MCLC: Verse Going Viral

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Verse Going Viral
***********************************************************

Source: 
http://uwpressblog.com/2014/04/24/in-china-today-does-poetry-still-matter/

In China today, does poetry still matter?

[In Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes, Heather Inwood unravels a
paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a
representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the
point of death, poetry activity flourishes across the country. She finds
that this ancient art form has benefited from China’s continued
self-identity as a nation of poetry (shiguo) and from the interactive
opportunities created by the Internet and other participatory media. In
today’s guest post, Inwood provides a glimpse into some of the myriad ways
the digital revolution has impacted the role of poetry in contemporary
Chinese society.]

There’s a famous Chinese saying that “the misery of the state leads to the
emergence of great poets” (guojia buxing shijia xing)–or more literally,
“when the state is unfortunate, poets are fortunate.” These words come
from a poem by the Qing dynasty historian Zhao Yi (1727–1814), observing
the phenomenon in which classic works of poetry often appear during times
of calamity: war, famine, dynastic downfall, and so on.

Zhao Yi’s saying sprang to mind for many observers of Chinese poetry after
the Sichuan Earthquake of May 2008. The loss of nearly 70,000 lives
spurred an outpouring of poems that were widely circulated on the
Internet, in newspapers, on television and radio, and recited at
fundraising events. As a form of writing that “follows from emotion” (shi
yuan qing), poetry is ideally placed in times of turmoil and tragedy. When
things go wrong, you can trust that poets will find a way to put into
words what many are thinking and feeling.

Turn the saying around (when the state is fortunate, poets are
unfortunate) and we might have an explanation for why the very existence
of poetry in twenty-first century China has been brought into doubt. China
as a whole seems to be flourishing, growing in confidence on the global
stage and on the way to becoming the world’s largest economy. Does that
mean it is the poets’ turn to suffer, robbed of their source of
inspiration and ignored by a public who craves instant entertainment over
contemplative reading?

Such questions echo concerns around the world about the fate of literature
under neoliberal conditions, in which success is judged primarily by the
ability to make money. If poets aren’t contributing to China’s economic
rise, why bother writing at all?

This is, needless to say, a distorted way of thinking about what it means
to write poetry. Yet similar suggestions have surfaced again and again in
critiques of modern poetry that swirl across the Chinese media. One
outspoken attack came from Han Han, a popular writer and race-car driver
with a knack for stirring up public opinion through social media. Joining
in the spoofing of some colloquial language poems that went viral on the
Internet in late 2006, Han Han proffered the provocative lines,
“My opinion has long been that there is no need for modern poetry or poets
to exist, as they are of zero value. These days paper is pretty expensive,
so why not write some decent prose and fill the whole page?”

In Verse Going Viral, Han’s words lead me into an exploration of the
public status of poetry and internal workings of poetry scenes in
contemporary China. It is a widely accepted fact that China is a “nation
of poetry,” but often the same person extolling the importance of poetry
will be oblivious to the fact that anybody writes it anymore. Happily,
even the briefest search online, look in a bookstore, or venture into
China’s burgeoning poetry event culture reveals that poetry is, in fact,
in rude health. Despite its widely assumed marginality, poetry is
everywhere—in the course of my research I attended events in schools,
parks, cafés, bars, real estate offices, peach orchards, and concert
halls, among other locations—and many people still care about it very,
very much.

You might even go so far as to say that rather than caring too little, the
public cares about poetry a little too much. The development of modern
Chinese poetry has been driven by the need to open the gates of poetry by
abandoning the literary language and stylistic conventions of classical
poetry for a more free-form, vernacular style of writing. By doing so,
early twentieth-century poets hoped that they might use their poetry to
participate in the rejuvenation of China, much needed after a series of
national humiliations that marked the last few decades of dynastic rule.

Yet the move toward accessibility hasn’t always pleased the public. Making
written poetry sound like everyday speech was supposed to facilitate
communication between poets and their audiences. Instead, it appears to
have prompted a large swathe of China’s online population to adopt a
gatekeeping mentality of their own, complaining that poems that are too
easily understood don’t deserve the title of “poetry.” In doing so, they
inadvertently address the question I began with. Does poetry still matter?
If the question is being asked in the first place, I would venture that we
already know the answer.
–
Heather Inwood is lecturer of Chinese cultural studies at the University
of Manchester. Her book,Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes
<http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/INWVER.html> is now
available from the University of Washington Press.