Asian American Poets Research Articles

Racial things, racial forms: objecthood in avant-garde Asian American poetry

In Things, Racial Forms, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing, particular the language of identity politics, which tends to challenge political marginalization without contesting more fundamental assumptions about the construction of racial form. In the poets various treatments of (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the avant-garde interest objecthood and the racial question of objectification.By refashioning avant-garde investigations of things into questions about how American discourse visualizes race in and on the body, these poets implicitly critique dominant modes of racial visibility, seeking alternatives to the unreflective stances that identity politics often unwittingly reproduces. At the heart of Jeon s project is the assumption thatracial form is continually recalibrated to elide ideological ambiguities and ambivalences contemporary culture. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively the subject interiority and individual experience Things, Racial Forms also uses the calculated strangeness of the avant-garde art object as an occasion to emphasize the physical and visual oddness of racial constructs, as a series of everchanging, contemporary phenomena that are conversation with, but not entirely determined by, their historical legacy.In this critical study, Jeon argues that by invoking the foreignness of an avant-garde art object as a way to understand racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized. In addition to appealing to those interested Asian American studies and race American literature, Things, Racial Forms addresses readers interested contemporary poetry, art, and visual culture, paying particular attention to the intersections between literary and visual art.

Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965

Reviewed by: Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965 Ashanti L. White (bio) Yu, Timothy . Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. "Race and the avant-garde have been linked since the dawn of the twentieth century" commences Timothy Yu's ingenious Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry since 1965 (1). In his exhaustive study, Yu delineates the political and social upheaval that defined the 1960s American climate to probe two social groups, Asian Americans and Experimentalists, that emerged from the turmoil to create synchronous aesthetic movements that redefined the avant-garde and American poetry. Since their inception four decades ago, both groups have altered and reformalized their sui generis [End Page 210] methods while emending who warrants inclusion into their poetic schools. Specifically, Yu demonstrates the modus in which Asian American poets and Experimentalists egressed as indeterminate poetic groups that adhered to avant-gardist standards by elucidating their social demarcation. One of the most turbulent debates of the 1960s was the anti-Vietnam War movement, which served as a major catalyst in the Language poetry revolution. Chapter 1 of Yu's study examines Allen Ginsberg, an original pioneer of the avant-garde style, and his poem "Howl," which politicized the usually aesthetic genre. By focusing principally on a point in history and crafting the work from a nonconformist perspective, "Howl" defies traditional poetics by suggesting that vision cannot truly embody universalities. Yu's inspection of "Howl" reveals that the poem's platform relies on the cognizance of the protesters who evolved as social "outsiders" who challenged the supererogatory conflict. The idiosyncrasies of discontent are imparted mainly in Ginsberg's phraseology. In the spirit of Language poetry, Ginsberg applies fractured language and imagery to actively involve the "conscious" reader "who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge that actually happened and walked / away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown / soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even on free beer" (30). Yu informs the reader that although Ginsberg subsumes individualist constructions, he recognizes that inspiration is derived from the situation of the group in which one is a member. Ginsberg's apperception, according to this study, establishes the foundation for the Experimental poetry movement. Yu continues Race and the Avant-Garde by investigating the work of a divergent Language innovator, Ron Silliman, who was sonorously influenced by Allen Ginsberg's style of literary recording. Conversely, Silliman's employment of formalistic modus operandi transformed the Language intendment from person in relation to his outside influences, as was the case with Ginsberg, to the collective experiences as the subject of the poetics. Yu exposes that this catalyst forced Silliman into a "much greater awareness of the location and the limits of his own perspective" (38). But the avant-garde is a movement outside of the mainstream, so the repositioning of Language poetry brought a characterization of the social grouping of its artists as well as the consciousness of other social dimensions within the environment in which the poetry originated. Whereas Ginsberg's focus lay in the anti-Vietnam movement, social revolutions, including the Women's Rights Movements and the African American Civil Rights Movements, were concurrently stirring. Yu divulges that Silliman exploited those happening to differentiate his writing. His embrace and utilization of the distinctiveness of "others" to influence his poetry served as a means of denoting Language poets just as there existed women and gay/lesbian poets. In the opening chapter of Race and the Avant-Garde, Yu asserts that race and the avant-garde are incontrovertibly linked, yet Language poets, who subscribed to the aesthetic and social requirements of the avant-garde, appeared racially and sexually exclusive. Silliman argues that the "social codes" that barred women, homosexual, and ethnic minority writers also dictated Language poets as they aesthetically diverged from other social groups. Yu comments: "This formulation . . . can be and has been interpreted in at least two ways: as an honest, descriptive assessment of the historical and personal forces that seem to have given rise to Language writing . . . or as an exclusionary, prescriptive formula that suggests women and minorities do not or cannot engage...

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

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). …

By Any Other Name

for the analysis of the Analyzing the racial self-awareness subtly central to contemporary Anglo American avant-garde artists, in other words,Yu usefully challenges the notion that experimental poetics achieved the rejection of identity politics it sometimes claims for itself. At the same time, he clarifies how racial and ethnic identity formation led Asian American poets to form artistic communities analogous to those of the white avant-garde. He ultimately provides a literary history of Asian American poetics that locates even formalist Asian American poets in an avant-garde and that includes innovative poets who are often excluded. Overall, he contributes meaningfully to the important ways scholars are

Ishle Yi Park's The Temperature of This Water: Anatomy of Korean America

Ishle Yi Park is a unique poet in Asian American literary history. The second-generation Korean American poet has read her poems and taught creative writing in schools, universities, community centers, and prisons across the United States. Unlike most Asian American poets, Park has recited and performed her poems at poetry slams and readings in clubs and cafes. She has been a featured performer uniquely mixing poetry, prose, storytelling, and song at hundreds of cultural venues and festivals in several countries. In 2001, the spoken-word artist became the LoudPoet of the Year and Grand Slam Champion of Bar 13 in the East Village, New York. She was the first Korean American to make the finals in the National Poetry Slam. The hip-hop poet was a touring cast member of the Tony Award-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam show and is a regular on the HBO series. The versatile artist released a CD of twelve poems and songs set to beats, Work Is Love, in 2003. The third Poet Laureate of Queens, Park ha...

Subway Prose Poem: Don Quixote

Two Poems Joseph O. Legaspi POETRY 3 Subway Prose Poem: Passengers Train doors glide open fora Nepalese boy with eyes likepolished onyxes. He keeps his ricehat on, framing his strangebeauty. It ispast midnight, New York City. We are all visitors here, passing through terminals. An African family sitswearing theirSunday best. A leopard head-wrapped woman falls asleep on her lover's stiffshoulder, his shirtbuttoned tightlyup to his neck. A man wears a bloody gauze eye-patchwhile rolling silver balls on his righthand. People are pass ing throughour lives like refractedlightor shadows. A homeless man announces every fleeting station. What is trainbut transport toother lives? What travelsbeneath the secret faces?A nun ofMother Teresa's order shep herds a young sister, tight-fisted, holding her rosary. In my messenger bag I carrybooks, scissors, and pieces of raw chicken. Subway Prose Poem: Don Quixote Enter: crowned man on horse, rather man wearing a horse?tattered pelt of rattybrown fabric,loose button eyes, nappy mane. His wayward majesty, he looks as ifhe bore a hole through a boat and plugged itwith his body like a socket. Pulling at the reigns he gallops heavy-skirted,kicks, trotsand neighs, or is itthehorse? Where does man end, horse begin, and vice versa? They are Centurion fusion, Sagittarian dream. As his cassette player blares "Oye Como Va," our jitteryequestrian canters,every coin clinking inhis paper cup splashes of futurecoffee,theephemera of tobacco.He has stepped into this realm as iffromanother, unleashing the stuff of characters?entertainer, prince, clown, lunatic, myth icbeast?and he dances past theballerinas biting into green apples, down theaisle throngedwith his reverent subjects like jurorson benches, thenopening thedoor and stepping into the metallic sunset of thenext speed ing car likeDon Quixote. Joseph O. Legaspi isthe author of Imago (CavanKerry Press), winner of a 2008 Global Filipino LiteraryAward. Born in the Philippines, he was raised there and in Los Angeles, where he immigrated with his familywhen he was twelve. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University's creative writing program, hiswork has appeared recently in American Life inPoetry, Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, New York Theater Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, and the anthologies Language for a New Century and The Waiting Room Reader. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving Asian American poets. November-December 2009 i25 ...

Subway Prose Poem: Passengers

Two Poems Joseph O. Legaspi POETRY 3 Subway Prose Poem: Passengers Train doors glide open fora Nepalese boy with eyes likepolished onyxes. He keeps his ricehat on, framing his strangebeauty. It ispast midnight, New York City. We are all visitors here, passing through terminals. An African family sitswearing theirSunday best. A leopard head-wrapped woman falls asleep on her lover's stiffshoulder, his shirtbuttoned tightlyup to his neck. A man wears a bloody gauze eye-patchwhile rolling silver balls on his righthand. People are pass ing throughour lives like refractedlightor shadows. A homeless man announces every fleeting station. What is trainbut transport toother lives? What travelsbeneath the secret faces?A nun ofMother Teresa's order shep herds a young sister, tight-fisted, holding her rosary. In my messenger bag I carrybooks, scissors, and pieces of raw chicken. Subway Prose Poem: Don Quixote Enter: crowned man on horse, rather man wearing a horse?tattered pelt of rattybrown fabric,loose button eyes, nappy mane. His wayward majesty, he looks as ifhe bore a hole through a boat and plugged itwith his body like a socket. Pulling at the reigns he gallops heavy-skirted,kicks, trotsand neighs, or is itthehorse? Where does man end, horse begin, and vice versa? They are Centurion fusion, Sagittarian dream. As his cassette player blares "Oye Como Va," our jitteryequestrian canters,every coin clinking inhis paper cup splashes of futurecoffee,theephemera of tobacco.He has stepped into this realm as iffromanother, unleashing the stuff of characters?entertainer, prince, clown, lunatic, myth icbeast?and he dances past theballerinas biting into green apples, down theaisle throngedwith his reverent subjects like jurorson benches, thenopening thedoor and stepping into the metallic sunset of thenext speed ing car likeDon Quixote. Joseph O. Legaspi isthe author of Imago (CavanKerry Press), winner of a 2008 Global Filipino LiteraryAward. Born in the Philippines, he was raised there and in Los Angeles, where he immigrated with his familywhen he was twelve. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University's creative writing program, hiswork has appeared recently in American Life inPoetry, Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, New York Theater Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, and the anthologies Language for a New Century and The Waiting Room Reader. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving Asian American poets. November-December 2009 i25 ...

The world next door: South Asian American literature and the idea of America

This book grows out of the question, "At this particular moment of tense geopolitics and inter-linked economies, what insights can South Asian American writing offer us about living in the world?" South Asian American literature, with its focus on the multiple geographies and histories of the global dispersal of South Asians, pulls back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of many nations and peoples. South Asian American poets, novelists, and playwrights depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book exhorts North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. The world out there arrives next door.

Blurring the Borders between Formal and Social Aesthetics: An Interview with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing, China, of a Chinese mother and a Dutch American father. She grew up in Massachusetts. She received her B.A. from Reed College and her MFA from Columbia University. A recipient of numerous awards, including two Before Columbus American Book Awards, she is the author of ten books of poetry. Currently Berssenbrugge is living in Abiquiu, New Mexico, with her husband the sculptor Rich Tuttle and their daughter. This interview took place on September 21, 2000 at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where Berssenbrugge was invited to give a reading and to have seminars with students of the Poetics Program of the English Department. ZX: Your Four Year Old Girl won the 1999 Best Book of Poetry from American Writers' Workshop. How much docs this award mean to you? Are you comfortable with the label Asian American poet? MB: I was very pleased with it. I cherish the label Asian American because I identify with other Americans who come from China, and with other Americans. I was part of the multicultural movement that was in the early 1970s. I would say that movement came marc from the writers than scholars. It was important that the stories of people's immigrant experience got told. My work was more abstract. But, whenever I fit in, I'm happy. ZX: Could you tell me more about the multi-cultural movement in the early 70s? How did you get involved? MB: The poet Michael Harper invited me to a conference of multicultural writers in Madison, Wisconsin in 1973. I had just finished the graduate program at Columbia, and was ready for new encounters. I met and became friends with Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Lawson Inada, Simon Ortiz, Al Young, and most importantly Ishmael Reed and Leslie Silko. This was a fervent, pioneering period of asserting and defining multi-cultural writing in America and it was fantastically exciting. In New York at Basement Workshop, I presented my play, One, Two Cups directed by Frank Chin, several dance collaborations with the Morita Dance Company, directed by Theodora Yoshikama, and many workshops. I lived for a while in San Francisco, near Frank and his wife Kathleen Chang, who was my friend, a performance artist, a visionary and the subject of my play. I was included in the Aiiieeeee! Anthology. Although abstraction, philosophy, and the visual arts began to take more of my attention, many of these friendships continue. Leslie Silko has been a great companion and influence in my work. ZX: I didn't know you were so involved with the Aiiieeeee! group. I love your play, One, Two Cups. (1) It's very engaging. In what way was Ishmael Reed important to you? MB: He published my second book, Random Possession. He has always been a provocative, sophisticated activist in multiculturalism. His ideas, his own writing, and our many talks together have been important to me. MX: You wrote something about your Chinese heritage in your early poems such as Chronology. MB: I wrote it when I was eighteen. ZX: It is a a wonderful poem. We have a poster copy of the poem in our rare books archive here. The lines are arranged differently from the version collected in your book, Summits Move with the Tide. It seems to me that you are returning to your Chinese heritage in your recent work. MB: We're all partly what our mothers were, and much of my work in the last ten years has included who my mother was. Then I read this book by Gayatri Spivak, called Outside the Teaching Machine. Her book informs two of my recent poems. Then I added ideas about nomads. And I was struggling with the role of women in the family, and how you can be an artist and deal with the labor of running a family. Ideas about women and powerlessness came together at a time when I was reading works by poor women from other countries. I think being a foreign woman in this country is one example of no power. …

David Mura's Poetics of Identity

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). …

A MELUS Interview: Joseph Bruchac

If the past thirty years encompass what has been called a Renaissance period in Native American literature, Joseph Bruchac, who has devoted his life to translating one culture to another through his writing and teaching, must surely be considered a Renaissance man. He has taught English in Africa and African American and Native American literature in this country. As the editor of The Greenfield Review Press, dedicated to the publication of multicultural material, he has published anthologies of poetryfrom American prisons-collected during seven years of teaching in the prison system-as well as anthologies of Native American, Asian American and African American poets. Greenfield Press has published early works by many writers who have gone on to become quite well known, such as Linda Hogan, Barney Bush, and Beth Brant, and an instructional volumefor other small press publishers. Bruchac's writing includes poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and retellings of traditional Native American stories. Yet, he is perhaps best knownfor his award-winning storytelling. Much of his time is devoted to telling stories in schools, and his stories have been published in more than twenty books and numerous magazines, and in both audio and videoformats. Bruchac's contributions to the educational process are numerous. Among his notable works of children's literature are his praised collaborations with Michael Caduto, Keepers of the Earth and Keepers of the Animals. In these books, traditional Native stories serve as a centerpiecefor lessons about environmental concerns. Motivated by a belief that the world is in need of saving, Bruchac says: My writing...give[s] me a chance to my insights into the beautiful and all toofragile world of human life and living things we have been granted. Which is one of the reasons I write-not to be a man apart, but to share (Albany Times Union 1 [June 1980]). Born in upstate New York, Bruchac is of Abenaki and Slovak heritage. In his essay Notes of a Translator's Son, Bruchac translates the FrenchCanadian termfor a person of mixed blood, metis, into English as translator's son. Unlike half-breed, a terms he finds insulting, metis means that you are able to understand the language of both sides, to help them un-

Reading Asian American Poetry

In the 1960s and 1970s, with the historic emergence of and ethnic consciousness movements in the United States, was considered an important vehicle for expressing the politicization of race. Indeed, this could be viewed as a racial in relations theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant's sense of forging links between cultural representations and social dynamics of inequality and racialized empowerment. Poems were at rallies, fundraisers, and other events, and circulated in independent low-budget and ethnic publications. Rodolfo Gonzales's Yo Soy Jouquin/I am Jouquin (1972 [1967]) is a prime example of a poem that was valued for articulating a cultural and political subjectivity and history that had previously been marginalized. The anthology Time to Greez! Incantations from the (1975), focusing on U.S. Third World writing and edited by a multiracial collective, included mainly poetry. Although published in 1984, Audre Lorde's argument that is a genre suited to those with few material resources and little uninterrupted time might have been formulated by her observation of emergent racialized and gendered poetries during this earlier period. Of all the art forms, is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Poetry, Lorde argues, has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women (116). Lorde's well-known formulation that poetry is not a luxury posits that the knowledges conceived and produced by poetic discourse are vital to the cultural survival of marginalized peoples. We can see an apparent turn away from toward prose, however, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when prose fiction became a prevalent means of circulating narratives of difference among a larger audience. Immensely popular works of this period, Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior were crossover hits that were considered successes in the mainstream marketplace, i.e., among consumers not necessarily of the same identity as the authors. No longer mainly the political tools of movement audiences, narratives of became explicitly commodified and promoted by publishing corporations to white as well as nonwhite readers and to secondary- and college-level educational institutions as teaching materials. When we consider what works are de rigeur in the multicultural literature curriculum and in multicultural literary studies, we think mostly of prose fiction and nonfiction: Richard Wright's Native Son, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, essays by Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, in addition to the above-mentioned titles by Walker and Kingston. I give this recent historical account of the genres in which we read race in order to situate my project of reading Asian American within the context of Asian American and multicultural literary studies. What accounts for the contrast in the reception of prose versus within multicultural literary studies? What difference does it make to specifically recognize poetic practices as part of racial, and specifically Asian American, discourse? 1 When Asian American literature is recognized at all as a body of work distinct from Asian literature, it is assumed to be a recently invented and individualistic phenomenon, associated with the names of bestselling authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Those that are aware of specific Asian American poets again often assume that the body of Asian American poetic writing originated in recent volumes of by individual critically-lauded writers. …

Jessica Hagedorn and Manila Magic

In 1975, then relatively unknown Filipino-American poet named Jessica Hagedorn wrote poem called Song for my Father in which life in Manila took on some of the surreal appearance of life in some Latin-American city under siege: dope dealers are executed in public and senators go mad in prison camps the nightclubs are burning with indifference curfew draws near soldiers lurk in jeeps of dawn warzones as the president's daughter bogies nostalgically under the gaze of sixteen smooth bodyguards and decay is forever even in the rage of humorless revolutionaries (Danger and Beauty 37) The tone of this poem, and of few other poems and stories dealing with life in the Philippines, suggested an interesting contrast with Hagedorn's other work, her Filipino-American writing which, although it shares the same sharp-edged glitter and flamboyance of the Philippine-centered work, lacks its dreamy, fantastic cast. Hagedorn's novel, Dogeaters, nominated for the National Book Award, deals with life in Manila in the 1970's, and makes this reader think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In contrast to Marquez, Hagedorn's story is urban-centered (and terribly urbane), moving in milieu which could only be Manila, with its outrageous blend of Spanish elitism And elegance gone seedy, American flash and decadence, and Third world desperation and brazenness. It is slicing and cutting and irreverent, disjointed like Marquez's dream world, but little more nerve-tingling than dust-covered Maconda. Nevertheless it carries strong sense of magic realism, of bizarre characters and strange coincidences, of real life gone unreal with sudden verbal twist, exposing the reader to a world totally reconstructed and subverted by fantasy (Llosa 5). We are left in limbo between the magic and the real, in world as it might be described by peasant, for instance, or street-boy - someone far removed from the logic and power of that world, experiencing reality but reality touched with the magic of incomprehension. Jessica Hagedorn was born in l949 in the Philippines to Visayan Hagedorn family. She immigrated to the United States as a, twelve-year old in 1961, living in San Francisco and New York, where she was deeply influenced by black soul music, black culture, rock and roll, and group of black and Chicana women writers and musicians. She was one of four women featured in McGraw-Hill's early collection of ethnic and women's poetry, Four Young Women: Poems. She has published in various Asian-American collections and magazines: Liwanag (1975), Time to Greez (1975), The Greenfield Review (1975), and. Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets (1983). She has published three books of her own: Dangerous Music (1975), Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), and Dogeaters (1990). As Filipina writing in the United States, Hagedorn had strong literary antecedents to draw on. Filipino immigration to the mainland United States started in the 1920's, after the waves of Chinese and Japanese immigration had been controlled by discriminatory legislation. By 1932 Carlos Bulasan, an Ilocano of basically peasant stock, had launched his very prolific writing career, in effect getting head start on what was to become the Asian American Movement of the seventies. Bulosan's America is in the Heart is still considered the classic account of the Filipino-American historical experience, and the old manong whom Bulosan loved so, still around in the fifties and sixties and seventies, older, of course, and maybe poorer, became the natural starting point for the new Filipino-American writers. Oscar Penaranda worked in the hop fields and the salmon canneries to duplicate the experience of the manongs, while Al Robles recorded hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the old-timers and Lou Syquia went into political activism to forestall the demolition of the old International Hotel in San Francisco, where so many of the manongs lived. …

Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets ed. by Joseph Bruchac

322 Western American Literature Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets. Edited by Joseph Bruchac. (Greenfield Center, NY: The Greenfield Review Press, 1983. 300 pages, $9.95.) Ours has always been a multi-cultural society. But only in recent years has this begun to be reflected in the published literature. The first novel by a Mexican American, Antonio Villareal’s Pocho, was brought out by Double­ day in 1959. The first published book of poems by a Japanese American was Lawson Inada’s Before the War, from Morrow in 1971. Now we have Breaking Silence, an extraordinary book and a publishing milestone, since it is the first poetry collection to represent the full range of contemporary Asian American voices. And that range is impressively broad — from the touching memoir of a family burying funeral urns before a 1953 exodus from South Korea, to the challenging stance of a Bay Area feminist coalition called “Unbound Feet Three,” to the love poems of Shawn Wong, whose forefathers arrived from China five generations ago and whose short elegant lyrics make no reference at all to ethnic origins or to Asia. A number of these writers, like Wong and Inada, already have books and awards behind them. Hawaii-born Cathy Song won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her first book, Picture Bride. Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge (“born in Peking in 1947 and grew up in Massachusetts” ) has twice received American Book Awards from Berkeley’s Before Columbus Foundation. For others this collection is the first appearance outside small magazines. Jeff Tagami is a young Filipino American (“I grew up in isolated farmhouses along the Pajaro River and Freedom, California” ). In spare, tough, com­ passionate portraits he illuminates the lives lived in that dusty world of row crops and cutting sheds. Joseph Bruchac (who also edits a highly respected literary quarterly, The Greenfield Review) solicited work from over two hundred writers and received submissions from a great many more, before selecting the fifty repre­ sented here. “My choices were subjective,” he says in his introduction. “I picked poems I liked the best, with an eye for variety and giving each poet enough space.” The writers come from Honolulu, from Toronto, from Colorado, New York City, Oakland, L.A. They often hark back to cities and landscapes rela­ tives left behind to head east across the Pacific. The book is sprinkled with place names: Shikoku, Chung-Ju, Yangtze, Manilatown, Hiroshima. Many poems are laced with foods and idioms from Asian languages, bringing both fresh blood and new vocabularies into the broad stream of American litera­ ture. The collection’s title is also the title of a poem by San Francisco writer and editor Janice Mirikitani, and that poem is worth dwelling on. Its subject — the World \\T ar ii internment — recurs often enough in these pages to remind us that it is still one of the metaphors central to Asian American experience. The poem is not about the internment per se, but about the long silence Reviews 323 that followed. It is dedicated to Mirikitani’s mother, who as a young woman was sent to Rohwer, one of two large holding camps in Arkansas. Like so many who underwent the shame and dislocation of those years, she had never expressed her deepest feelings about them. In an astonishing, two-voiced poem the daughter pays tribute to the mother who, after thirty-five years, finally speaks out. In 1981, in response to growing demands for some kind of reparation, a federal commission began hearings to investigate whether the government was liable for any injustice done to the 100,000 Japanese Americans interned during the 40s. This woman, who had been raised to bend to authority and not make waves, was among those who appeared. In the poem it becomes the occasion for her not only to testify, but to bear witness at last, to speak her heart. She talks about how family property was vandalized and lost. She wonders why no German or Italian Americans were interned. She remembers a niece who died at California’s Tule Lake camp. When a commissioner says she has gone over the five-minute time limit...

Review: Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets edited by Joseph Bruchac

Review: <i>Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets</i> edited by Joseph Bruchac

Breaking Silence, an Anthology of Asian-American Poets

Journal Article Breaking Silence, An Anthology of Asian-American Poets. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. Greenfield Center, New York: The Greenfield Press, 1983. Get access Breaking Silence, An Anthology of Asian-American Poets. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. Greenfield Center, New York: The Greenfield Press, 1983. Shirley Lim Shirley Lim Westchester Community College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 11, Issue 2, June 1984, Pages 85–90, https://doi.org/10.2307/467073 Published: 01 June 1984