Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poets (review)

Abstract

Park, Josephine Nock-Hee, 2008. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $55 h.c. 208 pp.Josephine Nock-Hee Park's Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poets is eloquent and valuable addition to emergent field of transpacific studies. In her book, Park probes into controversial, yet productive alliances between Asia and America, focusing specifically on American and Asian American poetry's trafficking in western and eastern images of Asia from modernist of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder's Zen ethics, to experimental aesthetics of Bandit poets Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, and Lawson Fusao Inada. Park concludes her book with astute examination of poetic innovations by contemporary female Asian American writers Hak Kuyng Cha and Myung Mi Kim. Perhaps most poignant aspect of book is Park's attempt to trace ways in which transpacific aesthetics of 1960s and post-1 960s Asian American poets have been haunted by an ongoing American with deep roots in modernist era (19), and specifically by the of Ezra Pound's intricate conversion of Confucianism and Asian influences. Invoking ghost of Pound as a major, albeit spectral influence on post-1960s Asian American poetic strategies, Park sets out to explore ways in which American modernist reappears, but also triggers new forms of Asian American poetic innovation.The first chapter opens with a provocative homage to Ezra Pound's vision of a new, enlightened Sino-America, a vision inspired by Ernest Fenollosa whose papers Pound creatively transcribed in 1915 collection titled Cathay. As Park emphasizes, apart from Cathay, Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry played a formative role in Pound's Imagist poetics and echoed throughout his Cantos, where vision of American renewal is laced with Confucian reverberations of coherence and harmony. Such reverberations come under attack in second chapter, where focus shifts to Gary Snyder's Beatific Orientalism that marked ideological and artistic departure from Pound's Confucian China to Beats' embrace of nature and Japanese Buddhism. At heart of Snyder's celebration of nature and Buddhism, as Park argues, was nonetheless a Pound-like nostalgia for a re-figured America where journey to Zen enlightenment was re-framed once again as imperial [albeit anti-civilizational] fantasy (90) . While Pound and Snyder strove to politicize American spirit through transpacific allusions, emergent Asian American poets of 1960s and post-1 960s wrestled with complexity of their transnational, yet deeply racialized (or, to put it in Park's terms, orientalized) heritage. The third chapter focuses on mapping ways in which distinct generations of Asian American poets, from Beat-influenced Buddha Bandits (Hongo, Lau, and Inada) to Albert Saijo and Victor Wong, navigated between apparitions of 'Asianness' they inherited and phantom poetics they generated. The chapter exposes struggle for authentic Asian American voice as empowering yet potentially exclusivist gesture that has contributed to further marginalization of Asian American artists. This argument is further developed in fourth chapter where Park focuses on highly experimental works of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. Park devotes majority of chapter to a discussion of Cha's Dictee, which she reads as a revised modernist epic poem whose multifingual and narrative complexity is deployed as a testament to literary modernism, with its predilection for formal difficulty and its location of cultural renewal in textual adventures (127). …