The “tireless telling of alternative stories,” to echo Cathy Schlund-Vials’ words, is how Asian American literature combats xenophobia and closed-mindedness—the stubbornly repeated, and frankly boring, stories told by madmen. Asian Americans have many ways to tell our many stories. And, as we grow into our immense, unwieldy diversity as a social-political community, . . .
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Read Part Four here. “To-day was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliantBlue” You probably remember where you were, what you were doing, when a brilliant blue September sky, the kind some of us look forward to throughout the hot and hazy end of August, was suddenly, strangely, riven by off-course . . .
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(Man Ray, Observatory Time: The Lovers [1936], detail) Read Part Three here. “September has come and I wake.” The calendar turns, and the new month is like a new day. After three beginnings in endings, Louis MacNeice offers a beginning at the beginning. Awakening from the dark night that has hung over the second . . .
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(Photo from vinepair.com) Read Part 2 here. “August is nearly over.” I forget, from year to year, how Autumn Journal begins with an insistence upon endings. Summer is ending in section I, August is ending in section III, and, in the section that falls between those, MacNeice contemplates the ultimate ending. Such emphasis is consonant . . .
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Photo by Chen-Pan Liao (CC BY-SA 3.0) Read Part 1 here. “Spider, spider, twisting tight . . .. . . in the web of night” Back home in London, Louis MacNeice has trouble sleeping. Section II of Autumn Journal is a nocturnal meditation, a dark night of the soul. Worrying over Being and Becoming, stasis . . .
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(Photo: first edition book cover, Faber and Faber, 1939) “Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire.” So begins Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), a poem that recounts the poet’s experience—physical, emotional, intellectual, memorial, associational—during one consequential fall. Between the poem’s opening in August and its conclusion at the turn of the year, Britain . . .
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What is the Future of Asian American Poetry? Before imagining the future, I must begin in the past, considering how we’ve arrived in the present moment. When it comes to Asian American poetry, the first question is always what defines Asian American poetry and where it begins. Does our tradition begin with . . .
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(Patricia Chu, Photo by Lee B. Ewing) “When We Look, We See Each Other”:Thoughts on Asian American Literature in the Twenty-First Century First, thanks to Lawrence Minh-Bui Davis, Caroline Hong, and Mai-Linh Hong for arranging this gathering and permitting me to take part. For Min, I’m delighted to be here with you . . .
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