Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (review)

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 offers an argument that is profoundly startling in its originality yet quite obvious upon further reflection. In this comparative study, Yu reads Language poetry and Asian American poetry together to explore the ways in which they are avant-gardist in their self-positioning against mainstream American poetry. Both are deeply enmeshed in distinctive social groups that responded to political and aesthetic issues in the 1970s. Focusing on writers such as Ron Silliman for the Language poets and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and John Yau for Asian American poets, Yu reads their poems against the backdrop of the post- 1965 protest culture, revealing strategies of formal experimentation yoked to social identity and community.

Scholars often align Language poetry with formal experimentation and Asian American poetry with racial politics. Yu, however, asserts that aesthetics and politics have always animated the work of both groups. He argues that both Language poets and Asian American poets created communities of artists defined by political and social relations. He also examines how Asian American poets actively constructed the community of Asian Americans by experimenting with poetic forms to create an understanding of social identity. Yu points out that despite these shared preoccupations, Language poets and Asian American poets seldom crossed paths or shared platforms, and developed their aesthetics and communities independently. Thus, he does not trace a shared genealogy for these two bodies of poetry but rather shows us the "vexed history of division" (16) between the two that has intensified over the decades despite their similarities as part of the contemporary American avant-garde.

A key component of Yu's analytical method is to read both Language and Asian American poetry through what he calls "a sociology of the avantgarde, which acknowledges the existence of multiple and even competing groups whose practices we might recognize as avant-garde and whose aesthetic programs are inflected by their differing social identifications" (3-4). Rather than simply identifying aesthetic traits that comprise a kind of poetry, he links such traits to the communities of poets that understand poetics as a revolutionary practice. For Yu, an aspect of this sociological exploration is identifying the significant institutions of publication and distribution associated with both Language and Asian American poetry to gesture toward the kinds of writer-reader exchanges that grounded their communities.

Chapter One positions Allen Ginsberg as a figure whose formal, experimental concerns meshed with racial and social issues in the cultural moment just before the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yu writes, "To revisit Ginsberg … is to return to the concept of the political, seeking to grasp how the idea of a contemporary American political poetry emerges in Ginsberg's work" (19). Reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and his later "Wichita Vortex Sutra," Yu suggests that the shift registered in these two poems is one from particularity to universality, from a sense of social rootedness to a universalist politics divorced from distinctions of race, class, and gender. Such a shift is unavailable to subsequent avant-gardists, to whom Yu next turns his attention. Chapter Two offers a reading of Silliman and his Ketjak to suggest that Language poetry, far from being just concerned with formal experimentation, is also strongly rooted in exploring working-class white male consciousness. Yu writes, "Silliman adapts to this new social landscape by ethnicizing the avant-garde, positing Language writing not simply as an aesthetic movement but as a social identity." Yu's analysis thus positions Language poetry as "a category equivalent to 'black writing' or 'women's writing'" (71), a position he argues Silliman has also acknowledged and struggled to reconcile with the distinctions often drawn between such categories.

The final three chapters of Yu's book offer the most provocative material for scholars of Asian American poetry and of multi-ethnic American writing more broadly. Yu argues that poetry, though at times denigrated...