The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry

5. Each of Us Harboring What the Other Lacked

chapter five Timothy Liu each of us harboring what the other lacked In his foreword to Timothy Liu’s first book of poetry, Vox Angelica (1992), Richard Howard speaks of Liu’s work as “a shocking poetry ,” noting that “the shock is not of recognition but of estrangement .” For Howard, the extraordinary strangeness of Liu’s poetry lies in the fact that it “makes an unfamiliar claim upon us, the claim of apostasy” (x). I would add that the astounding otherness of Liu’s poetry may result from other unfamiliar claims it makes upon us — the shattering of the Freudian myth of the family romance, the intermingling of homoeroticism and sentiments of Christianity, and the mixing of the spiritual with the corporeal, of the religious with the profane, rendering Asian American homosexuality visible and the “unspeakable desire” provocative. In articulating homoerotic desire, Liu also confronts the socially constructed debased otherness of homosexuality, which has led to violence and hatred directed at gay men. In poems such as “Against Nature,” collected in his fourth volume, Hard Evidence (2001), Liu raises questions about human nature by juxtaposing images of love and beauty with those of hatred and ugliness: “Eight dollars for a dozen roses sold / on Christopher and Grove where another / fag was hunted down last night by some / fraternity boys who took their turns / with a pocket knife” (Evidence 74). This social construct of gay men’s otherness and its effect contrast the alterity of the other, which gives rise to desire, including homoerotic desire, in Liu’s poetry. More often than not, homoerotic desire in Liu’s poems, like metaphysical desire, seeks the unfamiliar, the unknowable otherness of the other. As the speaker in “A Valentine” says, “each of us / harbor[s] what the other lacked: a wilderness” (Goodnight 27). Liu’s exploration of this wilderness and its impact on “each of us” seems to have contributed to the surprising effect of estrangement that his poetry produces. The shock of estrangement produced by Liu’s poems, in part, is related to the confessions in them that are aimed to move and challenge by revealing the vulnerability of his personae, while retaining their irreducible otherness. For Liu, writing poetry is a way of confronting repressed rage, shame, guilt, and “The grief of a lifetime. Of lifetimes .” Exploring those concealed areas of private lives that “remain under pressure,” Liu asserts, is like “clean[ing] out the active volcanos .” But he emphasizes that this exploration “is the business of poetry, a dangerous trade” (“Redemption” in Tabios 106). What is at stake, for Liu, is how to make the complexity and intensity of personal experience accessible to the reader without turning poetry into mere confession, and how to articulate a larger human desire through homoerotic desire without reiterating heterosexual norms and racial stereotypes constructed within phallocentric closure. Speaking of what he hopes to achieve in his poetry, Liu says, “I want soul in it!” Believing that he must use “a language that will not shield one from emotional experience but rather make it more available,” Liu has stayed away from “experimental or avant garde writing,” which for him, “is merely pyrotechnic” (“Redemption” in Tabios 70). While searching for a language to deal with repressed emotions, Liu was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s volume, Ariel (“Redemption” in Tabios 105). Many of Liu’s poems, especially those collected in his first two volumes, Vox Angelica (1992) and Burnt Offerings (1995), are autobiographical and confessional. Yet rather than being self-indulgent, his poems are concerned with the human conditions of suffering, loss, and mortality, while articulating homoerotic desire, exploring homosexuality , and confronting AIDS. Through a lyric I who is Chinese American and openly gay, Liu introduces a marginalized otherness — Asian American and gay men — into lyric poetry along with themes which are considered universal. But rather than assimilating the otherness of ethnicity or homosexuality through a discourse of universality, Liu disturbs the white, heterosexual content of the universal, and unsettles the binary of gender identity formulated within a phallocentric economy. In articulating homosexual desire, Liu develops a poetics that radically challenges the definitions of the holy and the profane, blending homosexual encounter with religious experience and relating eroticism to the absolute otherness of death. Facing the uncertainty of the future and inevitability of unknowable death in a relationship with an other 168 | | | Timothy Liu over whom the lyric I assumes no domination, the subject...