What Is the Tradition of Chinese Prose Poetry?

This chapter examines, rejects, and revises the traditional history of the genre of prose poetry. Through a reading of Agamben, it demonstrates that during the May Fourth period, writers called a wide variety of work by the name prose poetry, including lineated free verse, lyric essays, and even fiction. By contrast, the writers of the 1950s wrote generically coherent work, and in the 1980s those same writers produced the focused, meaningful genre definitions that we use today. Because contemporary prose poetry has its roots in the obedient socialist poetry of the 1950s, it is not an inherently subversive form; its acts of refusal often serve to humanize or personalize the dictates of state socialism. The end of the chapter finds that the greatest stylistic influence on early prose poetry were Bing Xin’s translations of Rabindranath Tagore, and the way she made his transcendental music into vernacular prose.

Semi-Orthodox Prose Poetry

Chapter four is a close reading of Liu Zaifu, a poet, scholar and essayist who wrote prose poetry throughout the 1980s. In the early 1980s, Liu Zaifu continued prose poetry's tradition of finding a place for the subjective and the aesthetic in the world of socialist prose. The first part of the chapter engages with his aesthetic and social philosophy, and uses that engagement to translate and read his best-known work, “Reading the Sea.” The second half of the chapter traces the impact of Liu's 1989 exile on his work. Liu’s post-exile works, published in Hong Kong, reveal the connection between prose poetry and the Chinese mainland context: once he leaves, Liu stops writing prose poetry in favor of literary essays. His work and his career therefore provide a crucial commentary on the line between orthodox and unorthodox prose poetry, and between prose poetry and other prose.

Orthodox Prose Poetry

This chapter opens by studying the two most seminal prose poets of the 1950s, Ke Lan and Guo Feng. It shows that by faithfully ventriloquizing state socialism, they effectively subjectivize it, putting the words of the collective into the mouth of the individual. It demonstrates the way in which the political pressures of the 1950s provoked acts of definition and organization on the part of prose poets. The second half of chapter three reads the prose poetry community itself as a key text of orthodox art. It finds that an intentional modeling of prose poetry communities on the structures of the Communist Party has produced a set of dynamics that are hierarchical, inter-organizational, and self-reproductive. These dynamics influence the composition of prose poems through the interventions of educators, editors, and study group administrators, leading to the conclusion that many people participate in the writing of each orthodox prose poem.

Afterword

The afterword argues that it is the way that prose poetry makes prose visible that gives it such power and promise in contemporary China, as well as abroad. Recitation summons the voices of others into the present, and into the present speaker: when prose poetry recites prose assumed to contain and deliver truths, those claims are brought into a kind of laboratory in which they can be tested and transformed. This is especially crucial in contemporary China, where the power of the tradition of socialism floats in an uneasy vacuum. The afterword looks at writing by Xi Chuan and Mao Zedong in order to ask what it actually means to “make it new” in China, and how prose poetry authors confront and answer questions about how we speak the truth.

Unorthodox Prose Poetry

This chapter follows contemporary poets whose work exists in formal or generic relationship to prose poetry, but who reject or elude categorization as prose poets. The chapter looks first at the poem “Hanging Coffin” by Ouyang Jianghe, which uses monumentality, rather than prose poetry’s traditional brevity, to engage with culture and history on a grand scale. The end of the chapter reads Bourdieu to track the way in which the avant-garde prose poet Xi Chuan fights against the identification of his work with the settled, more categorically cohesive genre as practiced by orthodox poets. In doing so, he returns to a core distinction between prose poetry and other literary forms and practices: instead of belonging to a fixed genre with a list of desiderata and taboos, Xi Chuan’s works of prose are acts that intervene in and shape the practice of prose.

What Is a Chinese Prose Poem?

Chapter one traces a reading process that ends in a metaphoric and hermeneutic definition of prose poetry. Reading Heidegger through Celan, and engaging with western theories of genre, it moves from the much-discussed insufficiency of categorical definitions of the genre to the need to describe prose poetry as the product of particular compositional processes, then determines that we can describe those processes as the condensation of prose writing, the recitation of previous prose art, and the refusal to be identical to previous prose art. These processes are simultaneous, and complexly interrelated; they take place, as Chinese scholars point out, inside poems, and indirectly determine their exteriors. The chapter includes translations of compositions from the 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations, and recent prose poetry by Xi Chuan and others.

Introduction

The introduction reads a poem by Chen Dongdong in order to think through the libidinal and ethical motivations for genre study. It balances the urge to intervene, categorize, and create against the responsibility to artists, editors, and readers, ultimately finding that this conflict is best engaged using methodologies from translation, specifically Yan Fu’s concepts of fidelity, fluency, and elegance. This justifies the translation practice of the rest of the book, as well as the book’s mix of literary analysis, sociology, and history. The introduction ends with a brief summary of chapters one through five.