Chapter 49 - Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry

Summary

This chapter talks about the bilingual, also known as the multilingual traditions that so define the literature of the U.S. Mexico border, such as that written by Juan Felipe Herrera and Alurista. It argues that poetry is best served by seeing the sociocultural specificity of the various poetries as constitutive differences. For the significant number of U.S. poets who use languages other than English in their work, whether their motives are a form of realism or a pointed resistance to globalizing English varies from poet to poet. Myung Mi Kim's work, for instance, returns again and again to show how the legacies of colonialism are connected. James Thomas Stevens frequently engages with colonialism, with indigenousness, and with queerness in his poetry. One productive way to read the English that is interrupted by Narragansett in Tokinish is as suggestively reifguring lyric intimacy as necessarily always in dialogue with global exchange.