The increasing vitality in contemporary American poetry is, to my mind, indistinguishable at present from the aesthetic and moral wealth of an extraordinary number of now active Asian-American poets, both young and old. Organizations like Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Kundiman as well as literary scholars like Sianne Ngai and Dorothy J. Wang are also profoundly shaping the discourse and attention of readers, both in and out of the academy. More specifically, as the poetry community confronts questions of racism prompted by larger cultural events as well as specific recent instances in the poetry community, Asian-American poets have played a tremendous role in challenging the status quo, no less valuable than the black radical tradition exemplified by poets in the black radical tradition such as Claudia Rankine and Fred Moten, among many, many others.
Example: Cathy Park Hong publishes the essay “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” in Lana Turner that cracks the Internet. Example: Jenny Zhang, John Yau, Ken Chen publish seminal essays concerning not only minstrelsy within conceptualist poetics, but also ruminative and responsive outcries to the scandalous persistence of racial appropriation (exemplified most recently by the Best American Poetry debacle).
This portfolio cannot and should not be seen as a codification nor totalizing index of Asian or Asian-American poetry. Indeed, there are many incredible writers not mentioned below (Tan Lin and Srikanth Reddy are just two examples). Yet the chance to foreground just some of these resounding poets’ works by their fellow poets seems to me a welcome opportunity to reframe our focus and energy away from attention otherwise swallowed up by the scandals of white trespass. Cultural appropriation continues to thrive in American literature in 2015, but it is still not as alive as these poets, their works, works which continue to interrogate self and society, image and hybridity, translation and nativity, among other infinitudes.
What follows below is the response by dozens of contemporary poets to a recent open-invitation to write about an Asian or Asian-American poet that they love, admire, feel transformed by.
–Adam Fitzgerald
Li-Young Lee
There are those who think his name doesn’t matter, that his face is of no consequence. That when I heard him read 20 years ago, what mattered were his poems. But in the world where I grew up, “I don’t think of you as Chinese,” was intended as a compliment, and “That isn’t your mom,” was as common as sunshine, and the only Chinese person I saw every day was my father, who never uttered a poem in my presence. In our world, his given name, “Li-Young” with its dash identical to mine (Ching-Ning), and his family name “Lee,” a name I’d heard my father utter hundreds of times, in reference to people I’d never seen, mattered. His face mattered. It’s a beautiful face; the poets know it. (My father’s face was beautiful too, but our world, full of Emersons, didn’t know it.) Here was a Chinese man who wrote like a god and read like a god and even looked like a god and yet he wrote about his father like a supplicant. As if his father were God. It was a stance I knew intimately; to hear it expressed publicly was astonishing and unforgettable. I titled my first book The Man With My Face to invoke Li-Young Lee and James Hsien-Wen Tseng and Jennifer Ching-Ning Tseng and so many others because our names and our faces matter as much as the poems. They are the poems. See how they cleave to one another.
He is
my sister, this
beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite,
keeper of sabbaths, diviner
of holy texts, this dark
dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one
with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese
I daily face,
this immigrant,
this man with my own face.
(Lee, “The Cleaving”)
–Jennifer Tseng
Ocean Vuong
Ocean is one of the first poets that I met when moving to NYC. Sally Wen Mao introduced us during his chapbook reading with Joseph Legaspi. In Ocean’s living room he once told me “anger is one of the greatest teachers, we should listen to anger.” (I’m paraphrasing this statement). A few months later, I read Ocean’s poem “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” where he writes “And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing / to surrender.” Thank you, my brother and friend, for everything that you’ve taught me about listening, healing, becoming human. I love you, Ocean!
–Christopher Soto (aka Loma)
Jackie Wang
Jackie Wang once sent me a vial of her menstrual blood. Sometimes you meet a poet and the poet is a poet of the body in this other way: the mess of it, the no-going-back that a body sometimes is. What I love lately is Jackie’s twitter feed that—in the space of an afternoon—might encompass the color green, psychosis and incarceration, as themes. Which are not themes. [Fetal microchimerism, what the] and [“the green mouth becomes the green stomach becomes the green intestine” becomes the “green intend time,” according to autocorrect] are two recent favorites. Also this, which resembles a form of cultural writing that is nevertheless unhoused, appearing here as the invitation to attend a workshop in Montreal: “what was the feeling you had walking to the park bench to eat your salad, the day grey with ruin like the final scene of tsai ming liang’s vive l’amour. it was the feeling that despite the ruin or maybe because of the ruin, something could be said. did you start to cry?” I have gone over my word limit. To summarize, I love Jackie Wang. Her writing completely and utterly breaks my heart. It makes my heart into a heart again.
–Bhanu Kapil
Sawako Nakayasu
There are many Asian and Asian American poets whose work I admire or adore—some whose poetry I feel is essential to my life and my work. While I am sorely tempted to begin listing them, I will constrain myself to naming only one of these poets: someone who is not a dear friend, former student, or former teacher; someone who has never published me and whom I have never had the privilege of publishing; and, finally, someone whose name is not as widely familiar as others I might mention. I carried Sawako Nakayasu’s book Texture Notes around with me for at least a year, teaching it when I could and recommending it more than was seemly. Her poems—short chunks of prose, dated like entries from a surrealist diary, and full of lists—delighted me as only language at the intersection of the Weird and the True can. I reveled in the sensory excess: “texture of danger,” of “an avalanche of undercooked hamburger meat,” “absolute texture of a park on some Tokyo Sunday,” “multiple disaster texture,” “texture of the sound of the wrong band warming up,” and—not last, but first, and because first, most breathtaking as the harbinger of a poetry swoon—“bicycle texture.” This passage is not meant to explain; it is meant as a tribute to Sawako Nakayasu, who writes, in the poem that begins “Texture of Needing Yellow”: “Needing Yellow when Needing Yellow is Needing Yellow, otherwise known as now.”
–Evie Shockley
Wong May
I suppose many have never heard of Wong May, the daughter of a poet, born in Chongqing, raised partly in Singapore. I suppose many who have heard of her might not think of her as an Asian American artist; she came to the States to study in the 1960s, and has lived in various parts of Europe ever since the mid-70s. But those first major books were published here by American publishers, and it was Robert Creeley’s recommendation that made me pick up her books when I found them among the remainder stacks. Inside, lines like these: “the thin line of milk / the imaginary line / What if it were picked up again / 300 pages later? Or in between / woven, forsaken,” It was a time when commercial houses were publishing innovative verse by young poets. Rosmarie Waldrop had a book with Random House. Clark Coolidge had one with Harper & Row, and here were two amazing collections, packed with poems, by Wong May from Harcourt Brace. “The Good Man Palliative / My Pal / The Pest-House Palliative / festooned / Pall Pall the Panorama / the UnPast / the Good Pal Pentatonic.” I’d been looking for her ever since, looking in the spaces her words had left behind them in America when she went off with a husband for elsewhere. Well, she turned up in Ireland, and just last year published a collection titled Picasso’s Tears with something called Octopus books. Wong May is a major find, refound. From “Poem in English”: “One of my first English poems / began / ‘The small man at the counter said’ // Then I went to another country. Indeed I could not remember / what the small man at the counter said. . . . But there is no poem / or I do not remember the poetry, / save that it is in English.”
–A.L. Nielsen
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Sueyeun Juliette Lee is one my personal heros. As a human being, she is generous, courageous, honest, and lives with such utter enthusiasm and integrity, it is hard not to fall in love with ever fiber of her being. Through loss and grief, she gives us some of the most heartbroken parts of her own self in generous gestures of love and compassion. As a poet, her language devastates, the deep honesty with which she lives each moment is embedded in her words and the spaces between those words. The often described act of lying bare on the page one’s own losses, flaws, emotions, etc. does not begin to capture the essence of her work, a work that begins in her body, in the spaces which she occupies, the sky, every ray of light. And as a literary citizen, she works to support so many poets and writers around her, through her many projects and acts, big and small, through Corollary Press, and through conversation, within which she listens and takes in, so much more than many others are capable of.
–Janice Lee
Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Growing up in Honolulu, Hawaii, the Asian American experience was a distant idea, one relegated to the confines of the United States Mainland. When I left Hawaii for the Northeast, I was confronted with hula grass skirts, Hawaiian Punch, and soft ukuleles as the advertised components of being “Hawaiian.”
Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at Pahala Theatre dares to counter these misconceptions. Written as dramatic monologues and narratives in Hawaiian Creole Pidgin, Yamanaka pulls back the dark curtain from Hawaii’s paradisiacal, tourist façade. Unapologetically grating to the ear, her staccato lines sing about the obsession consuming third- and fourth- immigrant generations to physically pass as “haloe” (white American Caucasian), the mass consumption of pop culture from “Da Mainland,” the sense of shame in local traditions, and the harsh socioeconomic realities fragmenting Hawaii.
Not only was it refreshing to read about issues confronted in my personal upbringing in Hawaii, I also became aware of how claustrophobic the “Asian American” label was. Perhaps this the main reason I admire Yamanaka, as she is one of many prominent Asian American writers from Hawaii daring to expand the narrowness of the “Asian American experience.”
–Qinglan Wang
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Like many Asian American poets, I was first struck by Cha’s DICTEE. What I love about Cha is her ability to create an experience. She asks us to feel what she feels through her form, which offers fragments of texts, images, and documents. It’s an emotional experience. From the opening, she writes: “Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.” At the time, I was struggling with fiction and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t write in a “linear” way. I kept kicking myself for it: why can’t I just begin and move forward, scene by scene? DICTEE made me realize that storytelling, especially after a history of trauma, war, and migration, was hardly a linear act. I deeply value the honesty and risk in her work—that she will attempt to tell, even though it might not be clear. Cha gave me permission to create constellations of memory as a poet—in media res. I’ve taught DICTEE in my classes and am always worried that she might be too difficult. But, each time, my students are struck by her ability to make them feel something, even if they can’t voice what that is exactly. The opening image of the rubble (above) is so moving in itself—how can we start with this unmarked and inhabitable space? This is how: through “words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, [more] sensitive than nerve.” I also recommend checking out Exile and Temps Morts: Selected Works and The Dream of the Audience. In 1982, Cha was murdered in New York City. She was 31 and I am 31 now. Thank you Theresa, for your subversive beauty and for giving me permission to write in any way I need to. “I write. I write you. Daily. From here.”
–Jane Wong
Myung Mi Kim
I read Myung Mi Kim’s The Bounty when I was 19 in Pattie McCarthy’s class in Towson, Maryland. I began writing poetry as a practice because of what Myung’s book made possible intellectually, imaginatively—because of what it opened for poetics as way of living with text. Unlike the positive poetics of inclusion of the NY School and the Black Mountain poets I was also reading at the time (in which the reader enjoys transference and comes to ‘love’ a book or a poet), Myung’s work opened negative affect as a way of living beside, estranged from (rather than through/via) a book. The reader had to undertake the text—as burden, as struggle, as object—and construct a poetics of not living with, of repulsion, of ostracism, of exclusion through acts of semantic suture, through failed gestures of understanding. Her opacity became a permission to write—to admit the need to tell a story even without an audience. Ever since, through Commons, Dura, Underflag, Myung has taught me how to ask the harder question of a text, how to make a more specific demand of the reader’s attention, how to phrase an ethical problem as a material one. Her seminars at the University at Buffalo were sites of urgent and affectively complex intellection (now documented in Andrew Rippeon and Michael Cross’s edited collection Building is a Process/Light is an Element). She insists on bending a claim far enough to see where it breaks; she insists on shadowing language instead of heralding it; she insists on not insisting, instead, allowing language (in spite of ourselves) to palpitate. Myung’s books have been primers for me in the study of duration, pace, documentation, emotive precision, and tonal attunement. But, unlike primers, one never outgrows Myung’s books—they grow in, burrow; purls from her pages float up at unexpected times; curls of a sibilant list litter the floor of my study.
–Divya Victor
During the first workshop, Myung Mi Kim gave a lecture on silence and it was as if she ripped the sheet of literary history in half. She asked us to think of the poem as a net that catches the mind’s hesitations rather than the perfectly formed phrase. Like most students, I held a conditioned notion on eloquence and Kim gave me permission to use what I considered my shameful ineloquence—my childhood struggles with English, my agrammatism—and fuse that into a radical aesthetic.
Susan Sontag, in her famous essay The Aesthetics of Silence, wrote “The notion of silence, emptiness, and reduction sketch out new prescriptions for looking, hearing.” While Sontag enumerates on silence as conceptual technique, she only passingly mentions the politics of silence. For Kim, attention to silence is an interrogation. In Under Flag, English is a foreign antibody that the subject attempts to assimilate into herself. To become fluent is not to become individuated but to become part of an assembly. By Dura and Penury, her poetry is stripped down to the point where a single word is inscripted on an expanse of white space. In her “disarraying” the authority of English, it is as if Kim is trying to rub the language out altogether.
Teaching was an intervention; pedagogy, a form of activism; she fostered in me an awareness of the classroom as an institution and how to struggle against that via poetry and conversation. In my mind, Kim is heroic and I am one student of a legion whom she has taught. Someday, she will be recognized as a singular poet who’s influenced a generation.
–Cathy Park Hong
Trisha Low
I’ve always admired Trisha Low’s love of doom, which literally means judgment but poetically means something else, perhaps a teetering toward the void that is terrifying, sure, but always a little funny, like the idea that we’ve come to this, to doom, of all things. I’m reminded of Amy Taubin’s review of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in which she argued that the film was a great wedding comedy. Like, god, things are terrible, but at least the world isn’t ending. Except, ha, it is. Trisha’s like that, like a grim punchline that ends the comedy half an hour before the film’s over, leaving us with a brutal last act: the death of the comedian, crushed by planet-sized fate. She once wrote on Facebook:
that thing where a thing happens that makes you resist writing entirely and it is so sharp; bc the thing about speech is that everyone does it/there is no such thing about it being free, it’s just about differentials in reception/audibility which means speech is always inherently fucked. but whatever, i will always believe in cruel art i really love having to take it i really love chris burden’s DOOMED so sue me because the thing is yes, they really are going to leave you there to die.
Twenty-eight people like this and one person comments: “yes urgh yes.” I’m usually in agreement with Trisha on everything, including this post, but I’ve never liked Chris Burden all that much. Boy’s toys and all that aside, his immovable position on doom—to borrow a phrase of Trisha’s—remains unconvincing to me whereas Trisha, who wrote a book called The Compleat Purge that collects several last wills and testaments written throughout the course of her (young) life, has always seemed closer—at least in writing—to the desperation that characterizes life pulled against its will toward meaninglessness, the sucking vacuum to which all things slide into profane oblivion (let’s say obscurity or poetry) that comes with being a writer like Trisha, that is, a poet. So the thing is, yes.
–Andrew Durbin
Divya Victor
Divya Victor and I both have published books with Les Figues, and I think of her as kindred, an aesthetic stepsister I don’t have to compete with—only adore. Divya’s conceptualism is neither sterile nor precious; it is an avant garde with guts. When I read her poetry my predominant emotion is the panic of immersion; she captures me in this fucked up cultural echo chamber from which there is no escape. Comfortable distanced observations are impossible when the text has swallowed you. Hers is a subject struggling not to be an object in the flood of cultural idiocy that makes up Western Civ. To claim an “I” in Divya’s writing is precarious, be you Eliza Doolittle or Dora, Freud’s hysteric who walked away from his patriarchal clutches. In Things to Do with Your Mouth, speaking is the one mouth thing not granted to Divya’s racialized/gendered subjects whose sheer physicality nevertheless evokes fear and disgust to the dominant gaze. Though gagged and silenced, they will not be contained. Their cagey bodies urinate and defecate and vomit, they exude pus tears bile milk blood earwax phlegm hair and dead skin cells that find their way into the salads of the proper. To privilege or display the female body is always an aggressive act in the English language. Divya Victor’s writing slams itself into your face, yet risks vulnerability. It is intelligent without pretension. I love her hypnotic wall-of-sound musicality, the way her cultural satire dares to be simultaneously horrifying and gorgeous. In Divya’s politicized landscape to be naturalized is to be denatured. As she writes in Natural Subjects: THIS NATURAL SUBJECT REQUIRES ASSEMBLY. When I read her work I feel taken apart and put back together in ways that astonish me.
–Dodie Bellamy
Franny Choi, Fatimah Asghar, Hieu Minh Nguyen
Don’t make me pick one, cause I can’t, so I won’t. I am happy to call these three poets some of my best friends, my best partners in this brutal, glorious world of poetry. We’ve toured together, written together, been through real life-ish together, side-eyed white folks together, all the things that writer friends do.
Franny Choi’s Floating, Brilliant, Gone teaches me constantly about grief as dangerous and beautiful beast, about the power of moving into out of it and allowing yourself to be transformed. I am always amazed how Franny makes alchemy and new technologies out of language without losing the heart of her poetry. He poetics is a fierce 1-2 punch, a combo which spins language into and beyond itself like that of the best “language poets” but still grips and tenderizes your heart like the most true and clear of storytellers.
Fatimah Asghar is fucking magic. And I don’t mean magic in a fake way (also, fuck western colonialism for trying to make us place the idea of magic into an unreal space). Through Fatimah’s work, I learn so much about myth-making, about transfiguration, about how poetry is the realest spell we have. I had the privilege of reading her new chapbook After and Fatimah’s constructions and reconstructions of family, self, love, trauma, and healing are what this world needs.
Hieu Minh Nuguyen… this mofo. I get so made reading his poems in the “YOU DON’T KNOW MY LIFE” kinda way. I’ve known this genius since high school and to watch him grow into the phenomenal poet he is today makes me cry. His book This Way To The Sugar is a gospel of the sad boy, a salve that doesn’t always fix the wound but makes it beautiful. I am grateful to my brother for his curiosity, his poems that dismiss as they embrace, his ability render us so bare and raw and worthy and unworthy.
Good lord, I am best in the company of my brave, brave loves, thank god for these poets in my life and yours.
–Danez Smith
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge was the second Asian American poet I read in my twenties. Her poems work by constellating fragments in an investigation that is both discursive and nonlinear, precise and abstract, as if one were to combine a microscope with a prism. Many of her poems move in long lines and small observations, speaking up for the integrity of small things, reassuring me that the shadows in our world are worth pausing over, examining in detail. In an interview with Laura Hinton, I love how she describes that “in the margin, fertile things happen. When things are fixed, things can’t grow. But in margins, things grow” (Jacket, April 2005). This impulse comes through not only in the subject of her observations but also in the shifting rhythm of her poems. In “Nest,” she writes: “Wherever I look is prior absence, no figure, ruin escaping an aesthetic: hammock, electric fan, ghost don’t qualify as guards. / The comfortable interior my guest inhabits is a moving base, states of dwelling undetermined, walls cross-hatched like mother tongue” (Nest, 1998). For me—someone who came to writing intuitively by way of the lyric essay—Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge provided further permission to see investigation, discourse, and even prose itself as emotional texture, as refraction, an experience where silences and suspensions and murkiness are as much a part of the meaning as what is explicitly said.
–Jennifer S. Cheng
We meet for lunch at Bottino by the High Line. Last time it was Aquagrill, a stone’s throw from her townhouse, back when she was losing the view outside of her window. That’s New York. This time she’s coming from a fashion shoot; Richard Tuttle is involved, her artist husband who has a polygonal scrap of sewed canvas tacked up on the Whitney’s wall. Perhaps you also caught his show at Sperone Westwater when Soho was more of a gallery destination than an haute-couture shopping spree? Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge says: Poets are some of the worst dressed folks she knows; there’s no excuse! If you don’t care about what’s hanging on your body, then what about the materiality of language? We talk about Yoji, about Issey, about how I depend on Tokyo 7 on 7th St. for my fashion fix. She reminds me to hit the annual sales at designer boutiques, how innovation remains within reach for all budgets! She adores Lanvin. I tell her about the Jill Sanders lace-up boots I scored at an estate sale up north for six bucks, a woman’s size 9, a perfect fit. No way!, she says. She tells me about the ants who have invaded her home in Abiquiu, her Southwest abode. She doesn’t spray Black Flag, doesn’t summon the Orkin guy. What she does is talk to the ants, respecting their needs but they’ve got to go. The next day they are gone. I look into her elegant face, this utterly humble culturally savvy down-to-earth verbal artist of the highest order, my maternal psychopomp! She talks about touring college campuses with her daughter. We talk about collage and the need for vast horizontal surfaces to lay out all the research. We talk about our health. I have no idea what we ate!
–Timothy Liu
Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim was revolutionary to the way I thought about Asian American poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Notes from the Divided Country, which was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as the winner of the 2002 Walt Whitman Award, encapsulates decades of Korean history. With deft lyricism and a fearless gaze, she traces the fraught relationship between North and South Korea as witnessed by her speaker’s grandparents. In doing so, she is able to place herself as both product of and progress toward reconciling that history and America’s involvement with her current role as an Asian American poet. Early work such as the tight, stark poem “Occupation” is propelled forward with urgency and hyper-awareness of: “The soldiers / are hard at work / building a house. / They hammer / bodies into the earth / like nails…” This seems to foreshadow her more recent work, which is dedicated, among other things, to various North Korean subjects. Kim casts her sharply critical and lyric-driven eye on the political upheaval above the 38th Parallel and beyond, to follow its reverberations toward the broader human perspective in poems such as “Rice-Field Road at Dusk”: “What does death ask of us? / I must change whatever it was I was / when the old man was alive.” At times, the steadiness of her lyric voice is such that readers almost miss the political and historical undercurrents layered in her work. Kim is a patient poet, taking her time to carefully craft each line to open, and at times re-open, the eyes of Western readers to the Forgotten War, and to a foreign and forgotten history, asking us where the Asian American poet stands in the canon, reminding us that we are heirs to multiple histories.
–Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Jenny Zhang
As poets (and editors more so), we pay lip service to pieties about poetry that are routinely belied by work that grabs our attention yet does little more than occupy us in the moment; we move on, unenlightened. But there are times when we do encounter poets whose work literally changes lives: Claudia Rankine, whose work made possible discussions of race that never took place before; Ocean Vuong, not reducing audiences to tears, but elevating them to tears; Danez Smith, bringing out in us by force—the forcefulness of his words and their rhythms—the humanity we’ve worked so hard and meanly to obscure and conceal; Fatimah Asghar, breaking the internet by breaking free of gravity and wresting Pluto back within our orbit… Among my pantheon of such life changers and life savers is Jenny Zhang. It’s reductive to characterize a poet’s work, it’s a kind of privilege and disaster even to be asked, so everything I’ve said in the foregoing and am tempted to say about Zhang makes me abashed—reminds me to shut the hell up and read. But I want to point out that not only in her momentous poetry, but in two recent prose pieces she has done best what poets are here to do: she’s called us out, and calls upon us. In “They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist” she refuses to be scandalized, which, pathologically, is what our culture requires of us; she indicts the vicious and ubiquitous invidiousness that “makes us act wild and violent toward each other sometimes instead of kind.” And in her essay for Poetry, “How It Feels,” she boldly summons our will to extend our sympathy, and makes this a crucial purpose, one fulfilled in her own poems. She reminds us—if we have forgotten it, we ought to be ashamed—that we can and must learn to see differently, and have to feel something in the process. That essay resonated with so many young readers that I’ve lost count of how many have written in to say so. That their lives had been changed by Jenny Zhang is changing mine, and will change yours, too.
–Don Share
Vijay Seshadri
Recently I read at the Hillstead Museum’s Sunken Garden Reading Series with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Vijay Seshadri and in introducing him recalled how influential his guidance was when I was a graduate student in New York City in the late 90s. I was struggling away on my own poems and, barely knowing me at all, Vijay nonetheless agreed to blurb my first collection of poems, Instrumentality—an act of kindness I have never forgotten.
In the citation for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, the committee called Vijay’s book 3 Sections, “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.” Indeed Vijay has proven himself to be an epistemological poet, one who is concerned with the scope of the human mind and its limitations, yet, rather than abiding in a purely Parnassian realm of speculation, his poems also include pop cultural references and a keen ability to satirize our new media moment of accelerated perception and innate narcissism. He also cultivates a Wallace Stevensesque focus on metaphysics and a John Ashbery-like parataxis, where ideas leap from line to line, clause to clause, using coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions to maintain an equilibrium between disparate figures.
One part of 3 Sections I love is the long poem of nearly 500 lines, called, in a representative conflation of genres, “Personal Essay.” Really a discursive meditation on the nature of the self, of language, and of the self in language, the poem emphasizes the microscopic and the macroscopic, moving from the specificity of certain individuals who live in the speaker’s neighborhood in Brooklyn to the chaotic plasma in the sun’s core, from the connotative to the denotative, perpetually perplexed at the sheer fact of existence, the plenitude that arises from sheer emptiness, both of which surround us at any given moment.
With the publication of 3 Sections, Vijay Seshadri became the first Asian American to win one of our country’s highest literary honors and I’d like to celebrate his work for its ambition and innovation, his generosity in my own life and his crucial, if reluctant trailblazing, hopefully opening up the way for other Asian American poets (who though too numerous to list here, deserve to be listed and more importantly, to be read) to prosper. If the speakers in his poems are amiable, they are nonetheless astringent in their lucid appraisal of the nature of reality and his voice—wry and perceptive, compassionate yet analytical, and surprisingly wise, or, rather, wise in surprising ways—has the capacity to comfort us even as it discombobulates the patterns we thought we perceived in the rhythms of our own lives as we’re afforded a glimpse of time from a vantage point high our unfolding into the hours.
–Ravi Shankar
Suheir Hammad
Lucille Clifton wrote “I had no model.” She, “nonwhite and woman” in “Babylon.” I had—I have—Suheir Hammad. Her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black and the hard plastic sleeve that housed it at UC Berkeley’s library. The first reading and the hug she gave me at 19. She stands in the center of justice and sings. To watch an audience watch her, to be an audience to her, is to be reminded of the most urgent and real and courageous possibilities of poetry to move, to grieve, to excite, to connect. She is Brooklyn, is Palestine, is displacement and warfares, is Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, is hip hop and Bucky Fuller, is Arabic wa English, is wa and wa, all and desire. What she gives us is exacting, taxing—it is not easy the grief she channels, the dead she restores with her body. Once, she gave me a jade plant trimming that was mid-sprout and said Don’t worry if it dies. Said it wouldn’t be my fault. It’s the only plant of mine that’s survived.
–Solmaz Sharif
Hoa Nguyen
Why pick one? Catalina Cariaga. Virginia Cerenio. Merle Woo. José Garcia Villa. Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Cha. Myung Mi Kim. Bhanu Kapil. Mark Aguhar. Brandon Shimoda. Farid Matuk. Ronaldo Wilson. I will pick one: Hoa Nguyen. Decolonial co-conspirator, drinking buddy, poetry page mother. An all-in-one. All over this continent of poetry, teaching everywhere, from her homes, something on the stove, green just outside. With her page mothers, Kyger and Frym. Across the poem’s millennium. Stealing from language itself, from whiteness, Americanness, heteropatriarchy, poetry careerism. Open to all of life itself, a queer Asian American life (mine? hers? ours? why not yours?), the organic ground for formal innovation, sonic space, multiple points of attention, the powerful filter against bullshit and what passes for poetry. The task of the poet to cultivate.
–Kimberly Alidio
Don Mee Choi
The first time I encountered Don Mee Choi’s work was through her translation of Korean poet, Kim Hyesoon. “No, I’m not an agitator. It turns out that I’m a mere imitator the lowly kind, which is non other than a translator…” she writes in her essay “Freely Frayed.” She continues: “In my world of nobody’s business I twirl about frantically frequently farfar to the point of failure feigning englishenglish.” Don Mee writes of the degradation of translation, language, its inevitable failure. Yet, confronting failure is only the beginning. In her translation and in her own poetry, failure is a feral state of being. “Leave! Let’s land, she’s none, a lone planet. / Come, have a long life and then glow-glow.”
Don Mee has taught me to embrace the discomfort of difficult texts. Her writing has showed me that discomfort is neither cruel nor condemnation, but a passageway towards freedom, or towards becoming feral, or freely frayed.
And who are the freely frayed? Daughters without homes, bitch mothers, sisters, unwanted girls, pigs…. Don Mee provides a space for these creatures of filth, love, and rebellion. Not a nation space, but a radically decolonized one, a poetic one; one of discontinuity and urgency, of faith and disgust. In her poetry, discomfort is not pain, but a blood necessity: “Sister’s madness is as good as mine. We make the biggest picture in the world.”
Dear Don Mee,
What is the racial identity of a worm?
In discomfort, I writhe.
In discomfort, I vomit.
In discomfort, I breathe.
In discomfort I fray.
A nation of pigs nod their heads and say
thank you.
I crawl out of my pig pen and say
thank you.
–Christine Shan Shan Hou
Garrett Hongo
I first read Garrett Hongo when I was 15, in high school. I used to skip lunch to hide in the back of the library, where no one could see me, and read with the book hidden in my lap. At that time, I was also working on a tobacco plantation in rural Connecticut. Being under legal working age, I was paid under the table, in cash, but made enough to help my mom with the rent and other bills. The work was excruciating, but when you’re 15 and making “your own way,” inner pride (and books) can be a great balm.
The copies of Hongo’s Yellow Light and The River of Heaven in the stacks were actually brand new, their spines barely broken. I remember hearing them crack and creak, like the hinge of doors. It might sound strange, but I picked out the book because of the face on the back cover: it was the face of an Asian man. I did not know Asian people could publish books, then. The Asian faces I saw most were my family, who could not read. For me, Asianess was, in a way, the antithesis to literature, to books, to words. But not stories. My family always had stories—and so did Garrett Hongo. Hongo’s poems were the welding of story and words and writing all at once. His very existence permissioned me into the possibility of my own writing. He wrote of his kin’s immigrant lineage in Hawaii with careful, ecstatic, and painful celebration. I especially admired his meticulous and prideful depictions of cane workers: the syntax and sonic pressures enacting the machete’s steady and melodious cadence. And because I never saw what sugar canes looked like, my mind replaced them with the tobacco plants I was cutting in those Connecticut fields, the same machete in Hongo’s poems lifted by my own hands.
Most pivotal for me is his poem, “The Legend,” in which a man of Asian descent is murdered, seemingly at random, while doing his laundry. The scene echoed the violent absurdities I often faced as a Vietnamese exile in White American spaces. The man is shot, but the crowd does not move to assist him. They are more arrested by the “sounds [that] escape from his mouth, / a babbling no one understands…The noises he makes are nothing to them.”
But they are something to me. It is my noise. It is my language. It is our language. Our voices—which are so often erased, silenced, crossed out, or stolen, suddenly reappear in Hongo’s poems—to stay. As I read, I felt I was standing side by side with someone I might become. I felt the machetes come down, the green stalks falling. I felt I was making something of value with my bare hands—and a few “sounds escaping from my mouth.”
Thank you, Garrett Hongo, for being.
–Ocean Vuong
Cathy Song
For years now, I have taught Cathy Song’s “Girl Powdering Her Neck”—a poem working from the Utamaro print—as part of an ekphrastic exercise in creative writing classes. Ekphrasis, I discuss with my students, is a Greek word composed of the words for “out” and “speak.” An ekphrastic poem then speaks out, creates phrases, for the silent artwork.
Is the poem then outspoken? Song’s poem works mainly in imagery. And its imagery makes it wonderful to teach to aspiring writers. Indeed, an ekphrastic exercise in a creative writing course asks students to “show” rather than “tell.”
However, Song’s poem both shows and tells. It tells precisely in those moments that revise Utamaro’s print and imagine a world outside of the portrait—extending the print’s frame and bringing agency within the confines of this world. Indeed, as the poem claims, the woman here “is about to paint herself.”
But as a woman of the ukiyo, the pleasure quarter, does she paint herself for her self or for others, specifically men—their pleasure, their gaze? This is the double bind of the poem, and in this way I see it participating within the fraught tradition of American Imagism—a tradition that begins with Pound’s “invention” of the Chinese and his signing Hilda Doolittle as H.D. Imagiste.
Is it possible to read Song’s final image—a formal haiku describing the silent woman in her mirror—as speaking back, or out to, the problematic appropriations of Pound’s Imagism?
Two chrysanthemums
touch in the middle of the lake
and drift apart.
Perhaps, the poem points to the limits of prioritizing showing over telling. Here, in Song’s own “apparition,” we see a woman’s lips in motion. It is like the close up of an actress in a silent film. In a sense, reading these lines we are also reading lips. It is also the image of drowning.
–Brandon Som
John Yau
I’ve known John for almost 40 years, since he was a student of mine in the MFA program at Brooklyn College. Since then, he has become famous as a poet and also as an art critic. In the latter, he was somewhat following in my footsteps, though I warned him against doing it! Several years into his career as critic he bemoaned to me, “What the heck did you get me into?” Seriously, he has written much and beautifully about art, more so than almost any contemporary critic I can think of. His monograph on Jasper Johns, called A Thing Among Things, is a model for what contemporary art-writing ought to be, taking in as it does the artist’s persona, yet not at the expense of formal considerations. Further Adventures in Monochrome, (which suggests John’s work) is the title of a recent collection of Yau’s poetry and shows how neatly his two writing preoccupations can play off each other.
I view John Yau as an incredible cultural/artistic catalyst. He has acquaintances and interests in many branches of the arts that he is magically able to bring together to create new and diverse areas of inquiry, a practice which fuels his own creativity as a writer. His poems are endlessly playful and often interrogate Chinese stereotypes in American culture (e.g. Charlie Chan, Anna May Wong) while taking their cues from the visual arts.
–John Ashbery
A couple of years ago Pleiades sent me a review copy of John Yau’s Further Adventures in Monochrome, and I carried it around by its dog-eared pages until, like the velveteen rabbit, it’d been loved nearly to death. Still, the review scared me because I had no idea how I would convey the way Yau’s poems electrified me. It felt as if reverence had mated with irreverence, the sky had split open, and whimsy (in the guise of John Yau’s brain) had been born. To simply say the poems freed me would be clichéd. But I mean it. John Yau’s poems freed me. They freed me in the same way a vault frees a gymnast from the floor—into flight, into flips and twists, into a launch away from that which had held me down. I saw that language could be stretched and snapped and turned inside out until what society thought it’d tamed ran wild again.
The truest thing I know to say is that Yau’s poetry found new ways to startle me awake to the peculiarities of being. It reminded me how little I really know about poetry, art, life, love, language—everything. It reminded me not to take it all too seriously (“I realized that I was going to / have to stop being a troublesome troll / if I wanted to make further strides / in my quest for nobility”) or to expect resolution, but to delight in play, to reside in uncertainty, and to have faith in the boundless possibilities for the construction and discovery of meaning through symbol and sound.
–Melissa Studdard
Patrick Rosal
I first heard of Patrick Rosal from John Murillo, when I was driving John back to Brooklyn from a reading he’d done at my school and asked him if he knew of any other strong young Asian American male poets I should check out. The ones I knew were all well-known (to me anyway) already—Yau, Hongo, Lee, Mura, Liu, Seshadri—and I knew of a few other guys close to my age (Rick Barot, Ken Chen, Oliver de La Paz, Ed Bok Lee), but it seemed to me there were so few Asian American men in poetry compared to the women, and I figured there had to be some people I was missing. I still feel I can count on two hands the number of Asian American male poets that a well-read poetry reader has heard of, and maybe half of one hand the number that mainstream America has heard of. This makes me a little sad, and looking through the poets already written about in this forum I’m not surprised to find that, with the exception of Hieu Minh Nguyen—a new name! Thank you, Danez Smith—all of the men a