ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the history and status of pattern poetry in mainland China, and discusses how 20th- and 21st-century Chinese poets have drawn upon this native tradition as well as Western modernist influences in the fashioning of their own ideogrammic concrete poetry. The chapter illustrates ancient huiwen (‘circular’), baota (‘pagoda’) and wugui (‘tortoise’) poems, whose visual and verbal intricacy was used in petition and occasional poems that highlighted the poet’s ingenuity and skill. This ancient tradition of ingenious occasional pattern poetry extends to work by early 20th-century writers such as Hu Shih and Bing Xin. The chapter argues that experimental techniques associated with later modernist concrete poetry seem to have been developed by the Hong Kong poet, Ou Waiou, and the Mainland poet, Yin Caigan, largely in isolation from Western influence.
