Reading Asian American poetry.

In the 1960s and 1970s, with the historic emergence of racial and ethnic consciousness movements in the United States, poetry was considered an important vehicle for expressing the politicization of race. Indeed, this poetry could be viewed as a "racial project" in race relations theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant's sense of forging links between cultural representations and social dynamics of racial inequality and racialized empowerment. Poems were read at rallies, fundraisers, and other events, and circulated in independent low-budget racial 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 Third World (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 poetry 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, poetry 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 poetry toward prose, however, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when prose fiction became a prevalent means of circulating narratives of racial 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 racial identity as the authors. No longer mainly the political tools of "movement" audiences, narratives of race 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 poetry within the context of Asian American and multicultural literary studies. What accounts for the contrast in the reception of prose versus poetry 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 poetry by individual critically-lauded writers. Against this assumption, and against what David Palumbo-Liu calls "the fetishization of the present" ("Theory" 58) in Asian American literary studies, I would like to contextualize Asian American poetic discourse with a brief recuperation of its history. In the following summary, my movement back through time is meant to show that for each commonly-assumed moment of origin, there is often in fact a previous moment.

Asian American poetry did not begin in the late 1980s, when David Mura's After We Lost Our Way was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1989 and Garrett Hongo and Li-Young Lee were awarded the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Nor did it begin in the early 1980s, when Cathy Song's Picture Bride received the Yale Younger Poets Series Award in 1982 and Joseph Bruchac edited Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets in 1983; in the late 1970s, when prominent feminist poets Mitsuye Yamada and Janice Mirikitani published their first volumes, Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976) and Awake in the River (1978), respectively; in the early 1970s, when poetic writing was included in several pioneering Asian American anthologies, including Amy Tachiki, et. al.'s Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971); Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas's Asian-American Authors (1972); Frank Chin et al's Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writings (1974); David Hsin-fu Wand's Asian American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974), Emma Gee's Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (1976), as well as more ethnically specific (e.g., Liwanag, a Filipino-American publication) or multiracial (e.g., Time to Greez!, cited above) or campus-based publications. While each signifies important moments in the history of Asian American poetry, the trajectory of Asian American poetic discourse extends even further back.

Asian American poetry, to the best of my knowledge, dates as far back as the 1890s, with the publication of poems by Sadakichi Hartmann, considered among the first to write Symbolist poetry in English, and Yone Noguchi, whose work interested his well-known contemporaries Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith. In addition to poetry in its written and published form, it is important to consider nontraditional oral and written forms as poetic discourse: we can date Japanese folksong-derived plantation worksongs (hole-hole bush)), Cantonese rhymes from Chinatown collected by Marlon K. Hom, and poems carved on the walls of the Angel Island detaining station (Lad, Lim, and Yung) to the first decades of the twentieth century. H.T. Tsiang published his Marxist-internationalist poetry in 1929, as well as the experimental proletarian narrative The Hanging in Union Square in 1935. Regional haiku, tanka, and senryu societies were particularly active in the early and mid-twentieth century.(1) Toyo Suyemoto's rhymed quatrains were published in internment camp journals in the 1940s. Around this period, Jose Garcia Villa and Carlos Bulosan each published highly distinctive poetic work, Bulosan's focusing on proletarian life and labor, Villa's on religious ecstasy. One cluster of Villa's poetry was also striking in its experimentation with punctuation. Notable writers who wrote or published their first poems in the 1960s include Fred Wah, Joy Kogawa, Zulfikar Ghose, Jessica Hagedorn, and Lawson Inada.(2)

At a reading and talk given at Tufts University, poet Marilyn Chin referred to what she called the "fear and loathing of poetry" on the part of Asian American literary critics. It's not hard to see why she made this comment. Despite the remarkable varieties of Asian American poetic discourse produced since the 1890s, a disproportionately small number of critical essays have focused attention on this genre. Since the early 1980s, and especially in the last few years, several book-length studies entirely or primarily discussing Asian American literature have been published, including work by Elaine Kim (1982), Amy Ling (1990), Stephen Sumida (1991), Sau-ling Wong (1993), and King-kok Cheung (1993). In addition to the essays collected in Shirley Lim and Amy Ling's anthology Reading the Literatures of Asian America and various other anthologies focusing on multicultural literature, numerous essays on Asian American writing appear in journals such as Amerasia Journal, Critical Mass, and MELUS. The vast majority of this critical writing within the field of Asian American literary studies analyzes works of prose fiction and nonfiction, and, to a lesser extent, drama.(3) As Chin pointed out, "Think of how many essays there are on Maxine Hong Kingston; then think of how few essays are devoted to the whole genre of Asian American poetry." What accounts for this critical marginalization of poetry? What are some critical approaches to reading Asian American poetry? I begin by discussing the implications of a dichotomy whereby poetry is perceived as either private or social within the context of racial discourse and literary criticism. I then examine how Asian American poetry is positioned by dominant discourses of race and culture. Against readings that would absorb Asian American poetry into dominant narratives, I argue for resistant readings of Asian American poetic discourse as reformulating received notions of culture and language.

2

In the introduction to their anthology Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller provide a thoughtful discussion of the relative lack of feminist theoretical writings on poetry, noting that the novel, short story, and drama are considered "genres that foreground the social dimensions of women's experience" (4). The suggested contrast here between poetic and nonpoetic genres may also explain the critical focus on prose narrative within Asian American literary studies. That is, the poetic, narrowly conceived, is generally considered lyric and therefore the realm of the private, as opposed to the public or social. Recall, for example, Bakhtin's formulation of the novel genre as registering social discourse through dialogism and heteroglossia, in contrast to the "unitary and singular" language of the poetic genre (286). Obviously, poetic discourse can in fact be read as dialogic and heteroglossic. The racialized poetries of the 1960s and 1970s were often orally-based and performative, and would thus be considered public. With the change in political climate, however, came fewer opportunities for performances and gatherings at which the political and literary could explicitly intersect.(4) Susan Stanford Friedman's essay in Feminist Measures reminds us that poetry can be narrative as well as lyric and notes a need or "craving" on the part of those positioned as marginal "for narrative to resist or subvert the stories told by the dominant culture" (17).

The point to reiterate here, however, is the critical perception that poetry is to prose precisely as the private and individual are to the public and the social, and that the poetic therefore has less social relevance. Anecdotally, I have heard consistently that poetry is considered "difficult," that readers often experience an anxiety over being equipped with the right "key" to decipher a complex of images and patterns in order to gain access to a "hidden," and therefore private, meaning. Prose, by contrast, presumably offers a less mediated, and more public, access to meaning.(5) Finally, as Keller and Miller suggest, poetry may be seen as suspect by critics interested in poststructuralist theory who regard as naive the notion of a unified speaking subject that lyric poetry is considered to reinforce.(6)

In contrast to this privatization of poetry, which would imply taking it more lightly than prose narrative, are readings that conceive of poetry as heavily social. Filmmaker Isaac Julien points out that arts produced by members of marginalized groups are often held in the "grip of realism" and made to bear the "burden of representation" as a corrective to hegemonic cultural misrepresentations (Trinh 201). Critic Kobena Mercer similarly uses the phrase "the burden of representation" to describe the dilemma of artists of color, whose artistic representations are often made to bear the weight of a political and collective representation. Apprehensive about the gaze of a white majority audience, critics invested in the discourse of racial difference may occasionally lambast artists for presenting "negative images" that are interpreted as reinforcing racist ideology and practice. Some of the most controversial debates within Asian American studies concern the degree to which literature and literary studies should explicitly foreground social inequalities and identity politics. "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake," Frank Chin's introduction to The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese and Japanese American Literature, is the best known polemic arguing for the division of Asian American writing into authentic and inauthentic, based on the perceived degree to which a writer deploys "nationalist" or "assimilationist" strategies.

In addition to these nationalist pressures, the tendency to read narratives of race as reflection of or substitution for social experience comes also from a different quarter. I alluded earlier to the multicultural literary curricula currently employed in educational institutions. David Palumbo-Liu argues that what he calls "liberal multiculturalism" (as opposed to "critical multiculturalism") is a "mode of managing a crisis of race, ethnicity, gender, and labor in the First World and its relations with the Third" (6), a process whereby ethnic texts are "deploy[ed]" as "proxies" for ethnic peoples (13), giving the illusion of a democratic pluralism. The reader attains the enlightenment of cross-cultural understanding, which s/he imagines as both enabled by and contributing to such a democratic pluralism. Potential social conflicts and tensions are presumably smoothed over in these literary encounters. In contrast to this leveling of difference, Palumbo-Liu argues for the necessity of a critical multiculturalist practice which would confront the student with "the rough grain of politics and history" (2) that continues to contribute to the formation of groups with unequal access to resources, institutional power, and life opportunities.

3

The ideological and material positionings of poetic discourse within the United States are suffused with contradiction. Some would defend the poetic as a pristine realm to be guarded against the political; others would extol poetry as a direct and powerful embodiment of the social or historical. Insofar as poetry is maintained to be one of the last strongholds of "high culture" against the encroaching takeover by the low-brow cultures of talk-shows, tabloids, and airport novels, poems by designated writers of color can be read as exemplars of the "transcendent" and "universal" language of poetry, indicating the successful process of civilizing the Other. Li-Young Lee's highly acclaimed poetry, in one review, is described as "transcend[ing] color, class, nationality" (Silberg 24). Proper poetry, again, is defined as that which is uncontaminated by the social. The fate of such elite, esoteric high culture, however, is relegation to the economic and discursive margins of a national capitalist culture that prioritizes industry, technology, commodity, and mass media. This economic and discursive marginalization may have contributed to the recent publication of memoirs and prose fiction by Asian American poets such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim (forthcoming), Lois-Ann Yamanaka (1996), Garrett Hongo (1995), Li-Young Lee (1995), Chitra Divakaruni (1995), John Yau (1994), Meena Alexander (1993), David Mura (1991), and Jessica Hagedorn (1990). The promotion of ethnic memoirs by corporate publishers fits into a historical pattern of reading and marketing Asian American literature ethnographically, that is, as a discourse giving direct access to cultural difference and Otherness. The publishing world apparently considers Asian American poetry too "literary" to sell to a mass audience that prefers to consume the more "literal" memoir.(7)

Related to the above ideology of a depoliticized poetry is the conception of poetry as expressing a subjective experience more deeply and more authentically than prose, in a Romantic "absolute moment of insight" (Perloff 181). When this formulation of poetry as articulation of authentic subjective experience intersects with discourses of liberal multiculturalism, poems by writers of color are read straightforwardly as examples of experiences of racial difference. A poem may be simultaneously positioned as representation of individual experience and representative of the collective experience of a larger social group. Within the framework of a liberal multiculturalism, however, this acknowledgment of racial difference need not threaten an ultimate national unity. In his introduction to the anthology The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, Garrett Hongo notes that Asian American history is a history of marginalization, but that "all of us...had become Americans" (xxvi). He ends his introduction by celebrating the acceptance of Asian American poets into the grandeur of America: "It is a plain fact that recognition has come to us and to our work as part of the American voice that is great within us" ("Introduction" xlii).(8) In her review of The Open Boat, however, Catalina Cariaga poses the question of how to resist the appropriation of Asian American poetry into hegemonic narratives of immigration and assimilation, in which the United States and "Americanness" serve--as in Hongo's quotes--as the teleological endpoint for all (im)migrants seeking some version of the "American dream."9 Cariaga describes the danger of characterizing the poetry in this way:

I am afraid that a reader of The Open Boat anthology may come away from

the poems thinking that Asian American literature springs from one

homogeneous American "Asianicity" reduced to variations on the

"immigrant trope." The narrative of the immigrant trope goes something like

this: John and Mary are uprooted from their homeland. They take a boat to

the New World. They endure many hardships. They feel like exiles, and

invoke the memory of their ancestors; but they continue to struggle. They

become Americans. I believe this narrative stance is largely what Marjorie

Perloff refers to when she speaks of "the dominant paradigms of

representation which remain quite intact" (Radical Artifice, 1991) in

discussing the commercialism of literary works which are designated by their

minority status. (1)

Capitalism in the age of multiculturalism promotes cultural difference as offering variety to the consumer, while simultaneously domesticating cultural difference as a variation on a common theme of Americanism or universalism. The increase in the publishing and marketing of multicultural anthologies by large publishing corporations is one example of this capitalist multiculturalism. We might consider the retitling of Cathy Song's award-winning volume as an indication of how poetry books are commodified and made subject to market forces. Song originally intended to title her collection From the White Place, after the title of a poem dedicated to the painter Georgia O'Keeffe (Lim 96); it is likely that her publisher preferred the title Picture Bride in order to market ethnic, cultural, and gender differences.(10)

Richard Hugo's reading of Song's Picture Bride indicates how a poet and her poetry may be read through the lens of racial ideologies, even when this is not apparently intended by the critic. It is hard not to recall the discourse of the Asian American, and especially the Asian American female, as the quiet and passive "model minority" when reading Hugo's foreword to Picture Bride. Although each section of the book is named after a bold, erotic painting by Georgia O'Keeffe ("Black Iris," "Sunflower," "Orchids," "Red Poppy," "The White Trumpet Flower"), Hugo characterizes Song's poems as "flowers...offered almost shyly" (ix). He describes Song's writing as demonstrating a "passive/receptive sensibility. She need not rave or struggle. She has learned the strength of quiet resolve. As a poet she has discovered how hard work and the long act of writing and rewriting pay off" (xiii-xiv). Song, he continues, demonstrates "a sensibility strengthened by patience that is centuries old, ancestral, tribal" (x).

This essentialist and Orientalist reading of an Asian American poet as embodiment of a timeless Asian culture fixed in antiquity is offered also by a critic discussing the Chinese American poet John Yau: "I suspect that the mysterious and potent resistance to complete exposure lies in an inheritance from the more ancient culture of China....What now appears as an intricate and symbolic manifestation of the writer's past...is the curiously timeless presence of an ancient sensibility " (Chaloner 113). A review of Li-Young Lee's Rose inscribes Lee's poetry as similarly influenced by an ancient Chinese culture but thankfully accessible to the Western reader: "Clearly Lee's Chinese heritage has contributed to these poems a kind of clear cunning and wit seen in ancient Chinese poetry. But as Gerald Stern suggests in his introduction, the search for these Chinese ideas and Chinese memories is handled without any `self-conscious ethnocentricity"' (Weigl 125). David Mura is described in a review as "writ[ing] as if he has a thousand years of experience behind him" (Fox 315). These readings elide the possibility of an "Asian American" cultural production distinct from "Asian" culture by positioning "Asian" or "Chinese" as a monolithic cultural essence detached from historical change, unmarked by processes of migration and displacement, and unproblematically (mystically?) transmitted through and into anyone of Asian descent. As many Asian Americanists have noted, Asian Americans are peculiarly racialized as those who are foreign and alien to the United States. The imperative for Asian Americans to "claim America,"(11) argued for by Elaine Kim ("Defining Asian American Realities" 147) and Sau-ling Wong ("Denationalization Reconsidered" 16), certainly represents a strategy to combat the rampant excision of "American" from "Asian American." Kim and Wong clearly articulate this move as a counterhegemonic one. However, one possible strand of "claiming America" is represented by the Hongo quotes above, in which histories of racism are construed as aberrations of, rather than central to, the "greatness" of America in which "we" desire to be included. This uncritical celebration of nationhood is aligned with a dominant and jingoistic U.S. ideology that has historically rationalized imperialist expansion and racialized labor exploitation. It is crucial for Asian Americanists to remain critical about how the nation of the United States is positioned in our versions of the imagined community. How might we re-vision the United States in ways that interrupt the racist and imperialist ideologies of dominant "Americanism"?

4

Whether poetry is perceived as erasing or marking racial and cultural difference, the above readings are in fact inflected with and serve to maintain dominant ideologies of language and writing, race and nation. I propose alternative readings of Asian American poetry that highlight, rather than contain, potential disruptions to these dominant ideologies. Japanese-American poets Kimiko Hahn and Traise Yamamoto, among others, are occasionally presumed to work with the haiku form.(12) Contrary to what I call the "haiku fallacy," which assumes that culture and literature are simply and directly transplanted from Japan--which here stands for all of Asia--into America, Asian American poetry draws from many different traditions and discourses. Poets like Kimiko Hahn, Marilyn Chin, Carolyn Lei-lanilau, and Arthur Sze are influenced by and incorporate Japanese and Chinese languages, literatures and philosophies in their work, but have a more complex and mediated relationship to them than one of simple cultural reproduction. As George Uba points out in his response to the introduction to Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology, "situating a writer like Carolyn Lau(13)...squarely within China's philosophical tradition may be true as far as it goes but undeniably devalues her powerful attraction to particular Western writers like Beckett, Woolf, and Kafka, as well as to postmodernism generally, while eliding the question of her precise relationship to Asian American cultural experiences" (104). While the dominant discourse posits the Asian American as either choosing between mutually exclusive and oppposite "Asian" and "American" cultures or seamlessly fusing the "Asian" and "American" in an embodiment of "the best of both worlds," many poets contest the assumed equivalence of "American" with dominant Anglo culture. Lawson Inada's poetic discourse is deeply influenced by African American music and culture; Jessica Hagedorn by Latino music and vernacular; Arthur Sze by Native American culture; Carolyn Lei-lanilau by Native Hawaiian culture, history, and language. Ultimately, I read these works and others as cultural productions neither "Asian" nor dominant "American," nor as some superficial combination, but rather as reconstituted within and across the interstices of various cultures, discourses, and histories.

My project is to destabilize readings of multicultural literature as simple instantiation of social experience or reflection of fixed cultures. Homi Bhabha, critiquing the notion of a static cultural diversity, privileges instead the enunciative act of cultural difference, and notes that "the act of cultural enunciation...is crossed by the differance of writing...." (36). It is crucial to recognize that Asian American poetic discourse foregrounds language as signifier, as well as signified. Poets like Jessica Hagedorn and Lawson Inada highlight musical elements such as rhythm and repetition in their writing, and thus call attention to the aural dimensions of language. In "Sorcery," Hagedorn teases out multiple and paradoxical relations between signifier and signified. Both the form and the content of the poem focus attention on the dangerous beauty of art and language:

...

stay away from the

night. they most likely

lurk in corners of the room

...

but they so beautiful

an aura

gives them away.

stay away

from the day.

they most likely

be walking

down the street

when you least

expect it

...

they so fine

they break your heart

by making you dream

of other possibilities.

stay away

from crazy music.

they most likely

be creating it.

...

everyone knows

how dangerous

that can get.

stay away

from magic shows.

...

words are very

tricky things.

everyone knows

words

the most common

instruments

of illusion.

they most likely

be saying them.

breathing poems

so rhythmic you

can't help

but dance.

and once

you start dancing

to words

you might never

stop. (Danger 23-25)

The repetition in the poem of certain words and phrases both confirms and disturbs their meaning. Simultaneous with the repeated injunction to "stay away from" the seductive dangers of music and poetry, the hypnotic effect of verbal repetition seductively draws the reader into the musical rhythms of the poem. We find contradiction between poetic structure and meaning at the level of prescription ("stay away"), but correspondence between them at the level of description ("poems/so rhythmic"). This simultaneous correspondence and contradiction confirms the description of words in the poem as "tricky...instruments of illusion." Rather than giving the reader a spectatorial and direct access to a reality behind words, they (threaten to) seduce the reader into the participatory bodily rhythm of dance.

"Sorcery" was written for the poet Victor Hernandez Cruz,(14) whose use of Latino musical rhythms in poetry is cited by Hagedorn as a poetic influence. I would like to note here the relation between English and the use of musical rhythms, particularly those with roots in Third World cultures, throughout Hagedorn's poetry. This relation may be described as an example of the "linguistic drama" that Albert Memmi defines as a struggle between the cultures of the colonized and the colonizer through language (108; cited in Campomanes 65).

Rather than assuming language as "universal" or naturalizing the use of English, many Asian American poets practice interlinguality by writing primarily in English, but consistently portraying the multiplicities, contradictions, and hierarchical relations within and between languages. I interpret the following comment by Catalina Cariaga as referring to an environment of multi-linguality: "In many ways I think that what Asian American poets grew up hearing, but not speaking, gives spark to the linguistic qualities of their poem: lexicon, syntax, music, utterance and sense of gesture" (8). Kimiko Hahn describes how bilinguality affects her writing when she says that "language, both English and Japanese, is not only a tool for writing, but also subject matter...knowing there are two ways to say something and not being able to say it, or decide which way to say it, or knowing the nuances of each are not translatable" (64-65). Inada's poem "Kicking the Habit" is a whimsically serious meditation on the U.S. poet as "Angloholic," addicted to the English language. The speaker both counters the misperception of the Asian American as foreign to English and denaturalizes his and the reader's relation to English.

Late last night, I decided to

stop using English.

....

Now don't get me wrong:

There's nothing "wrong"

with English,

and I'm not complaining

about the language

which is my "native tongue."

I make my living with the lingo;

I was even in England, once.

So you might say I'm actually

addicted to it;

yes, I'm an Angloholic,

and I can't get along without the stuff:

It controls my life.

....

I was exhausted,

burned out,

by the habit.

And I decided to

kick the habit

cold turkey

....

And in so doing, I kicked

open the door of a cage

and stepped out from confinement

into the greater world. (66-67)

The association of "addiction" to English with confinement and loss of control counters the U.S. hegemonic formulation of monolingual "English-only" use as desirable or possible. Also countering this monolinguality, Hagedorn alludes to the many languages constituting the U.S. national unconscious when she notes that for many of us, "the language(s) we speak are not necessarily the language(s) in which we dream" (Introduction xxx). The term "dream" here, as in her phrase "making you dream / of other possibilities" (from "Sorcery"), refers to the allure and power of what is suppressed, prohibited, taboo; emerging through cracks, fissures, disruptions. An interlingual poetics would change the shapes and sounds of dominant languages like English by pushing the language to its limit and breaking it open or apart. The interpenetration of languages acknowledged and performed by interlingualism allows us to re-imagine these languages and cultures not as discrete entities, but as radically relational.

Given the contest between a "liberal multiculturalism" and a "critical multiculturalism," the project of reading Asian American poetry assumes the significance of ensuring that linguistic and cultural cracks and fissures do not get smoothed over in culturalist readings and containments of dissent. The challenge for critics of racially emergent poetries is to judiciously examine and articulate the relationship between the poetic and the ideological, without reducing one to the other or masking one as the other. Readings that position Asian American poetry as either a reified instance of transcendence or of the transparently accessible social do violence to writing that absorbs and revives multiple histories and discourses. One way that poetic discourse performs critique is through the construction of alternative forms and structures that simultaneously reveal and disrupt more socially dominant structures. In the experimental work Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha recovers violence that is often "covered up" in official discourse by enacting and embodying violence in the very form of her sentence structure. For example, her phrase "decapitated forms" (38) could refer to the many sentence fragments that lack the heading of a subject; in a description of a street demonstration, the spilling of one phrase into another allegorizes the spilling of blood: "the piercing the breaking the flooding pools" of "your own blood your own flesh" (86). Cha links the material production of language to blood and saliva, bodily fluids that signify a transgressive break in borders. In this analogy, language has the potential to break through the conventional surface of the "no-response" (33), to stimulate or demand, through its own transgressions, a response to violence. Reflecting on Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach," Meena Alexander wonders whether interpreting the world does, in some measure, change it. In "The Shock of Arrival: Body, Memory, Desire in Asian-American Art," Alexander discusses images of bodies in Asian American art, some mutilated and grotesque. She considers how art "strip[s] apart the skin of what is rendered up as natural and reveal[s] its constructed nature" (317). As critics, it is important to keep in mind how our reading practices might reveal or conceal histories of psychic and material violence. Poetic language is not a smooth mirror reflecting social relations or an archive of fixed cultural essence, but a rough and uneven terrain through which we may glimpse how cultures and histories are refracted, suppressed, and re-imagined.

I would like to thank Henry Blackwell, Walter K. Lew, Otherine Neisler, Laura Tanner, and Chris Wilson for their suggestions; and Nisha Chatani and Candace Nakagawa for their research assistance.

Notes

(1.) See Nixon and Tana for a notable collection of tanka. (2.) The forthcoming anthology Quiet Fire: Asian American Poetry, 1892-1970 will include pieces by these and other writers. (3.) Kim and Sumida do discuss poetry at the end of their books; Sumida discusses Hawaiian song (or mere). George Uba has published several essays and book reviews focusing on poetry. Such examples of critical writing on Asian American poetry are rare. (4.) The contemporary equivalent in terms of "spoken word" would be poetries of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. See Algarin and Holman's Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The lyrics of rap music remain a remarkably undertheorized body of intersecting racial and poetic discourse. (5.) Muticultural prose narratives may also be more accessible to uniformed audiences because its length and form make the insertion of historical context less intrusive than in poetry. My thanks to Stephen Sumida for this observation. (6.) Shelley Wong, however, reads the Asian American lyric "I" as the subject of what she calls a poetics of "cleaving" neither fully dissolved nor resolved. (7.) See Patricia Wallace's "Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove" for an interesting discussion of the literal and literary. (8.) See Victor Bascara's "Hitting Critical Mass," especially pages 23-29, for a crihque of Hongo's desired depoliticization of Asian American poetry in this introduction. As Bascara observes, Hongo dissociates poetry from the social: "it is literature's function...that its process is not social" (Introduction xxxvi). It cannot be pointed out enough that critics like Hongo who claim to oppose the use of ideology in literary studies in fact strongly inscribe their own ideological viewpoints. See also "An Interview with the Editor" and Lew 1995 for arguments against a premature celebration of Asian American literary visibility and mainstream "acceptance." (9.) Popularly thought of as an idealized endpoint of (im)migration, the U.S. has in fact created conditions for such migration. U.S. interventionist foreign policies and "underdevelopment" of (neo)colonies like the Philippines have been responsible for the displacement of many Asians from their homelands. (10.) Walter Lew points out that "Picture Bride" is a relatively historical, documentary work, whereas "From a White Place" deals more explicitly with philosophical and aesthetic issues; and that Richard Hugo's own poetics may have predisposed him to the former mode. I would add that this shift in emphasis reinforces the notion that members of racialized groups are authorities about "their" experiences, but not about elements of dominant culture. (11.) The phrase comes from an interview with Maxine Hong Kingston by Timothy Pfaff, cited in Kim 1982: 209. (12.) Yamamoto notes that "when I tell people I write poetry, they often go on to tell me how much they like haiku, as if it were inconceivable that I might write in Homeric dactyls or Dantean terza rima" (144). (13.) Presently Carolyn Lei-lanilau. (14.) Conversation with Shawn Wong, December 29, 1993.

Works Cited

Alexander, Meena. Fault Lines. New York: Feminist/CUNY, 1993.

--. "The Shock of Arrival: Body, Memory, Desire in Asian-American Art." Women and Performance. 7.2-8.1; (1995): 311-24.

Algarin, Miguel and Bob Holman, ed. Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. New York: Holt, 1994.

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