Theorizing difference in Asian American poetry anthologies.

Anthologies of American literature and processes of canon formation are closely linked to contemporary cultural debates about Americanness, identity politics, and questions of ethnic and racial difference. In The American Equation: Literature in a Multi-Ethnic Culture (1971), Katharine D. Newman, whom this volume celebrates, writes that multi-ethnic literature "commands respect, not sentimentalization, exploitation, or neglect" (xiii). Yet she goes on to ask how a scholar can unite literatures as different as a "Japanese haiku, a Black play, a poem by Archibald MacLeish, a translation of a Yiddish story, and a monologue in dialectical English?" (xiii). Our questions today have multiplied: what happens when we take difference as our starting place and not our end? How do we attend to differences within variously defined groups as much as between them? How do we account for differences within poetic subjects themselves? How do we attend to what Newman describes in Ethnic American Short Stories (1975) as the "performance and potential, the problems and the paradox" of American identities in a constant state of process (16)? The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993), edited by

Garrett Hongo, and Premonitions. The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995), edited by Walter K. Lew, both take differences within the category Asian American poetry as their starting place. Each explores ethnicity and identity, never fixing that which is "ethnic" or "Asian American" or "ethnic American writing," for example, but constantly questioning the boundaries of such identifiers. These anthologies represent two of many locations where op/positional poetic practices are being formulated in contemporary American poetry. The anthologies, and the poems they anthologize, oppose mainstream anthologies that continue to marginalize and tokenize poets of color. They oppose easy categorizations of what counts as Asian American writing. They identify and disidentify with Asian Americanness. In other words, they are oppositional in the "traditional" sense of the word. But they are not merely reactive. These poets and anthologies actively examine their positionality in the complex and dynamic body of writing referred to as contemporary American poetry. Hence, they are op/positional; they examine the politics of oppositionality, but they also construct new approaches to their multiple positionalities in American literature.

In the past few decades, numerous literary critics have worked to broaden the canon of American literature to reflect more inclusive literary values. The success of Paul Lauter's work on restructuring the canon of American literature and the widespread use of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1989), now in its fourth edition, suggest that literature departments and teachers are receptive to such initiatives. In Canons and Contexts (1991), Lauter describes his project and its culmination in the Heath Anthology as "designed to present and validate the full range of the literatures of America" (37). Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern American Poetry (2000) engages in this same project, taking as its focus the genre of poetry. Nelson argues that the "anthology urges a major reassessment." For example, it is "the first comprehensive anthology to give sufficiently full and diverse coverage to Langston Hughes" (xxix). Furthermore, Nelson provides "more detailed annotation than any comprehensive American poetry anthology has offered before," contextualizing how processes of racialization and ethnicity situate poetic production (xxx). Yet dissenting voices continue to question the validity of such efforts, and argue that revisionary projects dilute the "truly great" American literary tradition. (1)

Jane Tompkins documents a long struggle with such points of view in her scholarship on the consolidation of American literature. Indeed, Tompkins argues, the history of American anthologies is full of editorial voices claiming that they did not "select" the great works of American literature, but merely served as vassals "codifying choices about which there could be 'no question'" (189). Critics, editors, and anthologies are always "perspectival, and not objective or disinterested" in their selections of ostensibly superior literary achievements (Tompkins 193). The "variability" between different anthologies of great American literature over time proves this; such variability, Tompkins argues, "is a function of the political and social circumstances within which the anthologists work" (191).

Anthologists of contemporary American poetry are no different from their precursors. (2) They too are affected by the historical circumstances of the contemporary US and by debates about what constitutes the canon of contemporary American poetry. Walter Kalaidjian goes so far as to characterize contemporary American poetry in general as defined by such debates:

   The history of contemporary American poetry has typically been
   staged through critical narratives of dramatic struggle. On
   one side stands the New Critical verse tradition; on the other
   are massed its emergent adversaries: 'projectivist,' confessional,
   neosurrealist, 'deep image,' regional, feminist, Afro-American,
   and other local schools and movements. (3)

These splits between "traditional" and "adversarial" poetry aggravate the already numerous confusions surrounding the genre of poetry. With its focus on form and aesthetics and its long history of lyric reflection, poetry is often seen as the last bastion of a high art sensibility. On the other hand, poetry is also a genre frequently utilized by contemporary American movements for social and political change. (3) Some debates view poetry as either exceedingly private and personal or public and social in its concerns, and between poetry as either primarily aesthetic or political in its effects) Other binaries that position contemporary American poetry revolve around politics and aesthetics. On one hand, writing "about" identity, differences, and their attendant topics (power, knowledge, hegemony, oppression) mark poets concerned with these subjects as "political," a marker that implies a poet is "aesthetically" compromised. On the other hand, when an ethnically marked poet chooses not to write "about" identity and difference, they may be perceived as "politically" compromised by those from similar positionalities (from within their particular communities) or as no longer marketable or "authentic" by those from different positionalities (from outside their communities, from the mainstream). As Trinh Minh-ha eloquently states, "planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression. We no longer wish to erase your difference, [sic] We demand, on the contrary that you remember and assert it" (89). Binaries that structure identities, (in)authenticities, and differences are inadequate, especially when analyzing contemporary op/positional poetry.

Oppositional poets--already marginalized from an ostensibly stable mainstream are split further into two groups: 1) those who explore textuality in their oppositional practices and who appear in anthologies such as Rothenberg and Joris' Poems for the Millennium (1995) and Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry (1994); and 2) those who explore identity in their op/positional practices and who appear in anthologies such as Gillan and Gillan's Unsettling America (1994), and Harris and Aguero's An Ear to the Ground (1989). This split--between textual and content-based modes of poetic opposition to the mainstream further contributes to misconceptions about poetry and assumes that such divisions are easy to make in the first place. While anthologies based on textual experimentation are quite useful for the questions they allow us to explore relative to form, positing that textuality and identity are necessarily separate concerns leads us to even more misconceived binaries: textuality is to identity as form is to content or as aesthetics is to politics.

Understanding these contradictions is a first step in recognizing why contemporary ethnic American poetries in general, but Asian American poetry in particular, continue to be, in Juliana Chang's words, "critically marginalized" ("Reading" 84). Asian American poets even more than African American, Chicano/a, or American Indian poets--still receive little critical attention, despite the proliferation of individual collections of poetry by various Asian American poets, as well as the publication of numerous anthologies. (5) No book-length study of any single contemporary poet or group of these poets exists. Guiyou Huang edited Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (2002), but no single-author critical study has been published by an academic or mainstream press. (6) Chang refers to her work anthologizing Asian American poetry as far back as 1892 as producing an "archival counter-memory" that calls attention to the gaps "in what has been presented as 'American poetry' and 'American culture'" (xv). Hongo's The Open Boat and Lew's Premonitions are two recent entries in this archive.

Perhaps the most important point that Garrett Hongo makes in his introduction to The Open Boat is that challenging fixed understandings of Asian American identity remains a necessary undertaking: "While we, as Asian American writers, probably share, by degrees, some understanding of the history of Asians in America, it is arguable whether or not we can agree on an identifiable model for the culture of Asians in America from which we must derive our work" (xxxiv). (7) Hongo opposes attempts to fix a particular cultural understanding of Asian Americanness as the only one from which to write. (8) Hongo denounces the tendency of critics who do try to isolate an authentic Asian American identity, those who try "to define our Asian American literature into two fundamental categories--authentic and inauthentic" (xxxiv). Frank Chin comes immediately to mind for his introduction to The Big Aiiieeeee/, which is titled "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake" (1). According to Chin, the fakes are those who write from assimilated, Christian, inauthentic positions (such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan), and the real are those who write authentically of their Asian histories and non-Christian cultural heritages (1-35).

Against these tendencies, Hongo constructs a complex cloud of Asian Americannesses, most evident in the "word-cloud" he produced to help him decide how to write the introduction to the anthology. The last few lines of the word-cloud read:

Greengrocer. Cleaners. Dogeaters. Diploma. Diaspora. Asian American. Song,

Encamacion, Shahid Ali. Ai. Aiiieeeee! The Woman Warrior. Bruce Lee....

Mainland. Homeland. "Third-generation return." Immigrant. Sojourning. "So

Long, Oolong ..." Kung-Fu. Fuck you. "Say Hello to Uncle Sam." Postcolonial Amirthanayagam. (xviii)

Hongo's word cloud not only documents the heterogeneity of Asian American experiences, contexts, and histories, but also functions as a prose poem in itself on the differences--of race and ethnicity, citizenship and nationality, language and cultural activity--within Asian America. Hongo does not choose to write his "wordcloud" as a poem with traditional lines, but as a prose paragraph. Just as the two effects of prose and poetry are separate yet interwoven, the competing and complex aspects of identity for variously identifiable Asian Americans are not reducible to simple binaries.

For example, Janice Mirikitani's accessible, colloquial, vertically-driven, feminist poems communicate erotic responses to sexism, racism, and the destruction of war. Hongo includes her long poem, "Shadow in Stone," that portrays the speaker's visit to Hiroshima on the anniversary of its bombing and theorizes how eroticism--the speaker's response provides an alternative to powerlessness as a response to the reality of the bombing. As Mirikitani recounts images of the artifacts she encounters, such as a person's shadow burned onto a stone, she wants to put her mouth to those artifacts in a healing, erotic gesture:

   The heat presses like many hands.
   I seek solace in the stone
   with human shadow burned into its face.
      I want to put my mouth to it
   to the shoulders of that body,
   my tongue to wet its dusty heart. (in Hongo 194)

The speaker continues by personifying the stone with a "face" and "heart" and asking the stone to speak, thus the image of putting mouth to stone resonates on two levels. On one level, it is an erotic response to human devastation in the form of a kiss that is life-affirming rather than a testament to death. The second level on which this image resonates is as a voicing of the devastation. To put one's mouth to something is not just to kiss it, but also to voice a reality: "I ask the stone to speak," and, personified, the poem does.

Mirikitani's use of the poetic "I" and her erotic imagery provide stark contrasts to John Woo's "Habit," a poem about the distances and connections between selves and unknown others. The "habit" the poem describes is the "habit of staring / at a stranger's profile," and finding avenues both out of and back into the self:

   the habit of seeing in any attitude
          what Baudelaire called
   the glance that brought him back to life,
          played over and over again
      in the faces of others,
          revising you, resuscitating you,
   propelling you back into yourself
          or, better yet, out of yourself--
    how weary you are of yourself!
          (in Hongo 287)

The entire poem is organized around a central line, splitting it into two halves representing the interaction of self and other. The lines almost, but never completely, touch; this represents the power that others have to propel the "you" back into and out of "yourself." Written in second person, the poem also implicates the reader in the "habit" it describes. This is not a personal "habit," the poem says, but one in which everyone participates: the self seeks resuscitation and revival in others, but constantly looks back to the self in the endless process of knowing and unlearning self-identification.

John Yau's elliptical poems provide yet another approach to identity; Yau explores the referentiality of language and identity as no more than "radiant silhouettes," the title Yau uses for a series of poems. "Radiant Silhouette III" ends by stating

   I am a paper hat
   tumbling across a desert

   On a dusty windshield
   someone has scribbled

   xylophone
   blubber breath

   dumbo and bud. (in Hongo 294)

The reader might search for meaning in the final words, but it would be in vain. The only "meaning" is in their sound effects: they evoke bumbling, clumsy sounds in keeping with the image of the self as a tumbling paper hat. Yau's "Postcard from Trakl" closes The Open Boat. In it, Yau asks, "Am I just an echo drifting back to myself" (in Hongo 299). In this poem, as in much of Yau's work, the self is again portrayed in terms of silhouettes and postcards, as "rock or the memory of a rock / falling toward the shadow it once owned" (in Hongo 299). Mirikitani offers erotic connections, Woo offers self/other interactions, and Yau leaves us with questions. Thus, the anthology successfully complicates debates about authentic and inauthentic Asian American writing. Hongo establishes the heterogeneity of Asian American poetry, displaying its breadth and diversity of aesthetic practices, political interests, and modes of theorizing.

Hongo claims a space within "contemporary American poetry" for Asian American poets, a claim that requires the redefinition of contemporary American poetry as a whole. "The Open Boat" of the title is the vessel of mainstream American poetics, and Hongo would put Asian American poets in that boat. He quotes the same passage from Stephen Crane's short story "The Open Boat" on the first page and again before the concluding paragraphs of his introduction: "If I am going to be drowned--If I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come this far and contemplate sand and trees?" (qtd. in Hongo xvii; xl). Those who have come so far are contemporary Asian immigrants to America and the descendants of earlier generations of Asian immigrants.

The boat also represents the history of Asian exclusion and the marginalization of Asian Americans as a "wreck" that contemporary Asian Americans continue to swim away from; they swim toward the shore of "the American voice" (xlii):

   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. We are
   already upon the shore of the land, though, undeniably, there have
   been losses and lands left behind .... The people are running and
   shouting on the grassy hills above the strand where the wreckage of
   a boat bounces in foaming surf higher than our knees. We lift our
   voices, bodies from the sand, and call. (Hongo xlii)

The metaphor Hongo develops here plays on both Crane's boat and Wallace Stevens' version of the American poetic impulse from "Evening Without Angels":

   Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,
   Except for our own houses, huddled low

   Where the voice that is great within us makes a true response,
   Where the voice that is great within us rises up
   As we stand gazing at the rounded moon. (137-38)

Stevens' mythopoetic moment stems from the poet's charge to represent the bare reality of sky and stars unaided by a supernatural heaven of angels. Hongo's mythopoetic moment for Asian American writers is the moment where they stand in the American surf and contemplate walking up onto the sand, leaving the wreckage of a boat (the past) behind them. (9)

Hongo's attempt to bring Asian Americans into the "boat" of contemporary American poetry and literature involves separating poetry from the social. He writes that literature is opposed to the social, and, by extension, the political: "It is literature's function, as a special case in human activity (it is art, after all), that its process is not social and that the meaning it constructs is primarily a subjective, even a dissident truth" (xxxvi). Hongo's understanding of art and its relationship to the social are very conservative and unusual in an introduction that is otherwise expansive in its attention to the multiple positionings of contemporary Asian American identities. Victor Bascara asks the following pertinent questions of Hongo's approach to ethnic writing:

   Why does Hongo push this out-dated, depoliticized, binaristic model
   of autonomous art versus the social? Perhaps so people will actually
   (buy and) read the volume and not worry about being challenged by
   its ideology, i.e., so people will know that it is harmless,
   multicultural Literature meant only to add some colorful culture to
   their firmly centered lives. It's like a literary achievement/
   aesthetics version of the model minority myth in that it asserts
   that, Yes, Asian Americans have shown that the system works if we
   only persevere alone without questioning the system! (28)

Bascara goes too far in dismissing Hongo's text since the poems themselves are not apolitical manifestations of "colorful culture," but engage in a variety of different political and aesthetic practices. Perhaps separating the social from the literary is Hongo's way of challenging the academy's tendency to mark ethnic texts as aesthetically inferior due to their sociopolitical concerns. In any event, The Open Boat enjoys a wide readership among mainstream poets and teachers of poetry, for whom acquiring and teaching Lew's Premonitions might be more challenging, given its small press distribution and its format, which I analyze in more detail later in this paper.

Considering the scope of consumer culture and the power of mass media, entering into mainstream publishing and acquiring a broader readership is not necessarily a self-defeating endeavor for an anthology that addresses the construction of ethnic identities. Balancing mainstream poetics with a smattering of experimental works can lay the foundation for a broader readership for more experimental, more destabilizing Asian American poetry (by "more," I mean both in degree and number). In this light, The Open Boat can be read as a cross-over text, one that holds meaning for those familiar with op/positional reading practices such as those found in literature and ethnic studies departments on university campuses. But Hongo's conservatism also leaves room for a popular readership in the milieu of multiculturalism. The poems anthologized examine Japanese American internment, Chinese and South Asian immigration, deculturation through the loss of language and cultural tradition, indictments of sexual stereotype and repression, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Cambodia. These poems cannot be reduced to "harmless, multicultural Literature"; the contradictions between the poetry and the editorial statement provide important spaces for reconceptualizing the relationships between the art of poetry and the social content found there.

Cariaga writes that Hongo's anthology is "by no means a definitive collection of Asian American poetry. Rather, it is a gauntlet thrown into the American literary arena" for approaching a new millennium (9), an apt description of the text, for anthologies of contemporary American poetry have a history of functioning as gauntlets thrown down before future anthologies. (10) One response to Hongo's gauntlet can be found in Walter K. Lew's Premonitions: The Kava Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995). Lew uses the term "premonitions" to refer both to the poetry and to the anthology as a whole. The poems are premonitional works that "remember the future, augur the past, play the present apart from itself--especially where 'history' is too much agreed upon" (583). The anthology as a whole, as Lew argues, is premonitional in that it contrasts itself with other anthologies which reveal an "editorial aversion to poetry characterized by formal experimentation, homoeroticism, or the use of pidgin dialects" which limits our understandings of the heterogeneity of Asian American poetry (576). Lew claims the anthology is a "premonition of how poetry might occur once such barriers are removed" (576).

The editorial project of Premonitions places the poetry in a primary position and allows it to speak for itself in terms of ethnicity, identity, identification, aesthetics, and politics. Lew's project diverges from earlier anthologies much more than it builds upon them. This is evident from the start, where the reader does not immediately encounter an introduction or preface; the anthology includes neither. Rather, Lew opts for an "editor's afterword" that comes after the contributors' notes. None of the notes identify the contributors by ethnic origin, nationality, or citizenship. Whether the poet is from Canada or the United States often becomes clear in references to awards or inclusion in previous, nationally-marked anthologies. Thus, their North Americanness is prioritized rather than their "other" origins. Cultural difference is not marked through the bibliographical entry, thus complicating difference in the text, rather than erasing it. This editorial choice gives the reader more power to explore the subtleties of difference in the poets' works, rather than emphasizing difference as such in their bodies. Nor does Lew use section titles or any other rigid means of structuring the book. The table of contents is separated into nineteen numbered sections, with no other immediately identifiable method of organization.

Section one begins with two black pages; on the right page in white capital letters is a dedication to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-82), Roy Kiyooka (1926-94), and Frances Chung (195090). Towards the bottom of the right hand page in lower-case white letters are the words "sculpted / in a vertiginous light" (1). What these words mean is unclear until the reader moves into the section that follows. Cha is the first poet included in the anthology, which establishes from page one that highly experimental writers will be included and foregrounded. Lew includes an excerpt from Cha's "Commentaire," a piece published in Apparatus (1980), a collection of writing Cha edited. Calling it a poem stretches the reader's understanding of what counts as a poem, regardless of whether one's definition hinges on form, content, mode of production, or published location. "Commentaire" comprises thirty-seven pages of words by Cha, photographs by Reese Williams (editor of Tanam Press, Cha's publisher) and Richard Barnes (executor of Cha's estate), and film stills from Carl Theodore Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). At most, there are five words on a page, and several pages are completely blank. The pages with Cha's words play on the definitions of and similarities and differences between French and English words.

"COMMENTAIRE" is the first text in the piece, written in black capitals against a white background (in Lew 5). No translations are given in the text, so the reader is faced with either grabbing a dictionary (the word translates as "commentary," or "exposition," Cassell's 75) or simply reading without the benefit of knowing the "meaning" of the words. The two pages that follow have one word on each page, "COMME" and "COMMENT" (in Lew 6-7). "Comme" translates as "as; like, such as; almost, nearly, as if; how, in what way, to what extent" and "comment" is a slight variation which translates as "how, in what manner; why, wherefore" (Cassell's 75). The succession of the two words which are embedded in the first raises a series of questions about how, in what manner commentaries are constructed, why and wherefore expositions (filmic, poetic) are conducted.

The next page reads "COMMENT TAIRE" (in Lew 8). An extra "T" is added, with one space between the two "T's." This word play juxtaposes the "why" and "how" of "comment" with the word "taire," which translates as "to say nothing of, to pass over in silence, to suppress, to keep dark" (Cassell's 308). New questions about how meanings are constructed, whether through a filmic or poetic apparatus, continue to be raised as the "poem" develops. Considering that Cha included this piece in a book on the filmic apparatus, the use of the word "taire" suggests that Cha interrogates how films work to suppress the nature of the filmic apparatus and how they suture the viewer into the production of meaning through traditional modes of looking and representation. Splitting the word "COMMENTAIRE" into "COMMENT TAIRE" shows Cha intervening in the commentary or exposition of a visual text through traditional filmic means, which tend to hide the functioning and presence of the apparatus. The same can be said for the operation of words in language and poetry; many contemporary poets do not call attention to "how" the words produce meaning, but focus predominantly on constructing content-based poems. This is not to say that most poets do not utilize such tools as metaphor, simile, assonance, and other poetic techniques, but that they do not write in order to show "how" language or tools such as these work. (11) Cha's positioning of single words on successive pages and her word play with different words made up of the same letters makes the functioning of language visible.

Cha's inclusion as the first poet in Premonitions establishes the anthology's commitment to poets who experiment with language as an apparatus for constructing meaning. Experimental forms extend from "video collage and highly compressed prose poems to cyberpunk critiques of ethnic mimicry" (Lew 575). Photographic stills from the video collages of Jessica Hagedorn and Gloria Toyun Park, textually experimental poetry by Gerry Shikatani, all different manners of prose poems, as well as poems which experiment with line length, stanza, and the construction of language and dialect all contribute to a non-unified whole. Lew writes that the anthology "is committed to making critical distinctions while remaining relatively fluid" (577). This explains why lines from poems, rather than titles or subject headings, organize the book's nineteen "zones": "The quotations at the beginning of each zone are neither chapter titles nor explications. They are small pulses that, recirculated through the ensuing poems, induce echoes and emergences without forcing the rings of language around them to be evidence or examples of a category" (577). The quotations are pulses, or initial thoughts, that are mirrored in or fractured by the poems that follow them in a particular section.

The "pulse" which precedes the first section, "sculpted / in a vertiginous light," is taken from Roy Kiyooka's "an April Fool's Divertimento: 'i am dancing a jig on an upturned bowl' by Heironymous Bosch & Heir" (in Lew 40). The word "vertiginous" also means unstable, or apt to change quickly, thus Kiyooka's lines also formulate a "pulse" that launches the whole book. That which becomes unstable is poetry itself, or the meaning of a word, or the way a word appears on the page. Cha sculpts language in a "vertiginous light," showing how meaning shifts with the placement of an extra letter or word, as much as visual meaning shifts as a result of the projection of light onto a screen.

Kiyooka's poem develops this concept of shifting light, in that he has Bosch (the speaker of the poem) refer to painting as a kind of "morning" where shifting lights are brought to bear on a "night" of pre-realization or pre-representation:

  Upon being interrogated by the local clerics
  Concerning the alembic of his heretical paintings:
  I come to my "painting" as I awaken to "morning":
  Incubated during the night both hold up a brimming chalice
  Full of iridescent light. (in Lew 40)

Since the poet is positioned as the "heir" to "Heironymous Bosch," painting symbolizes poetry. Both arts involve sculpting something under vertiginous light and representing what is seen. Significantly, this poem is put in the first section of the anthology: it establishes an understanding of poetry's relationship to identity that persists throughout the remainder of the text. Taken as a whole, Premonitions theorizes an approach to poetry and identity as shifting, unstable, and as vertiginous as Bosch's paintings and Kiyooka's poem.

Made up of 18 sections, the numbers of which follow rather than precede the sections, the poem represents the mind of Bosch or the artist as it shifts from one defense to another for why and how his art is made. Section 13 is particularly illuminating for the links Kiyooka makes between his own poetic practice and the visual tactics practiced by Bosch during the sixteenth century. Bosch's fantastic people-scapes represent his fascination with anima, nightmare worlds, heavens, ideas of Hell, and metamorphosizing humans. Kiyooka imagines that Bosch walks out into the "Flemish world with a painter's eye / For Verisimilitude" only to encounter

          the hulk of an un named
   Dread stalking my vernacular: It was as if the Painter "I"
   Be had turned into a gross caricature. It's the impervious
   Face of the "Other" that you happen to find your own face
   Among that fuels the Diaboli of History. Watchout! The very
   Next "Face" looming up in front of you could be your own
   Un born profile. (in Lew 45)

Looking for truth, Bosch finds caricature. The telling lines here are those that refer to the relationship between the self and Other. That the "Other's" face is impenetrable, impervious to the gaze of the painter or the poet, fuels "the Diaboli of History." Why? What are the Diaboli of History? Is Bosch warning the reader/viewer to watch out for the realization that one's own face, or "un born profile," is as impervious to understanding as is the face of the "Other"? The source of Bosch's dread is the realization that just as you can never penetrate and know the Other, you can never know yourself. The old platitudes, the old truths, no longer apply. The heretic of the contemporary period is not one who opposes the church, but one who exposes narrowly-defined and widely-accepted versions of identity or cultural identification. Challenging group identities as stable centers of organization is often seen as heretical, and charged as inauthentic and compromised. Kiyooka, and the anthology as a whole, undermine narrow understandings of identity and identification (and thus open identity politics to broader definitions) by emphasizing the opacity of ethnic and racial identity over their seeming transparency.

Other sections of Lew's anthology build on these questions of identification. Section 2 begins with two lines by Richard Oyama from the poem "In Praise of Nisei Men": "Once he worked for a magazine called / Common ground. What would that mean now?" (in Lew 65). Each poem in the section examines the concept of commonality from a variety of locations. Oyama questions what commonality means and whether it still has meaning. In contrast, a poem by Lawson Fusao Inada makes an implicit statement that commonality across racial groups is empowering; Inada illustrates this by constructing his poem as a tribute to the African American jazz legends who served as his creative icons. The section also addresses the common ground of poets who attend to issues of historical and political importance. Meena Alexander addresses a woman Chinese poet of the late Sung Dynasty (twelfth Century) in "To Li Ch'ing-Chao" and implores her to "not forget the Tartars you flee" (in Lew 87). Alexander portrays the poet as having "visionary eyes," though in her next poem she is much more unsure of the role that poetry plays in a world where the poet must contend with the

          rusty gasoline tanks,
   the packed cars of new immigrants, the barbed wires
   of Meerut, Bensonhurst, Baghdad, strung in my brain.
   How could I sing of a plum tree, a stone that weeps water?
   How could I dream of paper filled with light?
          ("Paper Filled with Light" in Lew 90)

Alexander asks these questions as if the realities of poor immigrant conditions and war make it impossible for poets to write of things with "purely" aesthetic merits. Yet, she has just written a poem that sings of a plum tree, which details a stone that weeps water, and which is titled "Paper Filled With Light." Alexander is but one of many poets in this anthology who look for locations between extreme formulations--whether in relation to identity politics or the politics of writing poetry--in order to construct more shifting, situated, and situable identities and poetics.

Lew's project is to "convey the astonishing diversity and eloquence of new poetries spread out among numerous networks and poetics--both esoteric and activist, imagist and deconstructive, pidgin and purist, diasporic and Americanist, high literary and pop cultural" (575). Lew provides a premonition of new ways of theorizing about identity and poetry that avoid previous debates rooted in either/or formulations. Thus, the contradictions that produce understandings of identity in Premonitions are not found between the editorial and poetic content of the anthology, as in The Open Boat; Lew relinquishes the power invested in the editor (to shape readings, construct continuities) to the readers of the anthology, who must themselves locate the continuities and discontinuities between the different poets and poetics anthologized.

In the first volume of his Opposing Poetries: Issues and Institutions (1996), Hank Lazer writes that

   one way to restore poetry to a position of importance in the
   contemporary curriculum would be to make an anthology that allowed
   for a heated teaching of the conflicts present in contemporary
   poetry: the nature of a self, gender in poetry, politics in poetry,
   reader-writer relations, the conflicts between a written and an oral
   poetry, written text versus performance, manifestations of ethnicity
   and community in poetry, and thematic versus textual feminism.
  (142-43)

Lew's Premonitions embodies Lazer's vision of an anthology that allows for a "heated teaching of the conflicts." (12) The poems anthologized cover a range of aesthetic backgrounds, thus bringing together poetries which have always been seen as polarized: poems written in a personal voice and those which question the speaking self, as well as poems written in traditional poetic forms and those which are textually experimental.

In his after "word," Lew writes that premonitional poetry is the best possibility for a reinvigorated understanding of the cultural possibilities that lie within poetic production:

   Premonitional poetry sees clearly the play between all divisions of
   tense, harmonizes at the modal switches where fact and simile still
   pulse together as the possible and must believe, like a master
   fighter or musician, that its throws, strokes, and attenuations, no
   longer owned by a source, will hit their mark, beyond the tired
   chords of the known. (584)

Premonitions offers up an editorial project and a collection of poems organized so that they are not owned by a source or situated in such a manner that their meanings or resonances are fixed. This anthology places the creation of knowledge in the interactions between text and reader, as much as in the interactions of the poets and editor, as much as in the collisions of certain and different poems themselves. It produces an understanding of Asian Americanness across North America that is heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity, aesthetic pedigree, and political commentary. Identifying the importance of differences within communities of Asian North American writers is as crucial a task as disidentifying false commonalities within Asian North Americans as a racialized group. Lew's anthology rises to these demands and provides the broader literary community with a mark by which to measure other anthologies that do not similarly expand understandings of ethnic and racial identities.

Hongo's The Open Boat accomplishes many of these same tasks, albeit through a significantly different editorial practice. Focusing mostly on Asian America as defined by the borders of the US, Hongo's selections illustrate the heterogeneity of Asian American poetry, its diverse aesthetic appeals and political concerns. The contradictions in the anthology exist between the editorial and poetic content. Hongo's conservative approach to poetry's aesthetic qualities ("it is art, after all" [Hongo xxxvi]) as binaristically opposed to its social and political qualities ("its process is not social" [Hongo xxxvi]) runs counter to the poems anthologized, where aesthetic and socio-political concerns are thoroughly intertwined. Lew, on the other hand, relinquishes the power invested in the editor (to shape readings, construct continuities) to the readers of the anthology, who must themselves locate the continuities and discontinuities between the different poets and poetics anthologized. Taken together, both of these anthologies, Hongo's The Open Boat and Lew's Premonitions, force us to question what counts as ethnic poetry and how that poetry gets situated relative to discourses of aesthetics and socio-political concerns, in the multiple traditions of contemporary American poetry itself as a non-unified whole.

Notes

(1.) See especially Schlesinger and Delbanco.

(2.) The shifting agendas of American poetry anthologies range from the preservation and historicization of a new national literature and the inspiration of national morals, as in anthologies of American poetry from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the establishment of universal poetic standards and the creation of canons based on those standards in anthologies of the late nineteenth century (Golding 8-18). Anthologies of early to mid-twentieth century American poetry began revising previously established standards and canons, and developing rhetorics of newness that would typify how "contemporary" American poetries would be valued throughout the late twentieth century (Golding 18-24).

(3.) For example, the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s (with its roots in the corridos [see Limon]); the Women's Movement (see Clausen and Whitehead); and lesbian and gay rights movements which count many poets as vocal advocates for social change.

(4.) Chang points out "the critical perception that poetry is to prose precisely as the private and individual are to the public and social," as well as the contradictory notion that poetry is "heavily social" and therefore bears certain responsibilities for collective representation ("Reading" 85).

(5.) All of these poetic traditions are critically neglected in comparison to fiction and other genres. For recent Asian American poetry anthologies, see Lim and Chua; Tabios; Tram Wornen of South Asian Descent Collective; Asian Women United of California; and Lim, Tsutakawa, and Donnelly. This is not an exhaustive list, but suggests the number and diversity of anthologies of Asian American poetry being published.

(6.) Tabios published The Anchored Angel (1999) on Filipino modernist poet Joss Garcia Villa, but my concern is more with the neglect of contemporary Asian American poets.

(7.) Hongo is not alone in these observations. See especially Lowe for the complexities of Asian American (dis)identification.

(8.) Hongo uses the editors of Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) as evidence of an editorial project that argues for a particular version of Asian Americanness. Hongo describes the identity put forth by editors Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong:

   The Asian American writer was an urban, homophobic male educated at
   a California state university who identified with Black power and
   ethnic movements in general; he wrote from the perspective of a
   political and ethnic consciousness raised in the late sixties: he
   was macho: he was crusading; he professed community roots and
   allegiances; he mocked Eurocentrism and eschewed traditional
   literary forms and diction in favor of innovation and an exclusively
   colloquial style; his identity was stable and secure, a
   personification of a specific geographic region and an ethnic
   ethos; and, though celebrated in the Asian American "movement," his
   work was widely unrecognized by "the mainstream." (xxxi)

An unfortunate element of Hongo's treatment of the editors of Aiiieeeee! is his failure to acknowledge the particular alliance between Asian American and African American resources that led to the anthology's publication by Howard University Press in the first place.

(9.) This formulation is easy to interpret as assimilationist and is also easy to critique for the manner in which it constructs all Asian American experiences as based on a first-generation immigrant paradigm. Hongo preempts the critique of assimilationism, though, by arguing that such charges are usually "nothing more than fascism, intellectual bigotry, and ethnic fundamentalism of the worst kind" (xxxv-xxxvi). He gives as an example the tendency of many Asian American critics to dismiss any Asian American literature that exhibits "literary qualities deemed 'assimilationist' or 'commercial'" (xxxv). What these statements reveal is that analyzing representations of cultural assimilation and authenticity remains an important task.

(10.) See Kalaidjian 3-4.

(11.) With the exception of Language Poets. See Lazer, Perelman, Perloff.

(12.) Though Lazer mentions ethnicity as one of the conflicting categories that requires attention for poetry to be reinvigorated, he constantly reverts back to white poets as exemplary. All of the poets in the second volume of Opposing Poetries, subtitled "Readings," are white. Thus, the "sustained differences" he mentions refer primarily to aesthetic differences, not those differences which revolve around identity, political alliance-building, and different ideas of authenticity and authentic writing styles.

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Adrienne McCormick

State University of New York, Fredonia