Most Questionable Choice of Reading Material of the Day

A middle-aged man with frayed pant cuffs sitting in a comfortable armchair in a suburban Borders cafe leafing through the most recent issue of Autopistols.

Tim Yu & William Allegrezza @ Myopic Books

MYOPIC POETRY SERIES

presents

Tim Yu & William Allegrezza

Sunday, April 22, 7 pm
Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave, Wicker Park, Chicago

TIM YU won the Vincent Chin Chapbook Prize for his collection Journey to the West, which appears in the Winter 2006 issue of Barrow Street. His work appears in Seven Corners, 2nd Avenue Poetry, Chicago Review, and SHAMPOO, as well as in the forthcoming anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab). He teaches at the University of Toronto.

Musician, sailor, poet, critic--WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Italy, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria, a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His e-books and books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, Covering Over, Temporal Nomads, Ladders in July, and In the Weaver's Valley. He occasionally posts random thoughts on his blog p-ramblings.

The First Volume of Richardson's Clarissa, As Automatically Summarized by Microsoft Word

brother's address. Solmes. father. Solmes. brother. Solmes's favour.
father's power.
Lovelace? sister, if I married him.
Lovelace. family. father's hands.
Lovelace.
younger sister. man.
Solmes.
sister.
man's own. sister loves!
virtuous man.
mother.
father.
family.
that man!
family.
father?] Solmes? family.
If you can
family.
mother. other man's favour.
brother. family. Solmes.
man? mother's. Solmes!] heart, if any man living does. * Lovelace.
If it be
Solmes.
dearest friends! Dear, dear
Solmes. If
If your
heart.
mother.
father. that man.
letter.
man.
father.
letter. If I did
brother.
MY DEAR BROTHER,
If you please. love? family.
sister--
Lovelace!

Look Out, New York

I'll be in New York from Thursday to Sunday attending the Association for Asian American Studies conference. While I'm there, I'll be doing two readings: one on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Lolita for Paolo Javier's 2nd Avenue Poetry (with Emmy Catedral, Kevin Coval, Thom Donovan, Wanda Phipps, and Sukhdev Sandhu) and another on Sunday at 5 p.m. at Verlaine for Kundiman (with Marlon Unas Esguerra, Rona Luo, and Margaret Rhee). Hope to see some of you there.

My T-Shirt

I am thinking about the parallels between a T-shirt that says

It's a black thing. You wouldn't understand

and

It's a language thing. Let me explain.

There is a whole raft of things to say here about how the label "language poet" might or might not resemble the label "woman poet" or "black poet," but you'll just have to wait for the book on that one.

Meanwhile, I guess my T-shirt would have to say

It's an Asian thing. I would explain, but I don't speak English.

Kundiman/Verlaine Reading, April 8, NYC

NYC Reading: 2nd Ave, April 7

A Shoehorn...with Teeth

I've got a few poems up in the March issue of Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, edited by Maurice Oliver. They were originally written as postcard poems in correspondence with Del Ray Cross back in July 2003.

I've been publishing a number of these poems in various places the past few months, and there's a weird nostalgia around them for me: I'm just realizing that they were written during my last month in California. There are some Stanford poems ("White Plaza"), San Francisco making an appearance as "The City at the End of the Rainbow," and glimpses of Chicago from our apartment-hunting trip ("The Magnificent Mile," in Seven Corners).

Adding to the time-warp feeling is that I've just completed my first round of postcard poems in several years--this one a sort of round-robin with my old poem-swap buddies Del, Stephanie, Cassie, and Jennifer. The postcards seem realer and more appropriate now that we're scattered (Cassie in Rochester, NY, me in Chicago or Toronto or wherever), opening up all kinds of possibilities for mishap (a few of Stephanie's postcards took a detour through Canada, and one of Jennifer's arrived with most of the pasted-on poem peeled off, creating an unintentional though interesting fragment), but also less immediate and conversational: sometimes a poem I'd send up the bay would arrive the very same day, while here I can wait a week for one. But opening the mailbox and having poems fall out is still worth it.

Seven Corners

I'm the featured poet this week in the Chicago-based blog journal Seven Corners, edited by Steve Halle. (Warning: the photo of me looking relaxed and summery can be blown up to an alarmingly large size.)

Journey to the West in Barrow Street

The new Winter 2006 issue of Barrow Street is out, and nestled snugly in its center is Journey to the West, a 15-page selection of my poems that won the 2006 Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize. Thanks to the folks at Kundiman, which sponsors the prize (and which is also sending me to their summer retreat at the University of Virginia in June). I also have to give a shout-out to Roger Pao, whose blog reminded me about the contest just before the deadline...and to Alli Warren and Del Ray Cross, whose collaborative efforts brought quite a few of the poems into being...and to Eileen for mentioning it.

My contributor's copies just arrived. I'm pretty sure this is about as many poems of mine as I've ever seen in print in one place before, so it's a bit of a strange sensation--a simultaneous feeling of pride and of looking-over-my-shoulder, is-anybody-else-reading-this embarrassment. The "chapbook" part is a bit of a misnomer, I guess; I'd been fantasizing about it as a pull-out section that you could detach from the binding with a satisfying yank, but it's pretty well integrated (not that that's a bad thing--there's a lot of other good stuff in the issue too, so you don't have to just read it on my account).

I'll be doing a reading in NYC for Kundiman on April 8 at Verlaine, with Marlon Unas Esguerra, Rona Luo, and Margaret Rhee. Hope to see some of you there, after you've rushed out to your local better bookstore and bought up every copy of Barrow Street your little hands can carry.

2nd Ave., Vol. 2

* Volume 2 features work by

ANSELM BERRIGAN michael coffey ERNEST CONCEPCION kevin coval DEL RAY CROSS thomas fink ROB FITTERMAN drew gardner RIGOBERTO GONZALES donna ho FANNY HOWE brenda iijima PAOLO JAVIER jack kimball SERENA LIU paolo manalo NOAM MOR joyelle mcsweeney BRUNA MORI daniel nester MANUEL OCAMPO tim peterson WANDA PHIPPS sreshta premnath MEREDITH QUARTERMAIN peter quartermain BARBARA JANE REYES tony robles PATRICK ROSAL thaddeus rutkowski SUKHDEV SANDHU leslie scalapino JENNIFER SCAPPETONE purvi shah DENNIS SOMERA rodrigo toscano TIM YU and more

A New Prairie School?

At this past weekend's M/MLA convention in Chicago, Bill Allegrezza assembled a panel on "Experimental Poetics in Contemporary Chicago," with Bob Archambeau, Garin Cycholl, Ray Bianchi, and myself. Since Bob has been kind enough to post his paper at his blog, I thought I'd follow suit.

I think it’s fitting that two of the four papers on this panel have question marks in their titles. Because I think the title of this panel itself, "Experimental Poetics in Contemporary Chicago," is itself a question: can such a thing really be said to exist? Without presuming to speak for the other panelists, I would guess that most of us would like the answer to this question to be yes--that we would like to assert that a discernable and robust experimental poetry "scene" has emerged in Chicago over the past decade or so--but that we also harbor some serious doubts about whether this is the case.

My own contribution to this debate will necessarily be a mix of the critical and the anecdotal, since in raising the question of whether a new "school" of Chicago poetry has arisen in recent years, I am really looking at two linked phenomena: first, the rise of new institutions, such as reading series, journals, and presses, that offer an alternative to established venues for poetry; and second, any distinctive aesthetic that may have been nurtured and propagated through those institutions. So this question of a New Prairie School is a question that is simultaneously aesthetic and social, as much about friendships, networks, and ephemeral connections as it is about texts.

First: what’s the origin of the term I use in my title, the "New Prairie School"? I’ll freely confess that it’s a term of my own invention. When I moved back to Chicago from California in 2003, I began collecting links to Chicago-area poetry websites, journals, venues, and blogs in the sidebar of my own blog, tympan. Needing something to call this section, I decided, on a whim, to label it "New Prairie School." Perhaps I was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, which, as a resident of Hyde Park, I walked past most days. Perhaps I was also thinking of the "New Brutalism," a similarly tongue-in-cheek, architecturally inspired name adopted by a group of young poets I knew in San Francisco. Most likely I was just grasping for some sense of a regional aesthetic. But as the list grew, including the blogs of Gabriel Gudding and Jeremy P. Bushnell, Ray Bianchi’s Chicago Postmodern Poetry site, and the homepages of the Danny’s, Discrete, and Myopic reading series, I had to admit that something like a scene for experimental writing was indeed developing. So was all this coherent enough to constitute a "school" of Chicago poetic practice? And what about my improvised label? What, if anything, did the new Chicago writing have to do with the horizontal lines and open spaces of Prairie style?

Let’s begin with the institutional signs of life for experimental poetry in Chicago. Again, I’ll emphasize that this is largely an anecdotal account based on what I’ve seen since coming back three years ago; others with more experience should feel free to correct or add to my impressions. Experimental poetry’s profile on the Chicago scene has been most visibly raised by the emergence of new reading series. Most prominent among these is the reading series at Danny’s Tavern in Wicker Park, which tends to host better-known names: local luminaries like Mark Strand, high-profile visitors like James Tate and Peter Gizzi, and events with national journals like Fence. The Discrete Series, started in 2003 by Kerri Sonnenberg and Jesse Seldess and housed in several art spaces around the city, has been both more consistently avant-garde and more locally focused in its programming, pairing visitors such as Lisa Jarnot and Cole Swensen with Chicago poets such as Mark Tardi and Chuck Stebelton. In 2004, Stebelton himself took over the reading series at Myopic Books in Wicker Park, a series established some 15 years earlier by legendary poet Thax Douglas. The series quickly progressed from a few chairs gathered in the bookstore’s rec-room like basement to capacity upstairs crowds for a diverse range of poets including Daniel Nester, Linh Dinh, and Kristy Odelius. The most recent addition to the scene—and the first to break the North Side mold—is Bill Allegrezza’s series A, at the new Hyde Park Art Center.

Reading series, while crucial to bringing together a face-to-face poetry community, can be notoriously short-lived, so it’s worth noting that several of these series have been able to survive the departure of their founders. But perhaps the most significant thing about the emergence of the experimental reading series in Chicago is the challenge it poses to that standby of Chicago poetry: the poetry slam. While New York and San Francisco are known for their diverse poetic cultures—and for nurturing experimental writing in the tradition of the New York School or the San Francisco Renaissance—the contemporary Chicago scene is still thought of primarily as the birthplace of the slam, an association that is probably as welcome to some Chicago poets as the miming of a machine gun. Since slams at places like the Green Mill are still going strong, reading series are crucial to building a space for experimental writing in Chicago.

Now, I’m making a big assumption here: that the Chicago poetry scene has, to this point, been actively hostile to experimental writing. Is this justified? Well, we can begin thinking about this by observing that the preferred word in Chicago for the kind of poetry we’re talking about is not "experimental." It is, in fact, "postmodern"—as seen in the title of Ray Bianchi’s website chicagopostmodernpoetry.com, which has become an indispensable resource for its listings, interviews, and reviews. I must confess that I’m not so fond of the term "postmodern" to describe contemporary poetry, probably because it is simultaneously programmatic and vague, and reeks too much of the academic. But I think that’s precisely why it’s become the term of choice for Chicago experimental poetry, both for its proponents and its detractors.

Take, for example, a post from early 2005 by poet C.J. Laity on his slam-oriented site ChicagoPoetry.com, which dubs itself "The Center of Chicago’s Cyberspace Poetry." Laity denounces ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.com as "an attempt to dig the rotted corpse of postmodernism out of its shallow grave and reanimate it" by Bianchi and his "academic camp." The association of the "postmodern" and the "academic" was no doubt reinforced in Chicago by the authority of Paul Hoover, formerly of Columbia College’s writing program and editor of the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry. Without any stable venues for experimental writing in Chicago outside of Hoover’s domain, performance poets have been less likely to see experimental writers as peers and more prone to view them as arrogant interlopers from the academy. If "experimental" and "performance" poetry seem more polarized and pugilistic in Chicago than in other cities, this may be, paradoxically, because of experimental poetry’s relatively weak presence on the scene, and its restriction to a very narrow academic realm, until recently.

Institutionally, then, experimental poetry in Chicago does face an uphill battle. But I think there’s good reason for optimism. The reading series I’ve described have endured and flourished; in the past year I’ve seen packed houses at Myopic and the Discrete Series turn out for poets from Chuck Stebelton to K. Silem Mohammad. Just as important has been the rise of journals and presses devoted to experimental writing, from online venues like Bill Allegrezza’s moria and Larry Sawyer’s Milk, to print journals like Kerri Sonnenberg’s Conundrum and Jesse Seldess’s Antennae, to the new press Cracked Slab Books. Such endeavors provide a more permanent home for new Chicago writing.

But the question remains: has a new aesthetic emerged from these growing institutions? Can we really speak of a "new Prairie school" in poetry? In the time that remains I’d like to address this question by looking at the work of a poet I’ve already mentioned several times, Chuck Stebelton. There’s some irony in my choice of Stebelton, who has recently left Chicago to become manager of literary programs at Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern--an institution that’s often pointed to as an example of what Chicago’s experimental scene is lacking. But I think Stebelton’s curious mix of density, seriousness, openness, and sense of place may best embody Chicago avant-garde writing. Stebelton’s deadpan, enjambed, sharply etched sentences give his poems urbanity and, often, a political edge. Yet some of his most powerful pieces also effectively evoke the Midwestern landscape, not through nostalgia but through suggestion and abstraction. Stebelton’s "new" prairie may be a highly built environment, but it retains an awareness of the wider and perhaps more open spaces that structure it.

When I first heard Stebelton read, I was struck by the density and uniformity of his linguistic surfaces, a stark contrast to the casual, fluid, and often jokey surfaces characteristic of contemporary Bay Area writing, or to the rapid switchbacks and self-consciousness of post-New York School poetry. Indeed, it took me some time before I felt I could find a point of access—just as it took me a few weeks to find the entrance to Wright’s Robie House. Again, I don’t think the analogy is entirely inapt. H. Allen Brooks’s classic treatise on Prairie School architecture asserts that the main characteristic of the Prairie style is the way in which the horizontal line dominates and unifies every element of design, from roof to foundation, leading to a "continuity of line, edge, and surface." "Short vertical accents" play off this horizontal structure, and conventional ornament is rejected in favor of what Brooks calls "the textural expression of materials and the often lively juxtaposition of various shapes and forms."

I think Brooks’s architectural analysis gives a reasonably good description of a Stebelton poem like "To My Father’s Emperors," drawn from his first full-length collection, Circulation Flowers, which was published by California-based Tougher Disguises Press as the winner of the 2004 Jack Spicer Award. Syntactically, the poem is a single, unpunctuated, run-on sentence, a free linguistic flow. What orders this flow is not any narrative structure but, quite simply, the poetic line itself, breaking the sentence up into thirteen roughly equal units, with about four beats per line. But just as the horizontal planes of a Prairie house are not symmetrical, but overlapping and projecting, the grammatical ambiguity created by Stebelton’s line breaks creates an overlapping effect, where each new line seems to be revising or restating a part of the previous one: "to be the city they had hoped he would come to / be by this next act and looked around the watch." The city of Chicago is, perhaps evoked in this poem, but not through realistic depiction, nor by using obvious landmarks as poetic ornaments. Instead, I would say Stebelton evokes the city texturally, through the juxtaposition of images: "gray garages," "silver balls," "lost tunes," "chrome toasters," "bird shaped pool." The only proper noun is "Loomis," unlikely to be recognized by anyone but a native.

That Stebelton might think of this poetic mode as a distinctively Midwestern practice is suggested by his 2005 chapbook Precious, published by Chicago’s Answer Tag Home Press. Stebelton’s horizontal structures are even more severe here, with the book broken up into numbered sections, most of which consist only of a single line. The urban scene here is not Chicago but the town of Xenia, Ohio. While the narrative we expect might be that of a poet’s looking back at his provincial past from his urban present, Stebelton makes clear that his project is not a nostalgic one: "I come to bury Ohio, not to blame him." In fact, Precious suggests not only the continuity of the Midwestern town and the metropolis, but the continuity of the Midwestern landscape and its cities, creating a sort of urban pastoral. Stebelton’s isolated lines place cattle and casements, turtles and flaneurs in parallel. As in Prairie architecture, the definition of separate planes paradoxically results in a breaking down of borders, a sense of unity, even between the city and the country. Stebelton writes: "Internal conflict inside or outside the park / to walk the city according to plan." If city parks are "green spaces" within the urban fabric, samples of nature set off from the street, Stebelton breaks down those boundaries; we can’t resolve our internal conflicts by displacing them onto artificial distinctions between civilization and nature. In fact, the natural world might provide the perfect "plan" for thinking about the city, just as the open spaces of the prairie suggest a pattern for organizing urban living.

The distinctive textures of Stebelton’s work, and its structural analogies to wide-open Midwestern space, suggests that the idea of a new Prairie School of poetry is not so fanciful after all. New institutions for experimental writing have given work like Stebelton’s a home in Chicago, and Stebelton, along with other poets of the Chicago avant-garde, have responded by marking Chicago writing with a distinctive style. The accomplishments of such work suggests that Chicago’s experimental poetry is becoming a major force not only here, but on the national scene.

Urban Poetry at IUN

Next month’s groundbreaking conference Drawing the Lines: International Perspectives on Urban Renewal Through the Arts at Indiana University Northwest will feature an urban poetry panel on Thursday, Nov. 2 from 12:15 p.m. until 1:30 pm in the IU Northwest Savannah Center Auditorium.

Four published poets will recite their works during this presentation and will also discuss what it means to be an “urban poet.” Presenters will perform traditional styles of poetry, experimental compositions, and works related to Northwest Indiana.

“Northwest Indiana needs more celebrations of the literary arts, and this panel is a fantastic way to celebrate writing,” said William Allegrezza, Ph.D., lecturer of English at IU Northwest and organizer of the urban poetry panel. “The panel will feature some great poets showcasing their works, works crafted in the region. It will be an entertaining, enjoyable event, even for people that are not overly interested in poetry.”

Scheduled poets include:

Garin Cycholl -- Instructor of writing and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chycholl is also co-editor of Near South, a journal of experimental poetry, fiction and drama and the author of Nightbirds and Blue Mound to 161, a book-length poem on geological and historical displacements in southern Illinois. Chycholl’s recent work is slated to appear in the upcoming collections Admit 2 and Keep Going.

Kristy Odelius -- Poet and Assistant Professor of English at North Park University. Odelius’ work has appeared in Chicago Review, Notre Dame Review, ACM, and diagram.

W.K. Buckley -- Professor of English at Indiana University Northwest. Buckley received his Ph.D. from Miami University in Ohio. In addition to teaching at IU Northwest, he is the editor of Critical Essays on Louis-Ferdinand Celine and New Perspectives on the Closing of the American Mind. Buckley is the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Loss and Hope and has been published widely in poetry journals, including Left Curve, Poetry New York, and New Orleans Review. His other published books include Athene in Steeltown and Lost Heartlands Found.

Tim Yu -- Co-author of Postcard Poems and instructor at the University of Toronto. Yu’s poetry and criticism have appeared in Interlope, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Shampoo, and Cordite.

Admission to the urban poetry panel is free for college students and Gary, Ind. residents. Others interested in attending may register for the Drawing the Lines conference at www.iun.edu/~dtlines. Registration fees vary according to days of attendance and lunch options.

The urban poetry panel is an important element of the Drawing the Lines conference, which will bring together international experts on urban renewal and the arts with community leaders, local policymakers and legislators, artists, social and cultural entrepreneurs, city planners, economic development officials, arts and humanities councils, and civic leaders. Scheduled keynote speakers will discuss topics such as how creativity and culture influence community change, what role the arts and culture play in urban renewal, and what factors need to be considered on a local level when advancing urban renewal initiatives. The conference itinerary also includes roundtable discussions and public forums.

“We believe that this conference will develop a dialogue about how integral arts and humanities are to urban life in the 21st century and how the particular communities in northern Indiana and Chicagoland can shape their own transformations,” said Robin Hass Birky, associate professor of English at IU Northwest and co-organizer of the conference.

“In this event, we join existing initiatives in renewing the area’s urban communities and revitalize Indiana University Northwest’s contribution and commitment to the Hoosier culture,” added Eva Mendieta, associate professor of Spanish at IU Northwest and co-organizer of the conference.

For more information regarding Drawing the Lines, visit www.iun.edu/~dtlines

Paolo Javier and Tim Yu at Myopic Books

Myopic Poetry Series presents

PAOLO JAVIER and TIM YU

Sunday, September 10, 7 p.m.
Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago

PAOLO JAVIER is the author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the
time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press
Traffic Book of the Year Award. He edits 2nd Ave Poetry, and lives in New York.

TIM YU's poetry and prose have appeared in Chicago Review, Meanjin, SHAMPOO, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He teaches English at the University of Toronto. A native of the Chicago area, he now lives in Toronto and Chicago.

Hyde Park Poetry!

series A, a new reading series, is hosting its first reading on Thursday, July 20, at the new Hyde Park Art Center at 6:00 p.m. The featured readers will be Kerri Sonnenberg and Chris Glomski. I invite everyone to come out and celebrate the launch of a new series in Chicago and to celebrate the writing of these wonderful poets.

For more information, please see http://www.moriapoetry.com/seriesa.html.

The Hyde Park Art Center is located at 5020 S. Cornell Avenue. The reading will be held in the conference room.

Bios:

Kerri Sonnenberg lives in Chicago where she directs the Discrete Reading Series at the Elastic Arts Space in Logan Square. Her books include The Mudra (Litmus, 2004) and Practical Art Criticism (Bronze Skull, 2004). Other writings can be found in recent issues of MiPoesias, Factorial, Magazine Cypress and Unpleasant Event Schedule.

Chris Glomski was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1965. Raised in Illinois, he has also made his home in Iowa and Italy. His first collection of poems, TRANSPARENCIES LIFTED FROM NOON, was published last fall by MEB / Spuyten Duyvil Press in New York. His poems and critical writings have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, The Octopus, Pom2, and ACM. Recently, he has been translating poems by the Italian Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale.

Those Glittering Asian Guys (II)

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Those Glittering Asian Guys

Hoo boy. So I was in San Francisco last weekend (more on which soon) and heard some murmuring about a Michael Magee poem that had caused a stir at a recent reading by talking about "Asians." That poem, of course, was "Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay", and after some pointers from Barbara Jane Reyes and Brent Cunningham I found the discussions going on about the poem at Minor American, lime tree, Asian American Poetry, and other places. I'm coming very late to this, and I (like others) debated whether to get involved at all, having developed a certain level of fatigue about calling out examples of Asian stereotypes in contemporary poetry.

But there did seem to be something a bit different about this case, in part because it involved a poem written by someone whose work I generally like and defended by someone else I agree with about 90% of the time. And in part it made me think about precisely how images of the "Asian" get used in contemporary poems, and whether one could usefully distinguish between those kinds of uses. I'm going to try to approach this by (empathetically and idealistically) imagining how the "general reader" might receive such issues, before going into how the position of an Asian American reader might differ.

As I've observed before, the most feared epithet in these kinds of discussion is not "Asian," or "Oriental," or "Chinaman." It's "racist." The arguments of those who critique stereotypes or racial imagery in a poem are often reduced to, "So-and-so says the poem is racist," and the charge of racism is seen as so toxic as to end all further discussion. More to the point: there's no such thing (today, at least) as a good, racist poem. The charge of racism is understood to place something outside of reasonable discourse and of aesthetic appreciation. This is not to say that there aren't poems written and published now that, upon closer reading, can be seen to have racist implications; it's simply that no acceptable poem can explicitly claim a racist position--one that openly seeks to caricature, demonize, and inspire hatred or fear of a particular racial group. One can certainly think of any number of historical examples of this kind of writing--for example, Bret Harte's poem on the "heathen Chinee"--but it's nearly impossible to imagine a "serious" poet today attempting such a thing.

So when we do encounter racial stereotypes in a contemporary poem, we tend to assume that "something else" must be going on. (For example, when I critiqued racial imagery in a poem on the Poetics list, the response came back, "Well, obviously we know no one on this list is a racist, so...") I'll attempt to describe two of those "something elses"--two ways in which racial images or stereotypes seem to get used in contemporary writing--before discussing the third "something else" that Magee's poem may or may not represent.

1. Ambivalent. This can best be described as a simultaneous fascination with and repulsion from racial imagery, an unease with the racial other that can manifest itself as mockery, ethnography, or fetish. The writer's intention and attitude toward the subject matter seem to be unstable. The examples that immediately come to mind are two pieces posted to the Poetics list, one titled "WHY DO THE TIAWANESE" and the other infamously referencing the "Filipino crack whore," that I discussed at some length here and here. In these cases, what the author allegedly intended as "realistic" or even "sympathetic" portrayals of Asians seemingly cannot help but partake of the most degraded stereotypes, not least because the author seems to lack any awareness of the destructive power of such stereotypes.

I think also of a story I read a few years ago in the New Yorker in which the protagonist is a young white woman who works as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, describing the food as dirty and disgusting and the proprietress's communication as consisting of guttural "ngs" and "oks."

It might easily be protested that these writings are straight-up racist--no ambivalence about them. Without a doubt the worst writings in this category lean that way. But their dynamic of repulsion and attraction (the young woman in the New Yorker story describes her attraction to a young Asian man who works in the restaurant) and the apparently unconscious nature of their racism gives them a kind of bare cover that in some cases can allow them to get away with it (at least to some readers).

2. Ironic or parodic. The vast majority of contemporary racial stereotyping in poetry, and perhaps even in popular culture, falls into, or wants to fall into, this category: it's a self-conscious use of racial imagery that holds the stereotype at an ironic distance, ostensibly parodying or satirizing the very stereotype it deploys. (In popular culture, cf. South Park, Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts, and so on.) In other words, using a racial stereotype is okay if you are aware that you are doing it, since then you couldn't possibly take it entirely seriously.

The simplest example of this is when the irony is provided by the position of the speaker, e.g. when Marilyn Chin refers to the "mega-Chinese-food tropes" of her poems or an African American comedian uses the "N-word." Since it's assumed that these speakers are not being racist toward their own racial groups, it follows that their words must be ironic or appropriative. As Pam Lu has pointed out, this strategy is by no means always, or even usually, successful; an Asian American writer who self-consciously portrays Asian Americans in stereotypical fashion can easily end up reinforcing those very stereotypes.

Another technique of ironic distancing is that of the dramatic monologue: you use racist words but put them in the mouth of a speaker clearly marked as a character, distinct from the author. Think, for example, of the opening scene of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, in which white male real estate agents invite each other to dine at "the Chink's" and inveigh against "Patels." The usual interpretation given is that Mamet is not himself a racist, but rather is realistically portraying the racism of his rather unattractive characters. (In the context of Magee's poem, this would be the "redneck reading"--that the poem's references to Asians should be attributed to an ignorant and racist speaker whom Magee intends to satirize.) Of course, a closer reading reveals that there is nothing remotely "realistic" about the racist language Mamet puts in his characters' mouths (one describes Indians as "A supercilious race"), which, depending on your view of Mamet, can lead in one of two directions: toward the idea that Mamet is adding another layering of irony in order to satirize us, who believe that we can comfortably distance ourselves from the racism of others; or back toward ambivalence, in which Mamet is not distancing himself from racism as much as we might initially think. (For a fictional take on this scene, see Bharati Mukherjee's story "A Wife's Story.")

For an instance of this strategy of ironic distancing, take a couple of poems that another Asian American poet recently pointed me to: two pieces called "Chinese Movies" by Bernard Henrie in the latest issue of SHAMPOO. (In order to insulate myself against the suspicion that I am anti-SHAMPOO, I should note that I and many of my, um, best friends publish our work there.) Henrie's title suggests the mass-culture source of Chinese stereotypes, and the poems' serial numbering suggests the mechanical reproducibility of such stereotypes. The poems are stocked with what Anglo-American readers have come to expect as the cliches of chinoiserie: silk garments, snow cherries, plum blossoms, bamboo, persimmons. The frame suggests that we are meant to receive these images with a wink and a nod, that they are cliches being used satirically.

But how ironic is it? There's a distinct speaker, but despite his language of cliches it's not at all clear how distanced we're supposed to be from him. When he describes a female artist, "Chen," the imagery is almost comically piled on:

A Mandarin when she works,
her oversize smock and sleeves
look like petals. I expect rice fans
to appear for shade, gifts from
her village in rural China.

And perhaps the "I expect" registers this as a product of the speaker's stereotypes.

But the poem never leaves this level, never actually gives us a position from which to critique the speaker. In fact, the poem's conclusion seems to do nothing so much as seek to reanimate the stereotypes, to reaestheticize them and restore their erotic charge:

Her painting dry and bamboo
brushes wrapped, she prepares
to bathe, pausing to peel
a fat persimmon, the juice drips
and forms a glistening drop
on her gold thigh:

"Look, another water color."

The final words, I assume, are Chen's own; she's actually shown to be participating in her own orientalized objectification. So this is a poem that seems to begin from an ironic position but fails to maintain it; instead, it slides toward ambivalence by seeing the stereotype as a source of attraction and pleasure.

Irony and parody can, however, be highly successful methods of critiquing and reworking racial stereotypes. The work of John Yau is probably the best example I can think of in the current context. Yau's series "Genghis Chan: Private Eye," like Henrie's poems (which actually seem derivative of Yau series like "Late Night Movies"), signals in its title its sources in mass culture, but the title itself mashes up seemingly incompatible stereotypes: that of the fearsome Asian warrior (Genghis Khan) and of the effeminate and deferential Asian (Charlie Chan); then it places these in a wholly unexpected American context (that of the film noir). The result is parodic but also unstable, not permitting any established stereotype to gain traction, seeking to create a new and hybrid speaking position.

The poems themselves often seem to function as junkyards--or recycling bins--for racially charged language, which is fragmented and reconstructed into something compelling yet monstrous:

shoo war
torn talk

ping towel
pong toy

salted sap
yellow credit

hubba doggo
bubba patootie

wig maw
mustard tongue

The result is less an attractive reanimation of orientalism but a pastiche of it whose primary emotion would seem to be a charged disgust.

So what does any of this have to do with Magee's "Their Guys"? My sense is that while most attempts to read the poem have fallen into one of the two above categories, the poem is tryihng to do some third thing; for what that might be, and how successful it is, stay tuned.

Reviews, Resurrected (II)

Thanks to Ron Silliman for pointing to my review of Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation--although it is a bit disturbing to think that this is the best available picture of me.

It's always illuminating to hear someone else summarizing your argument, which often brings out things that you may not have noticed yourself. Silliman's pithy precis defines the three "generations" of Asian American poets quite nicely along the lines of politics. I had also hoped to emphasize that I saw some degree of continuity between the "politicized & populist" poets of the 1970s and younger "post-avant" writers (with the implication that it was the "lyric" turn of the 1980s that could be viewed as anomalous in the history of Asian American poetry). But that's certainly a debatable point.

Thanks also to csperez for pointing (in Silliman's comment box) to the discussion that's been going on here and elsewhere. I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to respond more fully to the thoughtful comments by him and by Pam Lu, in part because I've been away the past few days (on which more to come). But I'll try a quick stab at answering now.

Both commenters raise the question of whether perhaps the anthology does represent some sociological "truth" about Asian Americans: as Pam puts it, maybe the anthology's "dehistoricized, deculturalized, uncritically-examined perspectives do actually reflect the perspectives of a (growing) sector of the population."

It's difficult for me to assess this as a sociological claim. It's certainly true that one hears Asian American activists complaining all the time about the problems of politicizing Asian Americans, and perhaps some might see this as a decline from the activist days of the 1970s. But is the Asian American population in general less politically engaged and less historically aware than it was three decades ago? My guess would be no: a generation of students has gone through American colleges with at least the opportunity to study Asian American history, literature, and politics, and Asian American student organizations remain robust (if rarely politically radical).

But I think Pam may be right in another sense, in that there are now a multitude of models for how one might be an "Asian American writer." To claim that label in the 1970s meant a rather particular thing, both politically and aesthetically--which also rather excluded one from "mainstream" acceptance. But the "breakthrough" success in the late '70s and 1980s of writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Cathy Song made it quite possible to be both an Asian American writer and a "mainstream" one--or, better yet, to be a writer who "just happens to be" Asian American.

For me, The Open Boat plays out the political and aesthetic logic of this moment. But what I don't think I'd realized in my past readings of Garrett Hongo's anthology was how pointed Hongo's dissent from the aesthetic/political conjunction of the 1970s was. To take up Silliman's characterization, Hongo's stance is probably not apolitical but purposefully anti-political, a reaction against "ethnic consciousness" dogma. But that resistance, at least, was still a kind of engagement, a conscious departure from a certain norm; an ironic awareness of ethnic politics is still a form of awareness.

But what happens when one places into the category of "Asian American writer" those who do not see their work in those terms at all? What Chang's anthology seems to argue is that it is now possible not to allude to the tradition of Asian American writing in form, content, or intention, and yet still to be called an Asian American writer. In short, that there is now a completely dehistoricized and decontextualized way of being an "Asian American poet," and indeed to be a highly successful one. To make this point even more contentiously: it may be precisely that success itself (measured in terms of fellowships, publications, and teaching positions) is the gold standard of acceptance into the category of Asian American poet. The Asian American poet thus becomes the model minority.

Finally, the question has been raised of what an ideal anthology of Asian American poetry really would look like. It's interesting that Silliman read me to be saying that such an anthology would essentially be Premonitions redux. That's perhaps what I would like to have said, or perhaps should have said were I a more loyal post-avanter. What I actually said was

The new, truly comprehensive anthology of Asian American poetry that is needed now would draw generously from both the 1980s lyric represented in Hongo’s Open Boat and the avant-garde work of the 1970s and 1990s featured in Premonitions, offering notes and introductions that place both aesthetics in historical and literary context. But it would also offer a much longer historical perspective on Asian American poetry...It would place this work alongside poems by younger writers who represent some of the newest Asian American immigrant groups, while using three decades of experience by teachers of Asian American writing to help measure what poems have been most useful in the classroom. Such an anthology--ideally a collaboration between critics and poets--would provide an invaluable introduction to Asian American poetry for general readers, while providing the depth students, scholars, and writers need.

That's the anthology that, to me, would seem the most useful--one I could use in my own classroom, but that I'd also love to read.

Ain't I Yellow?

[New Orleans] Mayor Ray Nagin, whose shoot-from-the-hip style was both praised and scorned after Hurricane Katrina, narrowly won re-election over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu on Saturday...

"It's time for us to stop the bickering. It's time for us to stop measuring things in black and white and yellow and Asian."

Um...

That's Progress!

I've signed up as a blogger for Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, the spinoff of the Asian American organization within the Howard Dean campaign. I'll be making occasional posts (with a couple other bloggers) over there on politics and Asian Americans. This may protect all of you from having to hear so many political rants from me. Unless of course you like that sort of thing, in which case come on over.