Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry

摘要

As a scholar and poet I read Nick Admussen's book with great delight, and this delight is both intellectual and literary. Prose poetry as a modern Chinese genre or non-genre has rarely been studied in its own right. Admussen's new book not only reconstructs the rhetorical-historical development of this hybrid genre in China from the Maoist period to the recent past, but also constructs an innovative theory about how to better understand the unstable nature of Chinese prose poetry both as a literary concept and a writing practice. Rather than focusing on the "form," "politics" or "content" of Chinese prose poetry, Admussen proposes to focus on "a particularly visible and visibly particular quality to its compositional process" (p. 1). This book's emphasis on "compositional process" represents a breakthrough in our reading and interpretation of post-1949 Chinese poetry. In chapter one, by examining a set of prose poems selected from vastly different contexts, Admussen reaches a new definition of this cross-generical genre: a Chinese prose poem means a compositional process of recitation and refusal. For Admussen, recitation is "different in intent, and almost always different in form" from citation. In a prose poem, the prior art of prose and other genres is transported "into the present," into a prosaic-poetic voice (p. 30). Yet recitation treats prose traditions not as a transparent tool, but only as raw materials to be worked on. A recitation of the familiar "coexists with a refusal to follow" it. Refusal means the non-identity of a prose poem with preexisting prose. The "twin movements of recitation and refusal" characterize Chinese prose poetry not as an autonomous aesthetic entity but as a compositional process. This perspective brings new light to the textual production of contemporary Chinese poetry.