Let’s all write poetry! – the Zhao Lihua affair

The poet Zhao Lihua.

What are the most popular poems in China this month?

It’s an easy bet that these are near the top:

Coming to Tennessee alone

There is no question

The xianrbing I make

Are the best tasting

In the entire world

Under a tree I finally found

One ant

Another ant

A troop of ants

Maybe there are even more ants

Zhang Wuji

Zhang Wuji and Zhao Min kiss

On Zhang Wuji’s lip, Zhao Min

Bit and drew blood

This kiss

On TV was handled carelessly

I swear that from now on I will no longer pay attention to you

I’ll do what I say

With no more regrets

The poems are by Zhao Lihua, a 40-something poet from Hebei who edits the Journal of Selected Poetry. Someone found some of her unpublished poems from a few years ago and posted them in a forum.

The response was immediate – and harsh. Zhao’s bio lists her as a “nationally-ranked poet”, so the naivety and awkwardness of some of the poems made them ready targets for attacks on high culture, self-styled intellectuals, and the national cultural apparatus, not to mention Zhao herself, who was given the nickname “Poetry’s Hibiscus” in reference to last year’s Internet clown, Sister Hibiscus.

Taken out of context, these poems are ripe for parody. Commenters quickly took to breaking their responses into lines of a few words each, and others came up with original poetic compositions. Some highlights:

God

Damn

Turns out splitting

Once sentence into many lines

Can be

Called a poem

Thank you

Grand

Mother

Lihua

Endless Tears

I never ate hot peppers

Now I like eating hot peppers

I feel I have no dignity

Saturday afternoon I cried my eyes out

My daughter said this

Dad

Mom

Why

Do you always

Want me to answer

Which of you I like best

If I say one of you randomly

The other

Will certainly be unhappy

So

It’s hard to be human

It’s harder to be a child

Mourning

Prof. Zhao Lihua

In America

Is a famous poet

But me

I’m alone in sorrow

Poets

Are disgusting

Experts

Are more disgusting

There were also how-to guides:

Universal techniques to writing Pear Blossom poetry

1. Find an article, extract a line, break it open, separate into lines, and it becomes a Pear Blossom poem. (If you want to become famous, select a hot news item.)
2. Record a line from a 4-year-old kid. Following his stops and starts, this is also a Pear Blossom poem.
3. Of course, of someone is a hesitant speaker, his speech is a brilliant Pear Blossom poem.
4. A foreigner who doesn’t speak Chinese fluently is a natural-born Pear Blossom poet.

and

How to write a Pear Blossom poem

Broken sentences

And

Carriage returns

A website was set up (Zhaolihua.com) that collected Zhao’s poems and their online imitations, calling them “pear blossom verse” (梨花体) after a homonym for her name. Devotees of this form belonged to the “Pear Blossom Sect” as the original parodies exploded into a full-blown spoof, the latest egao phenomenon to hit the net.

It’s not that they weren’t ripe for parody. Even in context (Tennessee, for example, was written in response to Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens), they’re not the greatest poems, as Zhao herself acknowledges. In response to the parodies, Zhao posted the following on her blog (item 3, her own taste in poetry, is omitted in this translation):

What I want to say

1. On parody:

I feel that parody is a product of a societal ideology that has developed to a certain point. It is a normal phenomenon in today’s era. And the Internet has provided parody with a platform of swift transmission. Whether spoofs of the movies The Promise or The Banquet, or of paintings, or of my own poems – these are all normal phenomena, demonstrating that art is not restricted to a single format or track. You do a serious version, I do a mocking version; you do a reverent version, I do a vulgar version; you do a heavy version, I do a light version…there’s nothing wrong with any of these, since we’ve already entered into a deconstructed society. I’m indebted to instigator of this instance of parody for the effort he expended, setting up a special website in my name, establishing the “Pear Blossom” sect, and publishing lengthy pieces extensively to stir things up; also, media who do business in latching on to the latest hot thing or creating the latest hot thing, who added fuel to the fire, causing me, anonymous and without station, to be known to all.

2. On my poetry:

The poems that have been spoofed online were extemporaneous compositions made in 2002 when I had just gotten online. At the time, my thought was to discard the vast majority of a poem’s weight, responsibility, significance, and educational benefit, and let is become something relying purely on intuition, something flexible, something random, something lithe. Wong Kar-wai said, “Wouldn’t it be stifling not to change after success?” Ask me to answer and I would say, “Yes.” At that time I want to play around with a different form; of course, I could call it an experiment. I remember one time looking at a Mondrian painting of the sea, not understanding why used only dense clusters of plusses and minuses to represent the rippling of the waves. I thought, can painting be done like this? But afterward I saw an explanation of how Monet and Renoir had rented boats to paint the scenes of the Seine, and especially Monet’s La Grenouillère, how they reproduced the way water flashes under sunlight and slight gusts of the breeze, and I understood – what would we have Mondrian do, coming after them? If he wants to follow a new road, if he wants to neither imitate others nor repeat himself?

I bring up this example because I want to say that progress in any art form requires continuous exploration and practice. And this experimentation and practice make it hard to avoid detours. But with my personality, I would rather go astray or come to branch in the road rather then retread the same musty, formulaic old road. But I understand that my experimental pieces are immature and slapdash. So I only tossed them up on the web and was done; I knew they were immature and unsatisfactory, so I didn’t publish them in print. Thanks to a few sharp-eyed websites who selected a few pieces out to put in a post. And some poems even had a few lines missing, so they looked even more imperfect. So it does make some sense for this kind of poetry to be criticized. However, I don’t regret those experiments; they were necessary for my own individual creativity. I had to go through those experiments. They relaxed my writing style, making me less tight, less rigid, and more able to enter into a free and easy creative state.

4. My views on this affair:

If we ignore the harm this affair has done to my own image and reputation, this might be a turning point for modern Chinese poetry to step out of a small enclave and meet the wider gaze of the world. There are many good domestic poets, and I recommend that everyone read more of their works. Yu Xiang, Zhang Li, Crystal Necklace (Shuijing Zhulian), Shen Haobo, Yang Li, He Xiaozhu, Jin Haishu, Yi Sha, Mu Ye, Tu Dou, Fu Fu, Zhang Xiaojing, Wu Hongfei, Nan Nan (Zhang Yushao), Lu Yue, E Su, Wu Yang, Liu Liu, Su Qian, Sun Lei, Chou Shi, Zhou Gongdu, Xu Xiangchou, Sheng Xing, Bewn Shaoye, Li Hongqi, Pang Hua…they have all written good poetry, and there are many more, which would require a much longer list, who are poets on the stage right now. Of course I will bring out those poems that I am pleased with to face criticism. But if you continue to say, we don’t care for these poems, then don’t care for them. At any rate poetry has always been the business of a small minority. It’s not normal for everyone to write poetry.

Zhao’s tone in this piece is generally dismissive of the whole parody business as too much fuss, but her statements here that she doesn’t care all that much failed to calm the debate. Readers seized on her last line, calling her elitist and subjecting her to a new round of mockery.

Ai Weiwei, an artist who speaks with a certain authority on poetry by virtue of being the son of Ai Qing, echoed this feeling in an interview with Xinmin Online:

“I’m not saying her poems are good poetry, but you can’t say they aren’t poems. Even doggerel is poetry!”

Speaking about the “Pear Blossom” poems that are popular online, Ai Weiwei laughed: “Who says that’s not poetry? Even a single word, a single sentence is poetry if the poet says it is!”

“Actually, everyone is a poet, though you perhaps aren’t aware.” On the rising wave of “Everyone writes poetry” sweeping the Internet, Ai chuckled: “This is a good thing! When I was young I wrote poems, too, but I don’t know whether or not it amounted to anything.”

He even offered up one of those compositions, from 1986 (not translated here).

Starving poet Yi Sha presented a rather more spirited defense, posting in huge characters on his blog that “Parody-poets are rabble”, drawing comments that he finally met some of the “people’s poets” he pretends to represent. He also posted a transcript of a 2002 dialogue between Zhao and himself in which they discuss various the state of the poetry scene at the time.

But this round of egao is not all negative, according to Wang Ke, a professor of poetry at Fujian Normal University and Capital Normal University. An excerpt of his analysis:

I’m totally able to be called a poetry “expert”, the target of the barbs and disgust of those netizens. But when the arrows took flight and struck at my heart, I felt great, not hurt. I broke my own online record and read in a single sitting all 1272 comments; posters were continuing to comment, and I was ready to keep reading and to save them all. This is possibly the “poetry incident” of the online age with the most participants, and likely the first, largest “clash” between poets and readers in the whole century of new poetry, with poets besieged by the greatest number of people, the first crazy farce put on by both poets and readers, and a highly meaningful drama at that. Reading the critiques of the netizens made me feel that the eyes of the people are bright while the eyes of the experts are blind. The people are honest and bold, while the experts are fake and timid. The people, and only the people, are the motivating force creating history; netizens, and only netizens, dare to face the bad practices of the poetry world head-on, to cleanse the trends of poetry, and to be the motivating force preserving a healthy development of new poetry.

The critiques of the netizens made me feel great! Not just because they played the role of the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, saying the things that poets and poetry critiques are too afraid of offending someone to say. The last few years has seen a flourishing of negative habits in the poetry world; even if people aren’t afraid of offending anyone, they are unwilling to speak their aesthetic conscience for fear that if they criticizing someone in the business they will be blamed for “internal feuding.” The flourishing of new poetry in the 80s is intimately connected to the escort and protection afforded by the harsh dealings of lofty critics like Xie Mian. Today’s world of new poetry criticism is in need of critics who can speak language in truth. It’s also because many netizens left their critiques in the form of standout poetry, outstanding poetic compositions, even more like poems than those poems of Zhao Lihua’s in the “news item.” I used to believe that in this age of materialism, when no life is rich in poetry and there is no way to study language, that there is no way to write poetry, that “highest of the language arts.” But the comments of many netizens led me to exclaim, “Good poetry is with the people,” and “Good poets are among the people.”