Misty poetry (meng long shi) is also translated into English as "poetry of opacity" or, in some other literatures, as "obscurist poetry." The misty school is characterized by oblique imagery and elliptical syntax and by its peculiar linguistic style, in which subject, verb tense, and the usages of number are elusive and transitions are unclear. The most important misty poetry writers are Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, Duo Duo, Jiang He, Mang Ke, Yang Lian, Luo Gengye, and Liang Xiaobing.
In the beginning of the school's development, the names "misty" or "opacity" were used in a derogatory sense by some of the most traditional poets of the old generation, who found the new poetry to be incomprehensible, indirect, foggy, hazy, vague, gloomy, evasive, and confusing in meaning—in a word, misty. Another connotation of "opacity" arises from questions about the validity of this new poetic form, which, it was claimed, could not be understood by the people.
During the Great Cultural Revolution, and particularly after 1972, Western creative works and literary theories began to be circulated among Chinese political leaders, who criticized them in the light of Marxist and Maoist doctrines. Chinese intellectuals and young people who belonged to or had connections with these political circles thus were exposed to contemporary Western literature, a circumstance that played an important role in subverting the authority of Maoist literary principles. Mao Zedong's literary theories had become cast-iron orthodoxy during the Great Cultural Revolution, which ideologically sanitized Chinese literature and criticism, stripping both of human emotions. The imposition of this rigid conformity created symptoms of spiritual deprivation. After the onset of economic reform in 1978, the national response was a voracious appetite for personal freedom, which allowed for a modicum of individual diversity. Western capitalism and Western literature were equally attractive to a society weary of conformity. The post-Mao era was thus characterized by literary liberation and intellectual freedom, which created the social-psychological environment in which misty poetry was born.
The first New Poetry writer was Guo Lusheng, whose pen name was Index Finger (Shizhi). He started to write modern, premisty poems during the Cultural Revolution, when he was working in the countryside. At first, his poems were transmitted in handwritten versions, but they soon became popular with younger readers via various underground publications.
In 1974, a young underground poet named Yi Qun, whose works were profoundly influenced by European literature, gained popularity for the stylistic reforms exhibited by his poems. Between 1969 and 1976, such young poets as Mang Ke, Duo Duo, Lin Mang, Bei Dao, Yan Li, and Tian Xiaoqing, who at that time were blue-collar or agricultural workers, began writing poems that were influenced by Western literary styles. Many had not even finished high school or elementary school before being sent to work in the countryside by the Communist Party. They formed the Baiyangdian Group, which was named after Lake Baiyangdian. These young poets wrote with more freedom in rhyme and more opacity in semantics to express the dreams and fantasies of Chinese youth and to tell fairy tales. Seeking poetic aestheticism instead of rationalism and realism, both in form and in content, this group laid the foundation of the misty school.
Gu Cheng later pointed out that there is a reality in everything that is independent; hence the poet is free to explore his own world. Misty poetry first gained popularity, especially with the young, in the early 1970s. In 1976, when Zhou Enlai died, many people gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest the Cultural Revolution and indirectly condemn Mao Zedong's politics. Poetry was an important part of this protest. Bei Dao and other misty poets joined this so-called April 5 Movement and posted their poems in Tiananmen Square together with hundreds of other poems.
In 1978, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Jiang He, and Mang Ke self-published their first nonofficial magazine of poems, titled Jintian (Today), on the "Wall for Democracy" in the Xidan district of Beijing. At first, this publication circulated only among the people gathered around the Wall. Bei Dao was optimistic about China's democratic future. He pointed out that suppression could only give rise to more diligent pursuits of democracy. In the early 1980s, Today ceased publication, and a new generation of poets emerged as Bei Dao assumed leadership of the New Poetry movement from the mentally ill Guo Lusheng.
In 1979, the first misty poetry was published in the official literary magazine Poetry. Immediately after, several well-known Chinese publishers began printing such famous examples of misty poetry as Bei Dao's "Yiqie" (All of them) and "Xuangao" (Declaration); Shu Ting's "Zhi Xiangshu" (To oak tree) and "Zuguo A, Wo Qin'ai De Muqin" (My dear motherland); Gu Cheng's "Yidai Ren" (One generation); Luo Gengye's "Bu Man" (Not satisfied); and Liang Xiaobing's "Zhongguo, Wo De Yaoshi Diule" (China, I lost your key). In October 1980, Poetry published a number of poems by Shu Ting, Jiang He, and Xu Jingya. By the mid-1980s, many literature publishers and magazines in China were competing with each other to publish misty poems.
Misty poetry was the most controversial poetic phenomenon in the post-Mao era. Beginning in the early 1980s, newspapers and magazines controlled by the Communist Party strongly criticized misty poetry as unacceptable to the people, who could not interpret its real meaning. Criticism was both political and artistic. The former attacked misty poems as too far from socialist orthodoxy, and the latter claimed that the misty style could never be accepted by the common people. Because misty poems are full of indignation, protest, spiritual expression, and a new generation's desire for change, the misty school definitely marked a new age of poetry in China. Although experimental poetry is still marginalized inside China, the misty poets received some recognition overseas, in part because the introduction of Chinese poetry in the West has so far been very restricted. A quick look at the translation anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry published in the United States in recent years shows that misty poetry still dominates.
The misty poets rebelled against the official artistic ideology, which held that the arts must serve politics and the people. The misty poets believed that socialist reality had been contaminated by excessive ideological propaganda, which had made ideology a kind of simulacrum that "served to alienate the human being from his or her true self"" For Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Yang Lian, Shu Ting, and other misty poets of this first post-Mao generation, the function of poetry was to recover the human self. This emphasis on recovering and refining the self was accompanied in poetic practice by the imagist language the poets fashioned. Landscape was humanized, and poetry was a mirror with which to see the reader or the writer. By infusing landscape (sky, rain, mist, river) with personal emotions through an impressionistic prism and often turning these images into political allegories, the misty poets strove to transcend the confines of realism and form a new entity between the self and the external world.
As far as linguistic expression is concerned, misty poems are characterized as paradoxical in their attitude. They are fully aware of the indispensability of language—"Poets live in language." At the same time, they realize that the nature of language is to cover. To these poets, being means writing, and writing means constant battles with language. The necessity of expressing and the impossibility of expressing have put these poets in a painful position. As Bei Dao pointed out, "Only language can redeem the collapsed and collapsing life," and the New Generation poets seek pure language, defying any symbolic meaning or imagistic juxtaposition that their misty predecessors may have forced on words. They believe that meaning is illusory and ideological and should not have power over language. The only meaning for language is its "meaninglessness," its resistance to human conceptualization and social and cultural value.
Bei Dao (pseudonym of Zhao Zhenkai), one of China's foremost misty school poets, was born in 1949 in Beijing. Both his father, an administrative cadre leader, and his mother, a medical doctor, came from traditional middle-class families in Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution, Bei Dao joined the Red Guards. Like most other youths, he was sent to the countryside, where he became a construction worker. Living in total isolation in the mountains outside Beijing increased his youthful melancholy and prompted him to explore a more spiritual approach to life. By 1974, Bei Dao had finished the first draft of his novella Waves and had begun a sequence of poems. These poems became a guiding beacon for the youth of the April 5 Democracy Movement of 1976. In December 1978, Bei Dao and Mang Ke published the first issue of Today. Widely treasured by those who participated in China's democracy movement, Bei Dao's poetry is marked by the effort to reveal the nature of the self, to identify both public and private wounds, to trust in instinctive perceptions, and to reach out to other afflicted souls. It depicts the intimacy of passion, love, and friendship in a society where trust can literally be a matter of life and death.
In 1989, when the demonstration in Tiananmen Square was suppressed in the massacre of June 4, Bei Dao was in Berlin. Because students circulated some of his poems during the democracy movement, he was accused of helping incite the events in the square. Bei Dao therefore decided to stay in exile. His friends Duo Duo, Yang Lian, and Gu Cheng also chose exile. With former contributors, he reestablished Today, which became one of the influential forums for Chinese writers abroad. After teaching in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, Bei Dao moved to the United States and became a resident scholar at the University of Michigan. In his traveling isolation, Bei Dao discovered the extraordinary effect of the forces of history and history's cataclysmic events on the life of the individual, and he expressed this discovery in his Can Xue (Old snow). The volume is divided into three sections that coincide with the European cities where the exiled poet has resided—Berlin, Oslo, and Stockholm. Indeed, the title evokes images of the weight of repression over China, both old and new, by describing remnants of national upheavals in European cities.
Duo Duo was born in Beijing, China, on August 28, 1951. He was a reporter for the national newspaper Farmer's Daily from 1980 to 1989. He left China on June 4, 1989. He was a Chinese teacher in the Department of Far Eastern Languages, School of Oriental and African Studies, at the University of London from 1989 to 1990. He was also a writer-in-residence at Glendon College, York University, in 1990–1991.
Shu Ting's real name is Gong Peiyu. She was born in 1952 in Fujian Province. Like most of the misty poets, she was sent during the Cultural Revolution to the countryside, and she began to write poems during her rustication. Upon returning to the city, she became a blue-coller worker. She achieved prominence as the leading female misty writer. Her first poetry collection, Shuangwei Chuan (Double-matted boat), appeared in 1982. She also published a joint collection with Gu Cheng, but then stopped writing at the time of the anti-spiritual-pollution movement. She published another two books of poetry in the mid-1980s: Hui Changge de Yiweihua (The signing iris) and Shizuniao (Archaeopteryx). Afterwards, she also published some essays.
Given this widespread shift toward opacity, it is perhaps not surprising that by the start of the new millennium, writers of Chinese poetry were thought to outnumber readers. In the two decades since 1979, the aims of the misty poets have been largely achieved: to create a space for poetic experimentation within a political culture of literary utilitarianism. In this process, however, poetry has been transformed from the popular front line of thought liberation into an isolated, self-enclosed vanguard. At present, as China's political system is continuously reformed, poets can mostly find a way to publish what they want and enjoy their freedom in writing as long as they do not directly criticize government figures.
In the beginning of the school's development, the names "misty" or "opacity" were used in a derogatory sense by some of the most traditional poets of the old generation, who found the new poetry to be incomprehensible, indirect, foggy, hazy, vague, gloomy, evasive, and confusing in meaning—in a word, misty. Another connotation of "opacity" arises from questions about the validity of this new poetic form, which, it was claimed, could not be understood by the people.
During the Great Cultural Revolution, and particularly after 1972, Western creative works and literary theories began to be circulated among Chinese political leaders, who criticized them in the light of Marxist and Maoist doctrines. Chinese intellectuals and young people who belonged to or had connections with these political circles thus were exposed to contemporary Western literature, a circumstance that played an important role in subverting the authority of Maoist literary principles. Mao Zedong's literary theories had become cast-iron orthodoxy during the Great Cultural Revolution, which ideologically sanitized Chinese literature and criticism, stripping both of human emotions. The imposition of this rigid conformity created symptoms of spiritual deprivation. After the onset of economic reform in 1978, the national response was a voracious appetite for personal freedom, which allowed for a modicum of individual diversity. Western capitalism and Western literature were equally attractive to a society weary of conformity. The post-Mao era was thus characterized by literary liberation and intellectual freedom, which created the social-psychological environment in which misty poetry was born.
The first New Poetry writer was Guo Lusheng, whose pen name was Index Finger (Shizhi). He started to write modern, premisty poems during the Cultural Revolution, when he was working in the countryside. At first, his poems were transmitted in handwritten versions, but they soon became popular with younger readers via various underground publications.
In 1974, a young underground poet named Yi Qun, whose works were profoundly influenced by European literature, gained popularity for the stylistic reforms exhibited by his poems. Between 1969 and 1976, such young poets as Mang Ke, Duo Duo, Lin Mang, Bei Dao, Yan Li, and Tian Xiaoqing, who at that time were blue-collar or agricultural workers, began writing poems that were influenced by Western literary styles. Many had not even finished high school or elementary school before being sent to work in the countryside by the Communist Party. They formed the Baiyangdian Group, which was named after Lake Baiyangdian. These young poets wrote with more freedom in rhyme and more opacity in semantics to express the dreams and fantasies of Chinese youth and to tell fairy tales. Seeking poetic aestheticism instead of rationalism and realism, both in form and in content, this group laid the foundation of the misty school.
Gu Cheng later pointed out that there is a reality in everything that is independent; hence the poet is free to explore his own world. Misty poetry first gained popularity, especially with the young, in the early 1970s. In 1976, when Zhou Enlai died, many people gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest the Cultural Revolution and indirectly condemn Mao Zedong's politics. Poetry was an important part of this protest. Bei Dao and other misty poets joined this so-called April 5 Movement and posted their poems in Tiananmen Square together with hundreds of other poems.
In 1978, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Jiang He, and Mang Ke self-published their first nonofficial magazine of poems, titled Jintian (Today), on the "Wall for Democracy" in the Xidan district of Beijing. At first, this publication circulated only among the people gathered around the Wall. Bei Dao was optimistic about China's democratic future. He pointed out that suppression could only give rise to more diligent pursuits of democracy. In the early 1980s, Today ceased publication, and a new generation of poets emerged as Bei Dao assumed leadership of the New Poetry movement from the mentally ill Guo Lusheng.
In 1979, the first misty poetry was published in the official literary magazine Poetry. Immediately after, several well-known Chinese publishers began printing such famous examples of misty poetry as Bei Dao's "Yiqie" (All of them) and "Xuangao" (Declaration); Shu Ting's "Zhi Xiangshu" (To oak tree) and "Zuguo A, Wo Qin'ai De Muqin" (My dear motherland); Gu Cheng's "Yidai Ren" (One generation); Luo Gengye's "Bu Man" (Not satisfied); and Liang Xiaobing's "Zhongguo, Wo De Yaoshi Diule" (China, I lost your key). In October 1980, Poetry published a number of poems by Shu Ting, Jiang He, and Xu Jingya. By the mid-1980s, many literature publishers and magazines in China were competing with each other to publish misty poems.
Misty poetry was the most controversial poetic phenomenon in the post-Mao era. Beginning in the early 1980s, newspapers and magazines controlled by the Communist Party strongly criticized misty poetry as unacceptable to the people, who could not interpret its real meaning. Criticism was both political and artistic. The former attacked misty poems as too far from socialist orthodoxy, and the latter claimed that the misty style could never be accepted by the common people. Because misty poems are full of indignation, protest, spiritual expression, and a new generation's desire for change, the misty school definitely marked a new age of poetry in China. Although experimental poetry is still marginalized inside China, the misty poets received some recognition overseas, in part because the introduction of Chinese poetry in the West has so far been very restricted. A quick look at the translation anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry published in the United States in recent years shows that misty poetry still dominates.
The misty poets rebelled against the official artistic ideology, which held that the arts must serve politics and the people. The misty poets believed that socialist reality had been contaminated by excessive ideological propaganda, which had made ideology a kind of simulacrum that "served to alienate the human being from his or her true self"" For Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Yang Lian, Shu Ting, and other misty poets of this first post-Mao generation, the function of poetry was to recover the human self. This emphasis on recovering and refining the self was accompanied in poetic practice by the imagist language the poets fashioned. Landscape was humanized, and poetry was a mirror with which to see the reader or the writer. By infusing landscape (sky, rain, mist, river) with personal emotions through an impressionistic prism and often turning these images into political allegories, the misty poets strove to transcend the confines of realism and form a new entity between the self and the external world.
As far as linguistic expression is concerned, misty poems are characterized as paradoxical in their attitude. They are fully aware of the indispensability of language—"Poets live in language." At the same time, they realize that the nature of language is to cover. To these poets, being means writing, and writing means constant battles with language. The necessity of expressing and the impossibility of expressing have put these poets in a painful position. As Bei Dao pointed out, "Only language can redeem the collapsed and collapsing life," and the New Generation poets seek pure language, defying any symbolic meaning or imagistic juxtaposition that their misty predecessors may have forced on words. They believe that meaning is illusory and ideological and should not have power over language. The only meaning for language is its "meaninglessness," its resistance to human conceptualization and social and cultural value.
Bei Dao (pseudonym of Zhao Zhenkai), one of China's foremost misty school poets, was born in 1949 in Beijing. Both his father, an administrative cadre leader, and his mother, a medical doctor, came from traditional middle-class families in Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution, Bei Dao joined the Red Guards. Like most other youths, he was sent to the countryside, where he became a construction worker. Living in total isolation in the mountains outside Beijing increased his youthful melancholy and prompted him to explore a more spiritual approach to life. By 1974, Bei Dao had finished the first draft of his novella Waves and had begun a sequence of poems. These poems became a guiding beacon for the youth of the April 5 Democracy Movement of 1976. In December 1978, Bei Dao and Mang Ke published the first issue of Today. Widely treasured by those who participated in China's democracy movement, Bei Dao's poetry is marked by the effort to reveal the nature of the self, to identify both public and private wounds, to trust in instinctive perceptions, and to reach out to other afflicted souls. It depicts the intimacy of passion, love, and friendship in a society where trust can literally be a matter of life and death.
In 1989, when the demonstration in Tiananmen Square was suppressed in the massacre of June 4, Bei Dao was in Berlin. Because students circulated some of his poems during the democracy movement, he was accused of helping incite the events in the square. Bei Dao therefore decided to stay in exile. His friends Duo Duo, Yang Lian, and Gu Cheng also chose exile. With former contributors, he reestablished Today, which became one of the influential forums for Chinese writers abroad. After teaching in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, Bei Dao moved to the United States and became a resident scholar at the University of Michigan. In his traveling isolation, Bei Dao discovered the extraordinary effect of the forces of history and history's cataclysmic events on the life of the individual, and he expressed this discovery in his Can Xue (Old snow). The volume is divided into three sections that coincide with the European cities where the exiled poet has resided—Berlin, Oslo, and Stockholm. Indeed, the title evokes images of the weight of repression over China, both old and new, by describing remnants of national upheavals in European cities.
Duo Duo was born in Beijing, China, on August 28, 1951. He was a reporter for the national newspaper Farmer's Daily from 1980 to 1989. He left China on June 4, 1989. He was a Chinese teacher in the Department of Far Eastern Languages, School of Oriental and African Studies, at the University of London from 1989 to 1990. He was also a writer-in-residence at Glendon College, York University, in 1990–1991.
Shu Ting's real name is Gong Peiyu. She was born in 1952 in Fujian Province. Like most of the misty poets, she was sent during the Cultural Revolution to the countryside, and she began to write poems during her rustication. Upon returning to the city, she became a blue-coller worker. She achieved prominence as the leading female misty writer. Her first poetry collection, Shuangwei Chuan (Double-matted boat), appeared in 1982. She also published a joint collection with Gu Cheng, but then stopped writing at the time of the anti-spiritual-pollution movement. She published another two books of poetry in the mid-1980s: Hui Changge de Yiweihua (The signing iris) and Shizuniao (Archaeopteryx). Afterwards, she also published some essays.
Given this widespread shift toward opacity, it is perhaps not surprising that by the start of the new millennium, writers of Chinese poetry were thought to outnumber readers. In the two decades since 1979, the aims of the misty poets have been largely achieved: to create a space for poetic experimentation within a political culture of literary utilitarianism. In this process, however, poetry has been transformed from the popular front line of thought liberation into an isolated, self-enclosed vanguard. At present, as China's political system is continuously reformed, poets can mostly find a way to publish what they want and enjoy their freedom in writing as long as they do not directly criticize government figures.
Jing Luo
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