Techne-in-Motion: Ezra Pound, Xi Chuan, and the Procedural Architecture of Global Modernism

This essay traces the transpacific migration of modernist poetic form through the concept of techne, examining how methods of spatial organization and poetic travel from Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic machine to the post-Mao prose sequences of contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan. Framing global modernism as an open workshop of evolving tools, the essay explores how both poets use identical micro-formal strategies like parataxis, visual layout, and spatial compression to achieve completely different ideological goals. Pound engineered his poetics to force a unified, authoritarian coherence out of European ruins. Xi Chuan, however, absorbs this machinery only to dismantle it. Facing the historical rupture of 1989, Xi Chuan leaves Poundian synthesis behind and opts for “procedural intelligence,” utiliziing dense prose blocks and everyday detritus to expose the structural failures of high modernism. In the end, these modernist techniques operate as techne-in-motion, constantly mutating to survive new historical pressures, and offering a fresh methodological framework for navigating cross-cultural literary history.