Asymptotic Freedom: Child-Authored Poetry from China

Child-authored poetry is one of the most remarkable and fascinating phenomena in the contemporary Chinese poetry world. However, for all its immense popularity among Chinese readers and attractivity for professional, adult poets, due to its unclear ontological status and lack of well-proven methodological tools that would be easily applicable to it, it has thus far remained beyond the scope of literary-critical and scholarly interests. The present paper offers a broad panoramic view of Chinese children’s poetry through six case studies of individual young authors and collective initiatives aimed at the artistic activization of certain groups of children, discussing the educational and social significance of children’s poetry writing, its complicated reception patterns, as well as its entanglement with various literary-political discourses. Subsequently, the study delves into the aesthetic, conceptual, and philosophical aspects of children’s works. The final part analyses the essential theoretical-philosophical questions that child-authored verse asks with regard to poetry at large, prompting us to rethink notions such as authorship or “poeticness” and the definition of poetry per se. The author proposes the metaphor of asymptotic freedom to illustrate how marginal phenomena of questionable status contribute to maintaining the distinctness and coherence of the field of poetry as a whole.