Buddha Bandit Poets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Bloch
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
State University ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
State Highway ◽  
Asian American Poetry ◽  
American Poets ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Buddha

In 1978, Asian American poets Garrett Hongo, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Alan Chong Lau published The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, a collaborative anthology of poems dedicated to meditations on the highway that runs north–south across California’s Central Valley. The "Buddha Bandits" helped inaugurate a wave of activist Asian American poetry after Modernism. Hongo, Inada, and Lau first collaborated as the Buddha Bandits in 1977 in a performance of music and poetry at California State University, Long Beach. Their 1978 anthology engages with the culturally and geographically heterogeneous landscape of the California state highway, particularly its history of Asian American migration and its significance as a site of Japanese internment during World War II. The Buddha Bandits shared the formal concerns and countercultural attitudes of their fellow avant-garde poets, particularly the Beats, but their collaboration also anticipated a rejection of American Orientalism in that same avant-garde. Activist Asian American poets of the 1970s later rejected the depiction of Asia as a distant source of enlightenment, instead asserting a historically specific identity for the Asian American avant-garde.

Contemporary Voices in Asian American Lyric Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Chang
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Asian American Poetry ◽  
American Poets ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Lyric Tradition ◽  
The Impact

Asian American poetry flourished in the first two decades of the 21st century. In 2004, the Asian American literary organization Kundiman hosted their inaugural workshop-based retreat at the University of Virginia, connecting poets from the United States and North America across generations. (The retreat continues to be held annually at Fordham University and has included fiction writers, as fellows and faculty, since 2017.) The first year of Kundiman’s retreat coincided with the publication of Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, edited by Victoria Chang, which introduced emerging poets Kazim Ali, Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Srikanth Reddy, and Paisley Rekdal, among others, to a broader audience of readers and critics and, at the same time, urged a reassessment of the contemporary poetry field. Both events signaled an emergent generation’s desire to find community and acknowledgment for their work. Not only were these goals accomplished, but the collectivization of young Asian American poets and critical attention from universities and other cultural institutions also evinced how powerfully the impact of a previous generation of Asian American poets had been felt. That generation arguably began with the publication of Cathy Song’s Yale Younger Poets Prize–winning book Picture Bride in 1982 and grew to include Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, Garrett Hongo, and Agha Shahid Ali, whose work can be found in Norton anthologies of poetry and various other canon-defining projects. The critical and cultural acceptance these poets enjoyed at the end of the 20th century blazed a trail for Asian American poets of the 21st century, who increasingly balance the lyric conventions of emotional expressiveness and imagistic language with audacious political subjectivity. In doing so, Asian American poets of the 21st century have opened up conceptions of lyric, particularly regarding voice, to incorporate questions of identity, immigration and migration, and American cultural experience. Contemporary Asian American poets frequently reimagine the lyric tradition through a distinctly Asian American political imagination.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

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