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Chapter 3 - Poetry on the Stage
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115 c h a p t e r 3 Poetry on the Stage I’m not a poet whose recitation can move a room to tears but I can use my words to move these blue walls that surround me when I step upon the stage, black birds are my listeners, wings settled upon open pages of red-skinned notebooks and handkerchiefs I see this each morning so thank you all thank you all the winter still loves a poet —wang yin, “Recitation” (Langsong) The microphone grasped between my hands is like the head of an erect penis, covered in a metal web that glints darkly. I find myself confused: can I use it to rape the world? Will it heed my every word with rapt attention ? Who am I? A professor, a president, a politician, a TV presenter? —yu jian, “Recitation” (Langsong) Activities that take place face-to-face and “in the flesh” have played a central role in the development of post-Mao modern poetry in mainland China. From the salons and open-air recitals organized by the Today group in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the proliferation of poetry recitals held in cafés and bars in the 1990s and turn-of-themillennium large-scale gatherings like the Panfeng Meeting, face-toface poetry events (huodong) are a mainstay in the lives and careers of contemporary Chinese poets. They have a powerful effect on the dynamics of poetry scenes, giving geographic shape to poetry communities and generating aesthetic developments, one-off incidents, and long-running sources of contention that have in some cases irrevocably changed the course of contemporary poetry and helped further— or set back—the reputations of poetry scene participants. Chinese terms used to denote face-to-face poetry events include meetings chapter 3 116 (huiyi or simply hui), recitals (langsonghui), festivals (jie), ceremonies (yishi), conferences (yantaohui or xueshuhui), summits (fenghui), salons (shalong), and gatherings (juhui). Although some are scheduled to take place on an annual or more frequent basis, many are one-off occasions held to mark a specific poetry-related, cultural, or national incident such as a poet’s death, an ongoing poetry polemic, or a national disaster. Communicating face-to-face is the oldest and most basic means of sharing poetry, traceable to the days when poetry was not written down or recorded using technological means but transmitted using nothing but memorization, repetition, and the human voice.1 In Chinese , this medium of transmission is built into the word “poetry,” which is comprised of the characters for poem (shi, a combination of “speech” [yan] and “temple” [si]) and song (ge). What Foley terms the arena of oral tradition or oAgora is in theory the most open of the three media spaces examined in this book; although it is subject to rules imposed by the group in question, access to the oAgora is open to any qualified person who wishes to take part. Foley notes that while some oral traditions discriminate according to factors such as age, gender, or ethnicity, most involve “open-ended, diverse audiences as participating, present partners.”2 Successfully navigating the oAgora requires fluency in its language, which in the case of contemporary Chinese poetry events is not just standard Chinese (Mandarin), the language usually used for reciting poetry and public speaking, but also the behavioral codes that determine when and how to assert one’s poetry citizenship through face-to-face interactions. Face-to-face events are characterized by a high level of contingency , defined by Foley as “an evolving reality” that depends on events and conditions that have not yet been established. Foley identifies five trademark contingencies that characterize business in both the oAgora and the eAgora (the Internet): the very next option; the performance; the network; meaning; and authorship. In the oAgora, agency is only partially in the hands of the person navigating the oral network: it also relies on other people who have paved the way by putting together networks of contingencies that can support any number of specific outcomes or configurations.3 The oAgora, in short, has much in common with China’s discourse of live scenes, which are also understood in terms of presence, process, and participation in the here and now and are thought to be open to whoever happens to be [18.206.13.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:56 GMT) Poetry on the Stage 117 on the scene during the unfolding of the cultural event. The face-toface...