Breaking Language Down: Taiwan Sound Poetry and its Ways of Saying

This paper explores the appearance and rapid development of a genre that crosses the boundaries between art, music, drama, and literature, and that is being variously called ＂sound poetry＂ (聲音詩 shengyin shi), ＂language art＂ (語言藝術 yuyan yishu), or ＂text-sound art＂ (文本聲音藝術 wenben shengyin yishu). I argue that Taiwan sound poetry develops as an alternative genre to Chinese poetic tradition, forging a disorienting aesthetics that is disruptive of conventional ideas of artistic quality. I conceptualize this phenomenon in its unique history and politics, extrapolating some key features that include: a poetics that strives not for semantic extension or enrichment, but that radically aims at ＂semantic abjection＂; intervention in Taiwan language politics and translingual context, through its contribution to a ＂culture of the ear＂; a shift of attention from textual semantics to performance with audience/users' participation; strategic denial of a genealogy rooted in the Chinese tradition, with sound poets' pronouncements about their poetics as being an entirely Western import; double nature as local, Sinophone, and global