Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry

doi:10.1017/9781108699518.004

2 - Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2021

Michael Leong

Edited by

Timothy Yu

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Timothy Yu: Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin

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Summary

A pan-Asian American poetry has been at the forefront of innovative poetics in myriad ways. This chapter foregrounds the impact the innovative legacies of the 1980s and 1990s have had on early twenty-first-century Asian American poetry. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed within Asian American letters the success of a mainstream lyricism but were also a crucial incubation period for a counter-tradition impatient with mainstream modes of poetic expression. Three major counter-modes have come to characterize some of the finest achievements of contemporary Asian American innovative poetics: a surrealist mode, pioneered by John Yau and practiced by younger poets such as Paolo Javier; a documental mode of postmodern montage, evident in the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Walter K. Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Divya Victor; and a phenomenological mode practiced by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

Keywords

poetry Asian American contemporary lyric experimental innovative surrealism

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry , pp. 31 - 47

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108699518.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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