Research
Interests
My primary research
interests are in modern and contemporary American and Asian American literature.
I am particularly interested in what might be called the "politics
of form" in poetry: how are political and social pressures registered
formally in the poem, and what political effects can follow from a poem's
form? My focus has been on the avant-garde or experimental tradition,
including writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley,
Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, John Yau, and
Myung Mi Kim.
Dissertation
The Sociology
of the Avant-Garde: Politics and Form in Language Poetry and Asian American
Poetry
In examining two modes
of contemporary poetry, Language writing and Asian American poetry, I
argue that the category of the avant-garde—as an aesthetic formation
that is simultaneously conscious of itself as a social formation—
allows us to bring these bodies of work together, illustrating both their
shared origins and the reasons for their divergence. Language poetry and
Asian American poetry exemplify a division in contemporary American writing
described by the poet Ron Silliman, who distinguishes in a 1988 essay
between the work of "poets who identify as members of groups that
have been the subject of history—many white male heterosexuals,"
and that of "women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire
spectrum of the ‘marginal.’" While many of the former
are apt to "call into question…such conventions as narrative,
persona and even reference," the writing of the latter group will
"often appear much more conventional," as such writers "have
a manifest need to have their stories told." Yet ultimately Silliman’s
controversial formulation sees both groups as part of a spectrum of "progressive
poets," whose apparently radical aesthetic differences are comparable
political responses to their social conditions, and who must be seen as
partners in a larger cultural project. I propose a sociology of the contemporary
avant-garde, one that is conscious of how racial, gender, and class differences
inflect aesthetics. Drawing on archival materials, including Allen Ginsberg’s
recordings, Ron Silliman’s correspondence, and ephemeral Asian American
periodicals, I reconstruct the material and cultural contexts often overlooked
in studies of contemporary writing, revealing links between poetries that
have been read in isolation.
My point of
origin for these concerns is Allen Ginsberg’s poetry of the late
1960s—poems dictated into a tape recorder while driving cross-country.
In these poems, which he dubbed "auto poesy," Ginsberg hoped
to combine the media’s generalizing power with the humanity of the
individual consciousness. But his original recordings reveal a subjectivity
that is uncertain and self-revising, relying not on spontaneous thought
but on will and assertion to create its desired effect. These aspects
of Ginsberg’s project are emblematic of the fragmentation of the
new left in the late 1960s into the identity politics of the 1970s—a
situation to which both Language poetry and Asian American poetry arise
as responses.
The work of Language writer Ron Silliman, the subject of my second chapter,
extends Ginsberg’s vision of a documentary poetry, but employs formal
techniques, such as the parataxis of the "new sentence," that
attempt to guard against Ginsberg’s excesses of subjectivity. But
with the breakup of the left in the 1970s, Silliman’s project is
threatened by the limits of both individual and group subjectivity—by
boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. In studying correspondence
among Language writers, I show how Silliman and other Language writers
adapt by redefining the avant-garde, positing Language writing not simply
as an aesthetic movement but as a social identity. Silliman’s first
major work, Ketjak, is both a convincing map of the contemporary social
landscape and an often uncomfortable exploration of white male consciousness—a
sensibility awkwardly aware of its own "pervasive presence."
While one might assume that Asian American writing of the 1970s would
be less prone to such anxieties, my third chapter shows Asian American
poetry engaged in comparable struggles over identity and poetic form—a
response, in part, to unfavorable comparisons to the strength of black
nationalism. Poetry fulfills an avant-garde function in early Asian American
publications, not by reporting on, but by actively creating an Asian American
culture. The work of such poets as Janice Mirikitani, Francis Oka, and
Lawson Fusao Inada, in which the Asian American subject is visibly under
construction, reflects a dynamic fusion of Beat, jazz, and populist influences.
During the 1980s, as Language writing and Asian American writing become
visible to mainstream readers, their common avant-garde orientations are
obscured, making their practices seem radically separate. I explore this
process in my fourth chapter by documenting the reception of Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha’s book Dictée. While Cha was known in white avant-garde
circles in the 1970s and 1980s, she was neglected by Asian American readers
until the early 1990s. Dictée’s difficult career illustrates
the avant-garde continuity of Language and Asian American writing, but
also cautions against any simple attempt to integrate the two. The multiple
and often conflicting structures that organize Dictée—linguistic,
poetic, mythical, historical, personal—make it a text in which the
impulses of experimental and Asian American writing meet in mutually critical
fashion.
By the 1990s, the term "experimental Asian American poetry"
has emerged to describe work like Cha’s. In my final chapter, I
critique this concept through a survey of the work of John Yau. Yau’s
use of ethnic signifiers allows his work to be positioned within the discourse
of Asian American writing; at the same time, he adopts the Language poets’
conception of a self constructed in language. But in hanging on to the
emptied-out structures of ethnic identity, Yau gains a foothold from which
to critique Language poetry’s attempt to incorporate the "marginal."
Far from providing a synthesis, Yau’s work stages the history of
and conflict between these contemporary avant-garde modes.
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