Realities in Postmodern Guise—Toward a Poetics of Contemporary Taiwan Poetry

[[abstract]]In Taiwan, poetics is often reduced into a framework to approximate poetry for equivalent match. Critics tend to use the framework to view and measure the stature of writings and therefore poetry has often been trimmed down into a binary opposition. Worse, these propensities for binary opposition combined with political or ideological bias often simplify poetics into two extremes: one favoring avant-gardism, the other, vernacularism. For the former, the more experimental in visual form, the more liable to be favorably discussed, the critics focus on their ostentatious structure and language game and extol their superb imagination while overlooking that avant-gardism sometimes may mask a lack of imagination to face the contemporary realities. For the latter, the critics pendulum to the other extreme, highlighting its “local color” ideology and concern with living realities without acknowledging that these ideology and realities concern may have degraded poetry into the instrument of political slogans. The critics therefore are blindfolded to realize that the best works exist “in between.”This paper tries to discuss the aesthetics of those works “in between” to unravel poetry in postmodern spirit without the seemingly necessary wordplay and twist of forms. Moreover, poetry in postmodern guise is also concerned with reality without the contamination of political or ideological propaganda