Experimental and opaque poetry

In late 1980, on the pages of the first and most important unofficial literary journal of the People’s Republic of China, Today, postgraduate student Xiao Chi, under the pen name of Hong Huang, wrote: “A new kind of poetry has been born. It is flowing in the winds and waters of our land, in the blood and breath of a new generation. Some call it a revolution; others an invasion of the world of Chinese poetry by Western monsters.” ¹ By then, the critic Zhang Ming had already labelled such new kind of poetry as menglong (misty, obscure, hazy, or opaque), adducing it to its indebtedness to “foreign” poetry. ²