Chapter 43 - Asian American Poetry

Summary

Asian American poetry has always been interested in both polarities, but in varying proportions and to varying degrees of success. With Pound, Asia came to function as central to the West's conception of itself, which relied on an imaginary idealization of the East in orientalizing terms. From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, Asian American poetry developed and diversified rapidly and, for the first time, embraced the term Asian American as an organizing rubric. The legacies of the labor and internment experiences of the first half of the twentieth century were invisibility and silence for Asian Americans, who were marked as perpetually foreign and marginalized from representational politics. This chapter highlights the characteristics of avant-garde art. The avant-garde art work typically engages in some kind of theoretical work, which is frequently staged by the formal and stylistic properties of the work.