David Mura's Poetics of Identity

Abstract

In 1989 interview, David Mura said that everything I write, except for certain pieces of criticism, reflects outlook which is conditioned by my being Japanese-American ... (265). But for Mura, being Japanese-American used to be a source of shame or inferiority, and he sought to minimize his attachment to any minority group, for fear that he would be labelled minority poet, whose poetry, as seen from much of American literary establishment, was crude, unschooled, and untalented, filled understandable but regrettable cliches of oppression. He felt that to be taken seriously writer, he must associate himself canonized White male poets, rather than unskilled, anonymous minority (Intellectual Biography 37, 40). However, he came to find that none of those poets' works reflected his own life he recognized conflict in his position poet who denies his own ethnic and experience.(1) When he eventually began to confront and accept his ethnic identity, Mura realized that his identification poets such Robert Lowell and John Berryman was similar to his parents' identification the middle class whites of America. We come to so identify ourselves, says Mura, with Victors, rulers, that we denied our own (Intellectual Biography 41-42). In confronting his ethnic and Japanese-American Mura opens up new areas of inquiry and new artistic challenges and possibilities for his poetry. Evoking James Baldwin's remark that No true account really of black life can be held, can be contained in American vocabulary,(2) Mura argues in essay on diversity of Asian American poetry that Any poet who wants to describe [minority Americans'] experience must somehow violate accepted practice of language, must bring into language alien vocabulary and syntax, rhythms that disrupt, images which jar, ideas which require totally new relationship to language and reality it contains. (Asian American Poetry 171-72) However, Mura finds that critical readings of Asian American poetry have not adequately dealt Asian American poets' experimental poetics. In same essay, Mura raises questions about critics' tendency to read Asian American poetry solely from social/historical model, and to insist that it delineate representative reality or experience. As example, he cites from Mayumi Tsutakawa, co-editor of The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology (1989), who writes that in process of selecting manuscripts for anthology, they had to bypass some manuscripts reflecting experimental forms, and some which did not carry recognizable Asian voice.(3) Mura notes that such critical models reduce complexity of language and our experience, therefore, he stresses need to fight against urges to simplify field of Asian American poetry (Asian-American Poetry 172-73). Garrett Hongo has made similar critical remarks about reductive models of reading Asian American poetry. In his introduction to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993), Hongo contends that critics' categorical dismissal for literary qualities in Asian American poetry results from an unconscious assumption that what was essentially Asian American was given work's overt political stance and conformity to sociological models of Asian American (xxxv). He suggests that it is such rigid constructions of ethnic identity that have led to reductive interpretations of Asian American poetry and to exclusively materialist models of our experiences (xxxvi-xxxvii). Such models may help reinforce kind of bias toward minority poetry Mura referred to, and may even inadvertently help perpetuate reductive treatment of ethnic literature ethnography rather than art, Bonnie TuSmith has pointed out in her provocative essay, Opening Up Theory (69). …