Poetry

This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th century facilitated an imagined spiritual and aesthetic accord that bridged the Pacific, and this study reads the expression and repercussions of these links in American Orientalist and Asian American poetry. After considering both the transcendence and constraints of a structure of alliance between East and West in the introductory chapter, the first half of the study examines two key American instigators of Orientalist poetics, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, who imagined an identity between Eastern philosophy and idealized notions of America. Their literary alliances imposed a singular burden on Asian American poets, and the second half of the study considers a range of formal negotiations with this legacy in the poetry of Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. In examining avant‐garde Asian American poetry against an American Orientalist past, this book reads the intersection of modernist and minority poetics.

Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model of rational exposition institutionalized under the Enlightenment. And yet, as the rhetorical figure of digression has grown increasingly marginalized within the decorum of public discourse, it has come to occupy a central position in the private discursive world of poetry. This book outlines an anatomy of “the excursus” within twentieth-Century American poetics; moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to theories of identity, this study considers the various spheres in which American writers of the period revise prior models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in the modern poem. The opening section considers the manner in which Wallace Stevens employs digression within the ars poetica genre to deconstruct aesthetic theory under High Modernism; the second chapter examines Marianne Moore’s use of the excursus to organize archival knowledge in the Progressive poetry of instruction; the third section turns to Lyn Hejinian’s construction of a digressive narratology intended to unsettle master-narratives of the Cold War era; the fourth chapter treats digression as a strategy for fashioning the self in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara; and the book concludes with a survey of “Elliptical” strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery’s aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the 21st Century.