Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology ed. by Alison Hawthorne Deming (review)

ture and her representation ofthe Chinese American community. The most glaring miss, in my view, is a chapter from David Leiwei Li's Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (1998), entitled "Can Maxine Hong Kingston Speak?The Contingency of The Woman Warrior." Not only is this an exceptionally insightful critique on The Woman Warrior, its topicality would also have made the collection more up-to-date, ^k Works Cited Kingston, Maxine Hong. "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers." Asian and American Writers in Diabgue: New CulturalIdentities. Ed. Guy Amirthanayagam. London: Macmillian, 1982. 55-65. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Mar, Laureen. "Leaping Beyond the Woman Warrior: The Myths and Realities ofa Culture." Paper presented at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, December 1979. Qtd. in Woo. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. "Necessity and Extravagance in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Art and the Ethnic Experience." MELUS 15 (1988): 3-26. Woo, Deborah. "Maxine Hong Kingston: The Ethnic Writer and the Butden ofDual Authenticity." Amerasia 16 (1990): 173-200. Alison Hawthorne Deming, ed. Poetry oftheAmerican West:A Columbia Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 328p. Carl Whithaus Graduate Center, CUNY "Location, location, location." Not only is this phrase a mantra for the real estate industry, but it is also a focal point for any work that intends to represent the American West. Since the nineteenth century, the American West has been constructed as an ¡deal paradise and as a living hell. Deming's anthology draws together a wide range ofpoetry that displays these two competing and contradice tory views oftheWest.The extent ofher selections both chronologically and geographically is impressive: chronologically, the earliest works come from the fifteenth century (Nezahualcoyotl's "Flower Songs") and the latest represent some of the best (and now relatively canonical) American poetry from rhe twentieth century (Ginsberg, Momaday, Clifton, and Soto); geographically, the poems take SPRING 2000 -i- ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW # 129 as inspiration locations ranging from Mexico City to Washington to Kansas. Deming's anthology does not run the risk ofdiffusing the idea ofthe American West; rather, she presents one particular narrative of the American West — for Deming, theWest is andhas always been a locus for thestruggle between humanity and Nature. In these selected poems the American West becomes a utopia in its own right—a location that is nowhere and everywhere, a place that is all things to all people, but overall and always has its own backbone, a resilient naturalness. I wonder about the ambiguity of"the American West." Don't we see the American West as an overdetermined location, idea, thing? Aren't there poets who write about the West that aren't Nature poets? Deming's selection ofpoems does capture a certain sense ofopenness and possibility, a sense that Larry McMurtry recalls in WalterBenjaminattheDairy Queen, his recent reflections on being a writer ofthe West. Like McMurtry, Deming gives us access to the American West as a place, a possibility, a location; it is, however, a place where Nature is writ large and the urban, the human, and the linguistic act ofwriting poetry seem small, tiny reflections ofthe magnificent. Demingsets two goals for her collection: shehopes to create "a reference book, [a] collection [that] provides many points ofaccess for those seeking a path into the unfamiliar terrain ofwestern poetry" and "a story about the West that ... is instructive for our present predicament" (xvi). The scope of the anthology provides many perspectives and points ofentry for readers; however, the omission of writers such as Bob Perelman and Naomi Shihab Nye does leave the work feeling a bit less contemporary than one would like. Nye and Perelman, ofcourse, are very different poets, who each write about aspects of the West that are not fully explored in Deming's collection. Since theWest is often seen as a place rather than a time, a sort of continual present, one would expect a fuller representation of contemporary poets. Deming's agenda, the story that Deming is trying to tell in this collection, is not, however, about the present. Rather she is concerned with establishing the history of the West in...