has positioned himself against, arguing that "true resistance lies in allowing poetry to separate itself from politics, leaving behind the language of states and thus freeing itself from the vicious circle of history". Elsewhere, he has bemoaned that journalists and critics have written about him as a political figure. Yet the prominent scholar of Bei Dao's work, Bonnie S. McDougall, has noted the nuanced relationship of his work to politics: "The central force of Bei Dao's poetry has been his complex reaction to the pressures of a brutalized, conformist, and corrupt society…asserting his individuality in an apolitical mode that was ultimately subversive". As the poet and historian Julian Gewirtz put it, Bei Dao is "a poet of political consequence, if not always quite a political poet". Form The foremost of Bei Dao's methods of subverting literary norms in his native China has been through form. In China, expectations for art and artists were set forth at the 1942 Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, where Mao Zedong described his view that all art is political and art in China should be connected to, and ultimately uplift, the masses. For poetry, this meant a reliance on classical and folk models with clearly comprehensible verses meant to inspire social morality as well as faith in communism. By contrast, Bei Dao rarely makes use of conventional poetic forms. As McDougall notes, he has "sought to find new formal devices within the general category of 'free verse'…Conventional but dispensable grammatical forms and punctuation disappear between intensely compressed images; subject, tense, and number are elusive; transitions are unclear; order and logic are supplied by the reader". By using such an experimental approach, Bei Dao has achieved what the poet and critic Michael Palmer has called "a poetry of complex enfoldings and crossings, of sudden juxtapositions and fractures, of pattern in a dance with randomness". This approach to poetic form earned Bei Dao his moniker as a "misty" poet, which was originally leveled pejoratively by Chinese critics who disliked his work for its lack of clarity. Some critics in the West have similarly found his work to be incomprehensible. In response, McDougall places Bei Dao's approach in context: "The so-called obscurity or bizarreness of his writing is…not simply adopted for reasons of expedience but is an emotional necessity" given the milieu in which he began to write. She elaborates that "his verse is not obscure just