ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies a growing dissonance between the conceptual timelines, temporal contexts, and verse rhythms of poems inside and outside China, and argues that this rhythmic mismatch is a result of the mounting stresses of climate change, which are experienced through locality. It contrasts the globally relevant, transnationally rhythmic 2003 poem “My Baghdad” by Jiang Tao with Xi Chuan's 2014 poem “Bloom,” which understands its temporality as more specifically regional. The chapter then outlines a transnational strange loop-based hermeneutics that responds meaningfully to the increased experiential and temporal gap between regions and rereads “My Baghdad” as a demonstration of the prospect for a future-oriented hermeneutics that links places not through their simultaneous and interlinked progress, but through their rhythmic dissonances.
