IF GENRE FICTION HAS BEEN the most successful type of Chinese Internet literature in economic terms, poetry has outperformed all other modes of online writing in terms of variety, experimentation, and critical acclaim. In Chinese Internet poetry we see a range of aesthetic programs being developed, from provocative avant-garde and moral transgression to reappropriation of the social functions of classical poetry. There is also lively interaction between poets working inside and those outside the PRC, while Chinese written characters can also be seen to be incorporated into the work of non-Chinese electronic poets, continuing a modernist tradition that dates back at least to Ezra Pound.1 With this final chapter, then, this book’s focus on the PRC literary system gradually gives way to a discussion of a wider range of writings belonging to the realm of sinophone (or sinographic) literature.2This chapter is divided into three parts. The first deals with online Chinese poetry communities as they have developed both inside and outside China. Similar to the approach I used in chapter 1, part of the analysis in this part consists of descriptive accounts of two separate visits to the same site, the first in 2004 and the second in 2012–2013. Also in this part I compare the practices of Chinese communities with those typically encountered on similar English-language websites, emphasizing the different social functions that online poetry writing appears to have in different literary cultures. The second part continues a line of investigation commenced in chapter 3, focusing especially on ways in which transgressive writing pushes the boundaries of what is or is not considered respectable or legal in the PRC context. Specifically, I compare the gradual canonization of the “Lower Body” (Xiabanshen) group of avant-garde poets, known for their direct engagement with sex in poetry, with the gradual expulsion from the realm of literature of the work of the online poet Datui (“Thigh”). Finally, in the third and longest part of the chapter, I return to questions of formal innovativeness in Internet literature, focusing on online experiments with visual or concrete poetry involving the use of Chinese characters, as carried out by both Chinese and non-Chinese poets. Much of the discussion is devoted to the unique early experiments from the 1990s by the sinophone poet and sound artist Dajuin Yao (Yao Dajun), whose by now almost classic achievements in the genre no longer survive on the live web. I also discuss poetic works by John Cayley and Jonathan Stalling, as well as Chinese translations by Shuen-shing Lee (Li Shunxing) of work by the acclaimed online poet Jim Andrews.
The experimental work discussed in the final part of this chapter can be fully experienced only online. It consists of words that move and change shape, it contains recorded sound, and it features the kind of user interaction that ensures that every “reading” of the works leads to the creation of a new text on-screen. It is hard to quote from such works, or do them justice in writing, nor can they be easily captured in images or screenshots. While I shall do my best to describe the experience of viewing these works, readers of this book are encouraged to follow the links to the actual online versions.
Poetry Forums and Poemlife
Poetry forums (shige luntan) are interactive message boards dedicated to reading, writing, and discussing poetry. Such forums exist on websites all around the world, but it is fair to say that in China, where state regulation makes independent niche publishing difficult and where poetry continues to enjoy high cultural standing and relatively strong popularity, these online forums are exceptionally important. Many feel that online forums have taken over the role previously played by underground (dixia) and unofficial (minjian or fei guanfang) print publications, a role succinctly summarized as follows by Maghiel van Crevel in his book-length study of contemporary Chinese poetry:
The unofficial scene lies at the core of a lively poetry climate that is instrumental for the development of individual poets and the poetry landscape as a whole. This is in evidence in literary historiography as well as in poetry’s general impact, domestic and international.3
In a recent interview, the poet and scholar Hu Xudong suggests that online forums have also taken over the social function of poetry. Hu says,
The 1980s was the heyday of modern poetry in China. Poetry was like pop culture then—it played the role karaoke has today. Twenty years ago there was still no such thing as karaoke, and every small city or town would have a place where people would get together after dinner and read poetry. It was such an everyday thing, so lively. Every night was like a mini-poetry carnival. But now, only twenty years later, and especially in these last few years, you hardly ever see this anymore.
These days we have online communities. Every creative group has its own online communities—art, film, literature—but the most obvious is in the area of poetry, where the internet has had the biggest impact on the community’s development.4
Hu also points out one clear difference between the unofficial communities of old and those currently active online, namely the lack of geographical proximity:
This community isn’t going to be like those of twenty years ago, where a group of people gather together in the one city—in a café, or in a university—it might be one person in the North of China, another in the South, another might be studying overseas. They’ll use a particular forum or internet group to make this tiny poetry community.5
Hu’s comments speak to the social aspect of poetry, which is very prominent in the Chinese tradition. Traditionally in China, the composition of poetry took place in the context of social occasions, poetry parties, competitions, and the like.6 Even in the modern period, although poets moved toward more unconventional uses of language and imagery, the desire to belong to a community and to have one’s work understood continued to exist and worked against the spread of excessively involutionary poetics.7 This convention adds another reason for the popularity of online poetry forums and also lays the basis for our understanding of the cultural differences between Chinese-language and English-language online poetry communities to be explored later in this section.
Compared with the pre-Internet situation in the Chinese poetry world, online forums have brought about at least two important breakthroughs. First, referring back to the comments by Van Crevel and Hu Xudong, online portals have enabled the unofficial scene to bridge the gap between its social activities and its publishing activities. Online, discussion and publication go hand in hand. A good example is the Shi Shenghuo (Poemlife, http://www.poemlife.com) website. Poemlife was founded in 2000 and claims to have been the first poetry site in China with its own domain name and server.8 The site is registered in Shenzhen, but its official approval was issued by authorities in Hunan. It claims that its contributors come from “all over the world.”
Its main forum, simply called Poetry Forum (Shige luntan), describes itself as devoted to “poetry writing and communication” (shige xiezuo yu jiaoliu). The term jiaoliu has a clear connotation of social interaction and is encountered frequently in the Chinese context, as opposed to similar sites in the United Kingdom and the United States, where the forums are often identified as being devoted to detailed critique of one another’s work. For instance, the main forum of the U.K.-based Poetry Forum describes its purpose as “in depth critique,” and its site rules add the following information:
In the critique forum, please specify what kind of critique you are after (for example: serious critique, light critique, about the structure, choice of words, etc.), because it makes it easier for not only you but for the people who reply to your thread. Please only post material here if you feel able to bear peoples [sic] frank and honest opinions. DO NOT post here if you are likely to get upset at people finding fault with your writing.9
The U.K. forum’s statements represent the ethos of creative writing programs and their practices. The forum clearly emphasizes participants’ belief that poetry writing is a difficult skill that requires serious commitment and training, and that it should rise above the level of socializing niceties.
Even more typical in this regard is the poetry site Everypoet (http://www.everypoet.com), which, although registered in Sweden, caters largely to a U.S. audience.10 Everypoet’s most popular resource is the “Poetry Free-for-all” (hereafter PFFA, http://www.everypoet.org), a collection of online forums described on its entry page as “the preeminent interactive poetry community for informed, constructive criticism of your poems.” The site has strict rules about the number of posts each member is allowed to upload each day (not more than one poem per day, and for each uploaded poem three constructive critiques of other members’ poems must be submitted). Its forums are divided on the basis of the perceived skill level of the contributors and the harshness of critique that can be expected. Its guidelines hammer home the idea that the site is to be seen as an online poetry workshop, not as a social network, as can be seen from these rules:
2. PFFA is not a showcase and it is not a free critique service. It is a poetry workshop. That means your main goal for being here is to improve your work and your critical skills. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ve found it. However, if all you’re looking for is a place to share your work, you haven’t. Neither of us will be happy campers in that case, and you should go elsewhere.
3. Because PFFA is a workshop that respects the best uses of the English language, not a chatroom, we expect all members, whether poets or critics, to use correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntax in all posts—poems, critiques, and posts alike. Be prepared to find sloppy, borderline-illiterate posts deleted.
(Artistic licence will, of course, be respected. However, don’t be surprised if we need convincing that the licence you’ve taken is, indeed, artistic.)
…
5. You’re here, we assume, to receive constructive comments to help you improve your work. NOTE: “Constructive” does not necessarily mean complimentary, flattering, or nice like your mom would be; it can also mean negative or even harsh. (Please note also that you are not “entitled” to receive critique or to dictate what kind you will or won’t accept just because you post here; no comment at all can often be the best constructive criticism you’ll get.) That is the nature of a workshop—you can’t improve if you’re just told that you’re a good little poet. At PFFA it’s all about the poem, not the poet. If you can’t handle negative criticism, don’t post your work here. We mean it.
(While we’re on the subject, “criticism” is much more than telling someone their poem “flows” well. If you’re unsure of where to begin as a critic, never fear: this thread will get you started.)11
This propensity for merciless textual criticism is much less strongly emphasized on modern poetry forums in China, where critique tends to be brief and friendly, or expressed in general terms (“like” or “dislike”), and is often interspersed with socializing comments. A random but representative recent example is a group of thirteen poems posted on the Poemlife forum on September 16, 2011, by the poet Anhuishama, who is an active contributor. The poet followed the post containing the poems with a post stating, “Let’s all criticize and communicate!” (Dajia duo piping! Duo jiaoliu!), clearly linking criticism and socializing. The comments from readers are limited, however, to short phrases such as “interesting,” “noted,” or “I like your poems,” and each of them is duly followed by a reply from Anhuishama thanking the reader and encouraging them to “communicate more.”12
For many years, the Poemlife site also published a regular webzine (wangkan), appearing as a monthly with some interruptions from 2000 onward, with the final issue being number 83, dated June 2010. The webzine issues appear on-screen as regular magazines: they start with an illustrated cover, followed by some pages of illustrations, and then a table of contents. The individual poems are accessed by clicking on links in the table of contents. It is not possible to browse through the whole issue from beginning to end. The webzine issues contain selections of poems from the forums, with any and all paratexts and comments removed and only the text of the poems remaining. Each issue of the webzine has a named editor, a date of publication, and a copyright statement. Moreover, in 2007 an annual selection of the site’s best poetry and critical essays of the preceding year was published in print by the prestigious Huacheng publishing house in Guangzhou.13 A second annual selection came out unofficially the following year.14 Also, the website still carries the text of the preface to a very early annual selection, published unofficially in 2001.15 The annual selections are not available on the website.
The example of the Poemlife website demonstrates the fluidity of boundaries between discussions about poetry and publications of poetry that has been facilitated by the advent of the online forums. Although poetry communities also published unofficial journals and anthologies during the time of the “karaoke-style” poetry salons of the 1980s referred to by Hu Xudong, the main distinction is that in the age of online forums, the contents of community discussions and the earlier versions of the anthologized poems are also publicly available. This draws attention to the fact that selection and anthologizing of online poetry go hand in hand with a process of rigorous decontextualization. As the poems make their way from the forums to the annual selection, all paratexts and comments fall by the wayside, and in some cases the end product (the anthology) does not even appear in cyberspace but only in print, which then becomes the highest form of consecration.
A second innovative element of many Chinese poetry websites is that they contain forums for both modern, Western-style poetry (also known as New Poetry) and classical-style poetry. Ever since the Literary Revolution of 1917, these two styles had been each other’s antipodes. Although the literary elite has often attempted to condemn classical-style poetry to the status of historical relic, the classical genres in fact continued to be actively practiced and its prosodies and chanting methods actively transmitted throughout the twentieth century and up to the present.16 Adherents of the classical style, including many members of the Chinese social and cultural elites, likewise show open disdain for the modern style, consistently attacking its lack of formal beauty and its origins in foreign examples. In Chinese education (not just in the PRC but also in Taiwan) the classical style is given much more prominence than the modern style. As shown in chapter 2, in the context of the debate about Zhao Lihua’s poetry, nonspecialist readers in China are also generally mystified by free verse and conceive of poetry mainly in terms of formal regularity. In other words, apart from the distinction between “official” and “unofficial” scenes, the field of poetry in China is also characterized by an important division between the “modern-style” and “classical-style” scenes.
Throughout most of the twentieth century it would have been rare to see both styles appearing together in a single publication. The unofficial scene, especially, generally displayed very little interest in the classical style as a living tradition. It did, of course, acknowledge the significance of, and at times the inspiration provided by, the great poets of the past, especially in the realm of imagery. However, poets identifying with the unofficial scene would hardly ever attempt to create work that would highlight distinct continuities with the formal prosodies and linguistic registers of the classical style. A website such as Poemlife, which has strong ties with the unofficial scene, continues this convention and pays little if any attention to classical-style poetry. However, there are many other poetry forums that break new ground in this respect. A good example is the site Zhongguo Shiren (Chinapoet, http://www.chinapoet.net), to which the discussion now turns.
Chinapoet
Like the Poemlife site, the Chinapoet site, based in Fujian province, claims to be the first poetry site in China with its own independent domain name. A comparison of their domain registration records proves that Chinapoet came first. Its domain was first registered on January 8, 2000, whereas the Poemlife domain was first registered on February 23, 2000.17 Chinapoet operates a membership system, and the number of members has grown steadily since its founding.18
I first visited Chinapoet in 2004 and made some observations about the community’s practices, comparing them with those found on the English-language poetry site Everypoet.19 Here I look at how the site changed over time, drawing on impressions gathered during later visits in 2011 and 2013. I look at practices surrounding the production and distribution of poems as well as practices of valuation (symbolic production20). Following the example set in Howard Becker’s book on art worlds,21 I try to take into account all the skills and tools that are needed to bring an online poem into being. I also refer to a more recent essay by Becker about hypertext fiction.22 In that article, Becker argues that hypertext fiction, being nonlinear writing requiring special software to create, special distributors to sell, and special reading strategies to enjoy, is a truly new art form in the sociological sense. The world of printed literature has no way of accommodating it within the existing forms of organization and cooperation between its producers, distributors, and consumers. This kind of total independence from the print-culture paradigm is not achieved by the poetry forums under discussion here, but that does not make them less interesting or innovative, as also argued with regard to online chronicles in chapter 2.
The basic material condition for the authors of online poetry is to have a computer with access to the Internet. For many people in the urban areas of China, computers are affordable and Internet access is cheap and convenient. Membership of a poetry website like Chinapoet is free, as is publication of one’s work on the site. This means that most of the cost of making this kind of literature available is incurred by those who run the website. Their position combines that of publisher and bookseller in the print-culture system.
The basic material conditions for hosting a website like this are server space and software. Large interactive sites like this generate much server traffic and are generally not hosted for free by Internet service providers. The software needed to operate the interactive forums is also not freely available. However, compared with any kind of print-culture venture, the direct costs of running sites like this is small. In 2004, my impression was that the site had very few advertisement banners. During my first visit in April that year, the only advertisement present was for a printed anthology of best works from the site itself. During later visits to the site in September and December 2004 and March 2005, I noticed an increasing number of advertisements on the front page, presumably an indication of increased popularity. The site also seemed to function as a company offering paid web-hosting services. It was unclear to me to what extent the enterprise was profit making or rather based on generous investment of time and personal funds by enthusiastic individuals. It seems likely that the latter was (and is) the case. The official registration records of the Chinese site, which were linked from the front page of the site in 2004 and have been preserved in the IAWM, place it in the official category of “noncommercial websites” (fei jingyingxing wangzhan).23
Apart from online poetry, the Chinapoet site also provides copious information about famous poems and poets, this being an indication of its relative closeness to the print-culture tradition. The main attraction of the site, however, is its collection of poetry forums. The forum software appears identical to similar software used for discussion forums around the world, with the first point of entry being a page listing the various available boards and inviting the user to choose which one she or he wants to read or contribute to. These listings also provide some statistical information about the forums, such as the number of posts and threads they contain. The lists also show the screen names of the moderators of each of the forums.
The moderators are the key agents involved in the running of this kind of online poetry forum. Combining the roles of editors and censors in print culture, the moderators decide which posts are and which are not included, but they do so (at least in the forums discussed here) after the original post has been submitted. In other words, the moderators’ main task is to screen submissions and to ensure that their content is suitable and appropriate for the forum to which they have been sent. The actual work might vary from removing obscene or abusive messages to moving a poem to another forum where it more appropriately belongs. In the case of Chinapoet, the moderators are also responsible for ensuring that submissions do not violate government censorship regulations.24 As is the case in most Internet communities, the moderators are themselves regular contributors or visitors to the site. It is unlikely that they receive more than token remuneration for their efforts. This is consistent with Becker’s model of art worlds: if one wants to do things within an art world that are unconventional (such as publish online rather than in print), one must be prepared to do a lot of the work oneself, since other agents within the community might not be willing (or be trained) to provide the assistance you need.
The key agents in keeping sites like Chinapoet alive are of course the members contributing to the forums, either by submitting their own work or by commenting on others’ posted work. As mentioned in previous chapters, contributions to the forums are represented as threads, that is, as a series of individual posts on one topic, normally a poem submitted by one of the members, who, by doing so, starts a new thread. A typical forum list shows the titles of the posts/poems, the screen names of the authors, the number of replies to the original post, the number of times the thread has been visited, the screen name of the last person contributing to the thread, and the date and time when that last contribution was made. Various symbols on the left-hand side indicate various aspects of the status of the thread. For instance, the yellow folder symbol representing a thread might turn into a symbol of a flaming folder if the thread is “hot,” meaning it has been responded to or visited more than a certain number of times. As the word “thread” itself indicates, the poems submitted and the responses by other users are organized in a linear fashion, namely in chronological order. In other words, the threads themselves are not hypertexts. Nevertheless, as also pointed out in previous chapters, the possibility of direct interaction between poet and reader/critic is unusual when compared with print culture.
Unlike with most print-culture communities, symbolic production (i.e., the production of the value of the work) in these online communities is not carried out by specialized critics but by other authors (i.e., members who themselves are contributing poetry to the site), presumably because it is difficult to find specialist critics willing (or able) to take on the task. Moreover, it is normal for authors to respond directly to comments on their work, which is a new function not available in print culture. The moderators (themselves also authors and contributors) play a crucial role in attributing recognition to members’ works as they decide which posts or threads are selected for inclusion on a special board for the best of Chinapoet. I noted in 2004 that this special board in turn provided material for the editors of the two web journals that Chinapoet strove to publish each month, although in reality they appeared much less frequently: one journal for modern poetry and one journal for classical poetry. These journals were made available for members to download as files to their computers and also appeared online.25 The web journals were edited by a small group of moderators. The contents of the journals represented only a very small part of what was contributed to the site every month. The works (poems and essays about poetry) were presented on nicely designed web pages that did not have any interactive functions, that is, pages that could only be read and not commented on.
The fact that editors select a tiny proportion of work submitted to them for inclusion in a journal is not dissimilar to the editing process of a print-culture journal. The main difference, however, is that in this case all contributions get published on the site first. To have one’s work included in the site’s web journal is likely the highest possible form of symbolic recognition that a contributor to Chinapoet can obtain within the site itself. Other literary websites in China have web journals as well, and some of them are important mouthpieces for groups that have little access to, or interest in, official print culture. On the other hand, the format of the web journals is so devoid of interactive characteristics that these publications can also be seen as possible stepping-stones into print culture. These Chinese web journals could be (and presumably sometimes are) simply printed off and enter the offline literary world. Unlike the world of hypertext fiction discussed by Howard Becker, the world of online Chinese poetry on the whole displays no intention to break away from print-culture paradigms, making the boundaries between the two much more fluid. As we shall see later in this chapter, this also means that experimentation with nonlinear forms of poetry is less conspicuous in the PRC than in other communities.
The web journal phenomenon is worthy of further, separate investigation. A useful question to ask is whether or not the editors’ selection of works for inclusion in the web journals is influenced by the valuation of those works by contributors to the discussion forums. It is likely that a certain amount of recognition derives from the statistics indicating how often a poem has been read and commented on. In studying these sites, I noticed that, as I was browsing the forums, I was generally inclined to click on threads with high statistics, assuming that they would be more interesting or controversial than others. Naturally these numbers can be manipulated by the author, if he or she simply keeps going back to the thread to add new posts. In 2004 Chinapoet had a rule that members were not allowed to submit more than three posts per day, without stipulating if these should be poems or comments on poems.26 However, the site did have much stricter rules for the contents of posts, based on government censorship regulations.
The rules for submission to Chinapoet, which I downloaded in April 2004, were in two main parts. One part listed all the content that is not allowed on the site, including “writings violating the PRC constitution, the policy of reform and opening up, and the four cardinal principles,” “writings attacking the PRC government, the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders,” “writings propagating violence, superstition, and licentiousness,” “writings exposing state secrets,” and (last) “all other content forbidden by law.” The second main part listed all types of screen names that members were not allowed to use, including “names, stage names, and pseudonyms of Party and government leaders or other celebrities” and “names of state institutions and other institutions.” Most important and mentioned three times in bright-red font, the site was closed to any and all content alluding to the outlawed Falun Gong movement. The last line stated unequivocally, “This site does not welcome Falun Gong. If we see them, we delete them [jian yi shan yi].”
This was not just paying lip service to government campaigns. When visiting Chinese online forums in 2004, I found that Falun Gong members and sympathizers were indeed using freely accessible discussion forums to spread information about their movement and to denounce government oppression. Failure to remove such contributions might in time lead to a website’s being closed down. The alternative to outspoken warnings like the one cited would be to renounce the open character of the forums and screen every contribution before publication, a step that Chinapoet obviously was not willing or able to take, since it would place a much heavier burden on forum moderators.
As was the case with Poemlife, the discussions taking place on Chinapoet represent a mixture of criticism and socializing. Detailed discussions of skill and considerations about the right word in the right place are much less prominent than on comparable English-language sites, although they do appear on the forum dedicated to those writing in the classical style, which of course has very strict prosodic rules. Already in 2004 I noted that the feedback on poems in the modern-poetry forums was much less normative and often consisted of one-liners of the type “I like this poem” or “I don’t like this poem,” without going into much detail. Questions of content and personality were also often debated, as were issues of gender. In one case, two members responded to a simple poem expressing love for a woman. The first dismissed the poem as romantic rubbish. The second pointed out that this would be the case if the poet had been a man, but since the poet was a woman writing about love for a woman, it was actually much more interesting and gave the reader “food for thought” because the poet created a “contradiction” and a “role reversal.”27 This is exactly the kind of conflation of poet and poem that would be anathema to English-language forums such as Everypoet.
In 2004 Chinapoet had a lively forum devoted to translation. Although the forum rules did not limit the translation to one particular language, all translations I saw were either from or into English. The forum had separate subforums for translation of famous English poems into Chinese and translation of members’ poems into English. These forums naturally attracted much normative discussion. The inclusion of translation and the focus on English placed the Chinese site firmly in the margins of the system of world literature, whereas the total neglect of translation places sites like Everypoet squarely in the center. The fact that, according to the Chinapoet site statistics at the time, 95.9 percent of its visitors were from China, and another 1 percent or so from sinophone areas such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, underscores the nature of the predicament.
In September 2011 I renewed my acquaintance with the Chinapoet website. The forums were much the same as before, still with regular contributions coming in on a daily basis, although with seemingly somewhat less discussion about individual poems. The site no longer contained any traces of the early webzines, which I had noted in 2004 and which, as mentioned, remain accessible nowadays through the IAWM. However, the 2011 version of the site did contain a special forum dedicated to the editing and production of an annual anthology, which appears to have been coming out in print since 2003 but which was not very visibly advertised on the site during my earlier visits. In at least one case (the 2010 anthology), the full contents of the printed anthology can also be found reproduced on the forum itself.28 Print publication of the anthology is facilitated by funds raised among members of the site, and the distribution is done privately.29 The forum contains records of payments made by members to order copies of the anthology and other publications.
Moreover, the site started a new webzine, the idea being launched in 2009 as a by-product of work on the annual anthologies and given a separate forum on the site. An editorial board was formed, and the first issues of the webzine, simply called Zhong shi wangkan (Chinapoet Webzine), started coming out in 2010. The webzine is distributed in the form of a compressed file (in .rar format) that can be downloaded by members only. Both the forum devoted to the annual anthologies and the forum devoted to the monthly webzine suggest that, compared with 2004, the site has become more organized. If initially sites like Chinapoet were characterized by a blurring of boundaries between author, reader, editor, publisher, and critic, the establishment of clearly separate groups or individuals carrying out specific tasks (such as editing anthologies, raising funds to publish them, or taking care of distribution) shows the kind of division of labor taking place that characterizes a more developed art world.
The establishment of more standardized working routines is also noticeable from the revised membership rules, as they exist at this writing (February 2013). There is no longer any specific mention of Falun Gong, just general statements stipulating that there must be no submission of posts that break the law, that discriminate on the grounds of race, gender, or religion, or that constitute any kind of defamation or personal attack. The rules further make clear that copyright of all posts remains with the original authors and that no copyrighted material may be posted on the site without permission. Any form of advertising is explicitly forbidden, as is the use of obscene user names, and so on. The site clearly states it accepts no responsibility for user-generated content. Clearly, compared with 2004, the fear that the entire site might be affected by illegal content posted by users is no longer present.
The membership registration process is simple and in line with what is common for most online forums. New members are asked to choose a user name and password and submit a valid e-mail address. There is no request for real-name registration, and when I registered, no confirmation e-mail was sent to my e-mail address, but my IP address was recorded. The site rules stipulate that users’ personal information will not be shared with anyone, unless legally requested by judicial or police authorities. As is common practice nowadays in order to prevent automatic registration by spam bots, those registering are asked to type in a verification code shown on an image. In a nice twist, an additional level of verification is added by asking for the answer to a question that consists of the first line of a famous classical couplet, with the person registering having to answer by typing in the second line. (In my case, for instance, I was given a line from the Tang poet Wang Zhihuan’s [688–742] “At Heron Lodge.” Of course the correct answer could be easily Googled.)
Going over the tables of contents of some of the annual anthologies, as well as the full text of the 2010 anthology, it is clear that Chinapoet’s publications continue to feature both modern-style and classical-style poetry. Although the two are kept in separate sections, and the majority of the anthology content is in the modern style, the presence of both in the same context is evidence that this form of border crossing, which has been unusual in mainstream print culture, is gaining more and more currency online. By following the many links to other poetry sites on Chinapoet’s front page, it is not difficult to find other sites featuring forums and publications with very similar characteristics, including at least one belonging to the “official” scene: the Chinese Poetry Forum (Zhongguo Shige Luntan), hosted by the Chinese Poetry Study Society (Zhongguo Shige Xuehui).30 If it is true, as Xiaofei Tian has noted in her study of the old-style Internet poet Lizilizilizi, that Internet publication of poetry is conducive to the emergence of “hybrid entities” that “powerfully demonstrate to us that we cannot disassociate modern Chinese old-style and new-style poetry in our critical discourse,”31 then the appearance of new-style and old-style poetry in one and the same context, both on forums and in spin-off anthologies, must play a crucial part in this process of hybridization.
Jintian
Xiaofei Tian starts out her “Coda” to the article just mentioned with the following lines:
Lizi’s poetry nicely illustrates the issue of local and global literature. Lizi is a provincial writer who lives in Beijing. Even though he is always at “city’s edge,” his poetry travels on the Internet, a space bringing together authors and readers across vast regions—even across the Pacific Ocean and to the United States. And yet, his kind of poetry will always lose in translation, because it affords too much “pleasure of the text”—echoes of classical and modern literature, cultural lore, contemporary colloquialism and slang, exuberant word play, or well-crafted parallel couplets.32
In a similar analytical move—confirming the potential of Internet literature to travel around the world but doubting its ability to overcome cultural differences—I concluded my observations about Chinese poetry forums in 2004 by saying that
these communities foster direct interaction across vast geographical distances, coupled with publication for a potentially huge audience, a combination that print culture practices would find difficult to accommodate. The use of similar software and protocols in different cultural settings ensures that the practices of online communities all over the world have certain elements in common, such as their tendency to rely in part on statistics for recognition and the blurring of boundaries between specialized roles such as author, critic, and reader, which are so crucial to the practices of print culture.… At the same time, cultural differences are observable and demonstrate that cyberspace is not the locus of any kind of transnational cultural expression.33
A good test case to see if modern Chinese poetry is really not capable of “transnational expression,” even when put online, is the history of the famous journal Jintian (English title: Today). Jintian was founded in 1978 by the poets Bei Dao and Mang Ke and first distributed on and around the Democracy Wall in Beijing.34 Although it was eventually banned from publishing, its “obscure” (menglong) poetic style soon set new standards for modern Chinese poetry, and a number of poets associated with the journal (apart from the two founders also Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, and Duoduo) went on to achieve national and international fame. In 1989, when all the mentioned, with the exception of Mang Ke, as well as a number of other literary figures of the same generation were outside China in the aftermath of June Fourth, a decision was made to revive the journal abroad, with Bei Dao as editor in chief and initially published out of Stockholm. For most of the 1990s, the new Jintian was considered to represent a kind of Chinese “exile literature,” and although its editors aimed to adhere to strict literary standards and published little of a direct political nature, the journal was seen as “dissident” and was for a very long time banned in China.35 Writers based in China did, however, publish in Jintian without fear of reprisal, and copies of the journal were regularly smuggled into the country by supportive sinologists and other travelers.
As time went by and the Chinese government gradually lost interest in dissident poets (with the exception of Bei Dao, for whom the borders of his native country remained regularly closed until quite recently), Jintian became more clearly and openly a journal featuring Chinese-language work from a variety of backgrounds, including many contributions from the PRC. The editors reestablished contact with the unofficial scene inside China and included some poets living in China in its editorial board. In December 1998 the journal registered its web domain, http://www.jintian.net, which was for a long time devoted solely to promotion of the printed journal. In February 2004, the website still opened with the following English-language introduction, highlighting the journal’s history and previous suppression by the Chinese government:
ABOUT TODAY
Conceived in 1978 and suppressed in 1980, Today became the best-known unofficial literary magazine in China, Bei Dao and Mang Ke as its founding editors. After ten years of silence, in 1990, it was relaunched from Sweden. It is now published as a quarterly and opens its pages to Chinese writers throughout the world. Its reputation continues to grow, that of a literary magazine dedicated to the enrichment of Chinese and world culture, today and in the future.36
In 2006 the website was redesigned and made to look more like an online portal than a static site for the promotion of a journal. The new design did away with the English text, which featured so prominently on the old site and was clearly aimed at an overseas audience (and presumably overseas sponsors), and instead switched completely to Chinese. At the same time a poetry forum, called “Poetry Commentary” (Shige dianping), was added to the site. By 2011, the site had twenty-four forums,37 edited by a mix of PRC-based and overseas-based individuals. It also provides blogging space. Notably, the site now also has a separate section and a dedicated forum for classical-style poetry. Seeing the Jintian “brand,” with all its connotations of modernism and resistance to convention, open up a space for old-style poetry is genuinely surprising. Moreover, when I last visited the site in 2011, the classical-poetry forum was among the site’s most popular in terms of activity, as expressed in the number of posts and responses to posts. (Although none of the forums came anywhere close in popularity to the site’s first forum, the mentioned “Poetry Commentary,” which was receiving around ten times as many contributions as the classical-style-poetry forum and other lower-ranked forums.)
The new organization of the website and the introduction of forums suggests that Jintian has successfully reached the audience that eluded it for such a long time when it was an “exile journal,” that is, the mainland Chinese audience. The site now has a clear presence among Chinese Internet users, and in 2011 its Alexa ranking for the China region, as well as its domestic Chinarank rating, was more or less as high as that of Poemlife, and much higher than that of most other Chinese poetry websites.38 The site’s own statistics as well as the Alexa statistics revealed that the vast majority of its visitors (80–85 percent according to the site’s Stat-Counter, 95 percent according to Alexa) were now coming from the PRC. Rather than having crossed boundaries and created new transnational spaces, it seems that Jintian has simply come home, having adopted a design and an online editorial strategy that differs little from those of similar PRC-based sites, and having switched entirely back to operating in Chinese and addressing mainly readers in China.
Moral Transgression
Even if Chinese online poetry fails to open up genuinely new transcultural spaces, the discussion so far has shown that it does manage to cross many previously established boundaries, such as those between poet and reader, text and commentary, or classical-style poetry and modern-style poetry. In addition, online poets (as with online novelists, as seen in chapter 3) have taken advantage of the relative freedom of web-based publishing to challenge long-standing moral boundaries for literary creation, especially with regard to the portrayal of sex in texts written by women. Moral, legal, social, and literary conventions all play a role here. General disapproval of explicit portrayals of sexual activity is largely a moral issue: one should not write about sex. In modern societies such general disapproval is usually laid down in obscenity legislation: one is not allowed to write about sex in certain ways. Specific disapproval of poetic descriptions of sex is a literary issue: there should be no explicit sex in poetry (nor anything else that is not conventionally “beautiful” or “meaningful”), but it may occur in other genres; finally, critical outrage at sex in poetry written by women is a social issue: women are expected to express themselves differently from men, especially where sex is concerned.
As observed in detail by James Farrer, sex culture has undergone enormous changes in China during the reform era, and this is also observable in cultural production, where “forced romantic rhetoric” has given way to “an ironic appreciation of the problems of free sexual and labor markets.”39 Although Farrer’s analysis is based mainly on nonfictional material appearing in popular magazines throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his use of literary terminology (“romantic” vs. “ironic”) is helpful in this context. Indeed, the presence of irony has in my view been tremendously important in making explicit sexual descriptions in literature more acceptable in the PRC during the reform era. One of the earliest examples of this process is the 1993 publication of Jia Pingwa’s Feidu (Abandoned Capital), with its ironic use of empty squares in the text to indicate obscene passages that had been excised. Of course those passages never existed in the first place and indeed the mechanism is classically ironic: rather than “cleansing” the text, the added blocks help to strengthen the visual impression of the text’s transgressive status. In any case, there was plenty of explicit description left in the novel to warrant its eventual banning, but according to Geremie Barmé, its publication and the ensuing debate also heralded the arrival of a renewed period of intellectual engagement and printed cultural polemic, which had been subdued since the events of 1989.40
In poetry, the 1990s saw the emergence of “colloquial” poets, most famously Yu Jian, who made it their business to bring poetry down to earth with the use of plain, sometimes even vulgar, language and a publicly stated resistance to embellishment and metaphor. Theirs was essentially an ironic stance, claiming to be opposed to anything “poetic” while obviously producing poetry.41 With the emergence of the Internet and poetry forums, the antiromantic stance of this style was trumped by the emergence of a new group of young poets who called their new journal, which had both a printed and an online edition, Xiabanshen (The Lower Body, http://www.wenxue200.com/mk/xbs001.htm, now unavailable42) and who frequently employed explicit sexual reference as a poetic topic. A well-known example is Yin Lichuan’s “Wei shenme bu zai shufu yixie” (Why Not Make It Feel Even Better), which, in the translation of Maghiel van Crevel, reads as follows:43
Why Not Make It Feel Even Better
ah a little higher a little lower a little to the left a little to the right
this isn’t making love this is hammering nails
oh a little faster a little slower a little looser a little tighter
this isn’t making love this is anti-porn campaigning or tying your shoes
ooh a little more a little less a little lighter a little heavier
this isn’t making love this is massage writing poetry washing your hair your feet
why not make it feel even better huh make it feel even better
a little gentler a little ruder a little more Intellectual a little more Popular
why not make it feel even better
In his discussion of the poem, Van Crevel addresses the moral, literary, and social issues that are at play in this context:
This is vintage Yin Lichuan…: derisive, tired, cynical, playful yet tough. The effect is strengthened by a dogma that holds everywhere but is particularly deep-rooted in China, certainly if one bears in mind a good two millennia of literary history: public, detailed description of sexuality is scandalous, especially if the author is a woman. To make matters worse, the speaker in “Why Not” is an immoral woman, whose carnal ecstasy is not the spin-off of soulmateship or love but emerges in lazy instructions to a man portrayed as a tool to satisfy female lust.44
In the same context, Van Crevel refers to some critics’ equation of the Lower Body school with pornography. He then comments, “It is, however, too frequently ironic and insufficiently focused on sex and sexual arousal to justify this classification.”45 This suggests that, in the literary context, the employment of irony by poets such as Yin Lichuan does not only represent the changed sexual morality of a new generation of Chinese, as Farrer would have it, but also serves as an indication of “literariness,” which absolves the text of potential legal challenges on the grounds of pornography or obscenity. In the case of Yin Lichuan’s poem, the fact that the text itself refers to “anti-porn campaigning” (saohuang) doubles the irony. Although certainly not uncontroversial, Yin Lichuan’s poem is now well on its way to achieving a canonized status, as evidenced by regular references to it in PRC scholarly journals, especially those dealing with women’s literature or the topic of “body writing” (shenti xiezuo).46
As discussed in the previous chapter, Chinese criminal law, like that of many other countries, excludes “literary and artistic works of artistic value that contain erotic contents” from persecution on the grounds of obscenity. Also as in many other countries, the law does not specify what “artistic value” is exactly. In many Western countries such issues were famously debated in the courts. In the United States, for instance, the 1957 California trial of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” set an important legal precedent in this context. The legal community in China is also aware of the need to provide further detail to definitions of “artistic value” and of key terms such as “obscene” and “pornographic,” but for the moment these do not appear to be forthcoming. When I queried a government official responsible for the regulation of Internet publishing on these issues, he simply stated that decisions about censoring obscenity were referred to a “panel of experts” consisting of academics and industry professionals and that, as far as he was concerned, anything they considered legal was legal, and the rest not.47 Clearly, the stronger the academic and critical support for and consensus about risqué literature, the better its chances to be spared censorship.
In the context of online literature, however, the question is not so much how to deal with erotic writing that has demonstrable literary value but how to deal with writing that lays no claim to being anything but erotic. Erotic writing can be found all over the Internet, and whereas in most Western countries it is commonly accompanied by an age warning, asking the reader to confirm that they are of a legal age to view such material, the concept of a “legal age” does not exist in China. Instead, the PRC government prefers to carry out periodic attempts at cleansing the domestic Internet through the mentioned antiporn campaigns. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the main literary target of such campaigns is online genre fiction. Chinese online genre fiction will generally find few literary critics willing to stand up for its “artistic value.” Nevertheless, the present situation in the PRC appears to be that such work can have explicit sexual content as long as it stops short of employing graphic vocabulary or presenting detailed descriptions of intercourse. When transgression takes place, website owners are instructed to remove the offending passages, and frequent transgressors are “named and shamed” on quarterly lists published by the General Administration of Press and Publishing (GAPP). GAPP’s aim appears to be to gently pressure commercial online publishers into falling in line with the norms for state-owned print publishers while at the same time not harming their business and the entertainment they provide for millions of readers.
Whereas the censoring activities deployed by GAPP have attracted wide attention to the online existence of “obscene and pornographic fiction” (yinhui seqing xiaoshuo), there appears to have been no concern at all for the existence of pornographic poetry. Yet such poetry does appear online in China and seems to be ahead of online fiction in its willingness to transgress, despite lacking critical or academic support. Specifically, I have in mind work that appeared on various websites in the past few years and that was produced by an author using the pseudonym Datui xianfeng nü shiren, which literally means “Thigh—avant-garde female poet.”
In a short autobiographical piece that can be found on the Chinese Internet, Datui traces her own genealogy to the Shi Jianghu (Poetry Vagabonds) website, which was also the home of many of the Lower Body poets.48 She writes that she registered an ID on that site in 2007 and that the first poem she published there was titled “Cao wo ba, ruguo ni you qian” (Fuck Me, If You Have Money). After Poetry Vagabonds was taken offline in 2008, she remained silent for a while before starting a blog on the popular Sina platform. That blog was quickly shut down, after which she migrated to blogging sites based outside China. Despite the fact that she herself no longer publishes on Chinese sites, her poems can be found on Chinese sites and remain part, however obscurely, of PRC Internet literature.
Datui herself boldly states that her work was even more avant-garde than that written by the Lower Body poets. A comparison of her poems with the quoted Yin Lichuan poem indicates that she is in any case much more graphic in her sexual references. The following poem can be frequently encountered on the Internet:49
Put My Cell Phone in My Cunt
I put my phone on vibrate
and sent you a message saying
I put my phone in my cunt
you called my phone like mad
it vibrated again and again
and made me reach
an unprecedented orgasm
Although this poem is lacking in redeeming irony, I would argue it could still be subjected to a sympathetic literary analysis in terms of the impact of modern technology on human relations. But that is beside the point here. The point is that this kind of poem pushes the Lower Body aesthetic into the realm where it did not want to be, namely that of pornography and obscenity. The fact that the author’s virtual identity is female (I have no idea of the real-world gender identity of the author, but that is arguably irrelevant to the reception of the work) may well make it even more scandalous. To make matters worse, Datui also has a tendency to comment on national symbols and render them profane, as in this poem:50
Coming to Beijing
to Tiananmen
seeing
the Monument for the People’s Heroes
erected there
I always feel that
it’s a cock
a Beijing cock
the Nation’s cock
tall
thick
and awesome
erected there
I reach into my bag for
a condom
I always want to
make the Monument wear one
so that the Nation
will be safe
In the poem “The East Is Red,” she utters the wish to bring Chairman Mao back to life by putting her hand inside his trousers.51
Her more recent work, as mentioned, was published on sites outside China and is therefore more difficult to access for readers inside the country, but a poem ridiculing youth idol and Internet celebrity Han Han has been reposted on various domestic sites:52
Han Han: Spokesman for the SC
A stupid cunt will never feel that
he himself is a stupid cunt
stupid cunts need a big stupid cunt
to speak on their behalf
When seeing Han Han
doing his best to act like a cunt on TV
I really don’t know what to say
Han Han uses his stupid-cunt-like
cunt-acting books
to make money off stupid cunts at large
and when he’s got the money
he plays with his shitty racing cars
Lately he’s got this air of
wanting to stick his neck out for the stupid cunts at large
making the stupid cunts at large all excited
shouting loud oh idol oh Young Master Han
what a damn
fucking stupid cunt
At least one Chinese forum that reproduced Datui’s poetry has added its own age warning by posting a selection of her work under the title “Not Suitable for Minors.”53 The forum post in question only lists the titles of ten Datui poems but has made the files available for download to members of the forum. The way this works, also on other forums, is that one must respond to the original post in order to get to the download. Within a year and a half, over two hundred people responded, and some also left comments indicating their approval. Clearly Datui’s work addresses only the smallest of niche audiences. She seems aware herself of the situation when she adds the following postscript to her poem about Han Han:54
A real fighter will not
appear in the mainstream media
and even when they do appear on TV
they will not take on the air of acting like a cunt
so my conclusion is that
Han Han is the biggest stupid cunt
the spokesman for the stupid cunts
The Chinese literary system has taken no interest in canonizing Datui’s work, as opposed to that of Yin Lichuan and other Lower Body poets, because it has too few redeeming characteristics that might help it escape from charges of obscenity and profanity. Yet at the same time, crude and angry as it may be, Datui’s writing demonstrates where the limits for literary recognition lie, especially inside China itself. By reading Datui, we understand better the boundaries within which the successful Lower Body poets needed to operate in order to achieve recognition. Even if critics would want to discuss her work, they would probably not be able to cite it publicly without crossing out a few words or reverting to paraphrase or euphemism. As a result, Datui’s writing remains situated in the literary underworld, so to speak, together with other genres and writings that do not meet the minimum current requirements for being tolerated.
It is unlikely that, in the foreseeable future, work such as Datui’s will ever appear in print in China. My discussion now turns to a type of online poetry residing at the opposite end of the literary spectrum but that has in common with Datui’s work its being so unconventional it can never appear in print.
Textual Morphs: Chinese Language in the Work of John Cayley
The Chinese written language has long fascinated Western literary experimentalists because of its perceived visual and imagistic qualities. These qualities are especially appealing to those working in the tradition of concrete poetry, that is, poetic creation that emphasizes the visual aspects of writing as much or more than the semantic or prosodic aspects. In electronic literature, the work of the Anglo-Canadian author John Cayley stands out for its frequent use of Chinese characters blended in with other languages constituting nonlinear sequences. Cayley was among the first to experiment with programmable digital media in producing concrete poetry, and although his work is not always intended to be read online, much of it is available for download from his personal website.55
The arrival of computers and, especially, programming languages that can make texts do things that print cannot gave new impetus to existing movements in concrete poetry. What computer programming brings to concrete poetry is the ability to make the text move, assume different shapes, or to change from one shape to another much more easily and in many more different ways than can be achieved in print. The poetic experience of this kind of work lies in watching the transformation take place and experiencing an aesthetic response to what appears on-screen.56 The creative technique introduced by Cayley in the 1990s is called textual morphing, whereby a poem appearing on-screen slowly starts to change, letter by letter, into something else, possibly another poem. Textual morphing can be entirely programmed (i.e., taking place in a predetermined sequence), or it can be “on the fly” (i.e., the trajectory whereby one text morphs into another is randomly generated by software), or it can be interactive (i.e., the user determines what happens to the text and when).
An early and straightforward example of textual morphing uses different versions of the famous Tang-dynasty poem “Deer Fence” by Wang Wei. Each morph involves two texts, including translations of the poem in English and French, a version in pinyin transliteration, and a version in Chinese characters. The reader-user starts the morph by clicking on links, selecting the pair of texts to use, and then moving the mouse pointer across a horizontal bar at the top of the screen. As the pointer moves, the initial text begins to change, on the basis of an algorithm created by Cayley that replaces letters by other letters until, via several intermediate steps, the first text has morphed into the second one.57 The poetic experience lies in the observation of the process of visual transformation from one text to another.
As becomes clear when one moves the pointer across the screen to let the morphing happen (and as has also been pointed out by Cayley himself58), it is not easy to create a form of morphing that allows for the roman alphabet to morph smoothly into Chinese characters. The best that could be achieved in the late 1990s was a smooth morphing into Unicode, which then suddenly (i.e., in a single step without intermediate transitions) changed into characters. It is worth bearing in mind, also for what follows, that in standard computer software Chinese characters were (and still are) encoded in combinations of letters, numbers, and other symbols within the ASCII character set, whereas Western alphabetic scripts require no such encoding. Cayley’s example does include a further link to a short Flash Video clip that shows a single English word (empty) morphing smoothly into one Chinese character (kong 空), demonstrating that it is technically possible to create the morphing effect between two radically different writing systems but that it would involve extensive programming if one were to do this for the entire poem.
In the Wang Wei morphing example, the reading process is interactive, but the morphs are not random. The user can only move through the stages provided by the programmer, not unlike the way in which a reader of a printed book can only move through the pages that are bound together. Although the reader is free to decide which page to read when, the specific content that is on each page does not change as a result of any decisions made by the reader.
“windsound,” a later work by Cayley, is not interactive but features a long, complex morphing sequence that was entirely software generated and then recorded as what the author calls a text movie.59 Letters randomly change and move across the screen for a period of roughly twenty minutes, punctuated by the appearance of a number of “nodal” poems written especially for the occasion, including Cayley’s own translation of a Song-dynasty poem by Qin Guan. As the words change, a computer-generated voice reads out what is on the screen, regardless of whether or not the letters form recognizable words. This work does not run into the kind of encoding problems just mentioned, but this is clearly because it does not use Chinese original text (nor sound) but only English translation. “windsound” won the 2001 Prize for Poetry of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), and a version of the work has been archived on the ELO website.60
In one of his later works, titled “riverIsland,” Cayley combines sound and image and random textual morphing in a complex whole that involves poems in various languages including Chinese and that is fully interactive. The work is based on a conceptual “map,” known only to Cayley himself, that links a multilingual set of translations of Wang Wei poems together in both vertical and horizontal directions. By moving on-screen controls in these directions, the reader can explore the links between these texts, initiating morphing sequences as well as activating sound files that read out the poems in various languages, including Mandarin Chinese. The Wang Wei poem returns in various forms (read in Chinese as well as in a literal English translation, for instance), as does the onscreen morph from the word “empty” to the character kong. Contrary to “windsound,” “riverIsland” is highly interactive. The sheer endless possibilities for horizontal and vertical movement and the fact that, as soon as one starts interacting, there is no single “straightforward” way of going through the work ensure that every single reading by every single reader of this work is different, not just at the level of interpretation (as is usually the case with literature) but also at the level of perception.
The use of different voices, including a female voice reading in Mandarin Chinese, ensures a fairly seamless integration of Chinese language into this work, yet the integration of characters into the morphing process clearly continues to be problematic, in terms of sheer programming requirements, and is therefore limited to the single morph from “empty” to kong, which appears as a kind of stand-alone movie at some point during the work and which has now been expanded to include not only the English word and the Chinese character but also the pinyin transliteration and the English word written in Xu Bing’s “Square Word Calligraphy.”61
Electronic Poetry Turned Chinese
A different type of interactivity in concrete poetry is demonstrated in the work of Jim Andrews, translated into Chinese by the Taiwanese scholar and e-writer Li Shunxing. Andrews’s works feature a gaming element that puts the reader-user very much in control of the poem and aims, as before, at eliciting a different set of emotional and cognitive experiences than those usually associated with reading a poem. A seemingly simple example is the work “Enigma n.”62
“Enigma n” begins with the word “meaning” in the middle of the screen. At the top of the screen is a small menu that encourages users to click on the words “Prod,” “Stir,” and “Tame.” As the reader clicks away, the letters start to move in different directions and patterns, and at different speeds. Further options appear on the menu, allowing the reader to change the size and color of the font and, crucially, to make the letters stop moving. One of the ways in which one might read this work (the way in which I find it most interesting and amusing to read) is to try to stop the letters on the screen at the exact moment that they form the phrase “enigma n,” the anagram of “meaning” that is the title of the work.
This work was translated into Chinese by Shuen-shing Lee (Li Shunxing).63 For obvious reasons, Lee replaced the seven letters of English that are in the word “meaning” (and in its anagram “enigma n”) with seven Chinese characters rather than trying to play the game with only two, as the literal translation of the word “meaning” (yiyi) would have forced him to do. Lee’s choice to translate the work in this way adds a new dimension to it, in that the seven Chinese characters (wenben zhi wai wu ta wu, or “there is nothing outside the text”) can now be moved across the screen and halted in different positions to make all kinds of funny-sounding, semicorrect complete sentences in classical Chinese. (For instance, wen zhi wu wu ta zhi ben, or “the nonmatter of text [is] the essence of him.”). It is important to note, however, that if only programming would easily enable it (but the point is that it does not), Lee would have been able to entertain the other option of translating this work, namely to use only two characters (for instance yiyi) and have the different components of those characters (the different strokes, or the four corners, or the radicals and phonetic elements) move across the screen and form new and interesting combinations.64 It is precisely because standard computer software conceives of Chinese characters either as a whole or as a sequence of code that this option is very difficult to carry out. There is no existing encoding to represent component parts or individual strokes of Chinese characters, unless such parts happen to be existing characters in their own right.
The different ways of encoding alphabetic writing and character-based writing in computer software can be further explored by looking at the actual language in which Jim Andrews wrote “Enigma n,” which is not the English language but the programming language DHTML. Andrews cleverly embeds this message in the poem’s source code, which can be accessed prior to or during the reading of the work by accessing the source viewer built into most web browsers. The source code starts out with the following comment:
<!—
Enigma n
Welcome to the ’neath text of Enigma n. Enigma n is a philosophical poetry
toy for poets and philosophers from the age of four up.
…
—>.
And toward the end of the source code we find, hidden among the coding sequences, the following:
<!—
If you’re reading this, I don’t know really why. You could be reading it to see how the piece was done so you can do dhtml yourself or you are looking for the true meaning of the piece or you’re a habitual source viewer or …
I’m not sure whether to talk about the mechanics of the piece here or not. Naw, that’s technique, and technique is hard won but anybody can do it.
—>
In my interpretation, Andrews inserted these comments into the ’neath text to emphasize on the one hand the complex structure of his work (there is a whole text underneath it that nobody reads unless it is pointed out to them) but at the same time, his comment toward the end seems to suggest that the art (as opposed to the technique) of his work is to be found at the surface level. This kind of antimodernist move (discouraging readers from going deeper into the work, encouraging them to stay on the surface) is typical of much avant-garde electronic literature. Andrews’s gesture did not make it into the Chinese translation, however, for when one accesses the source code of Shuen-shing Lee’s Chinese translation of the work, the two passages cited above are still there in English.
A more elaborate example of Andrews’s work, which is purposefully irreverent in its attitude toward poetry, is “arteroids.”65 The point of “arteroids” is to combine the aesthetic experience of viewing, reading, and using a work of art or literature with the rather different experience of playing a violent computer game. Words and sentences move across the screen intent on destroying one another. Users are in control of one word or phrase or sentence (which users can input themselves) and must “shoot” other words or phrases or sentences (which users can also input themselves) in order to reach the next level. Complete with sound effects (which users can also change), the work has well over two hundred skill levels. Every time a game ends (when a user’s word is blasted by the attacking words), a philosophical phrase shows up on-screen, urging users to reflect upon what it is they are doing.
There is no Chinese translation of “arteroids,” but arguably this is not necessary, since all the words that appear on-screen when using the work can be modified by users themselves. The only thing that is constant about this work is the movement of the words on-screen and the way they are controlled via the keyboard. The text itself can be anything the user wants it to be, making “arteroids” an extreme example of the textual fluidity inherent in interactive electronic literature. However, as soon as one tries to copy and paste a Chinese phrase into the text moving on the “arteroids” screen, the result is gibberish (either a row of question marks or a row of blank squares). I presume this means that the work recognizes only standard Western characters and therefore only alphabetic writing, not scripts that require encoding. There may well be a clever way of inputting code and get it to display as Chinese (although I tried inputting Unicode and changing the character encoding of my browser, to no avail), but the point is that it requires much more specialist computer knowledge to enjoy this supposedly completely open and interactive work if one wants it to be written in Chinese than in any of the alphabetic languages.
Jonathan Stalling and Sinophonic English Poetry
A very creative way of poetically blending Chinese and English, relying more on sound than on visual effects, is the poem Yingelishi (Chanted Songs Beautiful Poetry), which exists both as a printed book66 and as an online opera.67 Yingelishi consists of short phrases in Chinese and in English, followed by the transliteration of the English using Chinese characters, and a translation of those characters back into English. In the online version, the transliterated version is sung and accompanied by Chinese traditional folk musicians while the text displays on-screen. The aim is to create a poetic experience whereby the reader-viewer-listener can choose whether to receive the text as being in English or in Chinese, or something in between. Most of the text is made up of lines from typical tourist phrasebooks, and the inspiration for the transliterations comes from the way in which such phrasebooks (and also English-language textbooks published in China) use the sounds of Chinese characters to approximate the sounds of English words. Stalling’s creative transformation of these conventions reminds us that the Chinese sounds also have meanings separate from their function as transliteration. However, Stalling does not use the same standard set of characters for transliteration all the time but instead varies the characters in order to achieve specific translation effects, which are often poetic, and sometimes can be comical, as in this brief example:68
哦, 我的天啊!
oh my god!
‘ō mài gāo de
噢! 卖 糕 的!
Oh! a cake peddler!
Despite the presence of humor, Stalling’s purpose in writing sinophonic English, which he has been using to write poetry since the late 1990s, is a very serious one, as explained in the introduction to the printed version of Yingelishi:
Even if one does not understand the characters, it is important to acknowledge them because we must remember that every line’s assumed intelligibility (as English) comes as a result of the reader’s cultural imposition upon the sounds, which house meanings that English consciousness doesn’t have access to. I am hoping that such an experience will create a sharp contrast between the sense of superiority that manifests as humor … and the realization that profound meanings exist elsewhere in another language that speaks with the same voice. For this reason, I have chosen to write the Chinese poems in this book in a distinctly melancholic register that further heightens the distance between the desire to reduce these sounds to a kind of mockery and the realization that it is the English speaker who has imposed external linguistic and cultural meanings upon these sounds.69
A good example of this method of distancing the phonetic from the semantic can be seen in the following phrase, from the section titled “Customs”:70
你 将 在 这 里 呆 多 久?
how long will you be staying?
Hào làng wéiōu yŏu bì sĭ dāi yĭng
浩 浪 围 鸥 游
闭 死
呆 影
Vast waves play encircling gulls
sunken eyes fall dead
stiff shadows
The addition of traditional Chinese instruments and singing voices in the online version of the poem adds a further contrast, especially for the listener who recognizes the English line as English while hearing it sung in Chinese.
As we have seen, the fact that computers were not originally designed to display Chinese writing directly, rather than through encoding, makes merging the Chinese language into electronic works relatively more difficult. This might explain in part why such work is not so popular in China, although, as mentioned, conventional expectations about what poetry should or should not be also play an important role in discouraging formal experimentalism of this kind.71 One very notable exception is the ongoing poetic experiments of Dajuin Yao (Yao Dajun), which started out online as early as the mid-1990s. Yao has in common with Cayley and Andrews a preference for concrete poetry, whereas he shares with Stalling a desire to engage with Western perceptions of the Chinese language. A discussion of Yao’s highly original and constantly evolving work concludes this chapter, and the main body of this book.
Dajuin Yao
If the boundaries crossed by the poetry forums discussed in the preceding were mainly those between different scenes and between the different stages of the process of literary publishing, by looking at the work of Dajuin Yao we move toward more intrinsic questions of border crossing between text and image, sound and poetry originating in the Chinese language. That is not to say that Yao has not crossed more conventional boundaries. Geographically, he was born in 1959 in Taiwan to parents who had come from mainland China; he did his graduate studies in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, and he now teaches at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. In terms of literary publishing, he has consistently produced works that are not easy to reproduce in print, and he has therefore, in his own words, always been “outside the system” (tizhi wai).72
On June 4, 1996, Yao registered the web domain http://www.sinologic.com to create a website to promote his company selling Chinese-language-learning material. In February 1997, together with Jerlian Tsao (Cao Zhilian, b. 1969), herself now also a well-known Internet artist and novelist, he opened a section of the Sinologic site for the publication of avant-garde poetry, under the name “Wonderfully Absurd Temple” (Miao miao miao).73 In 1999, Yao added another section to the Sinologic site, this time featuring only his work and titled “Wenzi Concrete” (Wenzi juxiang). Drawing inspiration from the Western tradition of visual or concrete poetry and indulging in what he called auto-exoticism in playing with the presumed visual nature of Chinese characters, Yao created a number of works that have by now obtained canonical status in the field of Chinese Internet literature, even though they are no longer to be found online.74
An integral element of Yao’s work is that it frequently comments on the lack of attention to formal experimentation and visual effect in the Chinese poetic tradition. The work “Xinbian quan Tang shi (di si juan)” (English title: Complete Tang Quatrains), for instance, displays four vertical lines that each consist of five squares, which are constantly changing color.75 In my interpretation, the work drives home the message that, for a visual poet, there is little diversity in the time-honored genre of the five-word quatrain or wuyan jueju. Different words are put into the right positions in the standard-length lines but, visually speaking, they are but blocks of ink with slightly different appearances.76
Another work featuring a more complex comment on traditional poetry is “Duoshengbu wuyan jueju—lan jing” (English title: Multiphonic Quatrain: Looking into the Mirror 1 Day Before Autumn).77 When the poem starts, the only instruction given is not to start interacting until it is fully downloaded. This serves the function of hinting to the reader-user that interaction is possible. On the second screen appears a poem by the Tang poet Li Yi (748–829), with again the instruction to wait before interacting, indicating that interaction is possible. The voices that speak when the various characters of the classical poem are clicked represent different dialects and different registers of the Chinese language, and when clicked in rapid succession, they create a sense of noise, confusion, and polyphony that, in my interpretation, is meant to be the exact opposite of the Chinese poetic tradition in its relation to practices involving formal regularity, memorization, canon building, standardization, and so on. At the same time, however, the appearance of the classical poem on-screen reminds us of the fact that, despite all the different voices, registers, dialects, and regional languages, there is something that all these speakers have in common: a cultural tradition in which poems like this play an important role. As is appropriate for a work of concrete poetry, the actual semantic meaning of Li Yi’s poem is, at least in my interpretation, less important to the overall meaning of Yao’s work.
Some of Yao’s early work was created using a software that he refers to as Poetry Design Assistant (PDA) and similar software used to create “random” poetic lines on the basis of specific algorithms based, presumably, on word class and function. A very early work of this kind, dated 1994, is “Chengshi luoji jiqi shi—yi” (English title: Algorithmic Poetry—One), translated as follows:78
Algorithmic Poetry—One
lotus flowers turning to dust in a periscope burst open
crazy thoughts of the border
a dangling tenor
ancient undying angry fire scaling the void
the custom of the passer-by
because the unforgettable touch for an instant at the lake’s center
the forgotten rhythm
is the striking of the past
is the deep red ocean
just as an apparition in a mirror
In my interpretation, this poem may well be mistaken by many readers for a “normal” poem of the “obscure” (menglong) variety referred to earlier in this chapter. The fact that it was written by a machine (or rather, the author’s claim that it was written by a machine) is what sets in motion some pondering on questions of originality and poeticality. Note that we have no evidence, other than the author’s claim, that such a thing as a “Poetry Design Assistant” ever existed. Although it is perfectly conceivable that such a piece of software might be designed, the poem perhaps obtains a yet more interesting layer if we bear in mind that the poet’s statement might be ironic.
Yao also created sound poetry on the basis of such algorithmic work, as in “Zhendang de manzu” (Satisfaction of Oscillation), which is a nine-minute sound file containing sounds generated by a computer on the basis of a Mandarin recitation of five syllables of one of Yao’s algorithmically generated poems (or so he claims—I have no doubt that the sounds are computer generated, but there is no evidence that the sounds were taken from a poem, nor that the poem itself was computer generated). This work is still available online and appears among other avant-garde sound works by other artists on the website Archival Vinyl.79
A very specific textual concern expressed by Yao in his work from his early experiments onward is the blurring of the boundaries between horizontal and vertical Chinese writing. In a work tellingly titled “Xuanyan” (literally, “Manifesto”; English title: Autoexoticism Manifesto), Chinese text is arranged on-screen in square blocks of 320 (20 by 16) characters each.80 The blocks themselves constitute a visual reference to the Chinese language, since Chinese characters are all presumed to fit into perfect squares. The text in each block is in fact the same, but in the blocks on the left-hand side it is written horizontally and in the blocks on the right-hand side it is written vertically. Also, in the second, fourth, and sixth blocks in each column, the text is written backward, that is, horizontally from the bottom right corner and vertically from the bottom left corner. The text itself is a description of another poem by Yao, titled “Made! Wo de Quan Tang shi diaodao taikongcang waimian qu le” (Damn! My Complete Tang Poetry Has Fallen out of the Space Capsule), which features a visual representation of myriad Chinese characters dumped into space, where they form new “constellations” of form and meaning that do not make conventional sense. And this, the text concludes, is what is called auto-exoticism (or “self-estrangement,” in Chinese ziti yihua, with a nice, perhaps intentional, homophone of ziti 自体, “self”, with ziti 字体, “type font”).
In more recent work, Yao has focused mainly on sound art, but he has not moved away completely from textual work, and he continues to pay attention to visual aspects of language and to the random nature of the connection between words and meaning. He developed a vertical writing software called Verticalis, which produces hard-coded vertical writing that can be copied and pasted across programs and platforms and which, among other things, he recommends for the production of concrete poetry and for the publication of texts that cannot be found by search engines or censorship keyword crawlers. I tried using it to input hard-coded Chinese into Jim Andrews’s “arteroids,” but it still failed to display. Nevertheless, this is clearly an example of a Chinese poet attempting to find ways around the problem of encoding noted in the previous section of this chapter.
The Verticalis software also comes installed with a tool called Funky Funkey that claims to use “artificial intelligence algorithms” to change any inputted text into poems in a variety of genres, ranging from five-character and seven-character classical style to modern free verse.81
On his new website, now called Post-Concrete, Yao maintains an irregular blog that has the following statement on the front page, providing further evidence of his continued interest in alienating language from its conventional meaning and in playful pastiche of orientalism and exoticism:
This site is half written in semi-classical Chinese with excessive hyphenation, name dropping and meta-referencing and therefore remains untranslatably (un)Chinese, defying all machine translation.
(Dis)Orientally yours, Dajuin82
Finally, Yao has recently presented a new software and video installation called IdeoRhythm that showcases what he refers to as algorithmic calligraphy, aiming to break the link between calligraphy and handwriting by projecting specially created calligraphic computer fonts. In other words, he has created a kind of calligraphy that is produced by typing on a keyboard rather than holding a brush. I have not yet seen the installation, but its description, cited in the following, clearly draws on many of the concepts and ideas discussed previously.
IdeoRhythm is the artist’s unique homage to the Chinese script system, exploring the ideographic writing’s extreme possibilities in expression in this “post-handwriting” era of global culture. IdeoRhythm is a real-time software algorithm system projecting animated Chinese characters on large projection screens or gallery walls. With the pervasiveness of computer inputting, the ideographic writing system is already much removed from the motor memory and practice of our hands. In future Chinese calligraphy of the “post-handwriting” era, the art will be executed via the agent of fonts, software and algorithm, instead of traditional writing instruments. The recontextualization and indecipherability of Chinese characters seen in this series signify the alienation and auto-exoticism of Chinese culture in this and future centuries.83
Summing up, it seems fair to say that Dajuin Yao’s work burns as many bridges as it crosses. He moves freely between poetry, visual art, sound art, and software promotion and in doing so has created a number of works that make very creative use of the typical characteristics of the World Wide Web: hyperlinking and user-machine interaction. Moreover he has done so at a very early stage of the development of the Internet, joining the ranks of a global avant-garde experimenting with the literary and artistic potential of programmable digital media and the web environment. At the same time, the main bridge he has burned (and other similar experimenters with him) is that of linearity. In the examples given in the preceding, his only works that developed in a linear fashion and that were therefore open to conventional readings and interpretations were those he claimed were written by a computer program instead of a human being. His work is definitely transgressive when set against the poetic norms perpetuated by the online forums discussed in the earlier sections of this book. Due to its visual qualities, it also travels well across geographical and cultural borders, although in the PRC, in my experience, there are still very few who are willing to accept that his visual poetry is indeed poetry. However, similar experiments are widespread in the PRC art world, and it is not surprising that that is where Yao has now found his professional niche. Clearly, Yao’s work is much less adept in crossing the boundaries between online publishing and print publishing, simply because too much of his work features either movement or interaction, or both and therefore cannot be printed.
This chapter has focused on showcasing the variety of online sinophone poetry that can be encountered on the Internet today. As in previous chapters, I have tried to show that even mainstream work, produced on a daily basis on countless literary forums, is not devoid of innovative value. At the same time, I have demonstrated that some types of online poetry are either forced to, or choose to, remain largely outside the system. The work of Dajuin Yao, which literally disappeared from the web one day while I was trying to do research on it, epitomizes the precarious existence of much online writing. Taken in its entirety, however, as an art world steadily developing its own standards and conventions, Chinese online poetry provides Chinese poetry lovers with many of the aesthetic, cultural, and social functions that they enjoy, overcoming many of the limitations and boundaries inherent to the print-culture system.
Figure 4.1 Main page of Chinapoet website. 
