No One in Control? China's Battler Poetry

No literary genre is fully predictable or controllable – but some are more unpredictable and uncontrollable than others, and China's battler poetry is a case in point. In China, up to three hundred million people have left the countryside to flee from poverty and make their way into city life. Exposed to the extreme dynamic of global capitalism, these ‘battlers’ are the foot soldiers of China's economic rise but not invariably its beneficiaries. Many live and work under gruelling conditions and are deprived of basic civil rights, as second-class citizens in socio-economic and cultural terms. And… they write poetry. Not all of them by any means, but enough for a phenomenon called ‘battler poetry’ to enter the public eye. What is battler poetry, and what does it do? What happens when dominant logics of ideology, literary aesthetics and cultural expectations encounter the circumstances of battler life? The force field around this poetry is dizzyingly complex and rife with opportunities for disconnect and the unexpected, throwing into sharp relief the randomness that is part and parcel of cultural production.