ABSTRACT
Through textual analysis, this chapter will look at the relationship between humans, nature, and the environment in contemporary Chinese poetry from the perspective of ecopoetics and explore how poets in the Anthropocene era talk or think about nature through reflective language and poetic imagination. This chapter will take the poetic creation of Zang Di 臧棣 (1964–) as a case study and analyze how his poetic writing moves toward the integration of the object and the self, and how it contributes to and reveals the ecopoetics of contemporary Chinese poetry from three aspects: the general structure of poetic composition, the combination of imagery, and the rhetoric of discourse. Zang Di constructs his poetic world through his “Association Series,” “Book Series,” “Introduction Series,” and “Brief History Series.” This writing is a mix of natural history, autobiography, philosophy, and fiction, echoing a “nature writing” (Buell) that dissolves human dominance. At the same time, the poet constantly deconstructs the inherent human view of the nonhuman world from the political, cultural, and social dimensions of language through rhetoric and imagination, in order to seek to enter into all things (wanwu 萬物). Finally, the poet is also concerned with the contradiction between ecological conservation and literary civilization, and how human beings can start anew and learn to coexist with the ecological environment.
