without sharing with others), and remarks that she “comes

from nowhere, but seems to have inherited the orthodox” (yeluzi chushen, you sihu chengjie le

zhengzongdatong 野路子出身，又似乎承接了正宗大统) (Anon. 2014b). Both the attempt to

group Li Cheng’en in multiple ways and the tendency to single her out due to the difficulty to

track her literary lineages testify to the intricate web of connections around her and her poetry, a

web so extensive that it does not limit her to certain small circles, a web so abundant in

connections that it maintains potentials for solidarity and collective efforts. As a result, the

idiosyncrasy of Li Cheng’en’s poetry and its interrelationship with other bodies of poetry

indicate that the discourse of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry is so heterogeneous that it

cannot be essentialized and criticized as a whole, while still allowing for the formation of

coalitions among women poets and their works.

Whereas Li Cheng’en’s extensive reposting of others’ commentaries of her poetry

appears to suggest a partial relinquishing of authorship, it does not mean that she fully submits to

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the authority of her commenters. First and foremost, it is up to the woman poet herself whether

to post commentaries, which ones to post, and which parts to post (though theoretically, the

intervention of Sina editors’ censorship of blog content should not be overlooked). That is to say,

not only do the commenters examine her works, she also screens their words in an act of

authorial intervention.

One intriguing feature of Li Cheng’en’s screening of the commentaries is that she not

only includes diverse comments but also allows contradictory remarks. For example, regarding

the femininity of her writing, Xu Han 徐寒 (2008) comments, “her poetry presents women poets’

distinctive delicacy, sensitivity, and affectionateness,” whereas Xiong Yan (2010) claims that Li

Cheng’en impresses him by demonstrating “a masculine, tough style in her poetry as a woman

poet.” In terms of the female subjectivity in her writing, Qian Gang 钱刚 (2008) remarks, “she

observes the world, the times, and complex human nature through women’s intuition,” and Huo

Junming 霍俊明 (2008) points out that the female figures in Li Cheng’en’s poetry form “a

matrilineage that displays her unique female consciousness, and her reflection on the ontology of

women’s fates.” Peng Min 彭敏 (2010), by contrast, asserts that Li Cheng’en “does not

intentionally foreground female characteristics.” By including these sorts of multivalenced

remarks, Li Cheng’en conveys the message that she does not necessarily agree with everything

she reposts—an indication of authorial agency independent from her commenters. In fact, the

reposted commentaries are often preceded by Li Cheng’en’s acknowledgment of the

commenter’s time and attention and followed by a brief introduction to the commenter. As a

result, the commentaries are visually bracketed and separated from other parts of Li Cheng’en’s

blog. While the acknowledgment is a polite gesture, it also distances the poet from the

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commenter. By giving the background on the commenter, Li Cheng’en does not simply submit to

the commenter’s authority, but uses his/her authority to boost her own poethood, suggesting that

her writings are so meaningful that they attract the attention of multiple commenters from

varying critical perspectives. Through reposting contradictory comments, Li Cheng’en also

attempts to elicit readers’ reflections on her poetry, especially regarding criticisms offered in the

commentaries. Although this does not always directly lead to debates among her commenters, Li

Cheng’en is at least strategically using it for self-promotion—another accentuation of her

authorship of the blog.

Another telling sign of her authorial intervention lies in her personal connections with her

commenters. Quite a few commentaries not only engage in close readings of Li Cheng’en’s

poems; they also disclose their authors’ closeness to the poet. For example, Qiu Huadong 邱华栋

(2008) modestly confesses that he “knows a thing or two” (lüe zhi yier 略知一二) about Li

Cheng’en’s personal situation; Xu Han and Xiao Shui recall that they first met Li Cheng’en at

the online poetry forum Tianya Poetry Society and the second Chinese Poetry Festival,

respectively; Zeng Xiuhua 曾秀华, Lin Li 林莉, and Deng Xiaoyan 邓晓燕 were all Li

Cheng’en’s classmates at the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Institute. Besides the explicit

mentioning of friendship, the forms of address between Li Cheng’en and her commenters,

especially women commenters, are often tinged with a sense of intimacy. For instance, Li

Cheng’en addresses Hengxing Yanzhi横行胭脂 as “beautiful elder sister Yanzhi” 胭脂美姐,

Zeng Xiuhua as “elder sister Xiuhua” 秀华姐, and “elder school sister Zeng” 曾学姐, and Wu

Xiaocha as “beautiful talented women Wu Xiaocha” 美才女巫小茶. Li Cheng’en’s commenters

also comfortably address her by her given name, or as “younger poet sister Cheng’en” 成恩诗妹

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(Li Z. 2016). Such a demonstration of personal connection adds authenticity to the commentaries

by following the Mencian tradition of “knowing the persons before commenting on their works”

(zhiren lunshi 知人论世).83

Meanwhile, the fact of Li Cheng’en’s befriending her commenters or eliciting

commentaries from her friends has practical consequences. Being on good terms with the poet,

the commenters usually offer positive appraisals and minimal criticism. Established poets and

critics express praise and encouragement and her peers present admiration. When shortcomings

are pointed out, the criticism is gentle and framed as a general problem among contemporary

poets and not for Li Cheng’en in particular. For example, regarding Li Cheng’en’s poems on the

Bian River, Xiao Shui (2009) writes, “these verses become cultural footnotes to the river.

However, they are not enough to thrill us”; and on her poetry collection Conscience in the Spring

Breeze, he criticizes: “Conscience in poetry is insufficient, whether it is mine, yours, or some

poet Li Cheng’en’s. . . . I expect something more durable and profound from Li Cheng’en.” In

his criticism, Xiao is rather vague about what exactly is lacking in Li Cheng’en’s poetry, thus

undermining his argument. His advocacy for more conscience directs attention away from Li

Cheng’en to poets in general, and thus is by no means a strong attack. Therefore, by maintaining

personal connections with her commenters, Li Cheng’en makes her presence felt on the content

of the commentaries appearing on her blog.

However, what is even more important in Li Cheng’en’s social-networking with her

commenters is what Michel Hockx (2011: 127) calls “a poetics of intimacy and immediacy”

———————————— 83 In his discussion of friendship, Mencius (2003: 237) asks, “When one reads the poems and writings of the ancients, can it be right not to know something about them as men?” His point was later used to support an important approach of literary criticism that reads writings along with the author’s biography.

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which prioritizes effective communication between the poet and his/her readership. The more

active the poet is on the contemporary Chinese poetry scene, the deeper s/he is wired into the

network of poets and critics, the more symbolic capital s/he (and his/her texts) accumulates. In

other words, Li Cheng’en’s personal connections (especially those with other women authors)

themselves work into the meaning-making process of her poetry, thus solidifying her female

authorship.

Whereas Li Cheng’en’s meticulous reposting of commentaries on her poetry avoids the

peril of submitting to patriarchal authority by maintaining personal relationships with other

people on the poetry scene, she also avoids the pitfall of lording over others by juxtaposing her

poems with textual accounts and photographic images of others’ life experiences. If the

confessional style of poetry that expresses individual experiences and feelings in highly symbolic

and subversive language is not the only poetic way for women to speak up today, what are some

other possibilities? How can a woman poet make her own experiences more relatable to those of

others and thus endow her writings with far-reaching meanings? How does a woman poet

articulate her perceptions of others’ experiences? Li Cheng’en’s lending out part of her

authorship may suggest a way out.

Here I take the poems “The Cold Spell in Later Spring” 倒春寒 and “Jade Tree (Yushu)

Facing the Wind” 玉树临风 as examples. The former was posted as a separate entry after Li

Cheng’en’s reposting of poet Shucai’s 树才 open letter to the head of the Peking Union Medical

College Hospital 北京协和医院, in which he demands an explanation for the sudden death of his

preemie daughter after an eight-day stay in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

The latter was posted with a series of photographs from multiple news agencies capturing

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disaster scenes in Yushu after the region was hit by a strong earthquake. In these examples, Li

Cheng’en is not simply quoting the text and reposting images; instead, her poems are triggered

and partly shaped and explicated by the open letter and the photographs, a fact that suggests that

the woman poet has ceded partial authorship to other agents. Moreover, she uses the text and

images to join conversations on topics that deeply and widely concern(ed) Chinese citizens—

hospital-patient disputes and natural disasters—and contributes to making the topics even hotter.

In this sense, the prosumer poet produces poetry after reading sensational news and contributes

to the further spread and impact of that news. Although this move seems to hint at the

decentralization of the poet, it effectively opens up another way of speaking: these are the

common things that the poet, the victims, the survivors, other Chinese citizens, and some other

people in the world are exposed to. No matter how mediated the poet is in experiencing the

incidents, she can make connections by sharing things about the incidents and validate her

observations by recognizing the indirectness of her experiences and disclosing how her own

background shaped her views.

Written shortly after the events, both poems are fairly straightforward. I quote the full

poems here to keep their flows intact.

The Cold Spell in Late Spring: To Poet Shucai and Lin Yaping, Husband and Wife

Sunshine and cold wind are mixed together, the shriek in the wind and the rippling water in the spring pond outside Beijing are gathered on my numb face. The face collects the cold spell in late spring collects the blades that were forgotten last year I will not forget the pond that was frozen to death last winter nor the infant that suddenly disappeared in the NICU at Union Medical Hospital

this spring She was an angel, healthy for the first eight days

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showered by the blessings of some poets, but now in heaven prematurely All the poets raged. In the shrieking wind of the cold spell in late spring they collected tears and angry wind, and stormed to the Union Medical hospital The cold spell in late spring poured into the hearts of poet Shucai and Lin Yaping Their angel died in Union Medical Hospital for unknown reasons A commonly seen death, firmly grabbed the lives of the parents The life-robbing hospital stood on the high moral ground, and this is the human

world The cold spell that passed the end of spring withdrew the angel’s life Life, even the willows revive, even the pond has a life only that the poet’s child strayed into the NICU at Union Medical Hospital The cold spell in late spring blew into the NICU at Union Medical Hospital, the

baby cried The angels in white misconducted, the hospital misconducted, the head of the

hospital misconducted What a delinquent spring, a life-robbing spring On behalf of the hospital, nurses, doctors, and the head of the hospital, the cold

spell in late spring took away the baby, took away the poet’s tears, took away conscience and

morality The cold spell in late spring took away the infant of poet Shucai and Lin Yaping without any explanation. What kind of germs is this “kind of undetermined germs” after all? The head of the hospital keeps silence, a silence colder than the cold spell in late spring like an ice-cold point of a blade, stabbed into the cold spell in late spring A joy that had just begun suddenly stopped at Union Medical Hospital The shriek of the cold spell in late spring told the human world: the baby’s life was lost to Union Medical Hospital lost to the lack of responsibility and conscience in the NICU at Union Medical

Hospital 倒春寒

——致诗人树才、林亚萍夫妇 阳光与寒风交相混杂，风中的尖叫 与北京城外池塘里的春水晃荡，一齐聚到 我麻木的脸上。脸收集倒春寒 收集去年曾经遗忘的刀片

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我不会忘记去年冬天冻死的池塘 以及今年春天在协和医院新生儿室突然消失的婴儿 她是一个天使，她前八天健康 得到了一部分诗人的祝福，而现在她提早去了天堂 所有诗人都愤怒了，在倒春寒里尖叫的风声 收集泪水与愤怒的风声，齐聚协和医院 倒春寒灌进诗人树才、林亚萍夫妇的心里 他们的天使在协和医院里莫名地死亡 一次医院司空见惯的死亡，死死纠住了父母的命 夺人性命的医院在良知中高高在上，这就是人世 在春天穿过的倒春寒提走天使的命 命，杨柳都能复活，池塘都有命 而诗人的孩子却误入了协和医院新生儿室 倒春寒吹进协和医院新生儿室，婴儿啼哭 白衣天使失职，医院失职，院长失职 一个失职的春天，夺人性命的春天 倒春寒代表了医院、护士、医生与院长 收走婴儿，收走诗人的泪水，收走良知与道德 倒春寒收走了诗人树才、林亚萍夫妇的婴儿 没有任何解释，“不能确定的病菌” 到底是什么病菌？院长沉默，比倒春寒还要寒冷的沉默 像冰冷的尖刀插在这个春天，插在倒春寒上 一场刚刚开始的喜悦突然中止在协和医院 倒春寒呼呼的尖叫告诉人世：婴儿的命送给了协和 送给了责任与良知缺失的协和新生儿室 (Li Cheng’en 2009a) Jade Tree Facing the Wind Oh the wind blows to Jade Tree, blows up the battered skull blows up the beautiful hair tangled with the dust of ruins This skull is dead, but the beautiful hair is still alive This is a spring in which Jade Tree faces the wind I look up into the starry sky and see faces of the suffering people weeping, with tears frozen into stars of suffering in the nightly sky

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Oh the wind blows to Jade Tree, blows up the ripples on Qinghai Lake blows up the hoarse throats of the flowers, throats that are filled with dirt The throats are dead, but the songs of the flowers are still alive This is a spring in which Jade Tree faces the wind Some wild flowers on the hillside have bloomed, others are about to My hands cannot reach Jade Tree, I cannot touch the flowers of Jade Tree Oh the wind blows to Jade Tree, blows up the stiff feet The feet are dead, no more can they run across Jade Tree Stuck out of the back of a van, the feet are tied up like wood This is a spring in which Jade Tree faces the wind I come across a bird that suddenly tumbles down in the morning garden I caress its disheveled feathers, it is still breathing, with its beak open Oh the wind blows to Jade Tree, blows up my tears tears saltier than Qinghai Lake, and paler than the stars My tears contain the saltiness and blandness of humankind This is a spring in which Jade Tree faces the wind My hands and feet are still intact, but my skull is buried in the dust Suffering pain with Jade Tree in the wind, squeaking 玉树临风 风啊向玉树吹，吹起压扁的头颅 吹起废墟上灰尘纠结的秀发 这颗头颅已死，但秀发还活着 这是一个玉树临风的春天 夜晚我仰望星空，看见受苦人的脸 在流泪，在夜空凝固成苦难的星辰 风啊向玉树吹，吹起青海湖的波浪 吹起花儿沙哑的喉咙，喉咙里全是沙尘 喉咙已死，但花儿的歌声还活着 这是一个玉树临风的春天 山坡上的野花有的开了，有的正在等待开放 我的手伸不到玉树，我抚摸不到玉树的花儿

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风啊向玉树吹，吹起僵硬的双脚 双脚已死，再不能在玉树奔跑 伸在面包车后面的双脚像树木一样被捆住了 这是一个玉树临风的春天 我在清晨遇见园子里一只突然扑倒的鸟 我抚摸她零乱的羽毛，体息尚存，尖嘴张开 风啊向玉树吹，吹起我的泪水 泪水比青海湖咸，比星光黯淡 我的泪水收藏了人类的咸与淡 这是一个玉树临风的春天 我的手与脚都还在，我的头颅却在灰尘里 与玉树一起临风疼痛，嘎嘎作响 (Li Cheng’en 2010d) The first poem compares the (perceived) wrong that the Peking Union Medical College

Hospital did to the poet Shucai, his wife Lin Yaping, and their newborn to a cold spell in late

spring, which usually comes on suddenly after the weather has already warmed up. The rise and

plummet of temperature highlights the stark contrast between the baby girl’s birth and death, the

couple’s initial joy and the hospital’s tragic malpractice. The second poem plays with the

idiomatic Chinese expression “yushu linfeng” 玉树临风 (jade tree in the wind). The expression

is normally used to describe a young man’s outstanding physical appearance that matches his

talents and that resembles a jade tree dancing gracefully in the breeze. However, in this case, Li

Cheng’en uses “Jade Tree” as the literal meaning of Yushu, the earthquake-stricken region in

Qinghai, and uses the wind as a metaphor for the disaster that shook the region.

In both cases, the victims—the dead and the severely injured—and their loved ones were

not always able to have their voices heard. Some lost their lives or fell unconscious; some were

overwhelmed by grief; some spoke a different language (Tibetan); some were cut off from mass

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communications; still others failed to attract public attention in the explosion of information. Not

being one of them, Li Cheng’en neither speaks as them—and thus further silencing them by

putting words in their mouths—nor does she get trapped in the dead end of being unable to speak

for them. Instead, she articulates her observations of and feelings for them, and these

observations and feelings are relational (not relative) and mediated.

In “The Cold Spell in Late Spring,” Li Cheng’en is closely connected to the lost baby girl

through her poet father. Because of this personal connection, Li Cheng’en allows herself to side

with the poet’s family and indulges in directing condemnation at the hospital for its negligence

(not to mention for corruption, which afflicts the country’s medical care system). Therefore, she

is among the poets who bestowed blessings on the baby girl at her birth and burst into rage upon

her unexplained death. She is among the poets who metaphorically “stormed to Union Medical

Hospital.” In fact, her reposting of Shucai’s open letter and her posting of this poem were

effective forms of support for Shucai; it helped to attract more public attention to the incident

and to press the hospital for a response.84 In other words, this poem was born out of a close

personal relationship, candidly reflects the relationship and strengthens it in return.

In another poem about patient-hospital tensions, by contrast, the old woman Li Cheng’en

depicts is a stranger and she expresses caution about what she says: “I cannot casually tell the

truth/ Everything that comes out of my mouth/ bears my personal mark” 我不能随便说出真相/

凡是我说出来的/ 都打着我的标签; “I’ve faintly heard about his history of being black-hearted/

but I keep my lips buttoned” 我隐隐约约听到了他的黑心史/ 但我守口如瓶 (Li Cheng’en

———————————— 84 In Li Cheng’en’s comments on Shucai’s open letter on his blog, she urges him to take good care of his wife and assures him of the power of mass media (Shucai 2009).

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2011a). While saying that one is not going to say something is a form of objection, the stark

contrast between the harsh accusations in “The Cold Spell in Late Spring” and the promised

control of words in this poem, suggests that the poet’s relations to the parties involved condition

her poetic expressions.

Similarly, in “Jade Tree Facing the Wind,” Li Cheng’en has no personal ties to victims of

the Yushu earthquake, and she frankly admits her distance from them, but she hints that that

distance only enhances her pain: “My hands cannot reach Jade Tree, I cannot touch the flowers

of Jade Tree”; “My hands and feet are still intact.” The poet’s lack of close ties to the victims

indicates that the poem was unlikely written to relieve their pain; instead, it served as an outlet

and comfort to Li Cheng’en and her readers, who were not physically affected but were

emotionally disturbed by news coverage of the disaster. Again, Li Cheng’en’s interpersonal

relations shape the ways she writes.

The poems quoted above both betray the fact that the poet’s experience with the incidents

is mediated. We can see this, above all, in their juxtaposition with other texts and images.

Meanwhile, the poems themselves also bear signs of mediation. Wind (feng 风), as a medium,

plays an important role in both poems, not only pointing to the dark side of humanity and to

natural disaster, but also symbolizing the spread of news (as in the phrase “get wind of

something” 风闻)—through the open letter and the news photographs. Comparing “The Cold

Spell in Late Spring” with Shucai’s open letter originally posted on his Sina blog alongside

pages of reader comments, one finds the poem’s heavy reliance on other texts. On the general

content level, the open letter and comment pages contain all the information of the incident that

Li Cheng’en selects to keep in the poem, including the progress of the baby girl’s condition, the

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poets’ reactions, and the hospital’s attitude. On the sentence level, she even paraphrases Shucai’s

question, which quotes the doctors’ words: “What kind of germs is this ‘kind of undetermined

germs’ after all?” On the word level, the two terms “responsibility” 责任 and “conscience”良知

that Li Cheng’en chooses to end the poem with are the key words that keep surging up in the

open letter and the comments. The poem’s reliance on the open letter suggests that Li Cheng’en

experiences the whole incident through the mediation of Sina blog posts and comments.

In the same vein, “Jade Tree Facing the Wind” also converses with the news

photographs. First, some stanzas realistically describe the disaster scenes in the photographs. For

instance, the picture immediately following the poem is described in the fifth stanza. The photo

captures a minivan that transports corpses, which are wrapped in quilts and tied up, with heads in

the trunk and feet sticking out (Figure 16).

Figure 16: A news photo of the earthquake disaster scene that Li Cheng’en reposted.

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Second, the way the poet sees the disaster bears resemblance to the news coverage. Grieving for

the victims, Li Cheng’en never allows the pain for death to overwhelm the hope of life. She

repeatedly alleges that “[t]his skull is dead, but the beautiful hair is still alive”; “[t]he throats are

dead, but the songs of the flowers are still alive”; though the bird that embodies Yushu tumbles,

“it is still breathing, with its beak open.” Such an emphasis on a strong will to live complies well

with mainstream news media’s focus on disaster response—lives rescued and suffering relieved.

By describing the content of the news photographs and absorbing the ethos of news coverage, Li

Cheng’en keeps the signs of mediation in this poem. It is through the admission of relationship

and mediation that she is able to avoid domination over the victims and to speak with power,

respect, and authenticity.

Whereas the tragedies addressed in the two poems have shaken up the worlds of those

immediately involved, to experience the tragedies through media coverage and through people

she knows is also an intrinsic part of the life of an emerging woman poet like Li Cheng’en—not

unlike how surfing the Internet constitutes the daily life of urban youth. Relational and mediated

as it is, the experience is no less genuine and unique. The poet uses it to create poetry that is very

distinctive of her female authorship. In both poems, Li Cheng’en does not pretend to know what

the victims feel, but her being a woman in her particular situation does shape her perception and

presentation of the events.

“The Cold Spell in Late Spring” begins with the image of a pond (among other images),

which at first glance appears irrelevant to the event. However, the poet adds the detail that the

pond is located “outside Beijing.” This detail reminds readers of Li Cheng’en’s residence in the

suburbs of Beijing, and demonstrates the woman poet’s self-reflexivity with regard to the event.

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Indeed, Li Cheng’en (2008b) wrote a poem called “Pond” 池塘 the previous year. In the poem,

upon seeing the pond, a wandering daughter (referring to Li Cheng’en herself) starts to miss her

aged mother who used to wash vegetables in the pond. This highly personal connotation suggests

that although Li Cheng’en has no means to know the baby girl’s sorrow of dying prematurely

without seeing her mother, or Lin Yaping’s anguish of losing a child conceived with much

difficulty at the age of forty-three, she tries to relate through her own mother-daughter bond and

the agony of separation and aging. She is translating the incident into her own life based on

affinity and association rather than natural givens, resulting in a perception that simultaneously

bears the woman poet’s personal mark and shares her concern for the public issue. In so doing,

she demonstrates a possible way of speaking: by making connections rather than representing

others.

Throughout the poem, Li Cheng’en creates a documentary flavor by using plain

language, not withholding the names of the parties involved, keeping the details (such as the

number of days of the baby girl’s hospital stay and the words of the doctors), and being

unequivocal about her perception of the wrongdoings of the medical personnel (such as being

hypocritical, neglecting duties, and covering up the truth). At the same time, she does not bother

being rational, a much-valued attribute in phallogocentric cultures. Although it is perfectly fine

for women to be rational, Li Cheng’en values her right to lose her cool. Besides dumping blame

on the hospital, she employs abundant ironies and repetitions. For instance, while preemies are

supposed to go to the NICU, Li Cheng’en uses the word “astray” 误入, as if the baby girl went to

the wrong place, to offset the NICU at Union Medical Hospital as a slaughtering place, the exact

opposite of what it should be. The repeated mentioning of “the cold spell in late spring,”

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shrieking wind, “hospital” 医院, “misconduct” 失职, “take” 收走, and “life” 命 generates a swirl

of intense emotion that haunts the poem. Li Cheng’en is not detached from the incident, and she

preserves in the poem her rage as a woman friend of the family. Both the documentary and

irrational features of the poem contribute to a poetics of “strong objectivity,”85 a poetic

expression that does not pretend to have grasped the value-neutral universal truth, but a partial

yet responsible account of truth from a locatable standpoint.

By the same token, “Jade Tree Facing the Wind” deals with Li Cheng’en’s situated

experience with the Yushu earthquake in her distance from the victims, rather than representing

the victims on the basis of universal human nature. The poem begins with a crushed skull with

beautiful hair, and ends with “my skull” buried in the dust. In most cases, “beautiful hair” 秀发

refers to a young woman’s long, soft, and silky hair, which Li Cheng’en herself has. The

mentioning of the beautiful hair and the correspondence between the beginning and end of the

poem reveal her self-reflexivity and her effort to relate to the victims with her own specific

womanly traits.

At the same time, meticulous attention is given to her distress at experiencing the disaster

remotely, which is reflected in the twists and turns in the two concluding stanzas. The woman

poet sighs that her tears are “saltier than Qinghai Lake, and paler than the stars,” and that her

“hands and feet are still intact,” but her “skull is buried in the dust.” The contrast between

“saltiness” 咸 and “paleness” or “blandness” 淡, suggests that the woman poet is aware that no

———————————— 85 I borrowed the term “strong objectivity” from Sandra Harding (1991: 138-163), who coined it to refer to a kind of objectivity in scientific research, which reflects on the social situations of the researchers and the relation between the subject and the object. Strong objectivity is contrasted with “weak objectivity”—value-neutral universal truth—and “its mirror-linked twin, judgmental relativism.”

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matter how deeply she is disturbed by the victims’ sufferings, there is a huge physical and

cultural distance between them. She doesn’t try to conceal the fact that she and they are different

and that she is not physically injured like them, but she cultivates herself as someone willing to

translate their sufferings through her own experiences. To her readers—onlookers to the disaster

like herself—she offers an example and invites them to relate to the event in their own ways.

Facing the disaster, Li Cheng’en pairs images of softness (e.g., beautiful hair, songs, and

wild flowers) with those of toughness (e.g., skull, hoarse throat, and wood-like stiff feet). While

the tough images are usually linked with death and pain, the soft ones are signs of vitality.

Although seemingly polar opposite, the paired images are not to separate from each other,

because the soft ones arise from the tough ones. Such an arrangement of images suggests that in

the woman poet’s experience with the disaster, as well as in her self-perception, she is made of

both masculine and feminine characteristics. She re-attributes different values to the masculine

and the feminine that are different from social and cultural norms: while the masculine ones

allow her to feel pain, the feminine ones make her strong and resilient. This mixture and re-

evaluation of the feminine and masculine in a woman is based on the woman poet’s situated

personal selection, but its connection with the disaster allows readers to relate and attach

profound meanings to it.

Besides the careful arrangement of images, the poem is strictly structured with simple

language. Each stanza is composed of three lines, and starts with “[o]h the wind blows to Jade

Tree, blows up…” and “[t]his is a spring in which Jade Tree faces the wind,” alternately. The

simple, cyclical repetition is quite different from the complex sentences permeated with violence

in much of women’s confessional style poetry of the 1980s. With little intellectuality and an

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abundance of affect, it is a form suitable to the ongoing online conversation on disaster. It not

only resembles a lyrical, accessible style that is as old as The Book of Songs; it also corresponds

to the bodily experience of a young woman’s menstrual cycles and thus the feminine vitality

portrayed in the poem. Therefore, the selection of both images and form of this poem is highly

situated, and opens up conversations and connections. Again, the description of the news

photographs, the sincere self-reflexivity of the woman poet, and the effort to seek common

ground for conversations bespeak a poetics of “strong objectivity” that highlights the authenticity

of the female author.

Conclusion

Through discussions on poet Li Cheng’en’s strategic interactions with the blog—using

the blog’s generic convention that promotes the personal to re-evaluate the feminine,

maneuvering the visuals of the blog to negotiate with her readers on how her and her poetry

should be perceived and thus to practice her female subjectivity, reposting others’ posts to seek a

situated and relatable female authorship that simultaneously empowers the self and cares about

others—this chapter has demonstrated how she builds her female authorship and produces

meanings in her poetry by transgressing the boundaries of poetry writing and blogging, the

female body and information and communication technologies, part and whole, self and other.

By enlisting the blog as an indispensable life-changing and meaning-making actant, Li Cheng’en

develops her own ways to handle the issues that haunt the discourse of contemporary Chinese

women’s poetry. My analysis of Li Cheng’en’s blogging practices clearly reveals that poetry

crossover is happening even in places where literary experimentation is not explicitly claimed,

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such as women’s online poetry in contemporary China, and that the crossover radically changes

the way poetry should be read.

Nonetheless, my analysis of Li Cheng’en’s online poetry does not necessarily mean that

her strategies represent the only or the best ways in which women’s poetry and blogs, or other

Internet-based media genres, produce synergies. Other women poets who post their works on

blogs take radically different approaches. For example, Yu Xiuhua 余秀华, who rose to fame

overnight after her poem “Crossing over Half of China to Sleep with You” 穿过大半个中国去

睡你 went viral online, keeps her personal blog sensual and cynical—a way of manipulating the

personal aspect of the blog that is polar opposite to Li Cheng’en’s meticulous management of

self-image. Hengxing Yanzhi, another emerging woman poet, takes advantage of the space of the

blog to write long poems, and sometimes involves her readers and creates layers of meanings by

making her poems into projects under construction. By constantly adding stanzas and making

revisions, she invites readers to follow her flow of thoughts and emotions, and to witness her

process of writing. Established poets, such as Zhai Yongming, do not usually give much

attention to self-advertisement. However, they re-contextualize their previous works by posting

them on their blogs on special occasions, and thus attach new meanings to old poems.

Meanwhile, women poets also interact with media genres other than the blog through the

facilitation of the Internet. For instance, some manage both Sina blog and Sina weibo accounts;

as Wechat has become popular, poets such as Li Zhiping 李之平 and Bao Huiyi 包慧怡 post

their new or old works on their official Wechat accounts (Bao Huiyi has a joint account with her

cartoonist husband); still others, like Ni Zhan’ge 倪湛舸, choose their personal pages on

douban.com, the media-review and interest-sharing social networking website, among other

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sites. The different configurations of the various platforms and devices (such as pads and smart

phones) open up even more possible ways of crossing medial borders and engaging technologies

in women’s poetry writing.

The current study by no means exhausts the possibilities of how women authors can be

empowered through border-crossing practices on the Internet, nor does it seek to make some

sweeping statements about contemporary women’s online poetry based on one particular case.

Instead, it explores the empowering potential that crossover practices can offer to the discourse

of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry. It suggests the necessity and productivity of using

poetry crossover as a critical lens to understand and appraise this particular body of poetry.

Without considering the intermediality of women’s online poetry in China, our views of this

body of poetry will miss an intrinsic part of its meanings and do no justice to its creatively

gendered expressions. In a similar vein, other poetries may also benefit immensely from the

alternative insights that we researcher can gain through poetry crossover as a critical lens.

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Conclusion: Toward New Ways of Connection

This dissertation set out to address the question of how border-crossing experimentation

and transmission in contemporary China enables poetry to maintain socio-cultural relevance at a

time when poetry is simultaneously revered and neglected by the general public. Poetry

crossovers provide a plethora of solutions, both in terms of individual cases and as a trend, to this

historically conditioned paradox. Although I trace several major modes of poetry crossover in the

main body of this dissertation, including the dialogical, transferential, and integrational, these

border-crossing products, practices, and partnerships share some key features. First and

foremost, the poetry crossovers I have discussed here center around creating connections

between particular poetry texts and media products (ranging from high arts to popular

entertainments and everyday communications). The mutual complementation, correspondence,

contradiction, and transformation between them often generate new meanings and aesthetics,

which suggest that poetry fares well in the mediasphere of contemporary China. Second, the

copresence of multiple media and the intricate relationships between them in poetry crossovers,

often present the audience with an overwhelming amount of information and sensory

experiences. This simultaneously draws the audience into the atmosphere of the joint works and

stimulates them to ponder the immediate environments of the crossover events. While able to

ally with the poets and artists through emotional resonances, the audience is also given

opportunities to discern characteristics of the involved media, discuss the relationships between

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the poets and the artists, and ultimately articulate their own relationship with the topics addressed

in the poetry crossovers. Third, poetry crossover projects often take advantage of the

convergence of communication platforms and bring together poets, artists, performers, cultural

enterprises, media professionals, and audiences with diverse artistic interests and entertainment

tastes. In this process, poetry serves as the reason to gather, the theme to be pondered, and the

form of communication—the very substance of sociality. As the perceptions, attitudes, and roles

of the participants often change in these projects, so too do the power relations among them.

Therefore, poetry crossovers enable poetry to connect with other media, relate to individuals, and

reshape social relations in new ways that both utilize and adapt to this age of converging media

and participatory culture. These multiple layers of connection help to resolve several major

challenges to poetry’s relevance in Chinese social life today.

One of the greatest challenges to poetry’s relevance in early twenty-first century China

has been a limited readership. Despite the large number of poets, poetry societies, and poetic

output across the country, the spontaneous and regular reading of poetry is alien to the vast

majority of educated Chinese today. This is, of course, a common situation for poetry in many

other cultures in the world, but in China the situation is different, given both the saturation of

poetry among literate elite in premodern China and the “cult of poetry” of the 1980s and 1990s

when poetry and poets were worshipped by the general public (Yeh 1996). Although high school

and university students are required to read and analyze poetry, contemporary poetry makes up

just a small fragment of the poems included in national and provincial school textbooks, and the

selection seldom goes beyond a handful of the best-known Obscure Poems.

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Facing such a situation, poetry border-crossing seeks to reach out to an audience through

the consumption of media products. They not only allow poetry to collaborate extensively with

other media and genres, ranging from painting, installation, documentary film, and experimental

theatre, to new folk song, pop music, talent shows, and blogs, etc., but also to circulate poetry in

multiple communication platforms, including face-to-face performance and events, television,

the Internet, and more. The crossover media products can also be consumed on various devices,

at different places, at different times, and in various scenarios. If individual crossover cases

allow specific audiences to encounter poetry, poetry crossover as a general trend makes poetry

prevalent beyond the classroom and the pages of books. These crossover experiments help to

remind the general public of the enduring presence of contemporary poetry. This expansion of

“readership” is especially true among the mixed body of the middle strata, whose purchase

power and desire for culture makes possible their consumption of these crossover media

products.

Meanwhile, communications among the participants in poetry crossover events are often

saturated with a sense of responsibility to promote poetry and with a feeling of spontaneity that

emerges from their sheer love of poetry. For example, the concert In Ancient Times worked with

a non-profit organization and created a casual, though still calculated, atmosphere that suggested

the spontaneity of the poets and their artist friends. Its audience members also demonstrated a

sense of responsibility to promote contemporary poetry by expressing concerns about the status

quo of poetry publication in China. In addition, they betrayed a sense of responsibility to better

acquaint their peers with the poems by referencing related cultural products they had previously

consumed (Chapter 1). Both Poetry Island and Sichuan Satellite Television explicitly stated their

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responsibility to bring poetry to the general public through the We Poetize itinerant exhibition

and Sing a Poem for You program. The team of Poetry Island also frequently expressed their

pure love for poetry (Chapter 2). Similarly, the directors of The Verse of Us also indicated the

poets’ responsibility to write about universal feelings and specific contemporary phenomena and

their own responsibility to showcase the creativity of and hardships faced by (migrant) worker

poets through interviews and cinematic language (Chapter 3). Moreover, both the We Poetize

itinerant exhibition and the screening of the film The Verse of Us were partly crowdfunded. The

persuasive power of these crowdfunding projects lies greatly in the sense of responsibility and

spontaneity the organizers demonstrated. Audience members’ reported disinterest in keepsakes

for their monetary contributions also suggested that these were the values the audience shared

(Chapter 2). Although the sincerity of these statements may, in some cases, be questioned, this

discourse of responsibility and spontaneity usually indicated a collaborative effort to render

contemporary Chinese poetry as something worth reading and something desirable. It also

pointed to an anticipation for future acts of spontaneous poetry reading. The facts that the

crossover products or events garnered sizable audiences and that some audience members either

asked for more similar poems or claimed to have read more poems, suggest that poetry

crossovers can be an effective way to expose the general public to poetry.

Another major hindrance between contemporary Chinese poetry and the general public is

its perceived obscurity. As stated earlier, the contemporary Chinese poetry scene (especially the

avant-garde) has been characterized by alternating and overlapping inclinations toward

cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and populism, on the other. Whereas both inclinations can

contain elements, such as the celebration of individual expression, the attention to details of

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quotidian life, and the use of colloquial language, that potentially appeal to common readers,

other features can cause obstacles in comprehension, including techniques derived from western

poetic and classical Chinese poetry, idiosyncratic symbolisms, and resorting to the trivial, the

vulgar, or the provocative. These obstacles are reinforced by the general public’s scarce exposure

to contemporary poetry, a lack of systematic training in reading methods or a firm grasp of the

tropes of classical poetry, as well as the diverse life experiences of the educated. Hence,

contemporary Chinese poems are faced with a conundrum—either they are too difficult for

people to understand or they are so simple that people fail to find the poetic in them.

Instead of simply throwing up their hands and allowing poetry to fade in obscurity,

poetry crossovers provide the audience with hands-on experiences with it, a kind of poetic

training. Poetry crossover practices deviate from what many might consider the ideal setting for

poetry reading—a quiet and private environment with time and resources on hand—and allow

the audience to approach the poems in a real-life everyday setting, where the meanings of poems

can expand and morph. Rather than guiding the audience to appreciate the multiple connotations

and finer techniques of the poetry texts, these practices help the audience identify general

characteristics of the poems and establish personal connections with the poems through

intermedial relations. For example, the dialogues between poems and new folk songs make clear

their common themes; moreover, in establishing a common ground and dialogue between them,

they suggest that poetry is not as formidable and intimidating as the general public often makes it

out to be (Chapter 1). As paintings, wood boards, pop songs, and other media products transfer

the content, tone, mood, structure, and linguistic characteristics of the poems, they also generate

insightful observations through correspondences and discrepancies between the poems and the

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other media products, as well as the obstacles involved in the transference (Chapter 2). When

poems are used to thematize and structure other media products and to refresh the conventions of

those media, such as film’s visuality and theatre’s theatricality, the poems’ own aesthetics and

linguistic virtuosity are probed and tested in the process. For example, when the film investigates

how the poems rise up from life to art, it reveals and examines the poems’ imaginativeness and

creativity; when the poem is staged, the performance materializes how the language of the poem

achieves a theatrical effect (Chapter 3). Most importantly, new meanings and emotional

resonances are often generated in the intermedial interactions in poetry crossovers, through

intended arrangements and incidents, through the association the poets and artists make between

the poems and their personal experiences, and through the revival of particular memories,

retrieval of previous knowledge, and participation in discussions.

Such an intermedial approach to contemporary poetry demonstrates that poetry is a

multifaceted assemblage of texts, objects, places, technologies, people, institutions, processes,

and contingencies. Understanding poetry does not only mean grasping subtle connotations and

esoteric techniques; it also involves observing, thinking about, feeling, remembering, and

interacting with it. Not all crossover practices make the poems easier to understand; sometimes,

poetry’s challenges to other media conventions make both harder to grasp, as is in the case of the

poetry theatre Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the Fuchun Mountains (Chapter 3).

However, poetry crossovers tend to emphasize the many aspects of the poems that are knowable.

Their emphasis on the personal and the relational opens up contemporary Chinese poetry more to

the general public. When understood in terms of relationality, contemporary poetry becomes less

obscure and irrelevant; humans live in a relational world and poetry crossovers highlight the

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relations. By unveiling unnoticed social connections, they foster still more connections and

understandings.

Poetry is traditionally considered a source of truth and sincerity in China for at least two

reasons: the correlative cosmology that treats poetry as the poet’s emotional response to external

stimulations; and the lyrical mode classical poetry primarily takes. Contemporary Chinese

poetry, however, has to face public doubts about its genuineness and authenticity. Given the use

of poetry as a tool of state propaganda in the Mao era, the stylized poetry recitation one can see

on state television or at school gatherings, and the poet’s historically precarious relationship with

the “people” as a vanguard, a learner, or just an individual, there is little wonder poetry has

become a source of embarrassment among the general public today (though poets themselves, of

course, hold a different view). While a discourse of responsibility and spontaneity has saturated

most of the poetry crossovers I have discussed in this dissertation, another even more

fundamental solution to public doubts about contemporary Chinese poetry’s authenticity lies in

its self-reflexivity.

Border crossing experiments often demonstrate that poems are at once the poets’ situated

responses to happenings in the world and a representation of the world. Poetry, like any other

medium, is part of the real world and generates partial views of the world. Therefore, drawing

attention to contexts in which the poets write and recognizing that poetry is representational

(instead of simply reflecting the “reality”) are important steps toward enhancing poetry’s

sincerity and truthfulness. On the one hand, poetry texts featured in the crossovers frequently

involve poets referring to their own names or nicknames, their bodily conditions and life

experiences, and the very act of poetry writing; on the other hand, the crossover performances,

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products, or partnerships also highlight their mediatedness through various means, including an

emphasis on the calculated coordination between the poets and the performing artists and

contingencies that take place during the performance, an accentuation of medial differences and

obstacles in transferring medial characteristics, extreme viewing conditions (e.g., too dark, too

light, an unusual pace), as well as the blurred boundaries between the there and then of the poetic

world and the here and now of the current event, etc. While the dual reflections on the poets and

on the media in poetry crossovers do not necessarily exclude an ideological agenda or rule out

the possibility of acting for personal gain, they present poets and artists as flesh and blood human

beings—not solely the mouthpiece of the party or the distant objects of worship in the cult of

poetry—and offers an alternative way of seeing and relating to them.

In addition to poetry’s subjugation to state propaganda and ideology, poetry is also

subject to economic forces: its general unmarketability and its participation in the country’s

cultural economy, where its symbolic capital is used to boost real estate sales, consolidate brand

images, or distinguish cities and regions from others to attract financial investments (Crespi

2009: Ch. 7; Inwood 2014: 22-26, 140-143). These political and economic forces lead to an

either-or situation in which poetry is either hostile to or cozy with the political or the economic.

This binary obscures the more multifarious, and in my opinion more interesting, social roles of

contemporary Chinese poetry. Poetry crossovers, although often deeply entrenched in state

ideology and economic policies, create opportunities for sociality that celebrate individual

agency and the negotiation of opinions, needs, and desires not limited to the ideological and the

economic. Instead of being aloof to worldly affairs, poetry texts presented in these events address

social issues, as well as universal feelings. Poets on the elitist and the grassroots ends of the

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spectrum show concerns that are drastically different from each other: for instance, Zhai

Yongming’s concern about the fast pace of contemporary life, her lament over the fate of

students during political movements, and her attempt to empower women in media culture;

Wang Xiaoni’s anxiety over the intricate relationship between the individual and the collective;

Liang Mang’s attachment to his hometown and longing for his family; Chen Nianxi’s

paradoxical feelings toward migrant labor; Wu Xia’s attempt to bridge the gap between the

exploited producer and the unwitting consumer; and Guo Jinniu’s irony toward the household

registration system. However, although each has his or her own social position, these poets are

all responding to the same postsocialist reality.

In the crossover events, we can find intersecting networks of audience members who lean

toward neoliberal exaltation of individual expression or those who side with new leftist calls for

social justice and equality. These networks establish connections within the middle strata, and

form alliances between the middle strata and cultural elites and between the middle strata and

subalterns. In such a process, effective and respectful ways of communication often emerge. For

instance, audience members of In Ancient Times talked to the poet respectfully instead of hurling

ridicule; artists, singers, and audience members found emotional resonances with the poets in We

Poetize and Sing a Poem for You; audiences of The Verse of Us demanded respect for the

(migrant) worker poets rather than sympathy; audience of Following Huang Gongwang on a

Visit to the Fuchun Mountains were orchestrated into the performance and given a chance to

reflect on their reading habits. Such a process also features participants’ active affirmation of

their own interests. Within the context of the state’s promotion of patriotism, its support for

cultural industries, and the expansion of the middle strata, those participating in the poetry

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crossovers can derive their own benefits. As cultural enterprises, media professionals, and

companies earn profits, gain standing, or increase their public visibility, poets and artists also get

a chance to gather together, start or consolidate friendships, collaborate on experimental projects,

have direct contact with the general public and gain discursive power over their own works.

Similarly, audiences find a way to spend their leisure time, quench their thirst for entertainment

and culture, thrill at meeting poets and artists in person, show off their cultural knowledge, take

responsibility to inform and educate their peers, find intellectual challenges or emotional outlets,

etc. The outcomes of these negotiations of interests differ, of course, from case to case, but many

tend toward the creation of vibrant, collaborative communities. Poetry crossovers show us that

contemporary Chinese poetry is shouldering social responsibilities and is mediating social

relations. The very fact that these crossovers have emerged and formed a trend suggests that

poetry is desired and socially significant.

Even if people care about contemporary Chinese poetry, the ultimate challenge it faces is

whether it is good poetry or whether it still counts as poetry when it lacks fixed forms, syntax, or

diction (Yeh 1991: 22). Although these questions are often raised in comparison with classical

poetry and world poetry, contemporary Chinese poetry’s aesthetic characteristics can only be

understood against the specific postsocialist reality of present-day China. Poetry crossovers offer

opportunities for the general public to feel the power of this body of poetry through its

engagement with their intellectual, emotional, and practical lives. As stated earlier, through

various creative intermedial relationships, poetry crossovers point to the cosmopolitan and/or

populist aesthetics of the poetry texts, which involve emotional intensity and high technical

demands (e.g., Wang Xiaoni’s contemplation of transcendental themes through everyday

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happenings in a mixture of colloquial and literary languages; Zhai Yongming’s rapid shifts of

perspectives and shuttling between the present and the past; and [migrant] worker poets’ merging

of the hard demands of physical labor with profound emotions and rich imaginations). Touching

audiences’ hearts, provoking their thoughts, and altering their behavior and social relations,

poetry crossovers produce moments of audience’s recognition of the relevancy, sophistication,

and affective power of poetry. Meanwhile, the fact that a collaboration with contemporary

Chinese poetry meaningfully transforms the other media products (e.g., the cinematographical

style of The Verse of Us and the theatrical structure of Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to

the Fuchun Mountains) also testifies to the vitality of this body of poetry. Last but not least, the

collaboration of contemporary Chinese poetry and other media in crossovers exalts an aesthetics

of the glance—glances in-between media spaces, in-between the virtual cosmos of the works and

the real happenings at the events, and in-between the positions of the self and others. Such an

aesthetics of glances incorporates the poetry crossovers into a global new media culture, where

comprehensive technologies and the convergence of media provide an excess of information,

celebrate high interactivity, and thus demand a way of perceiving media products that is

compatible with these new features.

This dissertation has also sought to take up the challenge of understanding and assessing

poetry as a multi-faceted medium in constant interaction with others, rather than as texts to be

read in isolation. Poetry crossovers exemplify how new meanings, aesthetics, and social

interactions are generated in the interplay of human agency and communication platforms during

poetry’s intermedial production, circulation, and reception. I have also demonstrated that such

intermedial interaction is not limited to cases of poetry crossover but exists extensively in poetry-

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related activities, especially poetry writing on the Internet. Therefore, scholars should consider

examining poetry through an intermedial lens to engender a deeper and more comprehensive

understanding of how poetry actually functions. The difference between assessing poetry as texts

and investigating it through its intermediality sometimes can be huge, as is shown in the case of

Chinese women’s online poetry, especially Li Cheng’en’s poems posted on her personal blog

(Chapter 4).

Previous scholarly examination of Li’s poetry has missed many important strategies she

employs in her poems to negotiate her identity as a woman poet and empower women in general,

because of its exclusion of the Internet as an integral and by-no-means value-neutral facet of her

poetry and a blindness to the interaction between her poems and visual and social features of the

blog. An intermedial perspective, by contrast, demonstrates how Li Cheng’en justifies and

enriches her feminine writing with the blog’s celebration of the personal, how she juxtaposes her

poems with pictures and widgets to define her bodily boundary and manage her public image,

how she utilizes the connectivity and UGC mechanism of the blog to relate to others and

negotiate her own subjectivity with that of others. Looking at her poetry in this way suggests the

productivity of poetry crossover as a critical lens. This methodology is applicable to texts in

other time periods, but is most apt for works in the age of new media.

While I have focused in this dissertation on a few influential or inspirational cases of

poetry crossover, I have by no means covered all the important cases, some of which I have

mentioned in passing in the dissertation, others of which are taking place as I write. Nor have I

covered other interesting modes of poetry border-crossing strategies found in other poetry

crossovers or poetry-related events. For example, since 2019, considerable public attention has

343

been given to poems written by left-behind children (liushou ertong 留守儿童) in rural regions.86

The lives and poetry of these “little poets in the big mountains” have taken a long journey into

public view through multiple intermedial interactions and their accumulative impacts (such as

being printed out through POS devices at charity events, being incorporated into a television

documentary, and being juxtaposed with illustrations created particularly for them; Tan 2019;

Qin B. 2020; Guomai 2020). This long intermedial “biography” itself forms a distinctive pattern

of meaning making and relationship shaping. In contrast to these intermedial interactions

surrounding specific poetry texts, another important strategy is poetry’s participation into

transmedial discussions of social issues. As the COVID-19 pandemic broke out at the end of

2019, poetry was incorporated into a multimedia narrative of prevention and control efforts,

together with news coverage, documentaries, songs, online diaries, and video clips, etc. As part

of the intermedial totality, poetry repeated some of the observations, perspectives, and

sentiments shown in other media, but it also contributed some new ones (e.g., Ruoshuiyin 2020).

This repetition and renewal of facts and feelings in tune with the official discourse or with

nuanced discrepancies from it, contributed to the build-up and release of audiences’ emotions

and the making of a public memory. These fascinating strategies are material for future research.

I also have to mention that my analyses of poetry crossovers in this dissertation have

centered on cases where intermedial interactions take place on the level of individual poetry texts

and artworks, and thus left out many other possibilities, such as cases where interactions mainly

happen between an entire poetic genre and a particular artwork (e.g., films shot or edited with

———————————— 86 These children live in rural regions of China by themselves or with extended family while one or both parents work in urban areas. They number in the millions and their education, physical and mental health, and social behaviors have raised increasing public and government concerns.

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techniques in imitation of techniques commonly used in poetry, such as repetition, rhythm, or

symbolism, etc.) or those between a poetic genre and another media genre. While my choice to

focus on individual texts is partly the product of chance in my fieldwork, it is also related to

some broader questions: Will this trend of poetry border-crossing experimentation and

transmission last? Will the experiments wane or disappear at some point? Or will some of these

intermedial interactions be conventionalized, turned into a new media genre, and thus lose their

experimentalism? Answers to these questions are anyone’ guess. However, it is important not to

miss what comes with the current phase of experimentation—continuous emergence of new

crossover practices, event organizers’ claims of unprecedented ways of presenting poetry, and

new relationships formed between poets, artists, and audience; event participants’ initiatives and

passions to bring forth something new and to promote poetry among the general public; and the

potential for poetry crossovers to show patterns or become an even messier array of trials and

errors.

While I have discussed in this dissertation how poetry border-crossing experimentation

and transmission engaged with postsocialist reality in contemporary China, I have of course not

covered all the important aspects. I demonstrated how a collaborative model helped to raise the

visibility of some poet groups (such as women poets and [migrant] worker poets), lend them

discursive power, and win them recognition and respect, but I left other poetry and poet groups

for future study. Ethnic minority poetry has made a strong presence in crossover events and

exemplified border crossing in every sense, with poets writing in both their native languages and

standard Chinese, transmitting their works on traditional and new media platforms in

collaboration with various artists, promoting and reflecting on their cultures, negotiating personal

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and collective identities as ethnic minority and/or cultural hybrids, and remapping and forging

local and transregional ethnic minority communities and social networks.87 Poetry by left-behind

children and that by school janitors could be potentially productive directions to go as well: the

former engages the issue of migrant labor from a fresh perspective; both point to the public

suspicion of corruption among poets associated with the official discourse and the public’s

distaste for the eccentricity of the avant-garde; both also mark a search for poetry from new

corners of society. Another point I have to clarify is that although I have mainly employed a

collaborative model in my discussion of poetry crossovers and highlighted the active negotiation

of interests among the involved parties, I do not mean to suggest that the collaborations were all

harmonious or that the participants in every case were able to exert their agency equally. What

remains important, though, is the transformative potentials these collaborations offer.

It is my hope that this dissertation will help to expand the vision of contemporary

Chinese poetry’s socio-cultural engagement. I also hope that it offers an alternative perspective

for understanding particular works or authors, or arouses some interests in the many kinds of

poetry that exist beyond the mainstream and the avant-garde. The characteristics and impacts of

these poetry crossovers shed new light on the needs, desires, and thoughts of contemporary

———————————— 87 Taking Yi poetry for example, apart from Jike Ayou’s works concerning the gradual loss of Yi traditional culture due to the outflux of youngsters joining in migrant labor, which were incorporated into The Verse of Us as I mentioned in Chapter 3, some other cases include major Liangshan 凉⼭ poets’, especially the leading poet and scholar Aku Wuwu’s 阿库乌雾 (Han name Luo qingchun 罗庆春), performance of their Yi poems in front of a variety of audiences (sometimes together with successful rock bands or Yi folksinger groups) as an alternative opportunity for publication and a chance for re-creation (Bender 2016); contemporary poems written in Yi script by minor Liangshan poets, such as Aluo Fuji 阿洛夫基, being cast into songs and sung by locals as a way to preserve Yi cultural identity (Ayi 2016); influential poets, such as Asu Yue’er 阿苏越尔, Jidi Majia 吉狄马加 and Sha Ma 沙马, being featured as special topics on websites devoted to Yi ethnic groups, such as Yizuren.com 彝族⼈⽹ and Yizucn.com 中国彝族⽹ (Kraef 2013).

346

Chinese, what current technologies support or restrict, and how individuals and institutions

negotiate for themselves. Meanwhile, they may help to make sense of other related socio-cultural

phenomena, great or small. For example, considering poetry’s presence in cultural consumption,

it makes sense that paid online literature or art classes are growing in popularity among the

middle strata. Of course, the border-crossing strategies and mechanisms in contemporary

Chinese poetry crossovers are most pertinent to intermedial interactions, especially those

involving media that also seem to be marginalized in postsocialist China and other

commercialized societies. The poetry crossovers suggest that these media are not cornered or

replaced by other newer or more entertaining media, but are constantly connected to other media

and everyday life. Finally, I hope that my investigation into border-crossing experimentation and

transmission will contribute to intermediality studies in general, where cases from China barely

make a presence and the interactions between narrative literature and visual arts dominate the

discussions. In that sense, the dissertation also constitutes another kind of attempt to make

connections—getting contemporary Chinese poetry connected with scholarly discussions beyond

the field of Chinese literature and culture.

347

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———. 2015e. “Ni youmeiyou xiangguo jiang shiju wen (tie) zai shenshang?” 你有没有想过将诗句纹 (tie) 在身上？ (Have you ever thought of tattooing [pasting] verses onto your body?) URL (accessed 7/10/2020): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ASZ6rsanayLjQTxzmBJfKQ.

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