Exploring the concept of poetic language in contemporary Chinese experimental poetry

Abstract

The paper examines how contemporary Chinese avant-garde poets structure their oeuvre regarding the perception of language based on the presence of several different modes of forming a poetic text. The existence of two distinguishable artistic paradigms (“minjian” and “intellectual”) not only sets the formal criteria for differentiation of the poetic space, but also enriches the content of the experiments, linking them with the Chinese autochthonous tradition, “new literature” tradition dating roughly from the beginning of the 20th century and Western models of language appropriation.