The End of Canon

It is difficult at all to think of "South Asian American" because the directionality of language is one way, yet in most Asian American writing one has yet to contend with the issue of transnationality or issues of polylingualism, even when the writer is anglophone. For most writers, the connection to the old country is still strong, its cultural traditions, its languages, its literary forms, and so "influence" is multidirectional. Whether or not those poems of South Asian forebears were written in English or not, they bear the traces of a practice of translation.

To me there was a one-two punch that interrupted the possibility of a twenty-first-century South Asian–American poetic canon that younger poets of the contemporary moment could draw from, and that was the death at the end of 2001 of Agha Shahid Ali from cancer and the death of Reetika Vazirani by suicide in the summer of 2003. Both poets were comparatively young—Ali was fifty-one, Vazirani was forty-two—but were establishing themselves as important poets. Ali had published one of the most important collections of the decade, The Country Without a Post Office, in 1996, and Vazirani had won the Bernard New Women's Poetry Prize the following year, and her follow-up collection, World Hotel, had just been published by Copper Canyon the year before her death. Of course there were many other Indian Americans writing and publishing, but besides Meena Alexander, none had as high a profile in poetry circles or the critical acclaim of Ali and Vazirani. (Vijay Seshadri had not yet published his second volume nor won his Pulitzer Prize.)

I am tempted to rest it there and say that all the dynamic and exciting Indian American writers writing today spring from multiple lineages and did not or could not draw from the lineage interrupted by the premature deaths of Ali and Vazirani—Seshadri, Aimee Nezhukhumatathil, Bhanu Kapil, Tarfia Faizullah, Vandanna Khanna, Zubair Ahmed, Rajiv Mohabir, Soham Patel, and Amit Majmudar, to name only the very few that pop into my mind at the moment—and in fact, thankfully, there are too many to name and so I'd best stop naming.

But the truth of the matter is that two important posthumous collections were released by Ali, and Vazirani's dynamic last last work was also collected in a book called Radha Says. For her part, Meena Alexander has continued to break new ground in poetry, publishing four new volumes in the last fifteen years as well as publishing an important collection of essays, Poetics of Dislocation.

Both Ali and Vazirani had a vexed relationship with the English language, with American idiom, and with canonicity, including how it manifested in received poetic forms. Ali's answer was to traffic deeply in form, turn it on its head (he had an obsession with Sapphic stanzas in English), invent it ("real" ghazals in English), and fine-tune to the point of virtuosity (he always claimed—as far as I know, he is correct—that no one else had written two canzones, and so on his deathbed he wrote a third, all the better to clinch his legacy, he only partly playfully claimed). Vazirani for her part was in the process of splintering poetic form, fracturing the line, abandoning syntax. After a fairly traditional first volume, her second began rupturing the rhythms of free verse to something new. Her third continued this work in shorter and even more visceral spiky-lined lyrics. Vazirani, as some may know, suffered from mental illness and died by suicide after killing her young son. The very dramatic circumstances of her death have blocked much consideration of her work.

Ali pushed the very limits of constraint in his posthumous collections Rooms Are Never Finished and Call Me Ishmael Tonight. In the first he created long poetic sequences comprised of various poetic forms, explored (in an exquisite homage to the poetic inspiration of his friend and mentor James Merrill, as well as Merrill's poem "From the Cupola") the Ouija board as a compositional tool, and...