Towards a Poetics of Disaster: Chinese Poetry in Combatting COVID-19

Abstract

China’s campaign against the COVID-19 epidemic has triggered an upsurge in literary creation and animated discussions on writing about disaster. This essay explores the emergence of a disaster poetics in the COVID-19 war which considers poetry as revelatory, ameliorative and cathartic in both personal and national terms. This strand of poetry, which blends humanism, philosophical exploration, and a skeptical impulse, reexamines the isolated state of being, resists glorification, concerns individual lives and redefines heroism as quiet courage, love and compassion in despair among ordinary people, displaying a Chinese forbearance, wisdom and wry humor in facing grim reality. These poetic voices register admirable artistic courage, spiritual depth, self-critical reflection and stylistic ingenuity.

Keywords:

• Contemporary Chinese poetry
• poetics of disaster
• combating COVID-19
• narrative ethics
• narrative pattern

Notes

1 According to Jiang Hongwei’s statistics, more than 5 000 Chinese poets published more than 10 000 poems before 31 January 2020. A COVID-19 poem column is featured in Poetry Periodical 詩刊 (5,7) which includes 15 poets, Poetry Monthly 詩歌月刊 (2,3,4,5) which includes 85 poets, Journal of Selected Poems 詩選刊 (3) which includes over 160 poets, Chinese and Western Poetry 中西詩歌 (1) which includes 64 poets, The Poetic Tide 诗潮 (3,4,5) which includes 35 poets, The Stars 星星 (7,10) which includes 21 poets. Song of Combatting COVID-19 (Xiao Qin, ed. Beijing: Writers’ Press) includes 40 poets. This essay refers to the initial journals and anthologies published in 2020.

2 This reformulation of heroism interweaves the contemporary artistic and poetic trend, a ‘quotidian turn’ if we adapt Tang Xiaobing’s phrasing. Tang argues that ‘the heroic and the quotidian – two complementary visions of reality … constitute the inner dynamics of Chinese literature in the twentieth century’ (6). Contemporary films question ‘conventional tales of martyrdom, such as omnipotent heroes, gender rigidity, and patriarchal loyalty to the collective’ and ‘challenge the exclusively political representations of traditional martyr figures’ (Yang 183). Rejecting Misty's poetry's ‘grandiloquence and tragic heroism,’ Yu Jian, among others, in the early 1980s, began to propound a colloquial poetry, ‘a poetics of the everyday, with minimal use of high-modernist metaphor and symbolism, low-key language usage, and much room for humor and irony’ (Denton and Fulton 416).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant Number 20&ZD222.