Undoing the Form/Matter Divide in Avant-Garde American Poetics

The unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.

—Theodor Adorno¹

Perhaps poetics can be broadly construed as an inscriptive technique for making and remaking the self and its relation to others within the social world in a manner that escapes the grasp of instrumental rationality. If so, what might happen when such an act of writing as making is actively theorized by poets and critics who have been demarcated as "minority" subjects, who, by definition, have been subjectivated and subjugated in modernity as the brute bodies that are unable to embody various allegedly universal "ideas"? Poetics, which often explores formal innovations in a given poem, emerges as a crucial site where we might question a hegemonic social "formation," which itself is sustained by the hierarchical distribution of form and matter across the globe. As Pheng Cheah notes in his reading of feminist deconstructions of the instituted binary opposition between the masculinized intelligible "form" and the femininized passive "matter," an act of political "trans-formation" not only implies an amelioration of oppressive social forms but calls for a discovery of "formative agency" among the bodies that have been denigrated as merely material.²

Dorothy J. Wang's Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry engages precisely in such a task by questioning the hegemonic formation of race(s) within American poetry and especially its avant-garde sector. As Wang passionately elucidates in the introductory chapter, many scholars of avant-garde writing in the U.S. have uncritically reproduced the form/matter binary and spatially mapped it onto the imperial nation-state's color-line. Wang thus discovers, disappointingly yet predictably, that influential journal special issues and conference forums reproduce the "'literary versus cultural' divide," exacerbating the imagined border between Anglo-American experimental formalism and minoritarian empirical confessionalism (1–19). These critics consequently hierarchize and racialize the two terms ("the literary" and "the cultural") while the poets who are thus racialized as "minority" are only admitted into their special fora insofar as their "literary" experimentations are seen as replicating various "cultural" characteristics they are expected to embody, e.g., "hybridity," "globalism," and "ecology" (18).

In contrast, Wang foregrounds poetic forms as formed matters that produce and proliferate both critical bodily feeling and political signification. Wang's attention to this nexus of the sensuous and the significative in poetry comes strikingly close to Jean-Luc Nancy's definition of "sense," which appears for him most prominently perhaps in poetry: "[i]f we understand or . . . accede to a dawning of sense, we do so poetically."³ Or, as Wang theorizes it,

Poems are never divorced from contexts and from history, even as they are, among other things, modes of thinking philosophically through an engagement with formal constraints. Likewise, what constitutes the social, the cultural, and the political must be analyzed for their linguistic and structural forms.

(19)

Thinking Its Presence is Wang's effort to think about and through poems' own form-based critiques of the society's unjust formal constraints. As Wang argues incisively, "[r]ace itself is . . . a political concept that takes particular forms" through and as "a fabric of laws, stereotypes, historical accretion, and popular culture," while she invokes Adorno's insistence that "[t]here is no material content, no formal category of artistic creation . . . which did not originate in the empirical reality from which it breaks free" (54). Poetic forms, then, are critical folds that could be stitched into the hegemonic and unjust social and racial formations. Wang's task in the book is to read such critical forms intimately and critically, to engage in what she aptly calls "a praxis-based methodology of theorizing" which extends a kind of theorizing that is performed by poetic forms themselves (35, 39).

Each of the five Asian American poets Wang examines in the book invents "a formal crux or mode" in order to produce...