Globalization and Exposition Strategies in the Poetry of Jiao Tong (焦桐) and Chen Kehua (陳克華)

[[abstract]]Jiao Tong (焦桐) and Chen Kehua (陳克華) each provide diverse examples of engagement with issues of globalization in their poetry. How these poets have responded to specific issues associated with globalization in Taiwan are examined in light of how they depict “the dehumanizing implications of rationalizing and commodifying” (Malcolm Waters), how “commodification today is also an aestheticization” (Jameson), and each poet’s relations to international trends in cultural production. Official police and government interference with sidewalk and side-street vendors and their banning is taken as a tangible sign of globalization and assimilation with the forces of integrated world capital (IWC) in Taiwan (Guattari). Jiao Tong is shown to satirize manifestations of globalization so as to recover in his reflexive lyrical practice engaging multiple discourses and in this way presenting a less-alienated lyrical self which is in conversation with implied others (Bakhtin). Seeing through the postmodernity of globalization, in what Lo Men (羅門) has called a “new realism,” he invokes in his well defined satirical voice a shared ironic remembrance or understanding of ways of life possible beyond the alienating practices accompanying globalization. Chen Kehua does not approach this level of challenge to existing ideological practices in a reflexive reclamation of consciousness in constructing a reading audience in the process of satire itself; rather, he is shown to present a surface of commentary which delivers one-dimensional, descriptive world-constructions that in themselves may be seen as supporting reductionist consumer cultures, values and practices associated with globalization