Opposing the prevalent view by media organizations and literary critics that contemporary Chinese poetry is a marginalized “literature in crisis,” Heather Inwood in this book investigates modes of production and forms of contention among different poets and poetry groups active in China today so as to highlight the diversity and vitality of poetry created during the “conjuncture” of the early 21st century. The “new media scenes” (p. 3) that Inwood foregrounds emerge as dynamic networks of people, practices and discourses connected across multiple spaces and conditioned by the current historical moment. In looking at what is new about contemporary “live poetry scenes,” Inwood argues that it is the dynamics within and between three media spaces – the internet, print publications and face-to-face events – that allow us to understand contemporary poetry scene productivity (and contention). This book is a substantial and important contribution to the field of contemporary Chinese literary and cultural studies and also sheds light on the practice of poetry in the new media landscape of the 21st century.

Conceptualizing poetry as culture and social form that may be “dispersed across multiple textual institutional sites” (p. 6), rather than aesthetically determined “fixed texts” (p. 20), Inwood employs an interdisciplinary cultural studies approach and a conjunctural theoretical framework that illuminates the underlying historical conditions in which poetry is produced. This methodological perspective allows Inwood to closely examine (and, indeed, participate in) the temporal collusions among a diverse array of people, texts, institutions, resources and forms of capital that constitute and shape poetry scenes in contemporary China (p. 11). Inwood's study shows that at the heart of contemporary Chinese poetry production lies the notion of “live scene” (xiancheng) which embodies an “ideology of spontaneity and the here and now, of fleeting moments rather than big schemes and grand narratives” (p. 15). This dialogical, often contingent interconnection between “participant and observer, performer and audience, author and reader,” highlights the increasingly permeable boundaries between a poem, the site of its creation and the community to which the poet belongs. Inwood in this way highlights a novel 21st-century notion of “poet-citizen,” which “involves declaring membership and being present in a broader poetry community through participation across multiple media spaces” (p. 8).

Inwood carefully distinguishes the current, individual, interactive and exciting places and moments where poetry happens from conventional “poetry arenas” which are associated with high levels of “gate keeping,” such as poetry criticism in print journals, anthologies and established publishing houses. As Inwood shows in this book, Chinese poets like Yi Sha, A Xiang, An Qi, Bei Ta, Duoyu, Yu Jian, Yudu and many others believe that editors at publishing houses “do not understand the means of existence and constitutive state of outstanding poets” because they are “people who are not present [on the scene] (bu zaichang zhe) (p. 21).” Further clarifying the media dynamics at play in the production of contemporary poetry, Inwood draws on John Miles Foley's idea of the “textual arena” so as to differentiate between the tAgora and its concomitant ideology of the text, and the oAgora which evokes the “arena of oral tradition,” does not facilitate ownership over fixed texts and is “public and open-access” (p. 20). In the case of contemporary Chinese poetry scenes, Inwood argues, the more open, contingent, ephemeral and interactive “live scene” approach of oAgora intermingles with the authority of tAgora to bring forth hybrid agoras. To substantiate this theoretical argument, Inwood proves that each of the three media spaces in which poetry is created contain traces of the others and functions according to a complex mixture of dynamics and discourses (p. 20).

The rigorous theoretical framework which Inwood sets forth in her Introduction allows the reader to contextualize and enjoy the ensuing analyses in each of the four chapters. In the first chapter, entitled “Poetry on the web,” Inwood closely reads a variety of sites of poetry such as “rubbish poetics and imagery” (p. 58) within a context of identity politics as well as communication and contention online. The second chapter, “Poetry in print,” introduces the reader to the intellectual–popular polemic between poets adhering to “elevated writing” and those practising “earthly poetry,” by looking at the publication politics and attitudes toward a counter-anthology entitled The Chinese New Poetry Almanac from 1998 to 2010. In the third case study, “Poetry on the stage,” the author presents an analysis of “face-to-face space” by describing large-scale poetry events as well as the politically and aesthetically fraught act of poetry recitation. In the final chapter, called “Poetry in the news,” Inwood traces several interactions between modern poetry and the “non-poetry-reading public,” as well as “media spectacles” such as the spoof poetry forms that went viral in the 2000s and the Quake Poetry movement of 2008. Throughout her study, Inwood reiterates the interconnections between poetry, cultural memory and the need “to produce history, and not simply be governed by it” (p. 27), significantly expanding our understanding of the true nature and diversity of contemporary Chinese poetic practice.