Modern Poetry in China: A Visual-Verbal Dynamic by Paul Manfredi (review)

China, E.E. Cummings writes, is “where a painter is a poet.” It is possible that the poet/painter is projecting himself onto the image of China for a fun-filled aesthetic adventure, but such an impression of China as a place of poetry was not far from the common imagination in Cummings’s time, an imagination, no doubt, bolstered by Ezra Pound’s “discovery” of the Chinese character as a medium for poetry, to which early Cummings owes a great deal of poetic debt. We all know the story of how Pound felt inspired by the directness of the Chinese character and made it a premise for his theory for Imagism, and one has good reason to guess that it is upon the same premise that Paul Manfredi conceives Modern Poetry in China: A Visual-Verbal Dynamic since the book begins with a quotation from E. E. Cummings’s above-mentioned poem.

The convergence of the poet and the painter is what Manfredi calls “a visual-verbal dynamic,” a concept that emphasizes the visual dimension of poetic art. He elaborates three aspects of this “dynamic”: phanopoesi—the making of the imagery; phenomenology--seeing the lyrical subject; and pictography of the characters of the Chinese writing system. It is refreshing to see such a succinct yet precise description of the visual aesthetics of the poem, which prompts us to look anew at a topic we thought we already knew. Manfredi not only contributes a keen synthesis of poetic theories; his ability to apply these theories to the analysis of poets and poems makes the visual elements apparent to us at the basic structural levels of space, shape, and word-image.

But, if poetry is always “visual,” and Chinese poetry is particularly so, or as Manfredi more lucidly puts it, “the nexus of visuality and lyrical poetry is very old in the Chinese setting” (xx), how does the “visual-verbal dynamic” crisscross the “modern” in modern poetry? His answer is not an exact definition of Chinese modernism based on the usual premise of a radical rupture between the new, vernacular poem and the old, regulated one. Rather, he stresses the continuation of visuality by giving an eloquent argument for the importance of calligraphy in the Chinese art of poetry-making. Calligraphy, a long-running visual-verbal art form, not only typifies the intermixing of the poem and the painting in the Chinese tradition, but also brings forth ideas of abstraction and minimalism, two of the most celebrated aesthetic principles in modernism. To see modern poetry in this regard, Manfredi avoids the often contested but tired issue of China versus the West, and locates the “modern” squarely in the “materiality of the word” in which visuality is seen as its most prominent expression. The book for the most part is an attempt to discover and to interpret the variety of such an expression in selected Chinese poets.

One might raise a minor objection to Manfredi’s selection of poets for various reasons. For example, why only Li Jinfa from the pre-1949 period? Why give three individual chapters to three poets from Taiwan but group contemporary Chinese poets in two chapters? Indeed, whether the idea of visuality is being used as an identity marker for poet-painter or as an aesthetic pursuit for poetry making (it can be argued that the book treats it both ways), one can make a case for a far longer list of poets in modern China. Such an objection, however, hardly undermines the main thesis that “a visual-verbal dynamic” was present from the very beginning of modern Chinese poetry and continues to the present day, with poets of different time and space constructing the complexity of the modern lyrical subject. Despite their vastly different historical contexts, according to Manfredi, Li Jinfa and Ji Xian share a common thread of self-portrait as art in word and in painting, which presents “a picturing of the self that is virtually boundless” (60). For the...