Mightier than the sword

In the audience of several hundred there was widespread muttering. "What kind of question is this?" they seemed to be saying.

Rather than referring to the "walking dead", Chen said the questioner brought to him the lyrics of a song by the Chinese singer Cui Jian: "Because my disease has no feeling."

"Without feeling you cannot write poetry," he said. "You just don't know how to."

Adonis said this numbness among young people, rather than being peculiar to China, was a worldwide phenomenon.

"There are differences of course in different countries, but for me it is only the extent of numbness that varies, not its very fact."

He suggested that the questioner abandon books and cultural life dominated by media and advertising, and adopt a culture of his or her own body, dreams, personal experience and write about one's body, heart, skin, blood and worries.

"Ordinary life and dominant culture tends to reduce people to things or instruments, but poetry is right to resist any intention to instrumentalize people."