Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry
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In 1996, Juliana Chang observed that there were a "disproportionately small number of critical essays" on the topic of Asian American poetry and poetics. Asian American literary and cultural study might have grown rapidly as an area of scholarly specialty since the 1970s, but academics still seemed to approach verse with near "fear and loathing."
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Curator
Essay
“Disorientations,” my long poem in progress, collages together and so “disorients” two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson’s Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada and Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs.
Essay
This paper reads Agha Shahid Ali’s poetics principally through his canzone, “After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan,” epitomizing Ali’s commitment to form as not only a vehicle of poetic expression, but as a figure for dissecting the lyric mode within the continued departures of refrain.
Essay
The poems in Marilyn Chin’s most recent book of poetry, Hard Love Province (2014), explore, among other things, love and grief. Love is hard precisely because, as Chin illustrates, it continually circulates within overlapping registers of longing, desire, grief, absence, and presence.
Book Chapter
From its inception in the 1970s, Asian American poetry as a whole was an avantgarde, a grouping that defined itself not just through race but through bold experiments with form and style in the search for an Asian American aesthetic.
Book Chapter
I do not at all see why we must make an either-or choice between reading Beckett or reading Aimé Césaire, between calling out and into question “cultural desires, drives, anxieties, or prejudices” or analyzing metonymy, chiasmus, sprung rhythm, lineation, anaphora, parataxis, trochees, and so forth.
Essay
How Juliette Lee's poem is an example of Tina Y. Chen's "critical geographies."
Essay
This paper examines two of Mirikitani's well-anthologized poems, "Recipe" and "Suicide Note" as examples in which the political and the aesthetic merge to produce a third path that amalgamates those two.
Essay
Meena Alexander's poem is less the continuation of a dialogue begun by Walt Whitman than it is a rebuke.
Essay
One may well invoke the social in one’s work because it is a huge aspect of our lives. But no one wants to be reduced to some kind of social result.
Essay
What are the dangers of a “raceless” text? What are the dangers of stripping away one’s stakes, identity, nationhood, even life – real or performed?
Essay
Wang Ping situates her poetry in water spaces and contributes to a new transnational immigrant sensibility in poetry that reconfigures conceptions of hope for a new homeland.