LOWER DOWNS, RUBBISH AND LOW POETRY by Ouyang Yu

Beauty is so far from being the dominant principle of modern poetry that many of the most splendid modern works are clearly portrayals of ugliness- Friedrich Schlegel (On the Study of Greek Poetry, 1797)

Contemporary Chinese poetry has unashamedly turned from the sublime and sacred to the vulgar and profane.

In April 1999 at the Panfeng Conference in Pinggu County, Beijing, poets split into two camps, the zhishi fenzi (intellectual) and the minjian.¹ The poets in the intellectual camp (Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xi Chuan, Zang Di and others) were mostly well-published, anthologised, critically acclaimed, well-travelled and internationally well-connected. As university professor and poetry critic Cheng Guangwei noted, much of their poetry reflects the influences of Western literary masters such as Yeats, Rilke, Lowell, Pound, Baudelaire, Milosz, Pasternak and Brodsky.² The minjiancamp (Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang and others) critiqued these influences as ‘European’ or ‘colonial’, arguing that poetry should be rooted in theminjian, among the ordinary working people, and should take its inspiration from traditional sources instead of Western ones. It should be written in Chinese, a language as good as English, if not superior to it; for them, poetry should recover the ‘dignity’ of the Han language (Chinese).³

In the decade since the Panfeng Conference, at least three major groups of poetry have appeared – the xia ban shen group (lower downs or lower parts of the body group), the laji shipai (rubbish poetry group), and di shige (low poetry) – and a dozen smaller groups. Together these groups travel below the skyline of morality – and, indeed, far below the waistline.⁴

Xia Ban Shen Group (lower downs or the lower parts of the body)

Around July 2000, Shen Haobo and others set up the xia ban shen group, emphasising their radical departure from shang ban shen (upper parts of the body, knowledge, culture, tradition, lyricism and philosophy), and proposing a shift to the real, the concrete, the savage, the sexual and the uninhibited.⁵

A typical example is the poem ‘wei shenme bu zai shufu yi dian?’ (‘Why don’t you make it more comfortable?’) by Yin Lichuan, in which the poet describes what makes her feel good when making love. Another is Shen Haobo’s ‘wo men la‘ (‘We pull [shit]‘),⁶ which he read in Denmark at the ten-day Chinese Poetry Festival in April 2004.⁷

Haobo’s poem, after a sordid description of affairs between married people, ends with the lines, ‘and we shall bring our poems in such a weather/rushing to the university lecturing theatre and read in a chorus/- we pull shit, we pull it’.⁸

Laji Shipai (Rubbish Poetry Group)

A new poetry group appeared in March 2003, calling itself laji shipai(rubbish poetry group). This group claims to be a sharp contrast to the xia ban shen. It is concerned neither with the spiritual nor the flesh but is interested in the vulgar, the unrestrained and the useless.⁹ By writing about rubbish or the world that is producing tons of rubbish daily, these poets make radical political statements, not just about the environment but also about the government. In the words of rubbish poet Fan Si, the purpose of laji shi (rubbish poetry) is to ‘establish marginal values, subaltern values and multi-centre values’.¹⁰

Among the laji shipai, poets Xu Xiangchou and Dianqiugujiu stand out. In ‘shi de fengxian‘ (‘shit as a tribute’), Xu sends up the notion of worshipping the motherland: ‘Others all give fresh flowers to the motherland/I give shit as a tribute’. Dianqiugujiu, on the other hand, trashes the sacred image of Tiananmen by hanging his own photograph there. In the poem ‘wo yao ba wo de xiang gua zai tiananmen‘ (‘I want to hang my portrait on Tiananmen’), he says, ‘My desire to be the leader is becoming more and more distended/And I think it would be good even if I could become a virtual leader online.’¹¹ The poem was sharply criticised in a Guangming Daily article, which cited it as a sign of ‘subversion of history that challenges the nation’s beliefs and sentiments’.¹²

During the Cultural Revolution, if anyone dared criticise Mao, he or she would be put in jail or even executed. Rubbish poetry might be limited to online publication at present but even its publication there shows that the boundary of acceptability has been stretched to a degree unimaginable only twenty years ago.

On the other hand, rubbish poetry is a reflection of the worsening climate and ecology in China. Compared to their Australian poetic counterparts, Chinese poets take a radical approach – they plunge into the shit that is reality instead of dodging it with obscure imagery and metaphor.

Di Shige (Low Poetry)

In March 2004, di shige (low poetry) opened up its online forum. It published its first issue in March 2005, promoting the following as its principles: no forbidden areas, no principles, no order, nothing too extreme, no knowledge (ignorance) and no fear.¹³ A glance at the contents of a major anthology of di shige, published in 2007, shows some of the concerns: ‘nimen ba wo gandiao suanle‘ (‘Just get rid of me, okay?’) by Xu Xiangchou; ‘qing kan wo zhe zhang wu chi de lian‘ (‘Please look at this shameless face of mine’) by Lao De; ‘zai pibian xia dadao gaochao de renmen‘ (‘People who reached an orgasm under the leather whips’) by Li Hui; ‘yanwu huxi‘ (‘Sick of breathing’) by Xiao Wangzi; ‘dui zhe wo de xiati kaiqiang‘ (‘Shoot at the lower parts of my body’) by Da Tui; and ‘yige bu ba chuantong dangzuo chuantong de ren‘ (‘Someone who does not take tradition as tradition’) by Qin Feng.¹⁴

Perhaps what is more interesting is the acceptance – in marked contrast to either the xia ban shen or the laji shipai – of this low poetry by the poetry-reading public, including critics and publishers. In 2007, three collections of low poetry: di shige daibiao shiren shixuan (A Collection of Poetry by Representative Low Poetry Poets), di shige pipan (Low Poetry Critiques) and 2007 di shige nianjian (The 2007 Almanac of Low Poetry) were published.¹⁵ With its aim of construction through destruction, this poetic movement was welcomed by such established poetry critics as Zhang Qinghua and Chen Zhongyi as a ‘thoughtful, artistic and cultural ideology’.¹⁶

Low poetry is more popular than either the lower downs or the rubbish group, perhaps due to inclusiveness: its ability to embrace all the recent groups of poetry in its publications, either online or in print, and its inclusion of many of the poets mentioned before, even if they belong to either the xia ban shen or the laji shipai. Zhang Jiayan defines these poets (of whom he is one of the more vocal critics) as part of a yangxing shichao(a yangyinxing shichao (the yin poetic wave) that has been reigning for nearly a century. He declares that this di shichao (low poetry wave) with its ‘low attitude’ is filled with vibrant male hormones, assaulting the yinpoetry with its masculine power, flooding the site of discourse, forcing it to change.¹⁷ poetic wave) that is now overwhelming the

Implications for Australia

We are now living in a globalised and digitalised world, which means that no poetry that happens in one country can remain unknown for long to another – even when the country is China and the poetry is written in Chinese. It’s no longer tenable to remain in cultural and poetic isolation, comfortable in the sense of one’s own superiority; one has to learn and benefit from other cultures and literatures, particularly those that, for ideological and political reasons, one does not normally identify with.

One could see from Zhang Jiayan’s remarks about the dichotomy of yin(normally standing for the feminine) and yang (male) that the male-oriented Chinese poetry is very much on the rise, dispelling a yin often associated with the dark, the devilish – and, by extension, with the West, whose people were not so long ago referred to as gui (devils) and, in daily Cantonese discourse, as guailo (devil people).¹⁸ One could also sense a streak of misogyny.

However, in the new China emerging from a near half-century of political oppression, and easing into a society more permissive than ever before, this PI (poetic incorrectness) is necessary to liberate the minds and bodies of poets who are often regarded as harbingers of a new era.

Much of this new poetry is written by poets born in the 1970s and 1980s who have gained a strong voice never heard before – one that no amount of magazine or journal editors could suppress. One poet friend of mine born in the 1970s told me that he had never bothered sending a single submission to any established poetry magazine but instead posts his poetic stuff online. The Chinese poetry websites allow you to simply post your poem or selection of poems so that other people can respond.¹⁹ The websites have become so alive that editors of established magazines have actually started looking for good work online.

In comparison to what is happening poetically in China, Australian poetry today seems to be losing its momentum and its energy, particularly that primeval energy from eclectic sources, buried in the shit, the shi.²⁰ Our poetry, along with our ecology, may seem clean but out there on any street in Melbourne one smells the exhaust pipes. Why is there nothing about this? Why is there nothing about tons of spiritual rubbish that we see in the daily papers and the tons of rubbish from America on the silver screen? Poetry has got to face life, the reality that is shit: it has got to face shit and to take shit in its stride, to shit well and to shi well. I remember the response from an Australian poet friend after he read the rubbish poems by Xu Xiangchou: This is good shit and I feel much better now!

1 The term minjian, originally a description of the working people, also refers to the unofficial, the non-governmental and, in poetic terms, often the ‘unestablished’, even though some of the poets (such as Yu Jian) who used to be minjian have since become ‘established’.
2 See Zhou Xinhuan, ‘Looking at the development and current status of new Chinese poetry with the “Panfeng Dispute” in hindsight: a trial analysis of “intellectual writing” and the “minjian position”‘,ww.zgyspp.com/Article/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=6485.
3 Ibid.
4 See Zhang Jiayan, ‘Preface 1: Low Poetry in China’, www.yanruyu.com/jhy/author/87479.shtml (translation in English all mine).
5 See Hong Ju, ‘zhongguo dangdai shige liupai ji daibiao zuopin‘ (‘Contemporary poetry groups in China and their representative works’), blog.readnovel.com/article/htm/tid_792301.html, 5 July 2007, accessed 24 August 2008.
6 The English equivalent would be ‘to push shit’.
7 The ten-day Chinese poetry festival was postponed from 2003 to April 2004 because of an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome(SARS). When it was eventually held in Denmark, ten Chinese poets were invited: six from China (Yu Jian, Shen Haobao, Zhai Yongming, Yin Lichuan, Sheng Xing and Xi Chuan) and four from the Chinese Diaspora (Bei Dao, Yang Lian, Jing Bute and Ouyang Yu). Most of these poets have appeared in In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation (trans./ed.) Ouyang Yu, Otherland Literary Journal, Melbourne, 2002. Ten Danish poets were invited to pair with their Chinese counterparts and gave readings together in Danish, Chinese and English across Denmark.
8 See Shen Haobo, ‘wo men la‘ (‘We pull shit’),www.yanruyu.com/jhy/author/4422.shtml, accessed 24 August 2008.
9 See Hong Ju.
10 Fan Si, ‘Random thoughts by Fan Si on rubbish movement’, at my.clubhi.com/bbs/661502/messages/25061.html (English translation mine).
11 See Dianqiugujiu, ‘wo yao ba wo de xiang gua zai tiananmen‘ (‘I want to hang my portrait on Tiananmen’),weiquanshiji.blog.epochtimes.com/article/show?articleid=238, 3-4 March 2004, accessed 24 August 2008.
12 Ibid.
13 See ‘di shige chuangkan hao‘ (‘First issue of low poetry’),www.douban.com/group/topic/1481596/, accessed 24 August 2008.
14 See www.xici.net/b9961/d76016715.htm, accessed 24 August 2008.
15 See blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_54b574bb0100a660.html, accessed 24 August 2008.
16 See www.douban.com/group/topic/1481596/, accessed 24 August 2008.
17 See Zhang Jiayan, ‘Preface 1: Low Poetry in China’, at www.yanruyu.com/jhy/author/87479.shtml. In fact, Zhang’s latest publication is just out, titled, zhongguo di shige (‘Low Poetry in China’), published, amazingly, by People’s Daily Publishing House, 2008, information accessed 12 November 2008 and found at my.clubhi.com/bbs/661502/messages/25260.html.
18 See Li Qingxi, ‘Legally governed society and “guailo”‘, Farewell, Australia (bie le, aodaliya), Shandong Pictorial Press, Jinnan, 2006, pp. 50-2 (English translation mine).
19 Of course, one is at peril if posting material deemed seditious or libellous, which is not so different from Australia, where one doubts if anyone would be freely allowed to call for an armed overthrow of the current government.

[Published in Overland: http://web.overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-194/feature-ouyang-yu/ ]