Fusion Kitsch (review)

The title of Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü's first translated poetry collection is quite apt. In fact, what first drew translator Steve Bradbury to her poetry was that it was both "very Chinese and refreshingly cosmopolitan." Hsia Yü, who lives in Paris, apparently doesn't grapple too hard with the problem of cultural identity. She's just as happy among the mysteries of Paris as in the warrens of her native Taipei.

A popular lyricist and author of four books of poetry, Hsia Yü is prolific and hard to pigeonhole. Her avoidance of a lyric or elegiac poetic voice and her refusal to cultivate a signature style make her work unique. But it's her adoption of various "postmodern" techniques,—such as pastiche, montage, and repetition—and her quirky fusion of high philosophy and low culture/kitsch that make her unpredictable. Sometimes she seems to be flying in the face of convention, flaunting her wit and tossing a philosophical wink out to the universe, mocking the seriousness of the enterprise of life. Other times, she's dead serious and probing. It's all material for art. It's all a game, it's all laughable, she seems to say. In "Epithalamion for a Tin of Fish," she takes a traditional marriage poem and serenades sardines in rhyme, perhaps offering a whimsical allegory, perhaps not.

Lying in its bed of tomato sauce (or is it catsup?)
Our fish may not quite relish its position;
But what does the sea know of this, in its deep abyss?

Or the shore, for that matter, no less at sea, as they say.
'Tis a tale told in scarlet (or is it cherry red?);
Whatever—a little silly this matchup;
Which is to say it is, in point of fact,
A saucy tale about catsup.

If any influence is evident in her work, it is that of French culture and literature, especially surrealism and impressionism, but to say her influence is global is perhaps more accurate. According to Bradbury, a translator and professor at National Central University in Taiwan, her "Chinese-ness" lies in her preoccupation with the poetic resources of the Chinese language, which she explores with "breathtaking sensuousness."

"Nearly everyone who has written about Hsia Yü's poetry has described her as a feminist poet, a label that has infuriated the author, partly because she chaffs at being reduced to an 'ism' but also because her feminism is problematic at best," Bradbury comments. "She's more concerned with the intersection of flesh/text than with gender or culture." Indeed, Hsia Yü's poems are often deliberately spicy and provocative, like salsa—the title of one of her collections. You can almost taste the vibrancy and piquancy of the language on the page, aided by the subversive freshness of what she chooses as her subjects and concerns. She draws not so much from the basket of traditional cultural motifs (seasons, nature) but from the global hand basket and its universal themes (love, sex, life, death) and how they are captured in language. In Fusion Kitsch, she writes:

When did it all begin
This bucolic and pan-incestuous atmosphere
Was it not always there in the selfsame family album
Lovers fallen to the status of kin
Animals fallen to the condition of lovers
Nor let us forget the repressive inclinations
In the animistic discourse to which
All romances arrive in the end

Hsia Yü's is a vibrant voice from the edge of the new world, where East and West no longer matter as poetic distinctions.