(This paper is not objective at all – what can you expect from an amateur practitioner who had no systematic theoretical study over the topic at all *Shrug of shoulders*)
Ancient Chinese poetry is a totally different from contemporary Chinese poetry – this is not technically true as they all use Chinese, express similar feelings, describing similar subjects. A less ignorant claim is that ancient Chinese poetry is totally different from contemporary Chinese poetry in format (well, I know this is true for poetry in almost in all languages). This results in a discontinuity of the argument of nature of poetry: an emphasis of how should a poem looks like fades away. The transformation was at its peak in the New Culture Revolution around 1920 in China, as part of the westernization and modernization of China. Vernacular Chinese replaced classical Chinese as the common and formal writing language, and poems of Indo-European languages were translated. Such introduced an alternative perspective on what poems can be or should be.
Enough for the background. In the early stage of the New Culture Revolution, the ‘new’ poems still meet the requirements of the ancient ones: only certain number of characters can be put in one sentence; there are strict requirements in the arrangements of syllables except rhyme; the parallel in format and meaning at certain locations of the poem. At this time, the language of poetry is blank and evident, the subjects of which focus on average and common life issues, e.g. “I love you”, “I like you”, “you are cute” (Well, young people of all ages and regions care the same things, you know, like boots rather than ethics).
While these people were experimenting in writing poetry with the vernacular Chinese language, others could not wait to propose their claims about literature. There might be a deja vu: some claimed literature, including poetry, should serve as a tool to investigate and describe life of average people, intending further discussion on the meaning of life; some seek literature as an affirmation of self and ego, but historically they turned to aestheticism; there were also poets who follow some traditional established “school” of western poems, to be specific, the “school” of Lake Poets; last but not the least, some accepted the new movements of the poetry while preserved an emphasis on the beauty of coloring and artistic conception.
Surely through several decades, a large amount of different positions were taken: adoption of French Symbolism, Boorism (opposition to and deconstruction of deliberation and elegance in poem), Stream of consciousness (yeah this is a narrative mode but it is also an experiment in poetry: how could this narrative mode be applied in a dense language like Chinese and in the format of poetry), and surely anti-post-modernism trying to preserve some old values.
I personally take a radical stance. Poetry only requires a beauty in rhythm. The significance of artistic conception is unnecessary, for ideally, poetry is transcendent – it is beyond language, and beyond the meaning within the scope of language. So it is paradoxical here:poetry is composed of language, but it needs to be independent of the language that produces it. Imagine this relationship as the relationship between brain cells: the mind supervenes the engineering of brain cells, yet it is more than the brain cells, and has a certain degree of independence. Interestingly, I know there is a claim right against it: any poem can be read aloud is trash. *Shrug of shoulders* After all, there is no united opinion among contemporary Chinese poets, either. I just take this as a possibility, and experiment to see how far it can travel.
PS. I just noticed how mysteriously I thought my date is 11/23/15 which turned out to be 11/16/15. Sorry guys and ladies.