Vegetarian Hugging a Rooster by Che Qianzi

from the translator's 'backdrop': Che Qianzi, born in 1963, belongs to the second wave of post-Maoist poets, following closely on the decisive opening created by the slightly older Menglong or Misty poets in the years around 1980. Inevitably, the Menglong poets inspired widespread imitation and dissent among younger poets. In defining his own direction, Che objected to the Menglong poets' tendency to adopt a heroic, even vatic pose for the poet as the voice of the repressed cultural psyche and the elevated poetic language this tended to entail. Che's stance is situated in the commonplace, even the trivial, which de-emphasizes personal style and opens into an unbounded range of language and observation. Compared with most other contemporary poets, Che seems unburdened by Chinese history, both recent traumas and the accumulated mass of past cultural achievements, while avoiding the common antithetical response of derisive cynicism. Younger poets necessarily see th! emselves as releasing the repressed possibilities of a language that had suffered the extremes of instrumentalization during the period of their childhood, yet few if any have been willing to go as far as Che in giving free rein to the playful possibilities of Chinese. Certainly no naïf, Che's work is remarkably uninhibited, extending into performance, sound poetry, visual poetry, poet's prose, as well as to the painting and calligraphy he assiduously practices in the tradition of his classical predecessors.