It is a challenging task to write a response to a book that feels indispensable for anyone reading and studying literature today. Dorothy Wang’s Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry calls upon its readers to think about poetic form as co-emergent with the conditions of racialized, Asian American experience. The book examines, through its many inviting, detailed readings of poetic form, processes of cultural assimilation, identity and subjectivity, racial interpellation, and diaspora. There are several overlapping interventions that Wang makes. One of these, the one which has understandably received the most attention, is an indictment of twentieth- and twenty-first-century US poetic criticism for its prolonged and conscious refusal to bring race into discussions of poetic form. Wang shows how the marginalization of minority poets takes place through institutional exclusions in academic book publishing, conferences, and mainstream poetry journals. Throughout the book, she critiques methods of reading that create false binaries between racially marked themes and avant-garde experiments with language.

Thinking Its Presence offers an urgent and elegant response to work that would apply sociological and thematic criticism to some poets while treating others as universal subjects unmarked by race, gender, ability, or class. In addition to this, Wang’s book also functions as a corrective to histories of poetic criticism that treat US and European poetry as a claustrophobic system of formal cross-references. “Corrective” treads too softly: Thinking Its Presence is a critically insurgent text that makes the strongest case I know against the shibboleths of twentieth-century poetry criticism. By refusing to remain within the disciplinary cordon sanitaire of poetic criticism—by reclaiming poetry as an aesthetically complex intervention within the political and social—Thinking Its Presence opens up possibilities for the study of poetic form in the twenty-first century.

To bring Wang’s method into the sharpest relief, it might be useful to compare Thinking Its Presence briefly to a book that also contains a strong methodological claim, John Hollander’s Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (1990). Melodious Guile makes the case that poetic trope and scheme—for instance, a metaphor or a refrain—refer outward to the world by referring back to their previous uses by poets. For Hollander, poems tell stories about their own tropes and schemes, their own figures of speech and arrangements of syntax. I read Hollander’s book carefully as a graduate student while I was writing about Claude McKay. But McKay’s innovative work with the ballad and the sonnet complicates and resists Hollander’s approach. I knew that McKay’s experience, as a racialized, colonial worker in early twentieth-century Jamaica, had to have shaped his work with the ballad and sonnet, as much as or more than his reading of Keats’s or Kipling’s poetry did. McKay himself often said as much. Still, these defining characteristics of McKay’s life did not appear only as visible evidence within the themes of the poems I liked the best. Wang’s book addresses the reader of poetry caught in this bind, faced with the question of how to understand the lived conditions of racialization as manifest in the endless renewals of poetic form.

I have not chosen Hollander’s book as an example primarily for its exclusion of McKay, or poets of color in general, from its canon—though I continue to be appalled by the paucity of black, Latinx, and Asian American poets in books of poetry criticism published by many university presses. The problem is not only that Hollander’s sample set comprises white European and US poets. It is, to follow Wang, that those poets are read in such a way as to treat the author’s experience as immaterial to a formal reading of the text. In an important late moment in Wang’s book, she demonstrates how her method applies to white, male poets: “What one says of Berssenbrugge can also be said of Lowell: his use of qualifying phrases is influenced by a particular constellation of personal, familial, social, and aesthetic experiences, histories, and interests” (270). One of the most radical aspects of Wang’s book is that, using case studies drawn entirely from the work of non-white poets, Thinking Its Presence argues that “all poetic production” and “all members of a society, not just those visible minorities seemingly most directly affected” should be understood in their “full dimensionality” (305).

The idea of “full dimensionality” brings out the scope of the work that still needs to be done after Thinking Its Presence. Hollander’s book helps make visible how the elements of poetry recur across time. Wang’s book adds to the dimension of the text that of social space, in which, as she shows, the same forms are operative. As Wang puts it,

What seem like “purely literary” formal concerns, such as figures of speech, can tell us a great deal about the forms of representation beyond the text—that is, within the realm of the social and political—particularly, how racial minority subjects become constituted through formal processes, such as metaphorization, in the world. (91)

There have been attempts to do something like this with the idea of the poetic subject, though even there, some of the most important critiques of subjectivity, such as Saidiya Hartman’s or Jodi Byrd’s, have yet to be acknowledged fully by many poetry critics. But extended social and political examinations of metaphor, irony, parody, syntax, and mood—some of the elements of form and genre that Wang analyzes—would make the case that poems were always active partners in the disclosure, arrangement, and negotiation of the structures of racial capitalism.

Wang’s “full dimensionality” is at serious odds with poetry criticism’s inveterate, institutionalized partiality. Hollander’s interest in the self-referential qualities of poetic form speaks of a deep disciplinary modesty. In much US poetry criticism, this restraint from trespassing into other humanistic and social scientific research can quickly modulate into a chastening, finger-wagging gesture. The scowling tendency to defend poetry as the sole and proper object of study for the criticism of poetry differentiates poetic criticism from nearly every other mode of literary and social analysis. Wang departs from what has been a sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit claim that the study of poetic form is contaminated by anything outside literary studies, with the occasional exception made for biography, moral philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Wonderfully, Thinking Its Presence makes the counterargument by wearing on its sleeve the most careful attention to and love for the nuances of poetic trope and scheme. Wang writes, in her epilogue,

Within the academy, the possibility for new types of poetry criticism largely lies with those who take seriously the new modes of knowledge opened up by years of civil rights and institutional struggle and who learn from precisely those interdisciplinary fields that literary critics nostalgic for a lost literary Eden decry—ethnic studies, for example—even as they rigorously train themselves in literary analysis, theory, criticism, and poetics. (304, emphasis added)

It makes good sense that this paragraph comes in the epilogue: Wang’s book culminates with and, in a sense, combusts in this assertion, since the book’s own ventures into “new modes of knowledge” are somewhat more lightly sketched than its profound engagements with the genealogies of literary genres and forms. This gesture back towards the book’s own incompletion is, for me, its most notable, inspiring, and indelible mark on literary criticism. Wang’s conclusion here is a clarion call to disciplinary curiosity. It is also an exhortation that brings into mordant prose the renewed vocation of the critic of poetry. I think it is important that Wang refers to “new modes of knowledge” here because that phrase emphasizes the necessity for literary critics to de-specialize, to engage with the radical work being done in, for instance, black studies and indigenous studies.

More damningly yet, it has become clear that the parsimoniousness of poetry criticism is inseparable from the racializing processes that Wang’s book examines. Like contemporary defenses of “free speech,” the liberal tradition of poetry criticism secures and immunizes itself through the active exclusion of forms of thought that deal explicitly with race as a determinant of poetic form. No accident, perhaps, that the most pronounced moments of formalist criticism have occurred during the postwar instantiation of US global capitalism and during the violent moments of its contemporary crisis of overaccumulation.

To recover alternative genealogies of poetic criticism means decentering, testing, and critiquing texts like Hollander’s. Wang offers a model for an eclectic, catholic approach to the history of criticism. To follow her would be to set off on a mission of intellectual discovery, curiosity, speculation, and engagement with other thinkers: from the politicized formalisms of Edward Said and David Lloyd to the anthropological approaches of Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments and Khaled Furani’s Silencing the Sea; from the critiques of political economy, neoliberalism, and global capitalism staged in Michael Dowdy’s Broken Souths and Christopher Nealon’s The Matter of Capital to the interventions within black studies of Fred Moten’s In the Break and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. Ultimately, however, Wang’s book reveals the perils of the paths it lays out ahead. Excluding the study of Asian American poetry from the study of poetic form has been a way of reinforcing the property claims of white critics. But including the study of Asian American poetry by reducing its formal complexity to a set of thematic commodities has also been a way of reinforcing the property claims of white critics. Wang’s concluding exhortation to take seriously new modes of knowledge offers one way of resisting the enclosure movements that have long terrorized poetry criticism from both sides.

In a December 1997 interview called “Generosity as Method,” Myung Mi Kim argues that we need a poetics that refuses to follow the narrative logic of opposition. One of the challenges with committing to opposition as a politics, she says, is that opposition is so often linked to narratives of empire. Kim, in conversation with Yedda Morrison, describes a poetics that seeks an alternative way, a poetics that instead provides multiple points of entry for radicalization: “If we could simply acknowledge that any move towards radicalization doesn’t always look like just one thing, that then we can begin to talk to each other,” she tells Morrison. Opposition too often, she adds, invokes the machinery of empire:

To thematize opposition for me is a direct replication of the whole machinery of the narrative of empire making, the narrative of sense making, the narrative of power-making. I think of the last decade as a time of trying to develop some way of acknowledging that there’s an arc along which people are at different points of understanding their own meaning of opposition. If we can respect this in each other, especially around issues of ethnicity and those things which are more thematically recognizable, they don’t simply become part of a whole language of opposition.1

When Kim emphasizes ethnicity as “thematically recognizable” in modern and contemporary poetry, her comments anticipate the methodological critique made by Dorothy Wang in her 2014 book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Wang’s critique seeks a way beyond disciplinary oppositions (lyric/avant-garde; historicism/formalism) as well as ideological ones (politics/testimony; historical/personal); her critique leverages intricate close readings of poetic form in a range of work by Asian American poets for what that form reveals about the social world. In what she calls a “praxis-based methodology of theorizing,”2 Wang uncovers the interlinking of race, ethnicity, and poetic form in work by a number of poets not often grouped together in literary studies, poets who come from a number of different aesthetic lineages and affiliations: Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Pamela Lu. But the word “interlinking” is not quite accurate enough to describe how Wang treats form in this book: one of her main interventions is to disrupt the notion that there is something called “form” and something called “the social world” and that our task as scholars can be (or is—the notion that this task is optional is one contested by this book) to discover the intersections or overlaps between them.3

Each chapter in Thinking Its Presence focuses on a poetic form that not merely gestures toward but embodies structures of the social. Form “isomorphically captures the structural logic governing social and psychic processes,” as Wang puts it in the chapter on metaphor in Li-Young Lee’s work (57), or “mirrors the structure[s]” of “subjectification,” as Wang puts it in the chapter on the subjunctive mood in Pamela Lu’s work (297). By emphasizing structure in each case, Wang’s work rejects a genre of criticism which Divya Victor has described as one in which “formal strategies are analogies for life experience.”4 Wang also takes up the same method to read poets with diverging relationships to avant-garde poetry and canonical literary institutions (for example: Lee, canonized in the mainstream Norton anthology, and Lu, published by Language poet Lyn Hejinian’s small Atelos Press), and in doing so offers a way to engage one of the questions Kim asks in the 1997 interview: “How can we keep making wider the terms by which we politicize or radicalize?” Attending to the incremental formal work poetry can do is what allows Wang to consider as fundamental and broad a poetic category as metaphor alongside the highly specific, even idiosyncratic, category of the subjunctive mood. But whereas Kim above links the question of opposition to the “thematizing” of ethnicity, Wang’s aim is to trouble sedimented notions of opposition not at the level of theme but at the level of form. And Wang’s book challenges the longstanding tendency in criticism of avant-garde poetry to treat race and ethnicity as a matter of theme, rather than of form.5

Wang’s formalism, then, is productively read against Kim’s call for new forms of radicalism in the interview I cite above. And Wang’s readings of metaphor and the subjunctive mood in particular offer a model of criticism that is as intricate in its close readings as it is sweeping in its challenges to disciplinary norms. But what about the notion of “divestment” in Kim’s remarks? Here is what Kim seems to posit as the alternative to the narrative logic of opposition:

I think there is always some kind of invisible, constant, millisecond-by-millisecond negotiation between the form and its divestment, between the poem and the world, that you’re engaging every time you decide to write anything.6

Does Kim suggest a parallel between poem and form, and between divestment and world, as if the poem were the form and the world were something else? How can a poem divest from the world and yet be resolutely of it? What if a poem divests from its own form?

In order to address these questions I want to question one specific aspect of Wang’s method, which is whether that method has the capacity to deal with form as well as its divestment. Wang uncovers how catachresis within a poem like Lee’s “Persimmons” structures the processes of cultural and linguistic naturalization (67) and the way the logic of the subjunctive mood in Lu’s Pamela structures the logic of racial interpellation (289). (I mention these two chapters in particular because the method seems especially delineated and close to the page, but other chapters follow the same methodological principle.) There is no poem without form (no such thing as free verse, as Williams would say), but how can Wang’s method address moments of what Kim calls divestment? How can the method deal with a poem of formal failure, rejection, or nonpoetic rhetorical tropes? How can an assessment of such formal failures assume a critical stance that does not neatly resolve into the whole-language opposition Kim asks us to think beyond?

Ginger Ko’s recent book Inherit offers a particular case study in which the poem divests from form, even from the start, by inviting and then undermining two rhetorical registers: testimony and translation. Ko’s book, a multivocal engagement with immigration, assimilation, motherhood, and intergenerational trauma, opens with a poem named for three years that contrasts the thematic with the formal:

1930-1963-1984

 

This blood

lent branch

by branch with

the lesson

that it was never meant to be unbound:

I don’t care what

freedom has led you

to believe—this blood is for testament.7

The years in the poem’s title might refer to the birth years of three voices throughout the book—voices that are differentiated but also overlap—but also, set hyphenated as one compound, suggest the compounding of generational experience, the “branch / by branch” outreaching of affect and memory along the family tree. The “testament” in this opening poem’s last line anticipates other moments throughout Inherit in which speakers deliver “testimony”: later on a voice tells us, “I came back from Japan when the Gold Banner Manchurians were labeled as class enemies / in my long days of confinement I didn’t stop writing”;8 elsewhere a voice remembers, “She preferred not to think about the Red Guard stamping up the stairs to fetch her mother, who then disappeared for years. Now that her mother was living with her in America, she found herself spitting back injustices until her tongue ran dry.”9

The “testament” of Inherit invites and then disrupts the poem-as-testimony in the book’s entire first fifty-seven-page section by setting each poem on the left across from a poem on the right set under the word “transl.” Facing the poem quoted above, for example, we get this:

transl.

 

Married for five years, her husband gave her a credit card to use in case of emergency. On the way to a friend’s birthday party, she stopped for a clutch of flowers and found she had no cash. That night her husband hung his mouth down, because at the time life was very small and one could waste time showing disapproval for insignificant things. It was a lesson she never forgot, and years later when her five-year-old daughter unraveled the fabric rosebuds displayed on the dining room table, had forcibly blossomed them into full-headed roses, she wept and beat the floor with her hands because at the time life was very small and one could waste time.10

Consider the title: “transl.,” abbreviated and italicized, not quite the more standard “trans.” of citational convention but set with an extra letter; set as a subhead more than a title; an unconventional mark. And to read this paragraph as a translation is to question its status: both pages are in the same language, English; one is in verse, the other in a prose paragraph; the content doesn’t seem to track—do the themes of testament, freedom, blood, inheritance? The translation that follows the first section of “1930-1963-1984” both does and does not interpret, transmit or, in the Latin origins of “translate,” “carry across”—which is also the Greek origin of “metaphor.” The most obvious form of translation might be between Chinese and English, for this Chinese American poet writing about immigration and inherited traumas of flight. Instead, the translation is doing something else entirely despite announcing itself as a moment of legibility.

To take another example, consider this one-line translation that follows a poem about going to the market and remembers “my father’s land-born riches: strange wild parrots”:11

transl.

 

A constant fear of furthering the sequence.12

And this one-word translation, which follows a poem that includes the lines “I’m not into anything these days / I swallow it down”:13

transl.

 

legacy14

In cases like these the “translation,” indexical, increasingly more abbreviated, functions as a way to reread the testament. And yet in other cases the “transl.” appears as capacious, diverging, allowing the poems on left and right simply to be read together for what emerges between them, incrementally and at an angle—undoing the work of translation and testament.

It’s also possible to read “fear of sequence” as a reflection on Inherit as a critique of poetic sequence and seriality—again even where that form diverges. I have been describing left-hand and right-hand poems, but Inherit is also two long poems set together in the same book that contain sequences within them. The first’s title, “Lacunae,” refers to a blank space or missing portion of a bound book or manuscript; it also, of course, refers to language that has been obscured or wiped away by damage to paper or parchment. The second, “Sequelae,” indicates the aftereffects of disease or injury, here the aftereffects of inherited trauma. To fear the sequence, then, suggests both fear of promulgating the legacy of intergenerational trauma as well as fear of putting these passages (or poems, or poems within poems) down on the page in this sequence. Joseph Conte contrasts a poetic sequence, which depends on its order to make meaning, with a poetic series, which contains discrete “modules” whose placement is not assigned by an external schema: “A sequence is a hypotactic structure (meaning, ‘arranged one under another’) whose elements are subordinate to or dependent on other elements for their meaning,” but “the series, however, is a paratactic structure (meaning, ‘arranged side by side’) whose elements, although related by the fact of their contiguity, are nevertheless autonomous.”15 By leveraging both seriality—translations that at times seem modular and at others vitally linked to the language they follow—and sequence—poetry that thematizes legacy and actively questions the logic of that legacy—Inherit engages both hypotactic and paratactic structures in order to move away from “the narrative of sense making” Kim describes.

To identify the social meanings embedded in those structures is the kind of formal intervention Wang asks us to make. And above I have briefly begun to historicize the poetic forms Ko draws on, which is the methodological intervention Wang asks us to make: a longer version of this discussion would trace the social embeddedness of seriality and sequence (and translation, and testament) that has constituted those forms from the beginning. And to more attentively, historically, theoretically trace the divergences from those forms will more fully reckon with what Wang calls for at the end of Thinking Its Presence: to recognize “the relation—sometimes mysterious but always abiding—between all poetic utterances and the subjectivities and histories from which they spring” (305), including those utterances that thematize and formalize their own rejections of form. Ko writes: “days of war are over / now just a modern fear,” the poem turning away from its own history even as it traces its shapes on the page: “the world is silent with words I don’t bother understanding.”16

In her introduction to Thinking Its Presence, surveying the misguided state of criticism on all ethnic American poetry, Wang mentions that misreading that has haunted African American verse: “If minority writers are acknowledged as producing literature at all, it is a literature that functions mimetically and sociologically as a ethnographic window into another ‘subculture’—or, in Founder Thomas Jefferson’s words, a poetry of the ‘senses only, not the imagination’” (20).1 Citing Jefferson’s derogation of Phillis Wheatley when describing the tendency to interpret minority poetry “mimetically and sociologically” demonstrates the centuries-long persistence of racialized reading practices across American poetics.2 Further, this reference connects two threads of Wang’s work that I wish to intertwine further.

The first is her call for reading multiethnically, “examin[ing] the connections between Asian American poets and poets and writers from other minority groups” (305). Indeed, often one thing “better left unsaid” (16) among scholars is sustained examination of the relationship between, say, Asian American and African American poetry—although critics like Evie Shockley3 are analyzing the latter in terms similar to Wang’s. Reading multiethnically requires eschewing approaches that address only “recognizably black” (Nielsen 539) elements in poems by black writers (and so forth) and grappling instead with those thematic, formal, and political qualities of individual poems and bodies of work that transgress supposed racial boundaries.

The second thread is the model Wang provides for countering misreadings of ethnic poetry—which date at least to Jefferson, often erupting into controversy—by not only reading the poems through public reactions, as is common, but also using the poems to elucidate arguments surrounding them. Wang asserts: “Critics are more likely to think about formal questions—say, poetic tone and syntax—when speaking about Ashbery’s poems but almost certainly to focus on political or black ‘content’ when examining the work of Amiri Baraka. . . . We should, I argue, be reading both minority poets and canonical poets with attention to formal concerns and the social, cultural, historical, and literary contexts” (xx–xxi). In parallel, we must address both form and content in the scuffles that emerge around poems when race is at stake, rather than focusing only on their content, which enables dismissing some concerns as “political.” However, “the primacy of race in the US imaginary and reality . . . has been, and continues to be, determinant of the forms of our textual production” (19).

To illustrate, I will address two starkly different instances of public misreading of poetry and race. The first is criticism of African American poet Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at Obama’s first inauguration; the second is the backlash prompted by Michael Derrick Hudson’s poem, published in Prairie Schooner and The Best American Poetry 2015 under his “strategy” of putting the pseudonym “Yi-Fen Chou” on pieces repeatedly rejected bearing his name (Best 167). Race-related incidents4 in the poetry world, of which these are merely two examples,5 tend to elicit virtually identical reactions, regardless of circumstances: repeatedly denigrating the poem(s) as not worth reading. Yet these pieces offer useful insights if read multiethnically: Alexander’s rejects efforts to limit its lineage to only African American antecedents, intermingling multiethnic allusions; Hudson’s illustrates the use of reading even white-authored verse with attunement to multiethnic influences. I juxtapose these two specific instances to, first, contrast the forms assumed by the attendant controversies when the poet is a person of color6 versus a white writer; and, second, echo the insistence of Wang, Timothy Yu,7 and others that reading all American poetry itself with attention to race proves useful, if we apply questions that reject binary oversimplifications. As Wang shows, “the posited choices are false ones” (10).

One of those questions might be: what is that “form” on which Wang focuses? We intuitively know what “form” and “content” mean, but reading for “form” in relation to “race” of course means more than discussing aesthetic details. “Form” often becomes a proxy for what makes a poem generically legible as such—but the standards for that legibility must be rendered transparent. Allow me to demonstrate by looking at “Praise Song for the Day” and “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve.” Analyzing the texts proves key to understanding the misrecognitions that spurred controversy and offers lessons for discussing all verse. Rather than jumping to evaluative conclusions without establishing clear evaluative terms, as though “quality” is a transcendent signifier, we must discuss the plural qualities of all poems in a descriptive, not prescriptive, mode; reading texts and their attendant controversies multiethnically can help achieve that aim.

* * *

Although the announcement that Alexander would read at Obama’s inauguration was greeted positively, the poem—and her performance—were ultimately panned by editorials and (white) poet-critics as “too prosaic”8 (Ulin) and “inauthentic” (Kirsch). Occluding Alexander’s gesture of titling her poem in reference to both African American religious music and an African oral literary tradition, this occasion was read according to white-produced standards. That reaction left the poem’s qualities underexplored in favor of nearly-uniform, yet ill-defined, condemnation of its quality.

Upon closer examination, though, “Praise Song for the Day” exhibits strategies frequently praised when practiced by white poets: Alexander’s anaphora mirrors that of pieces venerated in oral and schoolroom traditions, and the poem’s elevation of quotidian activities and everyday labor has been central to “great” American verse since at least the early twentieth century. Specifically, “love thy neighbor” evokes Frost, particularly his well-known (ironized) claim that “good fences make good neighbors.” And the references to “cross[ing] dirt roads” and “know[ing] there’s something better down the road” echo his much-misinterpreted “The Road Not Taken.” Of course, they signify on Frost with the pronounced twist of black liberation theology—assertively intertwining plural legacies.

Indeed, Alexander strove overall to address multiple ethnic experiences: the poem incorporated colloquial speech significantly, but not in ways specifically evocative of black vernacular. It hinted at the labor of the enslaved and of all working-class Americans: “Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, / who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, // picked the cotton and the lettuce, built / brick by brick the glittering edifices / they would then keep clean.” The balance between “train tracks” and “bridges,” “the cotton and the lettuce,” subtly interweaves African American, Asian American, and Latinx labor histories9—but the latter references are often ignored. Many refuse to see any one poem as both grappling with black histories and invoking Frost, let alone also alluding to other cultural heritages. But “Praise Song” insists that such simultaneous, multiple, intersecting traditions are foundational to American life.

* * *

Dwelling with Hudson’s poem understandably induces discomfort, for his hoax10 highlights contradictions between the understanding that “authenticity” is a problematically essentialist concept—and the fact that we adjust reading practices based on authorship. Rather than confront these contradictions, many simply dismissed the poem as unworthy of attention. Times columnist David Orr labels it mediocre, “perfectly fine,” before concluding that projects like BAP become “tricky” when “our ideas about excellence in poems collide with our ideas about the worthiness of poets.” Whose “ideas of excellence” are “our[s]”? Judging negatively—as did representative online comments—that “the only thing interesting about this poem is imagining the Chinese-American woman who was supposed to have written it” despite not even having “looked at the Best of . . . collection yet” (Borders), enables sidestepping a host of meaningful anxieties. Adjudging the poem mediocre without defining criteria can even bolster Hudson’s false claims about the publishing industry, reinforcing his implication that poems are interpreted only through the lens of authorship. Further, the dismissal of this poem operated somewhat differently from the dismissal of Alexander’s: critique here focused on Native editor Sherman Alexie,11 who admitted favoring the poem in part due to believing it was authored by an Asian American woman. This displaced blame onto a writer/editor of color, merely gently chiding the white poet. Yet this poem can reveal more than most accede regarding the intertwined multiethnic heritages of American poetry.

For example, the poem’s trope of inadequacy regarding the speaker’s relationship to the depicted landscape can be read in multiple ways. S/he “can never remember the names of” the flowers described and asks: “What is it I’m doing here . . . Am I supposed to say something, add / a soundtrack and voiceover? My life’s spent // running an inept tour for my own sad swindle of a vacation // until every goddamned thing’s reduced to botched captions / and dabs of misinformation.” Juxtaposing “inept,” “swindle,” and “botched” hyperbolizes the speaker’s incompetency. Orr deemed this theme “predictable,” deciding that the poem is merely “about consciousness . . . as so many poems these days tend to be.”

However, the poem intertwined references to: Greek mythology; the Bible; Western, Anglo-American Romantic lyric (bumblebee, “Ancient Purpose”); and Asian cultural stereotypes. Addressing only one of these is reductive, whether one does so to justify reading the poem as influenced by Asian American literature or to critique Hudson for appropriation, yet many white readers displayed that narrow focus. Hudson’s “fractured, // not-quite-right English” and “seeds / pooped by ancient tigers,” served as equivalents to “mascons” in black poetry, or “certain words and constructions” that “seem to carry an inordinate charge . . . [indicating] a massive concentration of Black experiential energy” (Henderson 44).

By contrast, Alexie’s subsequent explanation argued that the poem “contained nothing that [he] recognized as being inherently Chinese or Asian” and that it is instead “obsessed with European culture.” Thus we see how the evaluator’s positionality influences evaluation: Alexie’s background and experiences shaped his reading, just as many white commentators saw the poem differently, and just as I as a white scholar of African American poetries read it still differently. We must not let these limitations lead to such heavy emphasis on signal phrases/forms as to prohibit attention to the entirety of poems. That move reduces discussions about (value-laden) “quality” to a single dimension, rather than addressing poems’ many (value-neutral) qualities.

* * *

Talking together about Alexander’s and Hudson’s poems, and exposing the parallel and divergent forms of the surrounding fights, also yields new questions and clarifies terms. The tendency to zoom in on “ancestors” in the former and on “fractured, // not-quite-right English” in the latter evince clumsy efforts to grapple with how racial authenticity affects poetic evaluation—when we could be querying that very concept, addressing head-on its role in undertheorized evaluative terms. Further, the pieces’ relative similarity in terms of diction, line length, and layout demonstrates the narrow range within which most American poetry is permitted to operate. What qualities of linguistic/formal experimentation can poems exhibit to prompt wholly different questions about race and poetry—and what poems do so, but are segregated into separate conversations on the “avant-garde,” as Yu, Wang, Shockley, Nielsen, Nathaniel Mackey, Urayoán Noel,12 and others are highlighting?

It is therefore troubling that a poem’s “quality” often becomes a trump card to end these arguments. The brilliant Brian Kim Stefans even performs this move in his “Open Letter to the New Yorker” that pointed out “the racism he’s found to permeate the[ir] controversial” profile of Kenneth Goldsmith (Harriet): “The real issue with Kenny’s Michael Brown piece, to my mind, is the general awfulness of Kenny’s artistic production” (Stefans). I agree with his assessment but seek more specific terms to express it, terms less reliant on the ideal that all good critics can agree on certain markers of aesthetic/formal quality and goodness/awfulness. That awfulness is tied to aesthetics, politics, and myriad inextricable issues that must be brought to light, examined as plural, intersecting qualities. (Orr highlighted that perhaps the most interesting outcome of the controversy was Alexie’s dissemination of the criteria by which he chose the poems for BAP 2015; rendering such clarity more widespread would certainly be productive.)

The requirement to respond publicly to race-related poetic incidents understandably provokes knee-jerk responses. But our critical conversations must be subtler, addressing unexamined assumptions about poetic “quality.” The useful question is not whether these pieces are excellent or “awful,” but what work they can do, and for whom. For critics of ethnic poetry, these poems and events help identify modern iterations of Jefferson’s dismissal of Wheatley’s verse as a product of “the senses only, not the imagination.” The expanded “imagination” needs to be that of critics, who at times remain behind poets in complexity needed to address how readings of race remain tied to the “senses.” A step toward expansively asking new questions can result from reading all poems multiethnically, in modes that embrace the non-binary multiplicity of allusions and lineages that constitute American poetry. Doing so may be enabled by at least bringing into the same spaces conversations on black, Asian American, Latinx, Native, and white poetries. That can leave us on uncertain terrain—but it is a necessary start, for if we attend to the intertwined heritages of poems and their contexts, they themselves help guide us toward richer “cross-cultural” (Alexie) analysis and clearer articulation of all analytical terms.

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. “Sherman Alexie Speaks Out on the Best American Poetry 2015.” Best American Poetry (blog). September 7, 2015.

Alexie, Sherman, and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2015. New York: Scribner, 2015.

Borders, Dorothy. “Poetry Sunday: The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve.” The Nature of Things (blog). September, 13, 2015.

Harriet staff. “‘Open Letter to the New Yorker’ from Brian Kim Stefans Points Out Structural Racism of Goldsmith Profile.” Poetry Foundation (blog) October 5, 2015.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Jarrett, Gene. Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Kirsch, Adam. “Adam Kirsch on Elizabeth Alexander’s Bureaucratic Verse.” The New Republic, January 20, 2009.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “This Ain’t No Disco.” In The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1997–2000, edited by Joseph Donahue and Ed Foster, 536–46. Jersey City: Talisman House, 2002.

Orr, David. “Michael Derrick Hudson Posed as a ‘Yi-Fen Chou’: Did the Name Sell His Poem?” New York Times, September 9, 2015.

Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011.

Stefans, Brian Kim. “Open Letter to the New Yorker.” Free Space Comix: The Blog. October 4, 2015.

Ulin, David. “Inaugural Poem Is Less Than Praiseworthy.” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2009.

Wang, Dorothy. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Experimental and formal readings of poetry are dependent on the recognition of the experiment, which is often a racialized endeavor. Conversely, lyric readings are dependent on the recognition of the subject, which too is the process of racialization. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, by Dorothy Wang, takes up the recognition of the experiment and its subject by examining current methodologies of poetic genre and form. Throughout the book Wang forensically examines the continuity of blanket whiteness at poetry conferences, journals, and criticism forums. Materially, she lays out a landscape in which nonwhite critics have little structural presence in the conceptualization re: experimentalism. In this oeuvre, it should not surprise that poems by Asian American poets are allotted into formulaic projections, their language relegated to secondary forms: an argument so often debunked yet as Thinking Its Presence displays, has become incorporated into the marrow of US poetics.

While being a groundbreaking text on Asian American poetics, Thinking Its Presence situates the racialization of the lyric vs. experimental debate for the field of poetry studies. Lyric poetry has been defined in relation to the subject position; its form is said to posture a narrative or offer individual insight and personal feeling. The white lyric poet is in conversation with or against the nation state, and their work is to themselves. Experimental poetry supposedly strikes against this subject-driven poetry through formal inventions that antagonize quaint notions of inspiration, self, and feeling.

Recognition is pivotal and essential to this rendering of form and genre1. Whether or not the vehicle has been witnessed and for whom the omission remains is one of Wang’s central arguments. For these reasons, formal methodologies might be best described as a practice of racialized reading and recognition practices, and not a structure of learned sophistication. Wang argues,

Whether critics focus solely on ethnic content in more mainstream Asian American poetry or whether critics ignore issues of race in avant-garde Asian American poetry and privilege the “purely” literary or formal (against the ethnic), the full complexity of Asian American poetry—and minority American poetry—has not been acknowledged. These critical approaches profoundly impoverish our understanding of the complex multidimensionality and contradictions of American and English-language poetry. (33)

Rather than taking up form as set of recognizable devices, techniques, stabilized for close reading as previous studies have performed, or isolating content, Wang takes up form as the mediated and unstable structures of politicized language formation. The forms Wang examines range from: metaphor, translation, irony, parody, difficulty, and abstraction/grammar. Utilizing the poetic forms of “lyric” poets such as Li-Young Lee and Marilyn Chin, Wang unhinges the racialized dynamics of their genre limitation. If say, “unreadability” or “difficulty” (as narrative, beautiful, direct poetry allows for easy consumption, which the avant-garde purports to push against) marks the difference between lyric (and here, lyric does not fluidly absorb the “ethnic” as Lee and Chin are not read as lyrically writing about an abstract white self but divulging the secrets of ethnicity) and experimental, where could they fit? Wang interrogates how Chin’s deployment of irony and Lee’s unstable metaphors have been managed as content and not form in order for their work to remain in the thresholds of lyric poetry, rather than experiments of their own. She argues that previous formal reading techniques have been unable to register the Asian American subject, and work instead to conflate readings of race to a subpar category. Throughout the book she offers new ways to read Asian American poetry as connected experiments, rather than as didactic ethnic markers of history.

In my discussion I will focus on Wang’s convincing argument that US experimental poetic studies and its criticism is rooted in racial dispossession. Through my engagement with Wang, I wish to display how the methodology of Thinking Its Presence pushes forth a radical, materialist politics that the textual arguments themselves often do not fully encapsulate. Ultimately I wish to argue that Thinking Its Presence lays the groundwork for a premier poetic studies imbued in institutional critique, racial politics, that tends most carefully to poiesis.

* * *

In chapter 5, “Undercover Asian: John Yau and the Politics of Ethnic Identification and Self-identification,” Wang analyzes the criticism poet John Yau received while critiquing the whiteness of American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, an anthology of US poetry. In the chapter Wang describes the racialization of the debate and recounts a familiar mise-en-scène: Yau writes a critique of the racial makeup of the anthology (mostly white! surprise!). The editor Eliot Weinberger responds not by addressing the critique but by demanding racial evidence of Yau: namely, has Yau behaved authentically minor thus far? Weinberger responds not to the criticism of the anthology but by stating that Weinberger himself is more authentic than Yau (“I spent years studying Chinese—which John can barely speak and cannot read” [173]). Through this familiar scène-en-scène, structural critiques of the anthology become absolved as personal drama.

Taking up the criticism leveled concerning authenticity, Wang examines the use of parody in Yau’s “Genghis Chan: Private Eye.” Throughout this forty-four-part poem that spans Yau’s many poetry collections, a Genghis Khan character is refashioned through the detective persona of Charlie Chan. In the series, Wang displays how Yau parodies detective work as the processes of racial assimilation. The practice of the detective: the guises, the guises for passing, the gathering of the other’s information, organizing their stories to decide and select the truth to be accepted—the detective is the perfect racial parody/allegory. The parody of Charlie Chan, who is a white appropriation of the oriental stereotype, is enacted through the refashioning of Genghis Khan, its masculinist historical contradiction. Yau’s parody of the racist detective conqueror, or racist construction of a simulacra of the detective reveals the racialized labor in both the figure, and the author. Pleading with injury is what the victim does and confession is the criminal’s activity: mocking the agenda of the agent as the agent is the role of someone who has already crossed and can signal?

Of the political possibilities of Yau’s parody Wang writes, “Given the overwhelming power and ingrainedness of American racial representation and discourses, the degree to which any parodic text can effectually undermine or overthrow remains an open question” (212). Yau’s “Genghis Chan” as a critical figure to assimilation narratives remains debatable. Yet, chapters 5 and 6 spotlight the structural positioning of nonwhite criticism as formally destabilized through racial dispossession. In the case of Yau’s criticism of Weinberger’s anthology, akin to the function of “Genghis Chan,” Yau’s lack of authenticity was under investigation. The setup was in itself a kind of a parody: a critique of whiteness must come at the behest of verified non-whiteness, which can only be approved by whiteness. In the case of Yau, and as Wang demonstrates, parody might be one response to the phenomena of verification as it allows for repetition and reexamination. However, it is a tenuous process as the form is wholly dependent on recognition.

Additionally, and through Weinberger’s criticism of Yau and Yau’s poetics, we can see the historically rooted dichotomy imposed by experimental poetry criticism. The marker of racial dispossession means that one cannot speak of it too often, for fear of being marked aesthetically infantile. For nonwhite poets writing about immigration, race, or what is visibly viewed as immigration/race will mark them a lyric poet. And yet apparently, not writing explicitly about (or parodying) race, immigration, assimilation marks the Asian American poet an unqualified critic of their racialized existence.

Pushing beyond existence, what are the racial politics, the political potential of an Asian American poetics? In Wang’s extrapolation on the singularity of Asian American Poetry (rooted in a complicated relationship to immigration, colonialism and language, and permeant foreignness) and Asian American-ness (the endless wars, the forgotten wars) she leaves a potential either/or step. Citing a verdict from Plessy v. Ferguson Wang argues that “the Chinese were seen as more unassimilable than even ex-chattel slaves” (25). And cites Supreme Court Justice Harlan’s dissent saying as much. While assimilation is a point of contention that Asian American poetry will continue to grapple with, this variant elides how in the torturous present of segregation, Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation for all, including Asian Americans. Any comparison—as more—elides how Brown v. Board of Education overturned Rice v. Lum, the 1927 Supreme court case that ruled against Chinese students from attending white schools2. In effect, how rights for nonwhite persons are won and how freedom is conceptualized expands the framing of as more. Asian American history cannot be discussed in isolation, as it is intimately intertwined with antiwar, Civil Rights, and transnational feminist social movements. A horizontal discussion, rather than a comparative one, is not about inclusion or additions: it’s imperative to the reckoning of Asian American. The formation and trajectory of Asian Americans are relational processes and in pushing for a distinctively nonwhite, Asian American poetic trajectory, Thinking Its Presence limits its engagement with the politics of multiethnic coalitions, histories, and antagonisms.

There are two instances in particular that struck as constrained encounters full of potential. First is the discussion of Li-Young Lee’s usage of metaphor, and second is the function of irony and race mixture in Marilyn Chin’s poetics.

In chapter 2, “Metaphor, Desire, and Assimilation in the Poetry of Li-Young Lee,” Wang lays out a formative reading of Lee’s work, and the racial work of forms. She juxtaposes the biography of the poet to his poetics. In countless interviews Lee denounces the politics of his work for a more digestible “universal” art narrative (51). And yet by formally reading Lee’s metaphors, Wang exhibits its politics. Wang writes of Lee, “Metaphor’s structure—always reaching toward but never arriving—also mirrors the structure of memory, a major obsession with Lee, and the immigrant and hyphenated poet’s relationship to language, both the ancestral language from which he no longer has access and the new language, English, which he strives to speak ‘properly’” (61). Even in the pursuit of a universal artistic transcendence, Wang argues that Lee’s formal experiments (metaphor) recount the processes of racial formation.

This move toward the universal, yet technically concerned with the particularistic, is a reoccurring narrative for mainstream nonwhite writers. Lee’s mainstream acceptance comes with his depoliticized, racial rhetoric. This seems to be a story that’s shared across colorlines: from immigration to assimilation to the successful writer who wishes to transcend it all. For this reason it was surprising that the chapter ended with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” with Wang writing, “This nation, this idea, and this poetry we can call ‘American’ is large and contains multitudes. Minority poets can be poets of the soul as well as of the body” (92). Perhaps in a move to contextualize Asian American Studies for readers unfamiliar, Wang compiles Lee into a familiar white canon rather than suggesting that Lee (in any movement to and away from the high towers of the canon) fundamentally question poetics a priori. This contextualization towards a white American ideal of its expanding self, while understandable, does a disservice to how Lee’s metaphor may be in conversation with Black and Latinx poetics. Labor narratives, (forced) immigration, the complexities of assimilation, and the rhetoric to transcend this history ghastly link nonwhite rhythms. In Wang’s very analysis of Lee’s metaphor these linkages can be witnessed.

This witnessing of others also occurs in chapter 4, “Irony’s Barbarian Voices in the Poetry of Marilyn Chin.” In reading the usage of irony in Chin’s poetry, Wang lays out the literary history surrounding the deployment of this form: from early claims that irony works to support and maintain structures of power, to contemporary arguments concerning heteroglossia. Wang situates Chin as both a figure that deploys the variations of irony as predescribed by canonical, white literary scholars, and at the same time altering their preexisting claims. She writes that “using a multivoiced irony allows this Chinese American female poet to mimic and dissect conflicting states of self-hatred, self-colonization, and erotic desire for the white male, even as she hits hard at forms of domination” (116).

Wang is careful to situate that Chin is not reinventing irony, but floating inside its prospects. She writes, “Chin’s use of irony does not set up simple either-or-formulations or oppositions—of ‘Chinese’ or ‘American,’ of Chinese American female victim versus Chinese male oppressor, and so on (117).” However, we find that the focus of much of Chin’s irony circles race mixture and the romance of miscegenation. Chin’s descriptions of white male lust for Asian women, and Asian male desire for white womanhood test the limits of irony in contemporary poetry. Chin’s irony is deployed at foundational US arguments regarding, race and immigration, but particularly and repeatedly concerns around race-mixture. In Chin’s poetry, white men and white women appear as lovers and colonizers who desire and harm. Likewise, the various speakers of Chin’s poetry desire them and mock them. Of the descriptions on the potentiality of race mixture in “Happiness: A Manifesto,” Wang writes, “There seems to be no conflicted ambiguity to this sexual hunger, though there is obvious ironic humor in the description (‘My post-colonial position . . . was supine’)” (148). Through the deployment of irony, the speakers range from activists to recklessly active settlers to the politically unhinged. Akin to parody Wang notes that irony is dependent on its political recognition.

In addition, perhaps misrecognition as a device is useful as it reflects contemporary Asian American politics. Wang writes, “This fear and loathing and celebratory desire structure the Asian American woman’s subjectivity and her desires for whiteness (and white recognition for her as a subject, citizen, and as a poet)” (145). Desire for whiteness through race mixture (miscegenation) is in itself an ironic approach when taking the greater US context into consideration, particularly chattel slavery and genocide. From systematic forms of gendered violence and rape, forced sterilization, and boarding schools, to relocation—for native, Black, and Latinx communities—romantic miscegenation covers but one aspect of the fears and desires of racialized existence. In fact, romance through this process is a kind revisioning. Utilizing race mixture as a metonym for assimilation may be ironic: it may also be literal and historical. And through this Wang points out, Chin is at risk of perpetual misreading. Which leads to me wonder about the race mixture unimagined in Chin’s poetics that can be imagined in the analysis, as the analysis succeeds in opening up something else.

* * *

Throughout the text Wang models institutional critique for poetic studies. She takes up familiar arguments in literary scholarship (the racelessness of forms, racial authenticity, originality) and juxtaposes their argument with their events. Universities, presses, conferences, and critics are examined historically and theoretically. The methodology exhibits that nonwhite poets and critics make poetry and poetry criticism despite field constraints, and in spite of the institutional conditions against their making.

For this reason, I found it peculiar that Wang opens the book by crediting the field debt of experimental poetry to the very figures who normalized racial antagonisms in the scholarship. While critiquing the racial politics of the 2008 PLMA special issue of “The New Lyric Studies,” Wang writes of the contributor Marjorie Perloff, “Anyone who works on avant-garde poetic writing in this country owes a debt to her—including myself” (7). Throughout the text, Wang’s methodology and material pushes against the gesture of debt, origins, and order, as much of her argument concerns how the field of poetic studies refused to read Asian American poets, or misread them consistently. Of this poetic institutional history Wang writes,

To discuss American poetry and not discuss a single American minority poet—or include only the token one or two—speaks volumes about both a delusive blindness and a double standard in poetry studies. Because minority subjects and cultures as viewed in the American imaginary as occupying the realm of the bodily, the material, the social, they are often overlooked when considering questions of literary and the cultural (in the sense of cultural value and high culture). Form, whether that of traditional lyric or avant-garde poems, is assumed to be the provenance of a literary acumen and culture that is unmarked but assumed to be white. (20)

Providing examples Wang discusses the dynamics of “The New Lyric Studies” issue. The issue rehashed many of the polemics (we aren’t studying enough of the great poets anymore) and grievances (no one cares about poetry anymore) of poetic studies in its usual “post-race” fashion. Eight of the nine scholars featured were white, and they wrote implicitly or explicitly about whiteness and poetry. The PMLA is just one example of many in Thinking Its Presence. Poetic formations have been and remain structurally white in its imagination of the reader, speaker, and thinker. The evidentiary findings in her book support this claim.

With this example Wang discusses the 2010 “Rethinking Poetics” conference at Columbia University. Akin to the 2008 PMLA issue, nonwhite critics existed as token figures, exceptions to the blueprint. Throughout we see the inclusion of nonwhite critics and poets to institutional forums as just that: inclusions. Their presence is treated as unpivotal, unfoundational, unorganizing: tertiary.3 So then where does nonwhite poetry criticism come from, and is our debt to our very antagonizers? This argumentative yet methodological contradiction is painful as much as it is erotic: Wang points to the roots of whiteness in poetic studies as needing to be pulled up and out, while rhetorically suggesting the notion of repayment (what is a debt other than a transaction that remains?). Citationally, white poets and authors continue to appear; in the analyses a nonwhite, cross-racial future looms.

If there is a debt to the tradition-building of an experimental poetic studies, it is to Thinking Its Presence and figures such as Dorothy Wang, who forge political and unfixed theorems for the experiment poetry allows.

In her discussion of Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel, Dorothy Wang excerpts a passage that continues to bear relevance on questions of literary authorship, subjectivity, and race:

The self was a mystery so consumed by its own questioning that it had no room left for us, a condition which we nevertheless preferred since we were totally unprepared for the alternative. . . . We desperately depended upon the spectacle of the large “I,” with all its artifice and white noise, to keep us alive and functional in the world. We sometimes wondered who this “I” really was. Raw speculations placed “I” at the dawn of Western civilization. . . . There was no way to find “I” without by definition losing it, and therefore losing ourselves. (33–34)

As Wang points out, Lu’s writing pushes against normative conceptions of the self. Even as Lu “resists her interpellation into the category of identity implied by ‘ancestral memory,’ she does not find solace in that very American refuge, the privileged idea of the ‘self’ or the ‘individual’ (or its corollary reserved for ethnic Americans: ‘identity’)” (286). Extending Wang’s analysis of Pamela: A Novel to other examples, I suggest that both the Asian American poet and her critic anticipate the lyric’s current configurations. In tackling the reception of minoritized poetry, Wang and Lu mark a lacuna wherein experimental poets of color—forever subject to exclusionary reading practices—have recently contended with a shift in the politics of recognition. Spectacularly late to diversity management, literary institutions have finally centered writers of color in light of a heightened awareness of racial injustice and the global resurgence of white nationalism. And yet, this inclusiveness has mostly followed the script of multiculturalism, incorporating otherness by privileging certain aesthetics over others. While poets such as Bhanu Kapil, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Eunsong Kim, Layli Long Soldier, Demian DinéYazhí, and Precious Okoyomon reenvision the self—displacing the waning influences of a white avant-garde lineage—a possessive individualism characterizes US poetry. To map the lyric’s contemporary subject, I explore how a propertied self becomes compatible with anti-racist speech. My discussion makes connections between critical and literary texts in what could only be a preliminary attempt at charting the relationship between race, neoliberalism, and lyric subjectivity.

According to Grace Hong, “Because neoliberalism is so centrally a refusal to recognize its own violence, and a stubborn pretense that the racial, gendered, and sexual basis for the distribution of protected life and premature death has been remedied and leveled, it is structured by a deep disavowal” (Hong 29). To position Pamela: A Novel against such dismissal of structural violence, Wang illuminates the text’s critique of post-identitarian discourses and the straw-man of essentialized identity. As Wang argues throughout her book, critics of both experimental and mainstream poetry have de-racialized form, positing “the provenance of a literary acumen and culture that is unmarked but assumed to be white” (20). Poets of color, in turn, are taught to avoid identity politics. By this logic, to see race in aesthetic form is to essentialize identity and uphold a fixed, transparent notion of the “I” that does not account for the social mediation of the self. For Wang, Lu’s writing debunks this dichotomy between avant-garde authorship and raced perspective. Demonstrating the degree to which form is always already an extension of identity formation, Lu articulates not the fiction of a stable self but the processes whereby subjects are continuously shaped by race, gender, sexuality, class, and other vectors of power. The social field is what the text navigates, then, with a deftness and complexity that critics have neglected in the work of Lu and other Asian American poets. Here Wang lays groundwork for an urgently needed model for reading poetry beyond calcified paradigms. Sensitizing us to the ways race and form are enmeshed, Wang traces an othered subjectivity in Lu’s writing that escapes whiteness and heteronormativity even as it shows itself to be structured through the latter’s optics. Because of their double consciousness, the experimental poet of color is able to anticipate the white reader and intervene in racialization—an imaginative striving and form of survival that I interpret as the taking back of scopic power. Instead of allowing the white gaze to continue seeing without being seen—presuming an unmarked vantage point—Lu’s speaker upends this very act. At the same time as Lu seems to overcompensate for her otherness through linguistic virtuosity, her writing encodes an “unplaceable essence” that resists legibility, eluding the optics of whiteness (Lu 31). By focusing on the subjunctive mood in Pamela: A Novel, Wang thus argues that Lu situates Asian American diasporic experience less through readily identifiable thematic markers than the opacities of grammatical structures. Borrowed from a poem by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, the title of Wang’s book highlights this dynamic whereby alterity is experienced and manifested at the threshold of meaning, beyond the level of denotation. A secretive and slippery presence that proves irreducible to “superficial citations” or the “reifiable and quantifiable,” racial otherness inhabits language as mood, feeling, syntax, and tone (301–24). While indexing the harms of assimilation, Lu does not so much name her subjectivity as much as animate its (dis)location “not in a ‘here’ or ‘there’ but in the hoped-for, the contingent, the hypothetical, the impossible, the utopian, in the ‘as if’” (299).

If Thinking Its Presence situates a post-racial era before wokeness and poetry’s focus on racial justice, Wang’s readings raise the stakes of experimental writing today, shedding light on continuities. To consider the present juncture, I reframe Wang’s arguments in light of Jodi Melamed’s and Sara Ahmed’s trenchant discussions of neoliberal anti-racist discourse. Putting Wang in dialogue with other critical race scholars allows me to foreground new hegemonies in US poetry while showing the work of experimental nonwhite poets to be as crucial as ever. According to Melamed, US literature reveals how during neoliberal multiculturalism “newly privileged racial subjects have emerged—the white liberal, the multicultural American, and the multicultural global citizen, respectively—along with newly stigmatized racial subjects, including the un-American, the overly race conscious, the monocultural, and the illegal” (Melamed 13). For Ahmed, the self-declared white anti-racist would be one such subject of racial privilege. Analyzing how the very recognition and declaration of one’s whiteness often ends up reproducing white supremacy, Ahmed writes, “Calling for whiteness to be seen can exercise rather than challenge white privilege, as the power to transform one’s vision into a property or attribute of something or somebody” (Ahmed 2004). By linking Melamed’s and Ahmed’s critiques of the propertied subject, I argue that two recent poems by mainstream and experimental poets alike reveal an idealization of whiteness despite their purported anti-racism. The fact that each poem limits itself to the declaration of whiteness points to a possessiveness masked as wokeness, narrating a self whose ownership has formal as well as political bearings. If Lu’s writing asks us to rethink the opacities of subjectivity and the social embeddedness of form, the poems I discuss claim a transparency that could only be manufactured. They reiterate whiteness as a “‘standpoint’, a location from which to see selves, others, and national and global orders” (Frankenberg 113).

Published within the last few years in the New Yorker and Boston Review, Jameson Fitzpatrick’s “White Gays”1 and Juliana Spahr’s “My White Feminism” locate their speakers at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality.2 Signaling awareness of how white privilege operates in queer and feminist circles, Fitzpatrick and Spahr perform a well-worn script of admission. Each poem registers the familiarity of this script by capitalizing their categories of identity, ironizing the act of self-labeling:

What I’m trying to say is

proximity is the problem with White Gays.

I’m one of them, so I can say that. (Fitzpatrick)

Germaine Greer is a white feminist.

And I resemble that remark.

All day long My White Feminism do this and do that. (Spahr)

Positioning themselves at the same time as they poke fun at their self-designation, Fitzpatrick and Spahr manufacture a kind of dis-identification. By admitting to their racial privilege, the speakers of each poem simultaneously assume proximity to and distance from whiteness, invoked here not as a formation of state power but as a checklist of undesirable social dispositions. In Fitzpatrick’s poem, the clueless figure of entitlement is also an object of desire, a cishet white male train passenger who splays on the seats of a train. For Spahr, it is the Australian feminist Germaine Greer who triggers the leftist academic’s ambivalence and handwringing, leading her to feel “stupid rude / for talking to them about Germaine Greer and her pretty crotch.” Despite their affiliations with mainstream and experimental camps, respectively, Fitzpatrick’s and Spahr’s poems converge formally and thematically. Reframing the aesthetics of abjection that has characterized much white-authored queer/feminist poetry in the past decade, the declarative “I” of “White Gays” and “My White Feminism” cannot but draw on the impulses of Confessionalism, foregrounding shame as an affective model for white subjectivity. The speaker of “My White Feminism” even professes to having edited “the listing of childhood memories into a sex scene” for sensational effect and googling Sylvia Plath along with Ted Hughes’s other lovers, satirizing her self-centeredness. “White Gays” similarly reflects on its composition, describing the universalism of white cishet male subjectivity in literature as the epitome of privilege: “It is also my not having / to describe his leather loafers for you / to fill in the white space of his body / straight and able.”

Pointing to the literary expressions of whiteness that inform their writing, Spahr and Fitzpatrick recast the white anti-racist’s anxieties and complicities through the lens of gender and sexuality. Such triangulation, however, demands analysis on a scale larger than the world of each poem permits. Even as both poets contextualize themselves within literary tradition, I argue that their poems narrow the scope of race relations, relegating racism to the sphere of individual psychology as “a matter of ignorance, irrationality, feeling, or habit” (Melamed 15). Fetishizing white guilt, each poem rebrands the admission of complicity as virtue signaling. As Ahmed suggests, “The white subject that is shamed by whiteness is also a white subject that is proud about its shame. The very claim to feel bad (about this or that) also involves a self-perception of ‘being good’” (Ahmed 2004). By signaling an ability to see racism where the normative white queer/feminist fails to do so, Spahr and Fitzpatrick center not the voices of people of color but the individualized possibility of white exceptionalism. Directed at what could only be a white audience and imagined community, “My White Feminism” and “White Gays” repackage the self for woke times, reducing anti-racism to an attribute of the intersectionally enlightened, aptly guilt-ridden subject. Never mind that intersectionality was first theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, or that the critique of whiteness as a social location goes as far back as W. E. B Du Bois’s The Souls of White Folk (1920). Beyond Spahr’s passing mention of Black feminists (intended to mock the tokenizing gestures of a reading group), neither poem works through the white anti-racist’s indebtedness to the labor of Black thinkers. Here I contend that the lyric expression of shame proves strategic. While letting the subject dwell “ethically” on their positionality, shame about being white does not relinquish racial power. Instead, the amplification of shame drowns out a critical and spiritual debt whose recognition would threaten self-possessed whiteness. What Lu calls “the spectacle of the large ‘I’’’ thus restores each speaker’s sense of ownership precisely as “artifice and white noise”—the self-referential loop of the propertied lyric. Duly catalogued and personalized, whiteness becomes a condition that might be psychologically contained and managed by its beneficiaries rather than structurally dismantled in relation and solidarity with people of color. In “White Gays,” the critique of white supremacy becomes so banal as to lose its historical specificity and provenance altogether, flattened at the end of the poem into a universal “we” and diluted into the lessons of the classroom: “Privilege is a tease, we forget, / what we learned in grade school.”

It becomes provocative, along these lines, to compare Spahr’s and Fitzpatrick’s identitarianism with the opaque subjectivity of Pamela: A Novel. To do so is to follow Wang and think the presence of racial formation, a task Spahr’s and Fitzpatrick’s poems fall short of when they atomize whiteness within the individual, failing to interrogate it as “a creative authority, a creative regime” (Jennings 60). If whiteness shapes the creative imagination through processes of representation, Lu’s text rejects the givenness of identity categories. In this sense, Lu mobilizes “Asian American,” “queer,” “postcolonial,” and “diasporic” not as attributes to be (re)possessed but as political coordinates to be critically and imaginatively navigated. Embodying these descriptors through the subjunctive mood and other devices, Pamela: A Novel scrambles the grammar of the self—the colonizing and assimilative drive of the English language. Where “My White Feminism” and “White Gays” proceed denotatively by naming the social traits of whiteness—retreating, in turn, from the linguistic exploration of identity—Lu’s speaker inhabits language self-reflexively. As if addressing the construction of guilt at the core of the white anti-racist’s moral compass, Lu theorizes how affect escapes ethical categories: “In my mother’s world a painting always bled from being right, whereas in mine it bled freely as the slightest consequence of its existence or else it had no more blood to give, and none of this had anything to do with being either right or wrong” (Lu 71–72). Accordingly, Pamela: A Novel calls for a poetics that seeks less to name the self or claim its ethics than perform an ontological richness and embeddedness: “Everything boiled down to ‘a feeling,’ which could be demonstrated but never named because its very precision existed on another level altogether, irrelevant to the field of names” (32). Implicit in this statement, as Wang observes, is a critique of diasporic literature’s reliance on legible ethnic/racial markers—what Lu captures elsewhere as “tedious round-table affirmations of ‘identity-related’ experiences” (19).

It is ironic that Spahr’s and Fitzpatrick’s poems rehearse precisely such affirmations. If experimental poets of color have long contended with the charge of essentialism by remaking the self, producing the most formally innovative work of the contemporary era, Spahr’s and Fitzpatrick’s poems reckon with whiteness as a newly visible identity under crisis. Once maligned by critics such as Marjorie Perloff as the racialized negative to avant-garde poetry, identity-themed writing here becomes the province of the white gender/sexual minority whose positionality has finally been singled out. The transparency that Spahr’s and Fitzpatrick’s speakers assume—their thematic marking and narration of an ethically shameful, self-disclosing white subject—thus manifests as imaginative deficiency. Unequipped to wrestle with the underlying structures of subject formation and account for the expansiveness of the relationship between language and racial power, the prescribed forms of “My White Feminism” and “White Gays” treat identification as a site of resolution rather than contestation. Identification, in this scenario, does not work toward coalition-building. What each poem tries to resolve is not the historically fraught relationship between feminists of color and white feminists, or gay men of color and white gays, but the white feminist/queer’s ephemeral feeling of moral lack.

I conclude on a note of caution. Even as a possessive individualism underwrites the white anti-racist’s claim to moral worth, it would be a mistake to reduce this model of selfhood to the poetry of white people alone. As they iterate an intersectional analysis, the white-authored poems I have discussed reveal how the logics of racial management are alive and well in discourses of wokeness, tacitly operating in the service of whiteness at the same time as the US state openly colludes with white nationalist policy and rhetoric. Eager to revise their histories in the face of official state racism, literary institutions curate difference by privileging lyric subjectivities that are not just morally redemptive but also ethnographically packageable. When articulated by nonwhite poets, possessive individualism leads to tokenism, diluting raced experience into what bell hooks calls “spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks 21). In this sense, the current paucity of critical discussion about poetry is telling. While blogs once gave poetry criticism a vital forum, what propels careers nowadays is not so much the ways a poet’s work might be framed within the history of aesthetic forms but the degree to which it visibly satisfies the diversity mandate. Branded for consumption, radical embodiment has been converted into a personal attribute, making it easy for venues and gatekeepers to mine the possibilities of intersectionality and their attendant activist/political narratives without enacting structural change. As Ahmed puts it, “This model of cultural diversity reifies difference as something that exists ‘in’ the bodies or cultures of others . . . if difference is something ‘they are’, then it is something we ‘can have’” (Ahmed 2007, 235). Such is the framework in which young queer poets of color, now widely celebrated, have become a particularly desirable tool of diversity management. Disconnected from lineages it never wanted us to know about in the first place, our bodies, memories, and dreams are what the institution uses to shield itself, concealing archival violence and the erasure of our elders’ work. Analyzing this proprietary view of literature in the context of liberal multiculturalism in the 80s and 90s, Melamed writes:

A work of multicultural literature was understood to be an example of the value of different racialized cultures and a commodified form of racialized cultural property. The idea of culture as property owned by people of color functioned within a consumer economy in which antiracism could be expressed by a desire for diversity, which consuming racialized cultural property presumptively fulfilled. [In turn,] the author’s racialized identity was of utmost importance because information retrieval for liberal multiculturalism was tied to ideologemes of representativeness, authenticity, and “gaining voice.” (114–15)

In many ways an extension of the canon wars that Melamed examines, today’s co-optation of activist-oriented cultural pluralism is worrying for the ways it innovates ownership over otherness. As awareness of racial inequality has spread, the stage of wokeness has idealized new subjects across the color line, elevating the individual and their (multi)cultural legibility and currency at the expense of a more visionary and collective politics.  In this gap between institutions, bodies, and souls, the experimental poet of color whose embodiment is their art and whose life is their politics plays a singular if necessarily opaque role, as Wang illustrates in her discussion of Lu.  To protect themselves and the legacies of their kin, such a poet chooses not the branding of the self but what Lu would call “unclickability” (Lu 91). And yet, even this remaking of subjectivity cannot be seen as the choice of a self-possessive individual. It is, I would say, the forced choice of the dispossessed, of those who live in the throes of relation. Here I refer to experimentation in the most fundamental sense as a way of remembering, surviving, and dreaming from the margins. To quote the queer Brazilian poet Roberto Piva, “Poetry is a delirium. The poetic is itself an act of transgression in the sense that it deals with invisible things on the planet, with invisible forces. This is why I say the true poet is marginal. And there is no experimental poetry without experimental life.”

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” 2004. http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm.

Ahmed, Sara. “The Language of Diversity.” Ethnic & Racial Studies 30.2 (2007) 235–56.

Fitzpatrick, Jameson. “White Gays.” New Yorker, October 2, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/02/white-gays.

Frankenberg, Ruth. “On Unsteady Ground: Crafting and Engaging in the Critical Study of Whiteness.” In Researching Race and Racism, edited by Martin Bulmer and John Solomos. London: Routledge, 2014.

Hong, Grace Kyungwon. Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End, 1992.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Lu, Pamela. Pamela: A Novel. Atelos, 1998.

Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Spahr, Juliana. “My White Feminism.” Boston Review, April 7, 2016. http://bostonreview.net/poetry/NPM-2016-juliana-spahr-my-white-feminism.

Wang, Dorothy. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.