This dissertation addresses contemporary Chinese poetry’s socio-cultural relevance through an investigation of a “crossover” (shige kuajie 诗歌跨界) trend that has loomed large in the past two decades, against poetry’s paradoxical condition of being at once revered but barely read by the general public. This trend, in which practitioners simultaneously experiment with aesthetics and expand poetry readership by innovatively fusing poetry with other arts and forms of entertainment and communication, engages an extensive body of established and emerging poets, poetry texts and artworks, and various technologies. As the first systematic research into this long-existing, far-reaching, interdisciplinary trend, this dissertation not only offers insights into individual cases, but also challenges the theoretical and methodological limits to our vision of poetry’s standing in contemporary Chinese life.
This dissertation analyzes the following: the conversation between poetry and new folksong in a concert called In Ancient Times; the transference of poetry into paintings in the We Poetize itinerant exhibition and songs in the Sing a Poem for You television show; the integration of poetry into the documentary film The Verse of Us and the experimental theatre piece Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the Fuchun Mountains; and the interaction between poetry and social media in Li Cheng’en’s personal poetry blog. Instead of viewing poetry as texts to be read in isolation, these cases call out for a reading of poetry as a multifaceted medium in constant interaction with other forms and media. Through the perspective of intermediality studies, which sees medial characteristics as both materially conditioned and historically conventionalized, all media as intersecting with and relying on each other, and medial borders as real but fluctuating, I illustrate common features of the crossover cases, chart out major ways in which medial borders are elicited and crossed, and demonstrate how poetry produces synergies with other media.
I argue that poetry crossovers recontextualize poetry texts with excessive sensory stimulations and culturally agreed-upon connotations induced by the co-presence of multiple media, which urge the audience to understand the poems based on the here and now of the crossover events and their personal knowledge and experiences. This rich context, as well as the fact that the presented poems are often self-reflexive, provokes the audience to resonate emotionally with the poets, who become flesh-and-blood humans rather than hollow voices, and to assess poets’ competence of mediating postsocialist realities. Poetry crossovers refashion the styles, structures, and spectatorship of the involved media, with poetry’s emotional intensity, technical complexity, or sociality as the driving force. Besides developing an aesthetics of “glances” in-between medial spaces, they draw middle-strata audiences with different entertainment interests and artistic tastes, enlist them as poetry performers, sponsors, organizers, and gate-keepers, etc. in their everyday consumption and production of media products, and encourage them to socialize with poets and peers respectfully. Therefore, far from being disconnected from contemporary Chinese life, marginalized in the cultural scene, and replaced by other more entertainment-oriented media, these crossover events show that contemporary poetry survives and thrives in China today.