However, it was precisely this marginality that enabled poetry to maintain a critical distance from the cultural mainstream, thereby fostering renewed vitality and transforming it into an alternative space of discourse (Yeh 1992: xxiii). After 1976, the equally marginal independent publishing scene further sustained this transformation, when some journals broke away from politically orthodox content and formulaic rhetoric to actively explore new modes of expression and circulate innovative poetic forms.
During the 1980s, the exploration of subjectivity initiated by Shu Ting [舒婷] was further developed by a group of women poets who infused it with a distinctly gendered dimension. Unlike Shu, they focused more specifically on the emotional and psychological worlds of the female self, often engaging with unconventional subjects and striking imagery (Zhang 2002: 108).
Shu Ting’s (b. 1952) To an Oak (致橡树) [is] a poem that explores the possibility of a gender-equal relationship grounded in women’s autonomy.
Motivated by a desire to respond to her generation’s ‘dire need of respect, trust and warmth’, Shu Ting (1995: 85) avoids ideological constraints, using poetry to contemplate the human condition in its widest sense. Indeed, her concern is the recovery of an emotional world—desires, hopes, insecurities, and frailties—that defines humanity before gender.
Equally significant was the influence of American confessional poetry, which enabled emotions—frustration, anguish, fear, and guilt—to be publicly voiced and transformed into a collective experience (Zhang and Chen 2016: 154). Sylvia Plath became a model for writing that foregrounds women’s lived realities.
The body poetics in [Zhai Yongming 翟永明]’s works resonates with Hélène Cixous’ (1976) notion of the body as a site of women’s writing and as a nexus between textuality and sexuality. In this sense, the body becomes the essence of gendered experience and a gateway to a distinctly feminine vision of the world—an inexhaustible source of inspiration whose representation is crucial. It assumes multiple meanings: from a space of reception that endures the suffering of the external world to an active, resistant subject and, at times, a dimension revealing hidden conflicts.
This vision culminates in Zhai’s concept of Night Consciousness (黑夜意识), denoting an awareness rooted in women’s physical and psychic traits—one that enables an autonomous, gendered existence and the imagining of an alternative world in which female subjectivity is fully expressed:
An inner, individual, and universal awareness—which I call the ‘consciousness of the night’—made me the one who takes on the thoughts, opinions, and feelings of women, guiding me to embrace this mission with full awareness. This is poetry … This is the first dark night and, when this night falls, it leads us into a wholly new world made of particular positions and perspectives that belong solely to women. (Zhai 1986: 124; translation by the author)