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.
