"I point to the waves billowing in the distance/ I want to be the sea that holds the sun in its palm/ Take hold of the beautiful warm pen of the dawn/ And write with a child-like hand/ Believe in the Future…" On the screen, a man in a hospital gown reads a poem to a crowd, to tears and applause from both the live and the taped audience.

The screening of the documentary Believe in the Future took place Sunday in Caihuoche Cultural Salon in Beijing. More than 100 people came to see the film, which is about Shi Zhi, one of the pioneers of obscure poetry.

The tradition can be traced back to the spring of 1970, when three young men were boating through the waters of the Summer Palace. Suddenly, one of them jumped onto the stern to recite Shi Zhi's "Believe in the Future."

 One of the two surprised "audience members" was Zhao Zhenkai, who later achieved global fame under his pseudonym Bei Dao. He didn't know who had authored it, but he was deeply struck by how the poem, which was written in 1968, seemed to stand outside of time itself. Bei Dao was then inspired to explore his own voice by writing poems.

A genre is born

In 1978, Bei Dao and some other poets founded Today magazine, which is commonly accepted as the formal beginning and core of obscure poetry. "Obscure poetry" was coined by a critic who'd thought the genre used too much imagery. Before it was forced to discontinue in 1980, Today had published many so-called obscure poems, which were circulated among the youth all over the country.

"Everyone in our generation read obscure poetry: no exaggeration, everyone indeed," said Yu Xiaoyang, director of the documentary Believe in the Future. Obscure poetry thrived from the end of the 1970s to the early 1980s, a period of social transformation and enlightenment that followed the dark decade of the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-76). Although obscure poets were loose in their affiliations and wrote in many different styles, they forged a great literary movement whose rise is regarded as "the rise of Chinese literature," and even a new Chinese culture.

It's not hard to understand how a school of literature could be so influential once you look at its history. If we describe the literature of the dark decade as a frozen river, then the appearance of obscure poetry is the thaw. Those obscure poets had experienced the Cultural Revolution, when "poems" were like stylized revolution slogans, full of empty clichés like "the sun is shining," "the song is loud," and "the sky is blue."

Then the collapse of the "utopian" political practice brought literature to sudden liberation. The basic dignity of humanity returned to the minds of Chinese people, and poets and their readers alike began to doubt, to criticize, to defy, and to explore, to seek and to hope.

Reclaiming personal expression

Obscure poems focus on the ideas and feelings of one's inner heart, emphasizing the individual, which had been ignored for a long time in Chinese Confucian culture and which was suppressed completely during the Cultural Revolution.

"New images of 'people' began to emerge within this poetry movement. Individuals were no longer little blades of grass or tiny screws that can do nothing but become fixed into the wheel of history, waiting to be saved. Rather, people realized that they are the masters of history," said Liu Denghan, vice president of the Writer's Union of Fujian Province.

So when Bei Dao declared in his poem "The Answer": "I tell you, world, I - do - not - believe! If a thousand challengers lie trampled beneath your feet/ Count me as number one thousand and one," his sentiment resonated throughout the whole country.

At that time, the most prominent obscure poets were cultural icons. Some people loved Bei Dao's intellectualism, while some appreciated Shu Ting's sentimentalism. Having spent years working in a textile factory, Shu was good at expressing the feelings at the bottom of people's inner hearts.

She moved readers with her poem "To the Oak", which describes remaining independent while loving another: "a Ceiba by your side, as a tree standing together with you."

Some people think Gu Cheng is the most gifted, as he himself once described his own talent as "reaching the peak of creation, having verse at the tongue's tip."

Gu Cheng retained a precious childlike innocence in his poems, hence the nickname "Fairy Tale Poet." Other popular obscure poets like Mang Ke, Jiang He, Yang Lian and Liang Xiaobin also attracted a large number of fans.

A dying breed

Many fans must lament the state of obscure poetry nowadays: Shi Zhi has become mentally ill; Bei Dao is still a heavyweight writer, but he's changed his focus to prose; Gu Cheng committed suicide after killing his wife; Yang Lian is living in London, writing no poetry; Jiang He has become a recluse; Shu Ting is one of only a few that have stayed in China, and although she's an officer at the Literature Association of Fujian Province, she has stopped writing poetry. Shu published a collection of prose, which won feeble praise.

"A poet in a healthy environment cannot write good works," Shi Zhi himself said in the documentary. Indeed, Chinese society has been largely transformed, and people's lives have improved on many levels. But as Shi Zhi has been isolated from society in a mental hospital since 1993, his perspective may not be typical.

We can also turn to Yu Xiaoyang, who says, "This is a fickle age." According to Yu, readers nowadays have little interest or time to carefully read and understand poems. The genre of obscure poetry is forever changed, as many poets of that era have pursued foreign nationalities, world-wide reputations, and, most of all, money.

"Poetry cannot feed people," said Yu. After all, a writer's payment is usually dependent on word count.