Hoogleraar Chinese taal- en letterkunde aan de universiteit van Leiden Maghiel van Crevel schreef een groot essay over de hedendaagse Chinese poëzie-scene. Hij deed tien maanden veldwerk: ‘A year in China has left me with more questions and stories than I can process in a lifetime, so I’ll need to do something about that. Short of more ambitious interventions, one thing that might work is pinning up some of the stuff in my fieldnotes right away, for all to see.’

I had established a tangential connection with the poetry scene when making an anthology of Dutch poetry in Chinese together with Ma Gaoming, during my time as an exchange student at pku in 1986-1987, and the summer of 1991 was my second time in China and my first foray into fieldwork. I have kept fieldnotes of about twenty visits since then, adding up to over forty months of in-country research throughout China, from Harbin and Hohhot to Kunming and Shenzhen, even though I’ve spent more time in Beijing than anywhere else. Over the years, I have sampled the landscape around literary studies in the general direction of anthropology and the sociology of culture, and worked my way from intuition and improvisation to a conscious if basic acquaintance with ethnography. The 2016–2017 visit was a trip in every sense, taking me to eighteen cities and a mountain village, from university guesthouses and lecture halls and libraries to cultural venues, bookstores, publishing houses, company and government offices, restaurants, bars, cafés, and private homes, and nearly drowning me in new books and journals.

Het hele artikel van Maghiel van Crevel getiteld Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene is via de volgende link te lezen; http://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/walk-on-the-wild-side

Er is ook een pdf van het stuk: http://u.osu.edu/mclc/files/2018/01/Walk-on-the-Wild-Side-Snapshots-of-the-Chinese-Poetry-Scene-vug4cz.pdf

Eerder verscheen een voorproefje van het artikel op de Gids
https://de-gids.nl/2017/no3/adembenemend