English Before Engrish: Asian American Poetry’s Unruly Tongue

This article interrogates the limits of the “playful” genre that Timothy Yu has recently defined as Asian American experimental or avant-garde poetry. Through the work of John Yau, Brian Kim Stefans, Fred Wah, and others, I demonstrate the centrality of Wittgensteinian poetics to the aesthetic innovations of contemporary Asian North American poets whose language games challenge normative assumptions about the relationship between language, literature, and identity.