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Why, in the early 1970s, did poetry seem vital to the Asian American political project? It is hard to imagine a recent political movement giving such a central place to poetry.
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Its 1976 sequel, Counterpoint, contains a section on "Literature" of over one hundred pages, with more than thirty poems. The groundbreaking 1971 anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader contains over twenty pages of poetry-and no fiction. Each issue of the seminal monthly Gidra, for example, included a section called "The People"-a full-page selection of poems written by readers. Perhaps most remarkable of all, though, is just how central a role poetry seems to have played in the politics of the early Asian American movement. Lew's anthology Premonitions, which places writers of the 1970s like Inada and Mirikitani alongside experimental writers of the 1990s like Kim and Lin, is one of the most striking statements of the continuity of the Asian American avant-garde.
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Indeed, the poetry of writers like Lee, Song, and Mura may eventually come to be seen as an anomaly within the development of an Asian American poetry whose allegiances are much more appropriately placed with the avant-garde. And the influences on and directions of this work are much more diverse than the canon of the 1980s and 1990s, with Beat, jazz, and Asian influences reflecting an interest in aesthetic as well as political vanguardism. Their authors-Fay Chiang, George Leong, Ron Tanaka, Francis Oka- are absent from recent anthologies of Asian American writing only Janice Mirikitani and Lawson Fusao Inada continue to be read. The poems in publications like Gidra, Aion, and Bridge are politically charged and direct, angry and passionate, frequently reaching for a populist aesthetic. 1 This formal consonance has allowed Asian American poetry to become an acceptable part of the multicultural curriculum, a transparent conduit for those neglected stories that some have asserted it is the job of minority literature to tell.īut if we return to the scene of Asian American literature's emergence in the 1970s, in the ephemeral newspapers, journals, and anthologies of that period, we get a very different image of Asian American poetry, one that is not so easy to place in the mainstream of American poetry. Like many of their non– Asian American peers, these poets were largely trained in poetry workshops and are now often professors of creative writing themselves their work fits comfortably into what some critics have called the "MFA mainstream" of the 1980s and 1990s, with its emphasis on personal voice, epiphanic insight, and loose verse form. The image of Asian American poetry familiar to most readers is a product of the 1980s, which saw the rise to prominence of poets like Li-Young Lee, Cathy Song, David Mura, and Marilyn Chin. If white avant-gardists such as the Language poets were compelled to "ethnicize" their writing, it was in part because of an awareness that emerging categories like "Asian American writing" were taking their place alongside those groups traditionally labeled "avant-garde." What I argue in this chapter is that from its inception in the 1970s, Asian American poetry as a whole was an avantgarde, a grouping that defined itself not just through race but through bold experiments with form and style in the search for an Asian American aesthetic. In what sense can Asian American poets be said to form an avant-garde? Although it is frequently acknowledged that there are a certain number of Asian American poets who now write in recognizably "experimental" styles, including John Yau, Myung Mi Kim, and Tan Lin, such writing is often regarded as a recent development in Asian American literature, a departure from the familiar Asian American literary modes of autobiographical lyric and narratives of family history.