Poetics and Justice in America, Japan, and Taiwan shows how entitlements are implicated in all areas of life—human and nonhuman—that poetry reaches. Through a creative adaptation of Badiou’s philosophical framing, this book argues that poetry matters as a form of media particularly suited to integrating diverse fields of knowledge and attention in newspapers, Tweets, and performance as well as volumes of poetry. Recasting intertextuality as more relational than referential, the author argues for the importance of poetry in realizing how social change and ecological justice are bound up in our orientations of affiliation. Each chapter focuses on particular sets of problems engaged by poets in different contexts to various ends in Japan, the US, and Taiwan. Some chapters explore the subtle implications of openly provocative styles, while others question the muted poetic intimations of injustices that are left standing unchanged in the name of aesthetics. Poets and performance artists featured include Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, Tawara Machi, Rodrigo Toscano, Hung Hung, and John Cage. The author argues for examining poetic expressions in terms of what discursive fusions and affiliations they embody beyond the intimation of good intentions or ironic passing over.

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.

Apart from “new poetry” composed in the vernacular language, the tradition of classical poetry originating in China has also been maintained in Taiwan. We cannot ignore the fact that those poets who continued to compose classical verse, as well as the activities of their poetry societies, are yet another aspect of the diversity of Chinese-language poetic development in Taiwan which at the same time has unique local characteristics. Professor Huang's organization of the issue includes an introductory essay, entitled “Poems that Speak of Taiwan—Speaking of Taiwan Poetry” in which she gives a brief summary of the historical background and special character of the development of classical poetry in Taiwan. According to her careful plan, Professor Huang divided the poems translated for this special edition into six thematic sections: 1) Taiwan and Taiwanese in the Interstices of History (6 poems) 2) Crossing the Ocean to Taiwan, Putting Down Roots that Grow Along with Chinese Culture (5 poems) 3) Poems on the Aesthetics of Natural Landscape Scenery (6 poems) 4) Climate, Natural Resources, and Food (6 poems) 5) Folk Customs, Festivals, and Sacrificial Ceremony (4 poems) 6) Poems Expressing Emotions, Sentiments and Criticisms (7 poems) In the poetry selected for this issue we see the rich, expansive content of classical Chinese verse from Taiwan. That verse manifests the responses of Taiwanese poets to their times, to nature, to places and to people. It also reflects the many faces of Taiwan's specific temporal and geographical background through depictions of local experiences and the local spirit. 台灣詩歌的發展，除了以白話文創作的新詩之外，還有繼承中國古典詩歌傳統、延續不絕的古典詩歌創作者及其詩社活動，呈現出台灣漢詩發展的多樣性，同時又有其在地特色。 在黃美娥教授的策劃下，這一專輯的內容，除了詩選以外，本輯還有特地請黃教授撰寫一篇導論〈詩說台灣．說台灣詩〉，簡述台灣古典詩發展的歷史背景和主要特色。另一篇是黃教授撰寫的學術論文，〈實踐與轉化：日治時代臺灣傳統詩社的現代性體驗〉（摘譯）。關於詩選，共選31家，34首，根據題材，分成6個主題，以呈現台灣古典漢詩的特色。在題材上，反映社會和生活的開闊性和呼應歷史和時代的現代性。

As the essence of Chinese traditional culture, classical Chinese poetry in Singapore played a very important role in the social and cultural development of Singapore’s Chinese community. Numerous poems depicted the unique scenery of tropical rainforest and the customs with a Nanyang flavor, recorded the various historical events from the colonial era, the World War II to the independent nation, and reflected the poets’ multiple feelings. This book sketches out the brief history of classical Chinese poetry in Singapore over a hundred years, and focuses on the complex identity of poets from different generations, the function of literary societies in the construction of cultural space and the influence of modern media on the development of classical Chinese poetry based on the text interpretation. In addition, the author attempts to define different types of poetry writing using diaspora literature and Sinophone literature. The discussion of these topics will not only expand the research horizon of Chinese literature, but also provide a meaningful reference to the studies of the worldwide Chinese overseas, especially in Southeast Asia.