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Essay
The Transnational Poetics of Wong May

This past March, I attended the 2015 Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing Conference in Missoula, Montana. The title of the conference comes from Dorothy Wang’s book, Thinking Its Presence (2013), in which she makes a necessary argument: that aesthetic forms are inseparable from social, political, and historical contexts in terms of writing and reception. On a Friday panel entitled “Fracturations: Mediations on the Politics and Poetics of Intersectionality,” Ruth Ellen Kocher repeated one line said by the academy around her:

“It's not about race, it’s about aesthetics.”

“It's not about race, it’s about aesthetics.”

“It's not about race, it’s about aesthetics.”

In a room full of poets of color, everyone nodded; this line was not uncommon. Kocher’s repeated quotation insists on the omission of race in discussions of contemporary American poetry. Indeed, Cathy Park Hong’s Lana Turner article “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” addresses these oversights. She asserts in the essay’s opening: “To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition.” And later, when discussing the omission of race: “But even in their best efforts in erasure, in complete transcription, in total paratactic scrambling, there is always a subject – and beyond that, the specter of the author’s visage – and that specter is never, no matter how vigorous the erasure, raceless” (Hong). 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?

Wong May, the focus of my conference talk, was born in Chongqing, China in 1944 and moved to Singapore with her mother in 1950. She also studied and worked in the United States (she was a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1968 and a MacDowell fellow in 1969) and currently lives in Ireland. In 2014, Octopus Books published Wong’s Picasso’s Tears, which collects her work since the 1970s. Prior to Picasso’s Tears (2014), she published three collections: A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals (1969), Reports (1972), and Superstitions (1978). These latter collections are currently out of print.

In numerous reviews of Picasso’s Tears, an exploration of Wong’s transnational identity appears to be absent or downplayed. For example, a review in Ploughshares focuses on her hard-to-pin-down interiority: “we learn nothing very specific about Wong May from [her poems], yet their interiority is so powerful…” Additionally, this review focuses primarily on Western influences: “[Wong’s poems] are aware of tradition (alluding to, for example, Milton, Blake, Keats, Pound, and Williams), but observe a logic of their own” (Scott). In 2013, prior to Picasso’s Tears, C.D. Wright introduces three poems of Wong’s on the PEN America’s website: “I include but a brief sample of this distinctive poet—quirky, in the best sense of the word… unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable in her concerns and procedures” (PEN America). Moreover, in 2004’s “Recovery Project” on Octopus, Zach Schomburg explicates a potential connection between Wong’s poetry and the haiku form, calling her work “an experiment perhaps in Haiku that has unraveled itself, has become completely undisciplined, but retains that core minimalism from when it was once tightly wound” (Recovery Project: Wong May”). Yet why not explore Wong’s transnationalism in terms of the form unraveling, as one unravels nationhood across multiple shores?

I argue that is it necessary to return to Dorothy Wang’s assertion about aesthetic forms being inseparable from sociopolitical contexts, including Wong’s transnational identity - often articulated through maternal lineage. Indeed, as she writes in her afterword to Picasso’s Tears:

& to my mother

For her permission

Once More

In Another Tongue.

In this acknowledgement, which echoes her first book’s dedication of “DEAR MAMA,” Wong’s use of space breaks, line breaks, and indentation separates her “formal” acknowledgments to her publishers, friends, etc. from her mother. This acknowledgement turned poem reaches out across time, space, and nations. Her mother, Wang Mei-Chuang, was a classical Chinese poet who taught history and Chinese literature. With “Once More/In Another Tongue,” Wong asks for this permission of language, embodying a voice through which her mother speaks, recalling Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s diseuse in DICTEE (1982) who says: Mother, I dream you just to able to see you” (Cha 49).

In this discussion, I hope to address that dangerous refrain “it’s not about race, it’s about aesthetics” and reconsider Wong’s work with a perspective that is mindful of her transnational poetics, challenging her positioning as a “quirky” forgotten poet, championed through experimental aesthetics. While Schomburg writes that “in 1978, she curled up into a tiny ball and disappeared” (“Recovery Project: Wong May”), Wong’s poems were not forgotten by Asian American studies; her work notably appeared in Juliana Chang’s anthology Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, published by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in 1996.

To begin exploring her transnational poetics, Picasso’s Tears includes a helpful epilogue where Wong discusses writing poetry after 1978. In particular, she addresses her mother as a main vein of influence. She writes: “My mother always held me in her mouth, like a fiercely maternal animal – but just so that she won’t, can’t swallow entire; not let go.” This ferocity and scene of ingestion/indigestion speaks to her transnational identity, as Wong discusses leaving thereafter. “What happened was that I did get away…” Here, she speaks of leaving Singapore, of going to Iowa, living in France for seven years, and moving to Dublin. And in thinking through her influences, mostly Western, she speaks about the dearth of contemporary Chinese literature in the midst of the era of Mao Zedong: “But I began by writing in Chinese, writing short stories… At that time, a great deal of translation was being turned out in Beijing, when writers were too fearful to write.” The statement “too fearful to write” is key. Where Schomburg writes about her form as a kind of “unraveled” and “undisciplined” haiku, I envision her “unraveled” form as risk-taking. Her work touches on the fear of writing, in which Chinese poets are under close watch by the government (including writers such as Ai Qing, Bei Dao, Liu Xiaobo, and Liu Xia[1]). As Wong later writes, as if confirming this risk: “Yes, what one writes does place one on the spot.” This pressure, this hot seat of language is transformative. She continues to echo this pressure and the risk of language: “If we were not ‘playful’ – we would all die out. I think PLAY makes one watchful.”

This playfulness in form – a kind of careful watchfulness as Wong suggests –exemplifies her movement from place to place. In a poem entitled “Surds” from Superstitions (1978), she writes: “like a tooth that sprouts/in another place//in another place” (Superstitions 50). A surd is an irrational root (i.e. the square root of three) and lacks sense. This “serial” poem itself jumps from section to section, refusing discrete sections, akin to a tooth “sprouting” where it should not. Indeed, her first book, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals (1969), is covered with strange growth. Akin to teeth sprouting, she writes in “Rot”: “Already I see mushrooms/growing out of everywhere” (A Bad Girl’s book of Animals 35). To return to her epilogue in Picasso’s Tears, she writes of her awareness of exile and growing up or “sprouting” wherever she could: “On the balcony with mother it was so. We were foreigners exiled from the mainland (China) to an island (Singapore). It had seemed alright from the beginning. So it was.” With her mirrored, bookended use of “it was so” and “so it was,” Wong suggests a kind of “swinging” acceptance of movement: she must and will move. Notably, she stands on the balcony with her mother, looking down – the balcony a kind of floating nation.

Furthermore, in the poem “History” in her first book, she enacts the playfulness of history and impossibility of the archive, thus refusing fact. In Wong’s world, history is a liar. To locate the root of a “family tree” is useless. She writes:

It was. The lie then

I’ve got a mother

I’ve committed murder

I’ve recovered

I couldn’t have wakened

to a finer world (A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals 4).

The proximity of “mother” and “murder” is visually and sonically dangerous, killing that smothering and loving “mother tongue”. Rather than nation and lineage, she only holds the landscape she travels across. She ends the poem: “It is October 1967/everywhere this sun and water/we’re going steadilier//steadilier immortal” (4). Here, the sun and water suggests her existence anywhere: without nation, without the certainty of language (she delights in the strange use of “steadilier”). Throughout this book, Wong pushes back as a rebel and non-nationalist with poems such as “The Yellow Plague”: “For 5000 years we have had/you to you we come/before you we hang down our heads/History Mistress get off my back” (81).

Notably, Wong’s sharp and unexpected line breaks, as seen above, create a kind of “swerving.” She simultaneously declares and denies. In “A Letter,” she conjures her mother and writes: “After yours/or anybody’s funeral,/the world is not made/ugly for me, it is” (A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals 11). Here, she writes: the world is and is not. In “Dislocation,” Wong swerves again in imagination and negation:

Imagine you

could not imagine

the whole ground floor gone

and you are on the first floor

drifting distrustful

giddy like a bird

indoors outdoors (58).

In terms of content, this poem brings to light transnational concerns. The idea of dislocation –evident in the simultaneity of “indoors outdoors” and “the whole ground floor gone” (58) –echoes back to “everywhere this sun and water” (4). Yet, beyond the content, the poem swerves into surprising juxtapositions and line breaks, to words such as “giddy” after “distrustful.” Notably, this “giddiness” returns in Picasso’s Tears, in a poem about her mother: “O I’m giddy from her fall” (Picasso’s Tears 17). Wong’s continual “swerving” comes back to Wright’s point about Wong’s unpredictability; here, this unpredictability is located in the surprise of being between places and nations. In this way, Wong’s work is a prime example of texts fraught with multidirectional routes. This state of being “between” recalls James Clifford’s concept of routes vs. roots in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997). Unlike the fixed “roots” of home, Clifford identities “routes” as ever-moving “between” spaces which promote becoming over being (37). He writes: “Everyone [is] more or less permanently in transit… Not so much ‘Where are you from?’ as ‘Where are you between?’”(37). Wong’s answer to this latter question: “indoors outdoors” (A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals 58).

In this strange transnational space of the “between,” I hope my opening of Wong’s work sprouts a tooth in another place, engaging race and aesthetics in contemporary Asian American poetry. Indeed, I want to recall Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1996) which argues for “hetereogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity” in Asian American texts – creating an identity that is continually made unstable through cultural productions (Lowe 67). Wong’s work complicates such spaces. We must look at Wong’s work through a transnational lens; indeed, how can one ignore lines such as: “I dream of saying goodbye to mother/In all the airports of the world” (Picasso’s Tears 16)?


Works Cited

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. DICTEE. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1995.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

“Four Poems by Wong May.” PEN America. 24 April 2013.

Hong, Cathy Park. “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.” Lana Turner 7: (2014).

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

“Recovery Project: Wong May.” Octopus Magazine. 2004.

Scott, Paul. “Review: Picasso’s Tears.” Ploughshares Blog. 3 Sept. 2014.

Wang, Dorothy. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Wong, May. A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969.

Wong, May. Picasso’s Tears: Poems 1978-2013. Portland: Octopus Books, 2014.

Wong May. Superstitions. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1978.


[1] For more about Liu Xia’s house arrest: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303725404579460961832371076

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Colloquy

Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry

Curator

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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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." Indeed, she estimated that there were probably more essays in print about a single novel, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior (1976), than about the whole of Asian American poetic production from the 1890s onwards (83-84).

Two decades later, one can no longer make the same claim. The year 2004 seems to mark a turning point. An anthology appeared, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, that announced the emergence of new, self-aware, ambitious cohort of authors, and the organization Kundiman put on the first of its storied annual "workshop retreats," in which Asian American writers, including poets, could meet each other, forge a nation-wide peer network, find mentors, and discuss topics of mutual interest in a supportive environment.

Soon after these important inaugural gestures, major monographs on Asian American poetry and poetics began to appear at the rate of one or more a year. Among them number Xiaojing Zhou's The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry (2006), Josephine Nock-Hee Park's Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (2008), Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (2009), Steven G. Yao's Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (2010), Joseph Jonghyun Jeon's Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (2012), and, most recently, Dorothy Wang's Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2014). While there remain large holes in academic coverage of the subject—for example, most scholarship to date focuses on poets with East Asian affiliations, not Southeast or South Asian, let alone Near Eastern—one can now talk about Asian American poetry and poetics as a solidly established scholarly specialty.

For the 2015 American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, the co-editors of this colloquy decided to organize a seminar with the purpose of exploring the state of the field. What kinds of material are scholars choosing to write about? How do they imagine their objects of study, and how do they configure the relation between the three key terms Asian, American, and poetry? How do they deploy rubrics such as diaspora, nation, and migration? How do they define the relationship between race and aesthetics? We chose the title "Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry" because so many of the questions we were asking involved charting spaces, providing timelines, and (re)discovering texts. We did not intend to fix or contain our subject matter, to pin it down or assign it a place; we wanted to generate and share impressions of and insights into a swiftly growing, changing area of study.

This colloquy gathers together six of the papers presented at the 2015 ACLA conference, along with excerpts from two precursor texts, Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde and Wang's Thinking Its Presence, which provide literary-historical and literary-critical background. Two of the new essays concentrate on figures who first came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Toshiaki Komura challenges Janice Mirikitani's reputation for writing straight-ahead poetry of political engagement by highlighting the ambiguity and wordplay present in even her most "activist" verse. Jane Wong revisits the formally adventurous, "transnational" poetics of Wong May, a Singapore-raised poet who earned a MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1966. Three essays concentrate on more recent bodies of work. Kornelia Freitag's essay explores Meena Alexander's intertextual dialogue with Walt Whitman; Brian Reed's looks to Sueyeun Juliette Lee for insight into the relationship between geography, diaspora, and the poetic imagination; and Sharon Tang-Quan's recounts Wang Ping's inquiries into migration and mourning. A final essay, by Pimone Triplett, combines commentary on John Yau's innovative dramatic monologues with a more-wide ranging, personal statement on what it means to be both Thai American and a poet in the era of Facebook.

Collectively, these pieces demonstrate a faith in the ability of close, careful reading of particular poets and poems (1) to enhance our appreciation of their aesthetic accomplishments and (2) to ground sociopolitical arguments about race, identity, nationality, and history. These aims are not perceived as opposing or irreconcilable. Rather, they are presumed to be mutually reinforcing, and to advance in tandem. The essays are of their literary-critical moment in other ways, too. For instance, the "masculinist critical bias" associated with early canonizing efforts such as Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) feels like a distant memory (Cunningham 17). Five of the six original contributions here focus on women writers, and two of the female contributors are themselves successful poets. Triplett has published three books, most recently Rumor (2009), and she has taught at Kundiman. Wong is a former Kundiman Fellow whose first poetry collection, Overpour, is forthcoming from Action Books in 2016. While no one gathering of essays could ever do justice to the full spectrum of what is being written by or about Asian American poets today, we hope that this colloquy—along with other, comparable efforts, such as the recently published volume Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (2015)—will help to introduce a wider readership to a compelling, even revelatory body of work.

List of Works Cited

Chang, Juliana. "Reading Asian American Poetry." MELUS 21.1 (Spring 1996): 81-98.

Cunningham, John Christopher. Race-ing Masculinity: Identity in Contemporary U.S. Men's Writing. New York: Routledge, 2002.

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