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Maghiel van
Crevel, Leiden University
Lower Body Poetry
“Lower Body” (xia ban shen) poetry, poetics and poethood—not necessarily in order of importance—present a highly visible recent trend in poetry from the People’s Republic of China, with the Web and unoffical print media as preferred channels of publication. The Lower Body’s main proponent is Shen Haobo (1976). Shen’s critical writing was instrumental in sparking off the 1998-2000 polemic on “Intellectual writing” and “Popular writing”, and Lower Body loyalty clearly lies with the Popular cause, but the Lower Body poets are much younger than the key players in the said polemic. They write poetry and discuss poetics and poethood from angles that are mostly new to PRC critical discourse, one exception being poet Yi Sha’s creative work, and his relentless sloganizing ever since his 1994 collection <Starve the Poets>. Beijing Normal University graduate Shen Haobo continues to take issue with what he perceives as despicably “intellectual” trends in Chinese poetry, and is less than enthusiastic about Chinese people reading foreign literature instead of Chinese. But unlike, for instance, Popular poet Yu Jian, Shen makes no effort to claim any Chinese cultural legacy. His commitment is squarely to the urban, carnal, cynical, shameless here-and-now, in a colloquial language which he considers forever outside the grasp of foreign sinologists. Documentary and shock value aside, what does the Lower Body add to Chinese poetry, poetics and poethood? And what does its reception, in official and unofficial quarters, tell us about tolerance on the poetry scene?