{"id":435,"date":"2009-12-07T10:02:22","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T15:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=435"},"modified":"2010-02-11T13:46:20","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T18:46:20","slug":"on-the-small-press-and-asian-american-poetry-a-focus-on-four-way-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/07\/on-the-small-press-and-asian-american-poetry-a-focus-on-four-way-books\/","title":{"rendered":"On The Small Press and Asian American Poetry: A Focus on Four Way Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Some<\/a>
Some Offerings from Four Way Books' List<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Stephen<\/a>
Stephen H. Sohn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In thinking about the so-called state of contemporary Asian American poetry, I am most struck by the issue of the proliferation of small presses that have remained afloat through print-on-demand publication policies and through the strategic limited print-run system.\u00a0 American poets of Asian descent have certainly been a beneficiary of this shift as evidenced by hundreds of poetry books that have been published within the last decade.\u00a0 In 2008 alone, there were approximately 20 books of poetry written by Asian Americans, the majority of which were published by independent and university presses.\u00a0 Of course, on the academic end, the vast majority of Asian American cultural critiques, especially book-length studies, have focused on narrative forms, but the last five years has seen a concerted emergence in monographs devoted (in part) to Asian American poetry, including but not limited to Xiaojing Zhou’s The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry<\/em> (2006), Interventions into Modernist Cultures<\/em> (2007) by Amie Elizabeth Parry, Race and the Avant-Garde<\/em> by Timothy Yu (2008), and Apparations of of Asia<\/em> by Josephine Nock-Hee Park (2008).\u00a0 As a way to gesture toward and perhaps push more to consider the vast array of Asian American poetic offerings in light of this critical shift, I will be highlighting some relevant independent presses in some guest blog posts.\u00a0 I have typically worked to include small press and university press offerings in my courses, having taught, for example, a range of works that include Sun Yun Shin\u2019s Skirt Full of Black<\/em> (Coffee House Press), Eric Gamalinda\u2019s Amigo Warfare<\/em> (WordTech Communications), Myung Mi Kim\u2019s Commons<\/em> (University of California Press), Timothy Liu\u2019s For Dust Thou Art<\/em> (Southern Illinois University Press).<\/p>\n

In this post, though, I will briefly list and consider the poetry collections by American writers of Asian descent that have been put out by Four Way Books<\/a> (New York City), headed by founding editor and director, Martha Rhodes\u2014and will spend a little bit more time discussing Tina Chang\u2019s Half-Lit Houses<\/em> (2004) and Sandy Tseng\u2019s Sediment<\/em> (2009).\u00a0\u00a0 Currently, Four Way Books’ list is comprised of:<\/p>\n

Tina Chang\u2019s Half-Lit Houses<\/em><\/a> (2004)<\/p>\n

Pimone Triplett\u2019s The Price of Light<\/em><\/a> (2005)<\/p>\n

C. Dale Young\u2019s Second Person: Poems<\/em><\/a> (2007)<\/p>\n

Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan\u2019s Shadow Mountain<\/em><\/a> (2008)<\/p>\n

Sandy Tseng\u2019s Sediment<\/em><\/a> (2009).<\/p>\n

Were I to constellate the commonalities between these five collections, it would be clear that the editors at Four Way Books are very committed to the lyric approach to poetry, in which the connection between the \u201cwriter” and the lyric speaker seems more unified.\u00a0 I have taught Pimone Triplett\u2019s The Price of Light<\/em> in the past, specifically for my introduction to Asian American literature course.\u00a0 What I find most productive about this collection is its very focused attention on \u201clyrical issues\u201d of the mixed-race subject.\u00a0 In The Price of Light<\/em>, one necessarily observes how distance from an ethnic identity obscures any simple claim to authenticity and nativity.\u00a0 In The Price of Light<\/em>, a lyric speaker returns to one vexing question: what does it mean to be Thai?\u00a0 To answer this question, the reader is led through a unique odyssey, where issues of poetic form, tourism, and travel all coalesce into a rich lyric tapestry.<\/p>\n

C. Dale Young\u2019s The Second Person: Poems<\/em> continues the exciting poetic trajectory envisioned in his first collection, The Day Underneath the Day<\/em>.\u00a0 I am especially energized by Young\u2019s texturizing of the lyric landscape through the consideration of Caribbean geographies, ones that complicate the notion of the \u201cAmerican\u201d in Asian American literature.\u00a0 Further, the inclusion of medical vocabulary, no doubt influenced by Young\u2019s work as a physician, uniquely stylizes his poetry, offering a heterogenenous semantic terrain that is breathtaking and wide-ranging.<\/p>\n

Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan\u2019s stunning debut, Shadow Mountain<\/em>, reminds me of the importance of the \u201clatency\u201d affect that has structured the appearance of Japanese American literatures concerning the internment experience.\u00a0 It is not unlike Lee Ann Roripaugh\u2019s Beyond Heart Mountain<\/em> in this regard, and the lyrical excavation important in contouring how the internment continues to reach across generations.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d also like to consider some specific poems from Chang\u2019s Half-lit Houses<\/em> and Tseng\u2019s Sediment<\/em>.\u00a0 One of my favorite poems from Half-Lit Houses<\/em> appears early on in the book; I reprint an excerpt here:<\/p>\n

Invention<\/strong><\/p>\n

On an island, an open road
\nwhere an animal has been crushed
\nby something larger than itself.<\/p>\n

It is mangled by four o\u2019clock light, soul
\nsour-sweet, intestines flattened and raked
\nby the sun, eyes still savage.<\/p>\n

This landscape of Taiwan looks like a body
\nblack and blue.\u00a0 On its coastline mussels have cracked
\ntheir faces on rocks, clouds collapse<\/p>\n

onto tiny houses, and just now a monsoon has begun.
\nIt reminds me of a story my father told me:
\nHe once made the earth not in seven days<\/p>\n

but in\u00a0 one.\u00a0 His steely joints wielded lava and water
\nand mercy in great ionic perfection.
\nHe began the world, hammering the length<\/p>\n

of trees, trees like a war of families,
\ntrees which fumbled for grand gesture.
\nThe world began in an explosion of fever and rain.<\/p>\n

He said, Tina, your body came out floating<\/em>.
\nI was born in the middle of monsoon season,
\npalm trees tearing the tin roofs.<\/p>\n

Now as I wander to the center of the island
\nno one will speak to me.\u00a0 My dialect left somewhere
\nin his pocket, in a nursery book (6).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This poem is largely instructive in the way that Chang continually subverts the nostalgic reclamation of family history and ethnic attachments.\u00a0 The opening moves us into this framework with the graphic depiction of roadkill as a metaphor for the way that Taiwan itself might appear geographically, but we also know that this connection links itself back to the lyric speaker\u2019s heritage.\u00a0 The \u201cTina\u201d of \u201cInvention\u201d is not born in the welcoming embrace of perfect weather, but in that of \u201cmonsoon season.\u201d\u00a0 It is no surprise then that her journey to Taiwan is itself replete with a sense of isolation, as \u201cno one will speak to\u201d her.\u00a0 Tina\u2019s father is posited as a laborer, but this force is one likened to \u201ctrees like a war of families,\u201d and we begin to see the conflicts that will emerge throughout the rest of the collection.\u00a0 For instance, in \u201cFamine,\u201d the readers are treated to a historically distant poem that situates the difficult conditions that structure the family lineage of the lyric speaker:<\/p>\n

Famine<\/strong>
\n[Hunan, 1932]<\/p>\n

Mother explains her love of heat
\nas she stirs over a burned pan.<\/p>\n

We collect them one by one:
\nbeetle, ant, june bug, roach, gnat, firefly.<\/p>\n

The cow crumbles on its thin legs.
\nAnd the dust over a million eyes.<\/p>\n

We let go of a handful.\u00a0 Tiny black legs
\nspinning on a mound of sugar.<\/p>\n

Let us eat, thankful for the small things
\nthat wander by the window or a door.<\/p>\n

We grasp what flits by us, flashing (35).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this case, we recall the very difficult situation that reconstructs insects\u2014not as some quaint local color\u2014but as objects for consumption.\u00a0\u00a0 The lines here are indicative of Chang\u2019s spare and direct lyrical style, which works at its best when disorienting the reader\u2019s expectations.\u00a0 I end my brief discussion of Chang\u2019s Half-lit Houses<\/em> with the intertextual lyric \u201cshout-out\u201d in \u201cStain,\u201d where Agha Shahid Ali\u2019s presence is made known.\u00a0 I always find these moments fascinating because they point to a multiply inflected poetic teleology, where the influences of romantic poetry or American free verse must stand alongside Asian American poetry as its own specific subarea.\u00a0 In \u201cStain,\u201d reprinted below, the lyric speaker finds inspiration in an empathic connection to Ali\u2019s poetry:<\/p>\n

I read of Ali\u2019s Kashmir, his country falling
\nbeneath an elephant\u2019s foot, the heaviness
\nthat breaks the dry ground and the high cry
\nof an impending siren.\u00a0 I want to tell everyone
\nof my alarm.\u00a0 That I am afraid for them.
\nWe must all admit what we fear in the lush
\nhazard of the waking heart, for what it wants
\nis to rest, a red flag hidden in uncertain
\ncamouflage, to disappear inside a stupor fog (79).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sandy Tseng\u2019s Sediment<\/em> is peculiar for the elliptical nature of its various poems.\u00a0 Structurally, the first section mostly coheres around a themes of alienation and descent similar to the ones found in Chang\u2019s Half-lit Houses<\/em>.\u00a0 As in Half-lit Houses<\/em>, ethnicity never provides a direct mapping of identity and history:<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the line,
\na native entered the family
\non my father\u2019s side and left
\nhis dark skin on us.<\/p>\n

There are some things I\u2019ve never asked<\/p>\n

and always wanted to know.
\nThe sound of rain tapping on tin
\nno longer soothes me to sleep.
\nWe begin to adapt to our surroundings<\/p>\n

but cannot give in completely.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a task of finding
\nthe right hole for the square peg
\nand not being able to fit it
\nperfectly into anything.<\/p>\n

I imagine that my skin is not the color of fire.<\/p>\n

When I am born, no one will fly me
\nacross the ocean to raise me
\nin another country.\u00a0 I imagine that
\nI am a round peg in a round hole.<\/p>\n

The breath is being pushed out of my lungs<\/p>\n

by the hands of something
\nunknown, the palms
\npale as the sidewalks.
\nI imagine so many things (5).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once again, the question of belonging surfaces through the oft-used metaphor, \u201cthe right hole for the square peg\/ and not being able to fit it\/ perfectly into anything\u201d (5).\u00a0 We are immediately led to think about the topic of miscegenation, as the opening lines tell us, \u201cSomewhere along the line,\/ a native entered the family\/ on my father\u2019s side and left\/ his dark skin on us\u201d (5), directing us again to descent and lineage.\u00a0 Where does the lyric speaker belong?\u00a0 Such questions continue to galvanize the poems’ openings.\u00a0 Such is also the case with \u201cFrom the First Generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the First Generation<\/strong><\/p>\n

The name I gave myself was altered by my parents\u2019 accent.
\nThe neighbors showed us how to spell it on a yellow notepad.<\/p>\n

Our first Thanksgiving we cringed at the stuffed bird open and gaping
\non the table.<\/p>\n

We drank large glasses of milk everyday.\u00a0 Our bones grew slender
\nand long, the height of a people increasing as our feet touched the land.<\/p>\n

I have heard my mother come home late in the evening.\u00a0 Some days
\nI could not wear the $40 sweater I begged her to buy.<\/p>\n

There was a boy whose family hid in caves during the war, a man who
\ncan still taste the C-rations he ate with a soldier.<\/p>\n

We can never go back.\u00a0 I\u2019ve wanted to pack everything into a box, ship it
\nback overseas with a note explaining (9).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, the problematic of assimilation looms ominous over the immigrant family, where the child\u2019s naming does not proceed seamlessly, and instead is \u201caltered by\u201d accent.\u00a0 Perhaps, most salient to the recent holiday, Thanksgiving emerges as a day that constructs the immigrant family as other, where the object of consumption is \u201cgaping,\u201d rather than inviting.\u00a0\u00a0 Food therefore structures one way into the fabric of immigrant identity, where belonging might be accessed through ingesting appropriate dishes or drinks, but where one\u2019s past cannot be escaped, as evidenced by the \u201cman who\/ can still taste the C-rations he ate with a soldier,\u201d an ever present reminder that what one eats cannot be divorced from such complex culinary archaeologies.<\/p>\n

In one of the most precise and crystalline poems from \u201cSediment,\u201d Tseng\u2019s \u201cThe Merchants Have Said It\u201d recalls Chang\u2019s \u201cInvention\u201d in exploring the way that a subject might find himself foreign to the very landscape with which he might claim an ethnic affiliation:<\/p>\n

The Merchants Have Said It<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the courtyard, laundry dries in the aroma of fried fish
\nwith a bit of garlic from someone\u2019s fingers.\u00a0 I hear
\nthe voices from the alley.\u00a0 The merchants have said it.
\nI am too tall.\u00a0 Because somewhere I drank milk as a child.
\nAnd somewhere my face was not weathered
\nby Mongolian dust blowing from the north.\u00a0 I hear the whispers
\nthrough the bed sheet curtains.\u00a0 The way I hold my head
\ngives me away.\u00a0 Although I cut my hair and buy clothes off the street,
\nstill I walk like a foreigner.\u00a0 My stride is too long, too quick.
\nBut if I hide my fingernails and slouch, if I look no one in the eye,
\nsomeone will take the offered coins without a word (18).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is the sense of the authentic local atmosphere, replete with the \u201caroma of dried fish\u201d and the \u201cvoice from the alley.\u201d\u00a0 Even given her enterprising journey through this terrain, the lyric speaker has perhaps intruded, as she is still \u201clike a foreigner.\u201d\u00a0 Interestingly, the poem ends on a note of shame, as the lyric speaker will not \u201clook\u201d anyone \u201cin the eye,\u201d so that any transactions might occur without challenging inquiries or the broaching of difficult topics.<\/p>\n

In providing just a brief view into Four Way Books, my aim has simply been to highlight the exciting and innovative work being produced out of independent presses.\u00a0 Of course, Four Way’s commitment to its poets continues, as Martha Rhodes has already contracted the future collections of C. Dale Young (Torn<\/em> in 2011) and Monica Youn (Ignatz<\/em>, April 2010), as well as the forthcoming collections of Tina Chang and Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Stephen H. Sohn<\/a> is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.
\nTo find out more about Four Way Books, please visit their web site at www.fourwaybooks.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University In thinking about the so-called state of contemporary Asian American poetry, I am most struck by the issue of the proliferation of small presses that have remained afloat through print-on-demand publication policies and through the strategic limited print-run system.\u00a0 American poets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[20,217],"tags":[113,115,107,109,118,117,58,110,114,111,116,106,112,108],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1029,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/1029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}