Apparitions of Asia: modernist form and Asian American poetics 9780195332735, 0195332733, 9780199397969, 0199397961

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Apparitions of Asia

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Apparitions of Asia Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics

Josephine Nock-Hee Park

1 2008

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Park, Josephine Nock-Hee, 1971– Apparitions of Asia : modernist form and Asian American poetics / by Josephine Nock-Hee Park. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-533273-5 1. American literature—Asian influences. 2. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American poetry—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 4. Orientalism in literature. 5. East Asia—In literature. I. Title. PS159.A85P37 2007 810.9'325—dc22 2007021792

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing —walt whi tman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

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Acknowledgments

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his project has been sustained by the generosity of teachers, colleagues, and friends. At Berkeley, Michael André Bernstein encouraged me from the start in my pursuit of this study and provided exemplary guidance; Barbara Spackman patiently helped me develop my inchoate ideas; Colleen Lye responded to my work with near-miraculous understanding and unstinting support. My debt to my advisors grows with their continued assistance; I only hope to follow their rigorous and caring example. I remember graduate school as a series of open conversations with brilliant and hilarious interlocutors:Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Susann Cokal, Ruth Desmond, J. P. Daughton, Michael Ferguson, Jennifer Greiman, David Larsen, Anand Pandian, Mary Quinn, Laura Schattschneider, Dana Shelley, Anna Stenport, and Antonia Syson. At the University of Pennsylvania, I have been blessed with supportive colleagues in the English department, many of whom responded to this work: Herman Beavers, Nancy Bentley, Charles Bernstein, Thadious Davis, Michael Gamer, Suvir Kaul, Sanjay Krishnan, Ania Loomba, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Peter Stallybrass, Wendy Steiner, and David Wallace. I would like to thank in particular my chair, Jim English, and my two mentors: Amy Kaplan, who has been remarkably generous in her guidance, and Bob Perelman, who has offered sage advice. The Asian American Studies Program is my second home at Penn, and I would like to thank Eiichiro Azuma, Fariha Khan, Ajay Nair, and Rosane Rocher. Grace Kao, our director, has been unwavering in her support and warmth. It was quite a stroke of luck that I began at Penn with a cohort of extraordinary women: Heather Love, Sara Nadal, and Yolanda Padilla. Friends and scholars elsewhere kept my spirits up and kindly read portions of this work: Christopher Bush, Eric Hayot, Joseph Jeon, Eric Keenaghan, Sean Keilen, James Kim, Ho Hon Leung, Sue-Im Lee, Jena Osman, Rachel Teukolsky, Rob Wilson, Edlie Wong, and Steven Yao. My writing has been supported by a Chancellor’s Opportunity Fellowship and a Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship, both at Berkeley, and the Penn Humanities Forum. Parts of chapter 4 were previously published, in different form, in Contemporary Literature 46.2 (Summer 2005): 213–242; and Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006),

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235–256. I thank the presses of the University of Wisconsin and Temple University for permission to include revised versions of this material. At Oxford University Press, I would like to express my gratitude to my editor, Shannon McLachlan, and her assistant, Christina Gibson, for their commitment and support, as well as to my anonymous readers, whose scrupulous reports vastly improved this book. Final preparation of this manuscript was made easier by Andrew Bae, who graciously assisted with the cover image, Lawson Fusao Inada and Albert Saijo, who were especially obliging in granting permission to cite from their work, and Myung Mi Kim, who shared her insights with me just as I was completing my revisions. My deepest thanks are due to my parents and sisters. On the far side of this project, I can see that it is their loving support that binds this book. Lastly, I thank James Ker, for everything.

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rateful acknowledgment is given for the permission to reprint selections from the following works:

Personae, by Ezra Pound, copyright ©1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, by Ezra Pound, copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, by Gary Snyder, copyright ©2003 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers. Turtle Island, by Gary Snyder, copyright ©1974 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Axe Handles, by Gary Snyder, copyright ©2005 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers. Mountains and Rivers Without End, by Gary Snyder, copyright ©1996 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press, a member of Perseus Books Group. Outspeaks, by Albert Saijo, copyright ©1997 by Albert Saijo. Reprinted by permission of Albert Saijo. “I Told You So,” by Lawson Fusao Inada, copyright ©1978 and “West Side Songs” copyright ©1970. Reprinted by permission of Lawson Fusao Inada. Legends From Camp, by Lawson Fusao Inada, copyright ©1993 by Lawson Fusao Inada. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. Drawing the Line, by Lawson Fusao Inada, copyright ©1997 by Lawson Fusao Inada. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material in this book.

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Contents

Introduction 3 1. Cathay to Confucius

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2. Beatific Orientalism

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3. Beats and Bandits

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4. Modern Warfare

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Conclusion Notes

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Bibliography Index 185

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Apparitions of Asia

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Introduction

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n Myung Mi Kim’s 1991 poetry collection Under Flag, she describes a voyage from Korea to the United States: “Mostly, we cross bridges we did not see being built” (15). Kim is describing moving bodies, but this line invokes a long history of bridge-building: over a century of transpacific economic and military alliances. Kim’s poetry is remarkable for its allusive richness, and among the bridges she calls to mind is a literary one, constructed out of an imagined aesthetic accord between East and West. This aesthetic crossing, underwritten by material ties, spans my study: Apparitions of Asia traces a literary intimacy between the United States and East Asia, by turns welcomed and shunned, that runs the length of the twentieth century. A new appreciation of East Asia marked American literary modernism; the Orient became an emblem of artistic solace in the first half of the twentieth century, renewing American letters at the same time that the United States increasingly turned to the Pacific. Decades later, Kim’s verse echoes the literary structures enshrined by modernism’s Orient in order to reveal in formal terms a long-standing transpacific relationship. It is the aim of this study to make literary bridges visible: by uncovering a fragile yet persistent consonance, my readings seek to create a modern history of transpacific literary alliances. This book closes with Myung Mi Kim: her work stands at the endpoint of a trajectory from modernist internationalism to the transnational flows of the late twentieth century. Between these two ends lies a significant breach which divides American Orientalism from Asian American literature: while modernist Orientalism rendered the Asiatic sign as a silent figure, artists of the Asian American movement in the late 1960s forged an ethnic coalition to sound a new voice in American literature and culture. My inquiry attempts to bridge these longsegregated discourses, and the task of the following pages is to illuminate the formal significance of modernism’s Orient in a century of United States expansion in the Pacific and the repercussions of this construction for Asian American artists. By considering the afterimage of American Orientalism in Asian American literature, Apparitions of Asia queries the costs of an Asiatic form cast as a peculiar figure of modernity. It is my 3

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contention that the American Orient of high modernism has significantly influenced Asian American poetry, both as an onerous burden and as an opportunity for literary experiment—whether through or against its forms.

Passage to Asia In “A Broadway Pageant,” Walt Whitman celebrated the 1860 arrival of Japanese delegates to New York, the final stop in a mission to ratify the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Their march down Manhattan’s main thoroughfare was a riposte to Commodore Perry’s famous appearance on Japan’s shores in 1853 with his “black ships.” With banners unfurled, the Japanese delegates were, like their American counterparts, heralding a rapid modernization. Whitman’s poem imagines American ships steaming across the Pacific, and these two budding empires crossed the ocean with dreams of commerce. Whitman proclaims, “The ring is circled” (245) when “at last the Orient comes” (243), and he imagines a reawakening: Commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work, races reborn, refresh’d, Lives, works resumed—the object I know not—but the old, the Asiatic renew’d as it must be, Commencing from this day surrounded by the world. (245)

Asia is born again through the touch of American commerce, and this far corner of the world can now be part of a “gliding present” (244), seen as a “kaleidoscope divine” (243) before the pulsing crowd. “A Broadway Pageant” was first published as “The Errand-Bearers” in The New York Times on June 27, 1860, but despite its topicality, the poem very quickly leaves the procession: Whitman writes, “The Originatress comes,” specifically, “The race of Brahma comes” (243).1 The “nobles of Niphon” (242) give way to the “intense soul and glittering eyes” (243) of Whitman’s true Orient, India. For Whitman, “The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race of eld” (243) was always aligned with India; all of the Asiatic moments of Leaves of Grass gesture toward a reverie of India as a rich, linguistic and racial origin for the West.2 Whitman’s India takes its cue from Emerson’s Orientalism, which took the form of adventurous forays into comparative philosophy and religion but settled on India: The Dial’s 1842 series of “Ethical Scriptures” introduced a variety of different religious texts to American readers, but Emerson’s “sympathies lay with the Hindus.”3 Sharing Emerson’s sympathies, Whitman recasts the Japanese delegation as a Transcendental ideal.4

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Whitman’s most famous meditation on India, “Passage to India,” marks the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, an event he reads as a necessary sequel to the discovery of America: a section which opens with an apostrophe to the “Year at whose wide-flung door I sing!” (416) only names the year 1492. From the contemporary “vast terraqueous globe given and giving all” (416), Whitman calls out to Columbus himself: “And who art thou sad shade?” (417). Whitman imagines this lonely figure on a stage, tracing his life “from Palos leading his little fleet” to “dejection, poverty, death” (417). The opening of the Suez Canal is figured as Columbus’s late, hard-won victory: (Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream! Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave, The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.) (414)

By crossing the Suez Canal, we may finally reach the Indians that Columbus was really looking for. “Passage to India” is rife with primitivist celebrations, the old fantasy of the Oriental womb, but Whitman’s poem connects the Orient to the discovery of America—indeed, he insists that a passage to Asia is a necessary continuation of American history. Though Whitman cites 1492, the year of the Suez Canal is crucial because 1869 marks two monumental passages: as Whitman wrote in his notebook, “Passage to India. Completion Pacific R. R. 1869?”5 On May 10, 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads joined, marked by a golden spike that celebrated the junction. The surprise of “Passage to India” is that even as Whitman heralds an eastern route, he embarks on a railway journey due west. Upon envisioning traversing the Suez Canal (“I mark from on deck the strange landscape” [413]), in the same breath Whitman imagines traveling across America, and this convergence is made possible because it is “yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same” (413): “I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier” (413). He imagines the Pacific locomotive “rushing and roaring” across the Great Plains and into California: I see the clear waters of Lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines, Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold the enchanting mirages of waters and meadows, Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines, Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel, Tying the Eastern to the Western sea, The road between Europe and Asia. (413–414)

Whitman inserts domestic travel into the heart of the poem, thus overlaying the “road between Europe and Asia” with the American landscape.

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This sleight of hand via “duplicate slender lines” represents both the railroad tracks and the double path to the Orient in his poem. In lauding the canal’s opening, Whitman claims that “Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas” (418), clearly imagining the Pacific railroad marching beyond its tracks, onward to the East. Whitman’s presentation of the Orient bears both the past legacy of Transcendentalism and a proleptic vision of continued American expansion into the Pacific, notably along industrial lines of advance. In “A Broadway Pageant,” Whitman cries, “I chant the world on my Western sea” (244), a line which bears all the hallmarks of his ringing voice and capacious self, although this particular appropriation of the sea signals a contemporary campaign to make the Pacific American. Akira Iriye describes an American “belief in the uniqueness of American–East Asian relations” (16) in the second half of the nineteenth century: in pointed contrast to what United States policymakers deemed the “ulterior ambitions” of the European powers (15), they celebrated America’s peaceful promotion of commerce as the basis of “an image of America’s future as a Pacific nation” (17).6 American ambitions were met by the Japanese: though Whitman imbues the “nobles of Niphon” with a familiar Oriental hoariness, they make the news because they are emblems of industrialization. The Meiji government’s rigorous westernization catapulted Japan into the international arena; Japan’s advances across the Pacific made them the darlings of the United States and subjects of narratives of emergence, in which America awakened Japan from its ancient slumber. The electric contact between Japan and the United States presented in “A Broadway Pageant” thus illustrates the modern template for America’s relation to the Orient: the West ignites the East with an enlightening spark of commerce. In Whitman’s poems we may register both the contours of Orientalism, a discourse that spans the West and reaches into ancient times, and a historically bound economic exigency specific to United States relations with East Asia. Edward Said’s monumental Orientalism revealed that the Orient was a creation of the Western observer, and Said’s core concept of “othering” follows from a psychoanalytic model in which the self discovers its own constitution by discerning the “not-I.” 7 Scholars have criticized Said for the totalizing force of his argument, but the significance of Orientalism lies in this single figuration which can be detected in case after case.8 In considering American Orientalism, however, instances of othering tend to unveil a complex array of alliances.9 United States foreign policy perpetually aligns others against an assembly of selves—and the socalled “American Century” has featured extraordinary efforts to solidify both enmities and friendships across the Pacific. In her study America’s Asia, Colleen Lye argues that American Orientalism shifts the emphasis in Said’s model because United States neocolonialism “installed the East as a Western proxy rather than antipode” (10). The expansion of United States

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power in the Pacific necessitated an international policy which, as Christina Klein points out, “work[ed] through a logic of affiliation as well as through one of difference” (16). Said’s other readily accounts for the repudiation of enemies in United States dealings in the Pacific, but the modern history of transpacific alliances in the region requires us to consider a side of the self/other structure which has tended to seem less remarkable—but which opens out to a set of strategies at least as varied and deep-seated as the setting apart of difference that Said’s study meticulously uncovered. The alliances that structure American Orientalism have been fueled by the dream of commerce that inspired Whitman’s ecstatic meditations on the Asiatic. United States appeals to the Pacific have sought to secure a market; as David Palumbo-Liu states: “The particular role that the United States imagined Asia Pacific to play was (and, as we will see… still continues to be) to be a market for the overaccumulation of goods and capital” (19). This economic image made a lasting impression: Lye notes that Asiatic figures have been consistently marked by a “putatively unusual capacity for economic modernity” (3) in the American imagination. The broad strokes of American Orientalism were set by economic images of Japan and China, both of whom began to occupy American interests in the same era. These “emergent” Asian nations were subject to shifting and competing figurations: Japan and China alternated positions as friend and foe, and as the century wore on, smaller nations in the region were assigned these roles.10 Under American stewardship, Japan became, as Bruce Cumings puts it, “an American-defined ‘economic animal’ ” (31) through which the United States could lay claim to Japan’s regional dominance. American support increased exponentially in midcentury,11 and by the late twentieth century, decades of American investment in the Pacific reached its apotheosis in what Rob Wilson calls a “utopic dream of a ‘free market’ ” (32) in Reimagining the American Pacific: a fantasy in which “the traumas of colonial occupation, regional fracturing, and world war will be washed away in the dirty, magical waters of the Pacific” (38). The end of the twentieth century witnessed a multiplication of “economic animals” in the Pacific. Whitman’s dreams came true a century later.

Pacifi c Inventions Whitman looked across the Pacific and saw an American destiny, but it was Ernest Fenollosa who built the bridge across the vast expanse. Fenollosa arrived in Yokohama in 1878, when Japan was rapidly transforming its feudal society into a modern, westernized culture. He was part of a wave of American intellectuals characterized by Christopher Benfey as “Gilded Age misfits”12 who found a place for themselves in Japan as cultural ambassadors. This handful of “upper-class New England

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men,” as Mari Yoshihara describes them, “became pioneer ‘Japanologists’ and played crucial roles in introducing Japanese culture and history to Americans” (9). By reinventing themselves as counsel to Japan’s transformation, these American adventurers achieved positions of authority far from home. Fenollosa, a learned dilettante at loose ends, secured his passage to the Far East through the good graces of his professors at Harvard. He went to Japan ostensibly to teach philosophy—his Harvard education included “Emersonian pantheism, Spencerian mechanism, Hegelian metaphysics”13 —but he quickly found himself seduced by the art of “Old Japan.” In the tumult of Japan’s new era, Fenollosa saw an opportunity to cultivate an appreciation for traditional artistry threatened by the juggernaut of progress. Fenollosa created an extraordinary niche for himself as a connoisseur of Oriental art, and his Japanese career ultimately cast him as a prime instigator for an American aesthetic revolution. In Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1913), an encyclopedic account of Oriental art posthumously published by his widow, Fenollosa posited a Sino-Japanese flowering which rivaled the Greco-Roman one. Trained in idealized philosophical terms, Fenollosa sought “a universal scheme or logic of art” (xxiv): Hegelian Universal Spirit mandated a “splendid single sweep” (xxvi) of human aesthetic behavior and a teleology in which “separate shining planes of movement of the human spirit” (xxvi) combined to produce a new synthesis. Fenollosa saw a Pacific antithesis to the Mediterranean basin, and he presented this vision in the first chapter of Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: Taking a Mercator projection map of the world, with its centre in the Eastern part of the Eastern hemisphere, bounded on the west by Europe and Africa and (as Asiatic appendages) extended on the east over Australasia and the Pacific Isles until the very western shores of America are included, we can get a bird’s-eye view over about all the geographical formations of human art.… Looking down now into the fertile regions of man’s work…we are enabled to make a large but sufficiently accurate identification of the most active centres of art-dispersion within this large field, which indeed we are ordinarily accustomed to conceive as one. Making a very broad generalization, it may be said that these centres have been two:—one belonging to the somewhat contracted regions about the east end of the Mediterranean.… The other belongs to some point…enclosed by the large islands of the western half of the Pacific Ocean. (3) This exercise in reorientation reveals two fields of force, East and West. Considering the “vast basin of the Pacific,” Fenollosa concludes that “there exists what we may fairly call a ‘Pacific School of Art,’ ” and the photographs in this first section compare Maori totems to ancient Chinese artifacts.

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In casting the Pacific basin as a counterpart to the Mediterranean, Fenollosa took a decisive step toward modernity. In contrast to Whitman’s railway passage across the Pacific, Fenollosa stopped well short of India; instead, Fenollosa’s mythical site of origin was China, viewed through its preservation in Japan. Fenollosa diverged from his Transcendental masters by focusing on the Pacific basin, and in putting East Asia on the map, he not only mirrored American interests of the era, he became a force for American modernism. For Whitman, India was “The Past! the Past! the Past!” (411), but Fenollosa’s Asiatic vision anticipated the future. His map is striking because it sketches the sphere of American influence in the Pacific: as his text alights from Tokyo to the Philippines, we discover a prediction of future American excursions in the region. A century later, a rich and contradictory vision of the American Pacific— in Rob Wilson’s words, “both dream and slime, an ocean with ancient contents and cyborgian futures all cast into one strange regional poetic” (Reimagining 48)—seems to follow from Fenollosa’s artistic map of the world. Fenollosa’s passionate advocacy of East Asian art made him a celebrity in Japan. Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet famously published by Harriet Monroe in Poetry, dubbed Fenollosa “the very discoverer of Japanese art for Japan.”14 Fenollosa’s most often cited address, delivered in 1882, urges his Japanese audience to “return to their nature and its old racial traditions”: Japanese art is really far superior to modern cheap western art that describes any object at hand mechanically, forgetting the most important point, expression of Idea. Despite such superiority the Japanese despise their classical paintings, and with adoration for western civilization admire its artistically worthless modern paintings and imitate them for nothing. What a sad sight it is!15 Fenollosa is credited with reinstituting the brush over the Western pencil in Japanese elementary schools, and in 1886, when he became the Imperial Commissioner of Fine Arts in the Ministry of Culture, he launched a massive cataloging effort to create an official record of Japan’s art and architecture. Considering Fenollosa’s curatorial labors, Kojin Karatani echoes and intensifies Noguchi’s claim: “it was Fenollosa who invented Japanese art” (158). Karatani reads Fenollosa’s ideals for Japanese art in the context of an Orientalist tendency toward “an aesthetic worship of the very inferior other” (147). Fenollosa’s zeal “rescued” Oriental art from a society he diagnosed as ill-equipped to understand its significance. As Lawrence W. Chisolm puts it, “So long as art works were considered simply as temple furniture or private luxuries, lists were unheard of; the very idea that art works might be national assets was Western, as was the study of archaeology” (53). Fenollosa thus “invented Japanese art” because he applied Western values to Eastern objects.16

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Warren I. Cohen reveals the far-ranging effects of Fenollosa’s connoisseurship: “By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, Chinese and Japanese masterpieces could be found in Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, and St. Louis, as well as in Boston, New York, and Freer’s collection, soon to be exhibited in Washington” (72). The great American museums only opened in the 1870s; it is astonishing to consider how quickly superb East Asian art penetrated museums in the heart of America.17 In discussing the repercussions of Fenollosa’s labors, Cohen provides a revealing contrast in the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts: Smith was a wealthy collector who was “partial to metal work and cloisonné” (72). Like Fenollosa, Smith “paid high prices for his treasures” (73), but his investments were never realized in the manner of Fenollosa’s collection because his tastes did not match the defining mode set by Fenollosa and he did not justify the market value of his own purchases. Indeed, Smith’s selections reflect an appreciation of Japanese art that predates Fenollosa’s interventions: Japanese delegates had proven their adeptness at profiting from Western tastes in Western expositions, as in the exhibitions in Paris (1867) and Philadelphia (1876), in which Japanese handiwork of exquisite craftsmanship were the objects of faddish desire. Beyond such handiwork, East Asian art remained forbiddingly alien to a Western audience: it was largely through Fenollosa’s labors that Sino-Japanese painting, previously inaccessible because of its nonrealism, traveled in new circles. Fenollosa did not merely appeal to Western tastes; he transformed them.18 Fenollosa’s interest in the hard fact of commerce is perhaps his greatest departure from American Transcendentalism and its older mode of Orientalism. John R. Eperjesi claims that Emerson had “two Asias,” “a religious-philosophical Asia and an economic Asia” (36), but Fenollosa combined the two. In yoking the “religious-philosophical Asia” to the “economic Asia,” Fenollosa became an agent of modernization, not only in Japan, a nation rushing to compete with the West, but in Western appreciation of the Far East. Fenollosa understood that aesthetic preferences could be altered in his favor if a market could be created to sustain these values—and in making Eastern art appreciable, he made Eastern art. In his discussion of aesthetic value, Karatani argues that the sublime, which relies on a “purification of all domains, was inseparable from the capitalist economy that nullifies differences of all domains” (150); Fenollosa’s aestheticism was ultimately an economic pitch, in which entry into a system of circulation purified the object as a work of art at the same time that it assigned a cash value. Ultimately, the values he created were in the service of a shared aesthetic spirit which seemed to cross the Pacific for the first time. Linking East and West was crucial to creating an artistic sympathy that seemed to transcend the commerce to which it was bound.

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Fenollosa returned to the United States as an authority on Oriental art and an advocate for friendly United States–East Asian relations. He made his case in public lectures and published articles for strengthening ties with Japan, and this alliance was the subject of his 1893 poem East and West, delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard, in which he presented “The Future Union of East and West” as a dialectical vision.19 In a preface crafted for the poem’s publication, Fenollosa laid out his “synthesis of two continental civilizations” (v): an Eastern bride is to be wed to a Western bridegroom. Fenollosa adds another layer of thesis and antithesis, however: he imagines a “twofold marriage” (53), a double union of East and West. The poem separates the two ceremonies by millennia; we witness these alliances at the far ends of East and West’s five sections, first with a portrait of Alexander’s blazing path to the East and a final union in which the East emerges as the ideal counterpart to the West. With this second betrothal, the poem’s final line imagines a future “Where there is no more West and no more East” (55). Between the instances of synthesis, however, the poem threatens to undermine its vision of perfect unity. In the wake of Alexander’s advance, the poem presents East and West in turn, but “The Separated East” does not produce a bride, and the Western man who emerges in “The Separated West” is a masked and compromised figure. Indeed, the only truly noble soul in East and West is “the final Asian man / Rising in far Japan” (17). This figure perplexed his Phi Beta Kappa audience— not least for the oddity of rendering the Asiatic masculine—because Fenollosa put a specific, living “Asian man” in the throne, “Dear Hogai, my master” (15). Descended from a long and distinguished line of Japanese artists, Kano Hogai was Fenollosa’s tutor in Japan. Fenollosa “was adopted ‘artistically’ into the Kano family” and took the name Kano Yeitan Masanobu, and as he wrote of this name to his mentor Edward Morse, “This I write in Chinese characters and have special seals.” The seals made official Fenollosa’s ability to certify works of Japanese art: as he writes in the letter, “It is quite a thing to have the three greatest critics of Japan admitting me to equality in certifying.”20 Fenollosa’s “adoption” into the Kano family led to regulatory powers, and the effusive portrait of Kano Hogai in the poem reveals Fenollosa’s alliance. Though East and West sets a paradigmatic marriage as its frame, Fenollosa’s own experience in Japan disrupts the poem’s vision of wedlock. Indeed, Fenollosa’s poem presents a significant departure from a familiar pattern of Oriental courtship, as in the tales of his French contemporary Pierre Loti, who effortlessly stepped into the role of the bridegroom in every Oriental port he chanced to explore. In contrast to Loti’s 1887 Madame Chrysanthème, in which Loti illustrated the conventional union of East and West in Japan, Fenollosa found himself a family lineage without the trappings of marriage. Loti sought out exotic girls but shunned their families; by contrast, Fenollosa’s adoption by the

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Kano family led to power in the national arena—Fenollosa’s East is less a subject of romantic alliances than of political and economic ones. Iriye singles out Fenollosa’s poem as an example of a new kind of transpacific thinking at the turn of the twentieth century: against prevailing United States suspicions of Japanese hostility, Fenollosa’s poem insisted that East and West “were complementary and would coexist together to enhance the general level of human civilization” (64). East and West is sketched out in the grand style of the political epic, written in the service of presenting a new civilizational ideal. The novelty and grandeur of Fenollosa’s vision exceeded his poem’s conventional frame, and the length and difficulty of the poem required not only an explanatory preface but also appended notes upon publication. Fenollosa’s note on Kano Hogai explains that he is “the greatest Japanese painter of recent times” (207), and the poem presents the painter’s voice as he fantastically traverses Asia, all the way “To the snow-capped castles of Ind” (16). This figure presents a radical departure from traditional Oriental roles—this Asiatic is instead a bridegroom who finds his own Oriental bride in India. Fenollosa’s portrait of the “final Asian man” casts the Japanese artist as a contemporary heir to Alexander: he is a Japanese epic hero who ventures into the hinterlands of empire. Fenollosa insisted that the “child Japanese” could “freshen the Asian ideal” (21); he advocated Japan’s stewardship of Asia and considered Japan’s 1895 victory over China a demonstration of “Japan’s role as guardian of the East and preserver of ‘the deepest and finest Oriental principles.’ ”21 Fenollosa renders his Japanese hero as an agent of history, thus inscribing into his Hegelian understanding of history a figure from a region which had long been seen as a dim origin. Japan’s imperial successes had a whitening effect in the West, and Fenollosa built upon Japan’s imperial aspirations to pitch the Far Eastern nation in a position of identity with the United States.22 The East makes its entry into history in Fenollosa’s poem, but the image of the West suffers. In “The Separated West,” Fenollosa excoriates the West for its vulgar commercial aims: The West provokes the East. The iron arm Slips off the narrow edges of this world. Flaxen-haired vandals hunt for zest of blood The black striped tigers of the Bengalee, Scaling the slippery crests of Himavats, Holding the poisoned cup to Mongol lips. (35)

This last line merits a note, in which Fenollosa explains, “I refer to the opium trade with China. After all, it is the selfish expansiveness of commerce, rather than warfare or science, which discharges the decreed function of bearing the West back into the bosom of the East. It is the

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last service of the explosive life of competition” (213). The poem reaches a fever pitch as it contemplates the crimes of the West, as in a following section in which he cries out, O you West in the East like the slime of a beast, Why must you devour that exquisite flower? Why poison the peace of the far Japanese? (39)

The poem’s far-reaching indictment of Western encroachment extends to a proto-Orientalist critique of the “occult boom” Fenollosa despised: “Here’s a sweet little charmer who dotes upon karma!” (43). He lambasts Western exploitation and its attendant fantasies of the Orient in order to reveal a true portrait of the Far East in which the Japanese man emerges as an ideal not only to be preserved in the East but emulated by the West. Indeed, Fenollosa’s tactic of undermining Western hegemony ultimately leaves his poem without a Western bridegroom; East and West is surprising for its contemporary portrait of Japan, but the poem makes no mention of the United States, and no new American hero rises to greet the “final Asian man.” The strangeness and difficulty of East and West lies in its insistence upon a new appreciation of the Far East free from damaging East-West relations of the past. Fenollosa’s East has been upgraded to belong to the modern world, but as an official in Japan he rejected the very forces of modernity that cast Japan on a par with the United States. The stark contradiction of Fenollosa’s own commercial transactions indicates the impossibility of excising commerce from East-West relations. Fenollosa’s elevation of an Oriental ideal, one which can correct Western failings, harks back to eighteenth-century European valorizations of China, but its particular reliance on United States commercial interests makes it a foundational text for American Orientalism. In celebrating the quietly radiant East through Kano Hogai, Fenollosa installed an aesthetic ideal that seemed to transcend crass commerce even as its sublimity was created by a system of circulation which assigned hard values to cultural objects. East and West denounced commerce in order to promote a higher order, and Fenollosa’s turn to the East set the template for American Orientalists who would discover a purifying light in the East in the hopes of disciplining Western commercial appetites at the same time that such ideals fed new dreams of transpacific commerce. The unwieldiness of Fenollosa’s poem reveals the difficulty of imagining an alliance between East and West without recourse to existing models. The rushed nuptials at the very end of East and West make evident in formal terms the difficulty of Fenollosa’s task, and his poem is ultimately a kind of aborted epic. Just as an Orientalist trope of marriage created a prisonhouse for his modern East-West alliance, Fenollosa’s verse, shackled to its rhymes and meters, found no formal escape from

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an earlier pattern—and perhaps the greatest failure of the poem lies in Fenollosa’s inability to present an American voice. Indeed, the shortcomings of Fenollosa’s verse present a mirror image of Whitman’s Orientalism: the revolutionary form of “Passage to India” accommodates American expansion, but at its heart the poem goes backward in time, to dusky lands and sultry bodies; in contrast, Fenollosa’s conventional forms cannot express the new alliance between East and West he imagined. In fact, we can measure their different estimations of American heroes if we consider Whitman’s Columbus against a second long poem by Fenollosa, The Discovery of America. In this later poem, Fenollosa imagines Columbus’s first spying of land and goes on to imagine a further journey “Across blue oceans of Nothing” (164), all the way to Japan as the endpoint of Columbus’s voyage (166). In Fenollosa’s poem, Columbus is led breathlessly onward in centered lines, but his fate is bleak: the poem ends in darkness for this “first and last begotten hero of the sea,” finally closing with a “perfect silence” that “turns the numbered pages of a dying theme” (205). Whitman brought Columbus back to life, but Fenollosa sounds the death knell for an American hero who has no place in a new world. Whitman’s “I” strode forth, into the ancient Orient; but Fenollosa’s modern Asian man rises at the cost of American valor.

Bardic Dreams Together, Whitman and Fenollosa set the terms for a literary American Orientalism constructed out of commercial ties and calibrated to modern desires: they are American prophets of a poetic revolution and an Asiatic turn. In imagining together these contrasting figures, my study seeks to examine a well-known creation of American modernism in order to understand its formal properties. I am particularly fascinated by the resilient structure of American Orientalism: in the face of repeated challenges, an essential identity between the United States and East Asia has remained a significant strand in the American imagination. Indeed, periodic challenges have sustained this structure of alliance: a splitting of self from other among different Orients reinforces delicate alliances, a process which can be traced to the rise of Japan and its seeming separation from a retrograde Orient. Japan’s rapprochement with the West relied on casting a modern silhouette against a faceless and timeless Asiatic other, and the specter of old-fashioned Orientalism necessarily haunts a modern figuration of alliance because it is in setting itself apart from such atavistic portraits that an American formulation can claim its freshness. The legacies of Whitman and Fenollosa feature prominently in the work of Ezra Pound, who cast himself as the Good Gray Poet’s enfant terrible and claimed Fenollosa’s writings as the key archive for his poetic revolution. My first chapter examines anew Pound’s China in light of

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his American ambitions: Pound’s struggle with Whitman’s influence was an agonistic battle with the American public, and his championing of Fenollosa was no less an American question. Pound was a self-appointed American ambassador in matters both literary and political, and in his long exile from the land of his birth, his American accent only became more pronounced. Pound discovered in Fenollosa’s papers an illustration for the new poetry he envisioned, and with the crucial raw material of Fenollosa’s research on Sino-Japanese art and writing, he became the most significant proponent of United States–East Asian alliances in American literary history. Pound anointed Fenollosa as the prime instigator of modernist Orientalism, and he upheld Fenollosa’s aesthetic ideals throughout his long study of East Asian literature and culture. Hence, though Fenollosa failed to imagine a contemporary American hero, his own fate in the future union between East and West has been extraordinary: Fenollosa’s East and West fell apart as a political epic, but the ultimate political epic of the twentieth century, Pound’s Cantos, took seriously a vision of the East as a statal ideal in a sustained vision that unfolded over hundreds of pages. The Cantos created a new history of American statecraft, in which Confucian historiography crossed the Pacific and found its way, incredibly, to revolutionary America; and in taking this transpacific leap, Pound thunderously crossed the bridge first imagined by Whitman and subsequently gilded by Fenollosa. Ezra Pound was utterly discredited in the postwar era—to Pound’s detriment, his argument for the relevance of poetry to contemporary politics was proven by his own example—and his work was driven underground. Artists of the Beat Generation, whose social ideals bore almost no resemblance to the civilizational order Pound labored to achieve, rediscovered Pound as a subterranean influence. The heirs to Pound’s legacy include a range of 1950s luminaries, but it was Gary Snyder, the focus of my second chapter, whose adherence to Pound’s Orientalism was the most complete and significant. Like his predecessors, Snyder imagined a disciplining East capable of reforming a wayward West—but this time through Zen Buddhism. Pound championed Confucianism and banished Buddhists from the earthly paradise he presented in The Cantos; Snyder, by contrast, continues to be one of the most well-known and eloquent advocates for Zen in the United States. Despite a nearcomplete divergence in political and cultural stances, however, Snyder and Pound share a conviction in Fenollosa’s union of East and West—and both actively promoted their visions for an ideal society as an amalgam of East and West. Snyder understood North America as “Turtle Island,” borrowing a Native American term for the land to suggest a natural order, and he embraced the practice of Zen as a means of accessing this state. Snyder crossed the Pacific in order to knit together Far West and Far East in an ecological vision which aligned a “native” understanding of America with an Asiatic vision, and we can measure the success of the

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future union of East and West imagined by the 1950s counterculture in the presently unavoidable and sometimes incoherent meldings of East and West which have become a commonplace in American culture. The Whitman-Fenollosa-Pound-Snyder genealogy I trace is marked by a repeated desire to reinvigorate an epic sense of America through contact with the Orient. In returning to these canonical figures, I aim to account for the endurance of a highly visible figuration by reconsidering American interests. My rereadings of major literary innovators of American Orientalism seek to uncover formal structures in order to provide a framework for the many images of the Orient that this study necessarily neglects. In devoting the first half of this book to the Asiatic images of Pound and Snyder, I examine transpacific alliances plagued by fantasy. Pound’s Confucian order and Snyder’s primitivism seemed as fanciful in their respective contemporary moments as Whitman’s oceancrossing train and Fenollosa’s impossible marriage, yet these political and social failures blossomed into aesthetic revolutions. Dreams of political or social purification through the touch of the Orient are fueled by an economic imperative that is part and parcel of American Orientalism; it is, after all, an ideal of commerce that has consistently transformed Oriental other into ally. Yet transpacific alliances are subject to constant aesthetic mystification; the hard facts of East-West relations seem to invite transcendent ideals, and the major poetic instigators of American Orientalism construct phantom bridges over the material connections that bind East Asia to the United States.

Orienting Asian America Whitman’s headlong rush to the Orient in “Passage to India” hinted at another, crucial aspect of America’s Asia: when he jotted down the 1869 junction between the great American railroads, he invoked an event that has become central to Asian American history and culture. The published photograph of the “Golden Spike” ceremony excluded the Chinese American laborers who toiled on the line in treacherous physical and social conditions. This now-famous exclusion has become one of the foundational outrages of Asian American studies, a field created out of a movement to redress such lacunae. Whitman imagined a train “on trackless seas” roaring across the Pacific, but Chinese pioneers who had already made the voyage in the other direction had a hand in creating this vehicle of westward expansion. The transpacific alliances and discords that shaped American Orientalism were deeply felt by Asians in the United States, whose fortunes were inextricably tied to the vicissitudes of United States–Asian relations. Very different subjects made the transpacific crossing; 23 the repercussions of transpacific alliances occasioned not only a reorientation in

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United States policy but also new arrivals to American shores. The history of Asian exclusion in the United States, which dates back to the landmark 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and persisted in the consistent barring of Asians from citizenship until 1952, reveals a preoccupation with regulating Asian bodies that corresponds to the rise of modern America. Considering the proliferation of anti-Asian policies at the turn of the twentieth century, Palumbo-Liu argues that “managing the modern was inseparable from managing Asian America” (17). His study Asian/American insists that Asians in America have been a determining force for “what ‘America’ was and is at any given moment” (2), and he pays particular attention to “early twentieth-century redefinitions of the American state” and its “particular blend of exclusionist practices coupled with liberal ideology, the latter used to distinguish the United States as the modern nation above all” (20). Asians in America in the years of exclusionist policy revealed the limits of the modern nation’s liberal ideology, and the experience of Asians in various stages of civic alienation and incorporation in the United States vividly demonstrates the price of an image of the Orient which bears the imprint of economic relations: just as late industrialization was alternately applauded and punished in the Pacific, “economic animals” have been rewarded and rebuked in the domestic landscape. Asians in the United States became local targets for a popular ire that could quickly become violent: Americans who felt their livelihoods were threatened by an alternately desired and despised economic modernity attacked Asians imagined as economic machines—as Lye puts it, “modernization rendered visible” (94). The tenuousness of their civic status within the United States made their Americanness a subject of debate—one alive and well today. In the late 1960s, ethnic activists created Asian America, a panethnic coalition in the service of radical political aims modeled on the tenets of black nationalism. Against a history of condescending and pejorative popular figurations of Asiatics, the movement created an Asian American past by enshrining two monuments of Asian American experience: the Chinese railroad worker and the interned Japanese American. The most significant document of the literary movement, the 1974 anthology Aiiieeeee!, presented a primer for creating Asian American literature, in which activist artists culled together a literary past and suggested the kind of work that could eventually find its way into the canon. From its inception, Asian American literature limited the kinds of expressions that could be accommodated under its banner: Chinese and Japanese American experience took precedence, and left out from the canon were all those works which did not strike a note of defiance and whose literary expressions were illegible to the stated aims of the movement. Asian American literature was a tendentious formation, but its political aim gave birth to an Asian American consciousness that has become a crucial component of American literary study.

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The call to unity relied on an existing Western discourse, a fact which Gary Okihiro underscores in the very opening of his overview of Asian American history, in which he discusses the designation “Asian”: Their classification as Asian was a European invention that named the Orient as spaces east of Europe and assigned natures, Orientalism, to its peoples. Accordingly, from 1850 to World War II, United States laws governing immigration, citizenship, and civil and property rights and social convention and practice lumped together Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Filipinos as an undifferentiated group. But that essentializing name was also made in America by Asians during the late 1960s, when they sought a pan-Asian identity premised upon a common past in the United States and upon a racialized politics that they believed would enable and lead to mobilization and empowerment. (xiv–xv) In a thoroughgoing critique of Asian American literature, Susan Koshy points to this similarity between anti-Asian policies and Asian American literature as a conceptual failing: returning to the “common history of exclusion and racism” (325) that defines Asian American literature, Koshy argues that “this formulation is vitiated by its obsession with the white gaze” (325). Koshy opens her essay by assailing Asian American literature for its “lack of significant theoretical work” (316)—but perhaps her charge could be reformulated: it is not that Asian American literature lacks a theory, but that its theoretical basis is so closely tied to its politics. The binding theory of Asian American literature is antiracism: the fact of a determining white gaze pitched the movement into a mode of resistance. The reactive stance at the heart of Asian American literature makes it no less of a theory, and its staying power, despite formidable challenges over the years, proves its coherence.24 With the post-1965 boom in Asian immigration, however, came a heterogeneous population whose artistic expressions did not always adhere to the founding principles of the Asian American movement. Some stalwarts of the movement adopted a combative stance against these writers, but as Asian American studies settled into the academy, new advocates extended the initial claims of Asian American literature to address a growing field of work. Lisa Lowe’s groundbreaking Immigrant Acts elaborated the significance of Asian exclusion—a history first brought together by Asian American activists—to the creation of “Asian American cultural forms as alternatives to national cultural forms and as sites for the emergence of subjects and practices that are not exhausted by the narrative of American citizenship” (x). Lowe’s critical work opened Asian American literature onto the terrain of culture, which she read as “a phantasmatic site, on which the nation projects a series of condensed, complicated anxieties regarding external and internal threats to

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the mutable coherence of the national body: the invading multitude, the lascivious seductress, the servile yet treacherous domestic, the automaton whose inhuman efficiency will supersede American ingenuity” (18). By positioning Asian American literature within a cultural site overdetermined by foreign anxieties, Lowe sustained the initial antiracist drive of the movement while opening it to new arrivals to the United States. Building upon Lowe’s work of understanding Asian American studies within the terrain of culture, Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise pitches Asian American literature as theory by specifying Lowe’s culture as “the locus in which signification has material life” (19). Using the terms of poststructuralism, Chuh argues that Asian American literature is ultimately “a mediating presence that links bodies to the knowledge regimes of the United States nation” (27). We may thus read Asian American texts as themselves theories, in the sense that they reveal knowledge formations and apparatuses of power. By turning readers into theoreticians, Chuh’s formulation accounts for the difficulty of incorporating different kinds of figures under the sign of Asian American studies by positing what she terms a “subjectless discourse” (9) which constantly queries its own boundaries.25 What began as a project of several strident subjects has become subjectless in Chuh’s hands, and her theoretical innovation ultimately provides a mode of accommodating a wider range of literary texts while retaining the category of Asian American literature. Critical accounts of Asian American literature thus grapple with the terms of its initial formation, whether in attempting to elude or expand its activist origins. From its inception, Asian American literature brandished its knowledge of Asian experience in both the United States and Asia in order to reveal the shortcomings of mainstream Orientalism. The activist movement took the terrain of culture as its battlefield in order to produce trenchant critiques of American policy, both foreign and domestic. I propose to reopen our understanding of the formation of Asian American literature by considering a presently disavowed past. To return to Orientalist literature as an instigator for Asian American literature is to examine anew a political and aesthetic response—one which has long been deemed a case of simple rejection—as a crucial point of contact which defined a literary movement. Ethnic nationalists forged their art against a tradition of Orientalism in American letters, and contemporary Asian American literature continues to react to an ongoing American Orientalism with deep roots in the modernist era. The often contentious conversations between Orientalist and minority poetics permit us to reconsider the foundational aesthetic stance of the ethnic nationalists, and, further, to understand contemporary Asian American literature as a continuing dialogue with the burden of transpacific relations. This study suggests that reading Asian American literature against a backdrop of American Orientalism may help us attend to present theoretical demands for greater ideological range and fuller transnational

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contexts. The structure of American Orientalism, which made alliance contingent upon a commensurate abjection, effectively divided Asian groups within the United States. All Asians were branded as “economic animals,” but the specific fortunes of each group rose and fell with American foreign policy, and little common cause could be found in periods of sudden upheavals and chronic uncertainty. The panethnic coalition brought together Chinese and Japanese Americans, long riven by social, political, and cultural differences, and I read the union of Asian America as a response not only to blanket anti-Asian racism but to the divisive operations of American foreign policy, marked by partial and temporary alliances. By bringing to the fore differential relations across the Pacific, we may examine aesthetic expressions that contend with the alternating alliances and enmities that structure transpacific relations. Indeed, just as the movement’s central tenet of antiracism makes visible a history of racism, attending to transpacific alliances in Asian American literature reveals the far reach of American economic and military interests. In tying the Asian American revolution to a past of transpacific literary expression, we may account for a multiplicity of literary expressions which evoke transpacific journeys, past and present.

New Bridges The second half of Apparitions of Asia considers Asian American writing which must contend with the potent formulation of American Orientalism. Asian American poets faced a singular plight: the poetic revolutions of the twentieth century were shot through with Oriental hallucinations. Figures like Fenollosa’s protégé, Okakura Kakuzo (Tenshin), paraded their allegiance to American Orientalism. Okakura embodied East-West connections: 26 his career followed Fenollosa’s model27—he became the curator of Fenollosa’s collection of Oriental art in Boston—and, echoing his mentor, Okakura “began to call Japan a ‘museum of Asia.’ ”28 He published books about Japan and the Orient in fluid and polished English, the most famous of which, The Book of Tea (1906), continues to charm readers. In The Book of Tea, Okakura presents a “philosophy of tea” as a small but significant example of a transpacific link: “Strangely enough humanity has so far met in the tea-cup. It is the only Asiatic ceremonial which commands universal esteem…in this single instance the Oriental spirit reigns supreme” (11). Okakura describes an intimacy with the Orient that has already touched every Western home, presenting a finessed version of the union that Fenollosa’s East and West sketched with less success: Okakura’s example of tea brings together aesthetic and commercial interests. The Fenollosa-Okakura pair has echoes in American literary history: dramatist and poet Sadakichi Hartmann served as Whitman’s secretary, and Yone Noguchi was Joaquin Miller’s houseboy. Such

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literary intimacies are rarely discussed,29 but in capitalizing on their transpacific privileges to craft their own alliances, these figures demonstrate the seduction of American Orientalism. The transition from American literary Orientalism to Asian American literature was not simply a clean break, and my third chapter reads the complicated appeal of this past in the bizarre and little-known case of David Hsin-Fu Wand, whose career captures in miniature the trajectory of my study: he began his career as a protégé of Pound, renounced this influence to dally with Snyder, and finally ensconced himself within the Asian American activist movement. Wand poses as a cautionary tale; his vacillations are illustrative for their excessiveness, and he usefully rehearses the different options available to Asian American poets. His Orientalist past kept him from full acceptance into Asian American studies, but his poetic trajectory was not so alien to the activist practitioners who considered him a tardy convert to their cause. Activist poets of the Asian American movement not only denounced Orientalists, they grappled with figures tainted by East-West alliances. My analysis reads reactions to American Orientalism in the work of prominent Asian American activist poets who echoed the Beat forms deeply influenced by Pound. The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, a significant 1978 poetic creation jointly authored by key activist poets of Asian America, engages in a conversation with Snyder’s “Night Highway 99”; against the backdrop of Snyder’s vision, these poets present their Asian American imaginations along the dark river of the Western highway. Lawson Fusao Inada, one of the Buddha Bandits and a major instigator of Asian American literature, presents critical responses to the prisonhouse of American Orientalism that turn to different American cultures in order to give voice to an Asian American subject. Inada’s verse displays the multiple dialogues of Asian American literature, which writes against a literary past at the same time as it invokes a bitter history through a range of American voices and literary strategies. Led by Frank Chin, the movement’s most vocal and inventive spokesperson, activist Asian American artists singled out a handful of writers who mistakenly and uncritically invoked modernist Orientalism in their work; chief among the violators was Maxine Hong Kingston, whose stated aims of writing a modernist epic branded her a comprador. I open the final chapter of this study with Kingston’s attempts to venture into a modernist literary past. Kingston’s 1976 The Woman Warrior drove the retheorization of Asian American literature; despite vociferous detractors from the activist camp, it was largely her work that occasioned the expansion of the field. Because her work transformed the Asian American literary landscape, I read Kingston as a model for subsequent reorientations of the canon. The recent work that has spurred a similar reconsideration of Asian American literature is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 epic Dictée, which presented a significant formal return to the modernist epic. My

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reading of this now-canonical text delves into the echoes between Cha’s work and Pound’s epic: I read her modernist allusions as formal attempts to reveal the modern history of American involvement in the Far East. The recent work of Myung Mi Kim follows Cha in employing modernist forms to unveil a literary and political past that binds Asia to the United States. In reading these late crossings on a bridge constructed by American alliances with the Far East, I demonstrate the persistence of these transpacific connections in American and Asian American literature throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The figures I examine in this study all performed cultural work through aesthetic forms: they yoked literary endeavors to political aims. Visions of more beautiful futures have always been the province of aesthetic production, but in each of the cases I consider, literary work is the preferred mode for expressing a critical stance toward contemporary politics. None of these artists accepted a division between aesthetics and politics, and they imagined their poems in the public sphere. Each of them performed ambassadorial functions; they are, to use Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s potent phrase, “ambassadors of culture”: they fashioned themselves as diplomats of cultural traffic by applying their aesthetic tastes to political ideologies. In the two halves of my study appear two different kinds of ambassadors: Gruesz distinguishes between “a ‘top-down’ model of cultural transmission,” in which the artist “validates his own authority through a tradition of taste and prestige understood to be the culturally dominant one” and “a ‘bottom-up’ model,” in which the artist “stands in for his readership, representing interests, and values, their knowledge before the tribunal of Tradition” (17). Literary scholarship tends to separate its analyses of “top-down” and “bottom-up,” but this study follows Gruesz’s conviction that they can exist in “dialectical relation” (17) in order to suggest that we may discover something new about cultural formation by considering both sides. Apparitions of Asia charts the pressure a newly “opened” Pacific region exerts on American literature; my emphasis on the formal expressions of this deeply transforming influence follows the ambassadors themselves in their belief that poetry is uniquely capable of registering cultural shifts—and creating new cultures.

1 Cathay to Confucius Ezra Pound and China

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zra Pound’s poetry spans continents and millennia, and the restlessness of his work matches the desire he urgently voiced in “The Plunge,” a lyric from his 1912 collection Ripostes: I would bathe myself in strangeness: These comforts heaped upon me, smother me! I burn, I scald so for the new, New friends, new faces, Places! Oh to be out of this, This that is all I wanted —save the new. And you, Love, you the much, the more desired! Do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones, All mire, mist, all fog, All ways of traffic? You, I would have flow over me like water, Oh, but far out of this! Grass, and low fields, and hills, And sun, Oh, sun enough! Out, and alone, among some Alien people! (Personae 66–67)

Pound discovered “new faces” in the range of personae he adopted, and this exhortation to newness and strangeness propelled his verse into new poetic terrain. Pound’s scalding desire led him all the way to dynastic China, and my inquiry considers the rich strangeness he discovered in the Far East. Bristling with action and organic growth, Chinese writing electrified his lyrics in the early part of his career; and in the hard and beautiful ascent of the latter half of his epic The Cantos, Confucius provided an ordered radiance at the nadir of his ideological fantasies and 23

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amid the welter of his postwar trials. So many of Pound’s famous discoveries can be traced back to the bracing alienation he plunged into when he turned to the “persistent East”:1 China was his paradiso terrestre, in which the grass next to the “low fields, and hills” glowed blue, and the Eastern sun’s rays stretched across the Pacific to touch America. It was through the strangeness of the East that Pound most fully expressed the sharpness of solitude, and the warmth of this light later nourished his time “Out, and alone” in his literal cage. Pound culled his most famous dictum from his study of Chinese history: Make It New was spelled out in a Chinese bathtub. It is fitting, then, that the desire to bathe in strangeness would lead him to a distant place that Pound made new for America in the twentieth century. Scholars have long considered Pound’s breathtaking innovations with his China, from his free translations to his submission to Confucius, and recent work definitively proves the centrality of China to his imagination.2 My reading follows the spirit of these accounts, which are less interested in applauding or excoriating Pound for his understanding of Chinese language and history than in considering the implications of his East-West alliance for the practice of literary representation. Eric Hayot’s study Chinese Dreams makes clear the stakes of Pound’s China: “It is possible that the history of Pound’s invention of China (a history that includes, I am arguing, its own criticism) might set the stage for a discussion of the nature of inventing—or knowing—itself ” (3). Pound famously brought Chinese poetry to life, but to make “China” appear in the American imagination required a new, modern understanding of the operation of poetry and its powers of presentation. Hayot argues that “it was as though something in the Chinese permitted, or gave birth to, the Poundian unveiling of the universal” (33); Pound proved the efficacy and beauty of his new principles of poetry by making China imaginable. Pound’s universal tends to cast him as a kind of world citizen and proponent of modernist internationalism, but my analysis builds upon the insights of Hayot’s critical foundation—in which Chineseness and modernism become inextricable—to argue that Pound’s China is a specifically American formulation. Pound burned into the American consciousness an Orient for the twentieth century; in casting about for a model that could renew poetry worn out by the conventions of the nineteenth century, Pound discovered an image of reform in China that engaged him for the entirety of his career.3 In 1938, Pound made a crucial distinction: “Serious approach to Chinese doctrines must start with wiping off any idea that they are all merely chinese” (Selected Prose 83). In separating “Chinese” from “chinese,” Pound delineated his use of China from chinoiserie, and it is my claim that the capital and lowercase denote the two halves of Orientalism: one sets apart difference; the other enshrines a shared ideal. The American literary imagination insisted on finding something more than

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an inscrutable race and lacquered bibelots—though they certainly found this as well. American poets from the Transcendentalists onward found a sympathetic philosophy in the Orient; they sought the intellectual riches of Chineseness over mere chineseness. Despite his call to strangeness, Pound’s China never devolved into rehearsals of difference; instead, he created a revelatory intimacy between China and America which has marked not only American ideas of the Far East but also a new openness in modern poetry. My reading of Pound begins with the specter of Walt Whitman, whose Americanness Pound envied. Pound fled America for London in 1908, but despite his exile he strove to be an American bard—and Whitman’s example presented both an example and an obstacle for the young poet who yearned to be “among some/Alien people” but whose artistic ambitions shackled him to a despised and familiar land. Pound discovered a way to counter Whitman’s looming visage in a serendipitous gift: in Fenollosa’s papers, bequeathed to Pound in 1913, Pound discovered a visible and dynamic formulation for his aesthetic ideals.The clean strokes of Fenollosa’s ideogram conjured up a poetic image, and it was through this new apparition, learned through Chinese writing, that Pound answered the challenge of Whitman’s status: Pound’s creation of modern poetry, shot through with Fenollosa’s American Orientalism, earned him a place next to Whitman as the next American innovator in verse. This negotiation between Whitman and Fenollosa in Pound’s early career set the template for his relationship to America, in which a detour through China would continue to feature prominently. I argue that Pound’s China is inextricable from his America, and the proof of an American allegiance to the Far East is plainly evident in the Chinese history lesson in the middle of Pound’s epic: in Cantos LII–LXXI, published in 1940, Pound connects the whole of a Confucian history of China to American colonial history in a startling leap across the Pacific. It is my contention that, in turning to the strangeness of the Orient, Pound discovered a means of reaching America, a country he considered by turns with contempt and awe but always with unease and the deep loneliness of exile. Ezra Pound fashioned an American Orient which believed in a singular consonance across the Pacific; and the East provided him with a voice and a landscape which ultimately resonated with generations of American poets who echoed the precision of his longing, cultivated in the light of a Chinese sun.4

American Camerado Pound’s American ambition can be traced directly to Walt Whitman, the specter who presides over his early lyrics and reappears decades later in The Pisan Cantos, in the keening voice of a single bird from Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Pound’s curious 1909 document,

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a two-page essay entitled “What I Feel about Walt Whitman” collected in his Selected Prose acknowledges his debt while expressing his resentment. Pound begins the essay by positing his distance from America—“From this side of the Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman” (145)—but Pound was one of the first American poets to pay attention to his “deliberate artistry” (146).5 He recognized Whitman’s singular power, albeit in stinging tones: Whitman “is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America” (145).6 In the stench of this phantom we can identify the full scope of Pound’s ambition: he longs to be the genius of his time in the way that Whitman “is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with his time” (145). Pound’s poetic innovations were directed at America, but he had to reform Whitman’s unruly America so that his own poetry could resonate with the nation. Pound imagined an America that could be written on and literally renewed—he wanted to “scourge America with all the old beauty” (146)—and in the essay he clarifies his role: “I at my best can only be a strife for a renaissance in America” (146). In fact, Pound never shook off this aim, which lay just below the surface of all of his poetic instigations. In comparing his own poetry to that of Whitman and of Dante, “The first great man to write in the language of his people” (146), Pound writes, “Et ego Petrarca in lingua vetera scribo, and in a tongue my people understood not” (146). The distance expressed by this ancient language reads as the voice of the enfant terrible in this essay, but this textual and temporal rift would emerge as the grave, overriding distress of the late Cantos, in which a rocklike impermeability and opacity express his solitude and the white silence at the end of his life. Pound’s bardic dreams forced him to face an inhospitable America and appreciate a poet who never himself considered poetic lineages and whose monument of American verse Leaves of Grass never referred to another poet. Pound addressed Whitman directly in A Lume Spento (1908), his first published collection, in a poem titled after a line from Song of Myself: “On His Own Face in a Glass.” 7 Pound looks into a mirror and sees Whitman reflected back: O strange face there in the glass! O ribald company, O saintly host, O sorrow-swept my fool, What answer? O ye myriad That strive and play and pass, Jest, challenge, counterlie! I? I? I? And ye? (Personae 33)

Pound defines this face with a series of anaphoric O’s, mocking Whitman’s extraordinary repetitions, but in his mockery he captures the

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contradictions Whitman reveled in: ribald and saintly; sorrowful and foolish. Yet the dazzling, myriad quality of the Whitmanian self, which can “Jest, challenge, and counterlie!” remains mute in this intimate encounter; Pound is left with a string of questioning “I?”s. Whitman’s “in my own face in the glass” appears in a late section of Song of Myself in which the poet ponders the divine and concludes that God is visible in every aspect of the mundane world and in his own reflection: I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass (86–87)

Whitman’s transports could dispense with God, and Pound, too, was unhappy with transcendence and looked for earthly paradises, but in zeroing in on Song of Myself ’s loftiest moment, Pound directs us to the heights of Whitman’s ambition while excoriating Whitman’s voice, chopping up his long lines and encasing them in rhyme. Whitman looked into the glass and saw his own visage, but Pound cannot do the same; R. P. Blackmur faulted Pound for donning so many masks in his poetry,8 and perhaps Whitman’s reflection kept Pound from this American “I”— Whitman’s “strange face” in Pound’s glass obscured his own. Much of Pound’s early poetry grapples with this phantom presence. In the 1909 essay, Pound labels Whitman his “spiritual father,” but in the essay’s scant two pages he quickly moves beyond this familial resemblance. He closes the essay with a “We” which binds him to Whitman in a spirit of camaraderie: “His message is my message. We will see that men hear it” (146). Similarly, in “A Pact,” a poem from his breakthrough collection Lustra (1913–1915), Pound names this spiritual father and refashions his relationship: I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman— I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root— Let there be commerce between us. (Personae 90)

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This blunt apostrophe to his ghost performs a kind of exorcism. The poem moves the poet from filiality to friendship in the lines between the two dashes at both ends, but the abrupt declarations of the first and last lines are speech acts which have the tones of an official document; a formal feeling surrounds this familial diction. The phantom is brought into a jarringly real world, and the new wood which is called forth to be carved does not permit even a momentary flight into Whitman’s world of song. “Let there be commerce between us”: the tone of divine fiat settles around a negotiation in hard currency. Babette Deutsch aptly named the difference between Whitman and Pound as that between woodsman and woodcarver; 9 the language of affiliation pervades the rhetoric of literary legacies, but Pound finally refuses to be cast as Whitman’s prodigal son—he chooses instead to “make friends.” Pound is heir to Whitman’s American poetic innovation, but I would like to follow Pound in insisting on the language of diplomacy and foreign relations to describe this literary inheritance. Pound only laid rest to Whitman’s influence by cutting a deal, and his relationship to America followed this model. From his exile across the Atlantic, Pound attempted to address a homeland he found hostile because he understood that bards could only have “one root,” but in decrying a family resemblance, he turned to diplomatic rhetoric. Pound labored in the service of an American audience; he took on the role of foreign correspondent for American literary journals, and much of his correspondence reveals the seriousness with which he conducted his role as American ambassador of poetry, both by introducing American poets to the European scene and world poets to the American market. In dramatic contrast to Whitman, whose model of national affiliation created a felt community through bonds of affect,10 Pound conducted complicated negotiations and struck hard deals to secure his position in the American landscape. In Lustra, the visibility of Whitman’s hand is astonishing. In fact, the collection as a whole carries a running dialogue with this reflection. From an opening gambit in which Pound ponders, “Will people accept them?/(i.e. these songs)” (Personae 83), the poems return again and again to the question of his songs and their audience, and they are shot through with Whitmanian inflections as they cry out to be heard at the same time that Pound exposes this mask. In “The Condolence,” Pound addresses “my fellow sufferers, songs of my youth” (Personae 83) against critics such as Rupert Brooke, who faulted Pound’s poems for borrowing too much from Whitman:11 And now you hear what is said to us: We are compared to that sort of person Who wanders about announcing his sex As if he had just discovered it. (Personae 84)

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In “Salutation” and “Salutation the Second” and perhaps most dramatically in “Commission,” Pound revels in a song of himself that echoes Whitman’s repetitions but goes where Whitman never attempted, “to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis” (Personae 89) and other figures unlikely to appear in Whitman’s roll calls. “Further Instructions” exhorts his songs to “express our baser passions” but turns to the “I” who remained only a question in “On His Own Face in a Glass”: And I? I have gone half cracked, I have talked to you so much that I almost see you about me, Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing! But you, newest song of the lot, You are not old enough to have done much mischief, I will get you a green coat out of China With dragons worked upon it, I will get you the scarlet silk trousers From the statue of the infant Christ in Santa Maria Novella, Lest they say that we are lacking in taste, Or that there is no caste in this family. (Personae 95)

Pound ridicules his own songs, which cavort in the freedom of their personification, but the call to the “newest song” follows the literary aims that kept his poetry alive. The “green coat out of China” may refer to his own youthful excesses, a coat worn to a Halloween party at age sixteen,12 but Lustra is significant not only for the levity and light he finally learned to extract from Whitman but also for Pound’s inclusion of new material “with dragons worked upon it.” It is in this collection that Pound tried his hand at revising existing translations of Chinese poetry: in “Liu Ch’e” he captured the sudden silence after “The rustling of the silk is discontinued” (Personae 110) and created a mute and sadly pliant closing image of “A wet leaf that clings to the threshold” (Personae 111);13 he cut down “Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord,” Herbert Giles’s translation of a Tang dynasty poem, into a delicate image of a silk fan discarded, “clear as frost on the grass-blade” (Personae 111)—Pound’s adaptation focuses desolation onto a small, frozen shimmer along a green blade. The most significant product of this eastward turn in Lustra is Pound’s most famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. (Personae 111)

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This “apparition” captures Whitman’s teeming multitudes in a flash, in the “instant of time” of the image.14 Pound takes Whitman’s subjects and frames them in a haiku, thus transposing the exclamations of Whitmanian song into a charged quietude, in which a sudden and surprising beauty appears in the poem’s two colliding lines. The faces are petals and the darkened underground is the glistening bough, but the immediacy of the apparition relies on the absence of these connectives; instead, the doubling rhythm of the second line answers the tripling gait of the first, and the near-rhyme seals the image in a lapidary perfection. To return to Pound’s elaboration of his first person in “Further Instructions,” the “newest song of the lot” is fresh because of its Eastern turn. I contend that Pound answered the Whitmanian “I” by discovering the Orient. The first section of “A Song of Degrees” addresses this bargain: Rest me with Chinese colours, For I think the glass is evil. (Personae 95)

The looming presence of Whitman’s face in the glass can be soothed by “Chinese colours.” In a 1912 letter to Harriet Monroe, Pound expressed his concern for the state of American letters by bluntly inquiring, “Are you for American poetry or for poetry?” The letter closes with a postscript that “any agonizing that tends to hurry what I believe in the end to be inevitable, our American Risorgimento, is dear to me.”15 Pound cast his lot with this “American Risorgimento,” and his momentous 1913 essay “Patria Mia” elaborates upon this desire to transform the American wilderness: “The thesis I defend is: that America has a chance for Renaissance” (Selected Prose 102). In attempting to characterize the American spirit, “Patria Mia” returns to Whitman and attempts to define his singularity: It is, as nearly as I can define it, a certain generosity; a certain carelessness, or looseness, if you will; a hatred of the sordid, an ability to forget the part for the sake of the whole, a desire for largeness, a willingness to stand exposed. “Camerado, this is no book; Who touches this touches a man.” (Selected Prose 124)

Whitman exemplifies the effortless melding of man and nation and, just as importantly, of man and book. Pound continues by considering Whitman’s own status in America: One reason why Whitman’s reception in America has been so tardy is that he says so many things which we are accustomed, almost unconsciously, to take for granted. He was so near the national colour that the nation hardly perceived him against that background. [. . .]

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Whitman established the national timbre. One may not need him at home. It is in the air, this tonic of his. But if one is abroad; if one is ever likely to forget one’s birth-right, to lose faith, being surrounded by disparagers, one can find, in Whitman, the reassurance. Whitman goes bail for the nation. [. . .] If a man’s work require him to live in exile, let him suffer, or enjoy, his exile gladly. But it would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness, or a Frenchness, or a European-ness that is more than half a skin deep. (Selected Prose 124) The wistfulness of these closing lines reveals an exilic longing beneath the surface of Pound’s breezy treatment of America. Wyndham Lewis called Pound “violently American” and Donald Davie called him “indelibly American”;16 Pound’s American accent grew more ornery with the years, and though he voiced a frustrated desire to shed his Americanness early in his career, he never lost sight of American poetry. When his American citizenship was imperiled in the aftermath of World War II, he turned again to Whitman for “reassurance” in The Pisan Cantos; in the face of a charge of treason, precisely the moment when “one is ever likely to forget one’s birth-right,” he turned to Whitman to restore his faith—and Pound’s own American timbre emerged from the fever of his wartime activity in the beautiful ruins of his postwar poetry. Pound resolved his relationship with Whitman in the pages of Lustra; he faced the imposing visage in the mirror by weaving its appearance into his poetry, and it is my claim that he countered Whitman’s face with Oriental reflections. Pound’s alliance with America, learned through contending with the bard, folded into a new and revelatory influence in his poetry, and the twinned allegiance to America and the Orient first evident in Lustra lasted for the duration of his work and, indeed, his life. After concluding his negotiations with Walt Whitman, Pound turned to another American who was equally well versed in American Transcendentalism but who dove straight into “Chinese colours” and imagined an American renaissance through a confluence of East and West.

A Medium for the Orient Pound was entrusted with the papers of Ernest Fenollosa by his widow. Hugh Kenner suggests that Mary Fenollosa read Pound’s poetry and chose him for the job; she intuited a kindred spirit in Ezra Pound.17 For Pound, these papers were a gold mine: through them, he would locate a core formulation for his poetics, translate Japanese Noh plays, and find the fodder for his most beautiful single volume, Cathay. These papers tap into Pound’s penchant for translation, but his labors with this material

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were of a different order from the reimaginings of Latin, Provençal, and Anglo-Saxon in his previous work. When Pound embarked on these translations, he knew no Chinese; and though doubts have been raised about Pound’s proficiency in several other languages, his ignorance of these poems was singular.18 In the face of this utterly foreign language, Pound relied heavily on Fenollosa, and though his interest in Far Eastern art predated the receipt of Fenollosa’s papers,19 in Fenollosa Pound discovered an ideal American cicerone for the Orient. A shared American Orientalism is evident in the now-infamous essay that Pound edited, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Pound’s note on the opening page acknowledges his debt to Fenollosa and his own editorial intervention:20 [This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences. We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics. In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in “new” Western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such. He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time to put into practice. In Japan he restored, or greatly helped to restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with the parallels and comparisons between Eastern and Western art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renaissance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 I have not had to change the allusions to Western conditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories. E.P. 1918.] (3) Just as Pound paid tribute to Whitman because the elder poet “prophesied” Pound himself, Fenollosa became another American comrade— indeed, he seems to have replaced Whitman.21 Pound displays a startling sense of recognition toward Fenollosa’s treatise because in it he found what he had been looking for all along; these shared affinities describe two Americans in exile with a poetic sensibility which “cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics.” Like Fenollosa, Pound saw an America “filled with parallels” with the East, and Pound’s claim that Fenollosa “looked to an American renaissance” further bound Fenollosa’s aims with Pound’s desire to renew the West.

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Fenollosa begins the essay in grand style: “This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter” (3). The surprise of this new chapter lies in the “Chinese problem”: “We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us” (3–4). Pound noticed when Whitman called his book “no book;/Who touches this touches a man”; Fenollosa’s calling the world a book must have been similarly exhilarating. Pound’s enduring naïveté was to believe that art could dictate politics, that to transform the language of poetry would bring about an attendant change in the nation, and Fenollosa’s opening tones operate on this premise. Pound suggests in his editorial note that this particular kind of interest in the Far East is an American predilection, and in Fenollosa’s opening words the rest of the globe is darkened before this confrontation on either side of the Pacific. It is an urgent political matter that Americans understand Chinese writing because it unlocks Chinese thought—and, further, unlocks American aesthetics as well. Upon stating his aims, Fenollosa humbles himself: “I feel that I should perhaps apologize for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim” (4–5). Pound tells us in a footnote that no such apology is necessary, but what is striking about this apology is that it functions to cast off both scholarly and European erudition on the subject. Fenollosa cobbled together his understanding of Chinese writing with Japanese tutors; his understanding of Chinese, then, was doubly refracted and Pound stood at an even further remove, at the mercy of Fenollosa’s heavily mediated and error-laden texts. Despite this woefully imperfect knowledge, both believed that they could pierce the heart of Chinese writing, powered by an American estimation that deep parallels would guide their understanding because the purifying light from the East was directed across the Pacific. In this singular confidence I think we can hear an echo of Pound’s previously cited characterization of Whitman’s American sensibility, defined as “a certain generosity; a certain carelessness, or looseness, if you will; a hatred of the sordid, an ability to forget the part for the sake of the whole, a desire for largeness, a willingness to stand exposed.” The love of the large gesture and the easy carelessness which uncovered grand parallels were all hallmarks of American Orientalism in the Whitman-Fenollosa-Pound lineage. This American tendency transcended “bare philological discussion,” and if the sinologists found much to fault Fenollosa and Pound with in their understanding of the language, such “sordid” considerations were of little interest to these sweeping American imaginations who hitched their Oriental dreams to an American largesse and, ultimately, found a sympathetic American audience.

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This tract of thirty-odd pages examines the pictorial quality of the Chinese sign. Fenollosa presents Chinese characters in order to prove to us that “Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature” (8). Fenollosa and Pound never speculated on the nature of language as arbitrary sign; their work proceeded from the opposite assumption.22 Further, just as the relation between the image and the letter doesn’t suffer from the gulf between sign and referent, the barriers of difference between East and West seem to fall away through an appreciation of poetry. Fenollosa’s theory is only possible because Fenollosa is not a sinologist; 23 indeed, Pound’s friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, could read Chinese with no knowledge of the language, as Pound explains in a note to the essay: “He was able to read the Chinese radicals and many compound signs almost at pleasure. He was used to consider all life and nature in the terms of planes and of bounding lines” (30–31). The artist can read the Chinese character the way he reads “life and nature”; as a “vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature,” Chinese writing was bound not to linguistic rules but to natural ones. Fenollosa insists that “all that poetic form requires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself ” (7). Thought processes are movements, and the sequences which express them are overflowing with motion: “The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous; one causes or passes into another. And though we may string ever so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire” (11). This understanding of motion as electricity must have seized Pound; his crucial series of essays entitled “I gather the limbs of Osiris,” published in The New Age in 1911–1912, imagined the different components of prosody as limbs to be gathered together into an organic whole, and identified his new method for poetry “the method of Luminous Detail,” in which the poet gathers shining moments instead of laboring over “the prevailing mode of today—that is, the method of multitudinous detail, and the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalisation” (Selected Prose 21). Pound imagined these shining points of Luminous Detail in a mechanical metaphor: “These facts are hard to find. They are swift and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit” (Selected Prose 23). Pound’s essays in this era often returned to this originary scene of the engineer before his board, harnessing the energy latent in nature and transmitting it into an ordered, lit screen.24 It is the poet’s job to reveal nature’s radiance through this mechanical translation, and Fenollosa’s energy that “leaks everywhere” corresponds to the electricity that led to Pound’s vortex and added a whirling action to his image. Fenollosa unveiled the underlying movement in Chinese writing as the action of pure verbs, and he argued that English, too, harbored a hidden verb at the heart of the language. Fenollosa railed against unnatural

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divisions in grammar, insisting that all parts of speech were essentially derived from verbs. When we discover these core actions, “we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast them at will” (17). The sculpture metaphor would certainly have appealed to Pound, and the foundry of this “inner heat of thought” makes art out of grammar. The beauty of Fenollosa’s theory is that it confers upon the word the organic wholeness that Pound previously sought in separated limbs as he “gathered the limbs of Osiris.” Fenollosa cast the word itself as an organic mass, pushing its roots into the soil (25). A crucial piece of evidence for the parallel that Fenollosa believed connected China to America was the order of the sentence: he pointed out that because Chinese and English are uninflected languages, both rely on word order to relay the expression in the sentence (13). In both languages, then, the sentence reveals the unfolding of thought, the electric movement of successive and continuous acts. Fenollosa’s revelatory logic of the sentence found stunning expression in Pound’s translations from Fenollosa’s crib notes on Tang Dynasty poetry. Pound published Cathay in 1915, and this slim volume represents the gem of Fenollosa’s papers. In these translations, Pound refined the long free-verse line first learned from Whitman via Fenollosa’s insight into the electric properties of the sentence, a revolution in the line which Donald Davie identified and hailed: The poem [in Cathay] establishes a convention by which the gauge of a poetic line is not the number of syllables or of stressed syllables or of metrical feet, but the fulfillment of the simple grammatical unit, the sentence; and, the convention thus established, we conspire in giving to naively abstract sentences like “Hard fight gets no reward” and “Loyalty is hard to explain” as much weight as to the longer sentences which make vivid images about lice on armor, and flying snow in the skies. This seems to be a wholly original and brilliant way of embodying abstractions in English poetry. (42) Each line in these translations does its work of following a single electric current to the end of the line; some lines reach Whitmanian lengths, but others are tightened into a sharpened fragment. Whether a poignant expression or small detail, Pound treats each line with near-reverence and an evenhandedness that allows each of them to breathe and live fully. In Fenollosa’s words, “In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate” (9), and the way in which Pound allows each sentence its allotted space seems to permit the poem to move at its own pace. The handful of poems Pound chose from the pages and pages of half-translations in Fenollosa’s papers are united in their expressions of

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longing. Pound deliberately chose poems which relied less on allusions that would require notes—though his note on “The Jewel Stair’s Grievance” is quite revealing as a guide to reading the poems in the collection—and he avoided mythic and fantastic subject matter.25 Hugh Kenner’s suggestion that the poems of Cathay express Pound’s distress over World War I explains the prevalence of war in the collection.26 Even as the poems of Cathay enter different consciousnesses—from a soldier on the front to a young merchant’s wife—their intimate air invites us to read Pound’s own position into them. The poems in the collection come together to create an ideogram of solitude and separation, affording us a glimpse into Pound’s own isolation in the first decade of his exile and the shattering experience of having his friends become casualties of war. The two centerpieces of the collection are both by Li Po: “The River-Merchant’s Wife” and “Exile’s Letter.” “The River-Merchant’s Wife” depicts a girl’s transformation into a woman and a loving wife, and the poem is famous for the sharpness of its images. Pound hones natural images in order to express the feelings of this reserved girl who reflects upon the stages of her young life in a letter to her husband as she awaits his return. At the heart of the poem, Pound tightens two sentences into one line: The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. (Personae 134)

The paired butterflies, metaphors for husband and wife, age before their time, and they find an echo in the pair of sentences forced into a single line. In their extreme compression, these two sentences register the pain of separation as a physical affliction, but within a poetics of deep reserve, in which such feelings are only expressed obliquely, directed at the butterflies yellowing like autumn leaves. In one of the installments of the “I gather the limbs of Osiris” essays, Pound defended the “powers of vague suggestion,” arguing that “it is these things that touch us nearly that ‘matter’” (Selected Prose 33). In “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” “They hurt me” is so beautifully brittle because it is a glancing blow: as in the note to “The Jewel Stair’s Grievance,” in which Pound explains that “the poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach” (Personae 136), the speaker never states her feelings for her husband—instead we watch the young wife respond to an image. His absence touches her deeply, but this fact can only “touch us nearly”; yet by writing in the distance between her experience and ours, Pound paradoxically intensifies our appreciation for her longing because, instead of asking us to feel what she feels, we are made to see what she sees. Her world comes alive for us, all of it imbued with her emotion, and we

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have fully entered the consciousness of a persona centuries and leagues away. “Exile’s Letter” describes a consciousness very like Pound’s own—a speaker consigned to be always “far away over the waters” (Personae 138). The letter is to an “ancient friend” (Personae 137), and the speaker recalls a series of meetings and partings between them. The shared moments comprise warm memories of drink, lovely valleys, music, and courtesans. As the friends age, their meetings become more infrequent, and the exile’s letter ends by describing his present existence as a mediocrity who “went up to the court for examination” only to fail and go “back to the East Mountains/White-headed” (Personae 139). The poem comes to a close with a moving account of their final separation: And if you ask how I regret that parting: It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end Confused, whirled in a tangle. (Personae 139)

An apparition of falling flowers describes a world that simply disintegrates with this final parting; the flowers “whirled in a tangle” describe the exile’s “world in a tangle”—it is as though his world flies apart in this separation. From these lines, the poem ends with the speaker calling in his son to take the letter: What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart. I call in the boy, Have him sit on his knees here To seal this, And send it a thousand miles, thinking. (Personae 139)

With the end of spring goes the need for talking, and the poem closes on “thinking.” The exile’s heart is sealed with the letter; and the happy episodes described therein take on a new significance because we realize that, like the poignancy of the final parting between friends, this is the last time these memories will ever be expressed. This meditation on friendship describes a “fellowship” in which “we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret” (Personae 137); we may imagine Pound’s relationship with Gaudier-Brzeska and the intensity of his loss when the young sculptor was killed in the trenches. The power of this poem lies in its ability to convey the deeply personal experience of exile, not by describing what it feels like to be abroad but by painting the intensity of a lost world. Youthful camaraderie and its loss are experiences the reader can feel even if he or she has never left home; to live every day in the freshness of that loss is to approximate the

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experience of exile, and “Exile’s Letter” conveys this painfulness with a lingering resignation. Pound seals his own identification with the plight of the speaker in one of the lively episodes described in “Exile’s Letter”: And your father, who was brave as a leopard, Was governor in Hei Shu, and put down the barbarian rabble. And one May he had you send for me, despite the long distance. And what with broken wheels and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going, Over roads twisted like sheep’s guts. And I was still going, late in the year, in the cutting wind from the North And thinking about how little you cared for the cost, and you caring enough to pay it. (Personae 138)

The obliqueness of the phrasing, with all of its negative constructions, follows the diction of the rest of Cathay, but this episode is singular in verging into an American voice: “I won’t say it wasn’t hard going” is the only instance of contraction in the volume, and the slang of “hard going” and choice of “guts” is pure Pound. The mention of “put[ting] down the barbarian rabble”—a sentiment heard again and again in the later Cantos—likely instigated the marked entry of Pound’s own voice into this translation, but, surprisingly, the strange grammar of Cathay seems to permit this small instance of slang. In Pound’s other translations, critics were quick to punish him for colloquialisms—in particular, in Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius”—but the angular constructions of Cathay are more forgiving of this inclusion. Perhaps it is precisely because of Pound’s blissful ignorance of the “sordid” details of Chinese writing that Pound’s own “desire for largeness” and “willingness to stand exposed” are so visible in these translations. 27 Of Pound’s different translations, those of Cathay are by far the most successful: “The Beautiful Toilet” and “The River-Merchant’s Wife” are widely regarded as the finest renditions of these classics from the Tang Dynasty into English. Pound’s English in these translations is halting and occasionally broken; these first-person experiences sound as though the speakers of the poems themselves are translating from a foreign language. Cathay has set the standard for translating from Far Eastern languages—all subsequent translations have incorporated the peculiarity of Pound’s “cuts and turns”28 —and, further, as Steven G. Yao points out, signifies an “unprecedented, liberatory moment in the history of literary translation in English” (28). The poems read as though Pound were writing out his own ignorance of the language; the stops and starts of the English of the poems’ speakers reflect Pound’s own valiant attempts with Fenollosa’s broken Chinese. Pound expressed a distance from the material

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that rang true for his readers, who had long assimilated pidgin English as the speech of Asians in the West29 —but this distance and foreignness had another function, and I think we can see the allure of Chinese in the intimacy of “Exile’s Letter.” The distance that Pound could not bridge in these poems had a surprising resonance with his exilic position; and, curiously, though Pound expressed his dismay at the impossibility of becoming European in “Patria Mia,” it turned out that though he had no desire to become a “Chinaman,” he could become Confucian. Indeed, in his later readings of Chinese history, Pound went on to discover that America could be Chinese. Europe could crumble and did in the two World Wars Pound witnessed, but it was possible to sustain an idealized Chineseness (as Fenollosa had), through which Pound found a path to America, the home he had fled. In his 1928 introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot famously called Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time” (14), and while much attention has been paid to the fact of his invention, less has been made of the specification of “our time.” Eliot went on to say that “when a foreign poet is successfully done into the idiom of our own language and our own time, we believe that he has been ‘translated’; we believe that through his translation we really at last get the original” (14). My reading of this appreciation focuses on “our own language and our own time”; the reason why we understand such translations as “translucencies” (15) is because our own idiom shines through. To reflect “our own language and our own time” is, ultimately, what Pound applauded and envied Whitman for doing: as Pound wrote in his 1909 essay, Whitman “is his time and his people.” In Cathay, Pound achieved what haunted him in Whitman’s status. Pound’s version is a modernist invention, not only of Chinese poetry but also a reinvention of the bardic standard: against Whitman’s echoing expanse of self, the “I” in Cathay speaks for different personae, with all distances and hesitations intact. Pound wrote his personal dislocation from America into great poetry, and in Chinese writing he discovered his own poetics reflected back in decisive strokes. Whitman set the bar for American poetry, and Pound discovered a path toward this standard by forging an alliance between East and West. Just as he finally addressed Whitman’s ghost with a pact, his later delvings into China and Chinese turned to the language of negotiation first learned in transforming his American forefather into a partner in commerce.

Inventing Chinese History In 1940, Pound published Cantos LII–LXXI, revealing a preoccupation with dynastic progression structured into a two-decad series of poems. The first ten poems sift through Chinese history, followed by ten poems

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that depict John Adams’s political career. Pound ends Canto 61 in 1735 with the death of Yung Cheng,30 the last emperor in his redaction of Chinese history, and, pivoting on this crucial year, he opens Canto 62 in America with the birth of John Adams. Reading this movement through dynastic history in the light of the American Orient Pound established in his early prose and poetry, I track the westward vector of the China Cantos—across the Pacific and into an American ideal. Unlike previous incursions into China in The Cantos—Canto 13 provides a vision of a generous Confucius, and Canto 49, the famous “Seven Lakes Canto,” is noted for the beauty and brevity of its images— the China Cantos are seen as an unhealthy ingestion of Chinese history. The China Cantos are an odd précis of an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest’s thirteen-volume translation of Chinese history, Père JosephAnne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s translation of the T’ung Chien Kang Mu, a Confucian history of China. The Adams Cantos, too, are derived largely from The Works of John Adams, and this near-singleness of source material in both cases is a notable difference in this epic heralded for its heterogeneous inclusions. Hugh Kenner criticizes “a certain lack of resistance” (434) to de Mailla’s text and concludes that Pound “wrote, in fact, too many pages for the ultimate good of the poem” (434). This judgment by the most sympathetic of critics is echoed in harsher terms by others. In sticking to these sources, Pound demonstrates a new exigency regarding content in these Cantos, and this series of poems opens with a table which lists the Canto number with the chunk of history contained in each, dates noted. No other series in Pound’s epic opens with a table of contents, and as we examine the table we can’t help remarking upon how unpoetic it seems—even in the context of The Cantos. Facing the table of contents, Cantos LII–LXXI opens with a note: No one is going to be content with a transliteration of Chinese names. When not making a desperate effort at mnemonics or differentiating in vain hope of distinguishing one race from another, I mainly use the french form. Our European knowledge of China has come via latin and french and at any rate the french vowels as printed have some sort of uniform connotation. (254) Pound registers his discontent with “European knowledge” even as he must rely on it, and much of Pound’s work on China is characterized by a “desperate effort” at rendering the Chinese accurately. This note is punctuated by an imposing ideogram beneath it. The facing table of contents identifies it as the “Rays ideogram from Fenollosa collection” (255). The splendor of this image makes overwhelmingly clear the full impossibility of pinning down this image in English. Mary Paterson Cheadle defines this ideogram as an “exclamation of light” (223), and its startling appearance on the page suggests the illumination that ought to result from reading this history lesson. This oversized image stands as a corrective

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to the apology above it, and its identification in the table returns us to Fenollosa’s American Orientalism. Unlike Fenollosa’s disclaimer at the beginning of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, Pound couldn’t simply throw off European knowledge in this instance, but he inserted a dramatic reminder of Fenollosa’s American liberties with the Chinese sign, reminding us of the previous beauties of Cathay and the moments of sudden light in those translations. The broad strokes of Pound’s history lesson sketched in the table of contents, with its leap to the Adams Cantos, share an affinity with the Fenollosan ideogram. It is through the great blocks of history Pound compresses in these pages that he hopes an image, an illumination, will appear. These contents represent what is ultimately distilled from the pages and pages of Chinese history and Adams papers Pound pored over, and, positioned to face the ideogram of rays of light, these contents stand as a translation of the Chinese sign. In a final note to the table, Pound writes, Other foreign words and ideograms both in these two decads and in earlier cantos enforce the text but seldom if ever add anything not stated in the english, though not always in lines immediately contiguous to these underlinings. (256) It is important to know that we should not be concerned with trying to translate the ideograms into English. Readers of The Cantos know all too well that a concordance is often necessary to follow the text, but this claim poses an interesting question: if the foreign word or ideogram does not add any new statements, what kind of work does it do? The enforcement Pound mentions exists beyond the level of meaning; instead, these foreign intrusions stand as illustrations, and the ideogram accomplishes this goal par excellence. To say that the ideogram is always a kind of picture refers us back to Fenollosa, and even as Pound relies on a French translation to tell this history, Fenollosan characters dot this text, reminding us of the way in which the lesson should be working. In Pound’s condensation of de Mailla’s history, the series describes a continual ebb and flow from one dynasty to another, in which virtuous rulers who follow Confucian precepts are followed by those tainted with Buddhism or dissolution or, as in most cases, both. Pound summarizes this vision of China in Canto 58: from the beginning of China, great generals, faithful adherents To echo, desperate sieges, sell outs bloody resistance, and now the bull tanks didn’t work sieges from the beginning of time until now. sieges, court treasons and laziness. Against order, lao, bhud and lamas, night clubs, empresses’ relatives, and hoang miao, poisoning life with mirages, ruining order; TO KALON (318)

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Pound presents an unceasing movement between virtue and disorder which describes the two poles of Chinese history in his redaction. All good rulers can be reduced to a few key traits—namely, adherence to Confucianism, attention to public works and agricultural reform, emphasis on distribution, lowering taxes—and all bad rulers can be reduced to a familiar list of sins, which tends to come in the form of a litany of the type exemplified in Canto 54: war, taxes, oppression backsheesh, taoists, bhuddists wars, taxes, oppressions (281)

In their constant repetition, these lists demonstrate an utterly predictable negation of Confucian precepts, and the virtuous rulers tend to blur together as well. Pound’s moral pronouncements and historical analyses in the series are Manichean in their simplicity; as Michael Alexander notes, the litmus test that Pound conducts on dynastic rulers can be boiled down to “Kung rules, ok?” (185). Destiny plays a role in this cycle of dynastic founders who inevitably give way—either through death or dissolution, or, more interestingly, from bad advice—to the chaos which marks dynastic decline. When the Mandate of Heaven has run out on a particular dynasty, the end of its lease is made known in nature.We know that the Chou Dynasty has reached the end of its run because “snow fell in mid summer” (274) in Canto 53; an aberration in the progression of seasons marks a fated end. Pound provides numerous examples of these contortions of nature, from pear trees fruiting in winter in Canto 54 (277) to a frank acknowledgment of the inevitability of these symbols in Canto 57: “thunderbolt fell, naturally, on the palace” (314). Natural signs reveal political fates; in attending to these images, Pound constructs a vision of China as a kind of natural history for the West. Despite Kenner’s critique of Pound’s seeming cession of will before de Mailla’s tome, the movement of these Cantos reveals a consistent design on Pound’s part: the China Cantos constantly look ahead—key figures and events appear long before their historical moment. This prefiguring principle demonstrates the trajectory of the series, ultimately directing us to American history as an extension of Confucian China. Confucius himself is introduced in Canto 53, several centuries prematurely. Pound has him appear alongside the early Chou kings: “Peace and abundance bring virtue.” I am “pro-Tcheou” said Confucius five centuries later. With his mind on this age. (268)

Confucius defines ages which predate his arrival, and when Confucius appears at his appointed time, the poem sketches his comportment

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as minister. In his role as advisor, we see his special utility for Pound; Pound aspired to the role of revered minister in Mussolini’s court. Pound seals his identi fication with Confucius when he writes “And Kung cut 3000 odes to 300” (273): the link to Pound’s cutting thirteen volumes of history to nine Cantos is clear. Confucius is transformed from a character in this story into a precursor, and, further, Pound transformed Confucius into a model for Pound’s own ideal role in the state. Pound grudgingly honored Whitman “for he prophesied me”; yet how much more potent a forefather is Confucius—and the subsequent harbingers in the series follow from this larger arc from Confucius to Pound. Similarly, although the full treatment of Genghis Khan does not occur until Canto 56, Canto 55 presages his arrival with the swift phrase “Ghengis rising” (295) inserted 200 years before his actual arrival. Genghis is planted in the text in order to create a developing narrative, a trajectory that plots the Mongol invasion as part of the growing encroachment from points north and west of China. Amid the cyclic movement through Chinese history, then, there is also a movement which cuts into these unending repetitions: the Western intrusion. The Mongol invasion is clearly figured as Western in Canto 57. Pound recounts the leadership troubles of the Ming Dynasty: GIN TSONG was ten months on the throne Under tartars had all gone feudal. And in 1430 was peace Came YNG-TSONG a child of eight years, eunuchs as wet-rot in the palace HONG VOU restored Imperial order (311–312)

In describing the weak rule of Jen Tsung and his young successor, Pound recalls Hung Wu’s restoration of imperial order as founder of the Ming Dynasty. In restoring imperial order, Hung Wu corrects the changes effected in the century of the Mongol Dynasty. According to Pound, “Under tartars had all gone feudal.” Yet this assessment of the Tartar influence does not appear in de Mailla’s text. John J. Nolde discusses this “mysterious” line: Pound’s notes contain the following comment: “Emp. barbarized by/century of/Tartar domination = gone feudal as Europe.” There seems to be nothing in the main body of de Mailla’s text to suggest this. (307) This invention on Pound’s part insists that the empire is barbarized by feudal, hence European, barbarism. Pound casts Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasion as a Western, and specifically European, incursion. This brief mention of a European taint prefigures further intrusions of Europe into China. A considerable portion of Canto 59 is spent describing negotiations and travels involved in the 1689 Chinese-Russian Treaty

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of Nerchinsk, a treaty which arranged an agreement over the shared border. The rather short Canto closes with an acknowledgment of the aid of European translators on the part of the Chinese (“and this was due to the frog and the portagoose” [327]), and the following Canto opens with the emperor weighing the pros and cons of the European presence in China, ultimately concluding, “They have not made any trouble” (328). Pound considers European curiosity toward the Chinese in Canto 60: Grimaldi, Pereira, Tony Thomas and Gerbillon sent in their placet sic: European litterati having heard that the Chinese rites honour Kung-fu-tseu and offer sacrifice to the Heaven etc/ and that their ceremonies are grounded in reason now beg to know their true meaning and in particular the meaning of terms for example Material Heaven and Changti meaning? its ruler? Does the manes of Confucius accept the grain, fruit, silk, incense offered and does he enter his cartouche? The European church wallahs wonder if this can be reconciled. (329–330)

Prominent Europeans of the day presented this petition on behalf of “European litterati,” and the debates that centered around their position in China are addressed in the above passage by their equally vital queries. As Pound quoted in Canto 54, “History is a school book for princes” (280), and these Cantos ultimately aim to create a glorified primer for the dynastic elite. Pound seizes on this petition, dwelling on a footnote of de Mailla’s text, because the questions listed above are the perfect study guide questions for the “school book for princes.” In fact, it is a kind of final exam: by this point, Pound does not need to bother answering these questions for us because the nature of Chinese dynastic rule should be utterly transparent to us after reading thus far in the China Cantos. The Europeans pose these questions, but John Adams will be shown to have already digested this lesson. A few lines after these questions, however, the emperor installs an embargo against Europe and Pound mentions a Chinese official who “putt up a petition: / AGAINST Europes and Xtianity.” This official goes on to say the “only danger to us is from these Europeans” (330); Europeans are cast out of Pound’s account once they have served their function. At the same time that Pound dispenses with Europeans, he includes the first mention of revolutionary America: after citing Kang Hsi’s embargo, Pound adds a parenthetical statement, “(a bit before Tommy Juffusun’s)” (330). The Chinese emperor’s anti-European embargo predates Jefferson’s; the Chinese example prefigures the American one, and both are set against

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the taint of Europe. The move toward the following American cycle of Cantos becomes foregrounded and thematically linked. The final Canto of the series gets to “putt out Xtianity” (334), and Pound happily casts them out. Though the Europeans have been banned, their model questions still have a Western audience: the Americans to come. Pound cites the death of the emperor who will lead us to the other hemisphere: Died 1735 at 58 in the 13th year of his reign Came KIEN, 40 years before “our revolution” (338)

This particular use of the first-person plural is possible at the pivot of 1735, the year of Yung Cheng’s death and John Adams’s birth. In earlier Cantos, Pound permitted himself to write “we,” including himself with the Chinese emperors and advisors he cataloged, but now, as he approaches the end of the Chinese series, he ushers in “our revolution” and defines the actual readership and students for these Cantos: Americans. The next page addresses the succession directly: “and as to the rise of the Adamses” (339). Earlier in the series, we were told that “it wd/be now 13 years until SUNG” (294); similarly, Canto 61 tells us that it is forty until “our revolution.” Confucius appears early because he presides over this history; Genghis is tracked before his appearance in China because he prefigures the nuisance of European barbarism; the dynasties themselves are inexorably moving toward John Adams, who, as Hugh Kenner observes, “is one more Great Emperor” (432). John Adams’s prolific documentation in diaries and letters, his multiple reframings and memories of his long political life, make up a 6,000-page source which Pound distilled into eighty pages of open verse. In contrast to the harbingers inserted into the China Cantos, however, endings—particularly the end of Adams’s life—have a curious status in the Adams Cantos. Pound roughly follows the chronology of his subject’s life, but he constantly violates this chronology, often leaping to the narrative end in the middle of the Canto. For example, in Canto 63, the lines progress from 1801, when Jefferson is inaugurated, to John Quincy Adams’s election to the senate in 1825, to the detail that, at the end of his life Adams enjoyed having Scott and Byron read to him, and then to a citation of John and Abigail Adams’s tombstone: “From Fancy’s dreams to active Virtue turn” (351). The death of the protagonist, however, does not hinder the progression of the Canto, for the poem continues, stepping back in time to the beginnings of Adams’s law practice in 1758. Canto 70, too, announces the end of Adams’s presidency in 1800, only to return to 1773 and the Boston Tea Party. Similarly, midway through the final Canto of the series, Pound fashions a gravestone for John Adams, a visible ending. In embedding these endings, Pound performs a series of extensions on Adams’s life; ultimately, the fact of Adams’s death does not end

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the poem and the dynasty it describes. The sophisticated composition of the Adams Cantos relies on a musical circularity in which new figurations are constantly developed and definitive resolutions are eluded.31 These echoed, premature endings placed in structural similarity within separate Cantos finally come to rest in the final movement, in Canto 71. If the China Cantos looked ahead to periodic reinstatements of Confucian rule, the Adams Cantos linger on this last emperor’s life, lodging both the end of his rule and his life in the middle of the poems; while the China Cantos charge the beginnings of Chinese history with Confucian influence, the Adams Cantos suggest that this particular reign need not end with Adams. Pound has plotted a Western development in Cantos LII–LXXI: China flirts with European influences and ultimately casts them out, but only with the understanding that on the other side of the Pacific lies a state able to continue its legacy. Thus the American Revolution, according to Pound, is really a Confucian one. Interestingly, not a single battleground of the American Revolution appears in the Adams Cantos. Instead, Pound provides us with document after document detailing Adams’s canny abilities as a negotiator, returning to the rhetoric of diplomacy with which Pound sealed his relationship to Whitman. The American Revolution of this collection is not a bloody affair; the true American revolution of this series lies in the harmony between China and America that Pound created through his own diplomatic skills.

Trouble in Paradise Ezra Pound was living in Italy in the 1930s and deeply engaged with the political upheaval of Italian Fascism. His hallucinatory desire was to implement these lessons from the East in Fascist Italy, and these Cantos are ultimately attempts to position an American bard at the center of a dangerously seductive new regime. Canto 52, the opening Canto of the series, makes these troubling aims clear. Unlike the history lesson from de Mailla’s translation that follows, Canto 52 is based on Couvreur’s French translation of the Confucian Book of Rites, and it eases into Confucian illumination rather slowly. The Canto opens with a full page of Pound’s vendetta against plutocracy, devolving into a naked anti-Semitism that both New Directions and Faber blacked out. In this opening Pound offers a kind of synopsis of his ideas thus far in The Cantos, beginning in medias res: And I have told you of how things were under Duke Leopold in Siena And of the true base of credit, that is the abundance of nature with the whole folk behind it. (257)

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This prophetic opening tone echoes the famous “And” which opened the epic, and the opening conjunction is repeated in the second line which features the vital center of Pound’s economic philosophy: “the abundance of nature.” But this generosity is vitiated by what follows: “Goods that are needed” said Schacht (anno sedici) commerciabili beni, deliverable things that are wanted. (257)

Carroll F. Terrell’s companion to The Cantos informs us that Schacht is the “German financier who became president of the Reichsbank under Hitler and presided over the financial operations of the Nazi state” (200), and in the passage this figure is followed by an invocation of the Fascist calendar in parentheses. The next line’s Italian phrase and its translation make evident the application to Italy. It’s a half step to the anti-Semitic condemnation that follows (“neschek is against this, the serpent” [257]) and grows in virulence to culminate in the blacked-out lines. Pound unfolds an appalling vision of “ jews, real jews, chazims, and neschek” (257) as a contagion which has the power to debilitate the state. From this repugnant opening descent, the Canto launches into The Book of Rites, an Eastern refuge away from the contamination Pound imagined. Upon condemning the pope (“Gregory damned, always was damned, obscurantist”), the Confucian section begins with “Know then:” (258), a phrase which nudges our memory back to the “So that:” of Canto 1 which ushered in the whole of the epic. Moving into the The Book of Rites, the poem shows us the seasons and their corresponding agricultural rites, and Pound links them to his Classical interests: The lake warden to gather rushes to take grain for the manes to take grain for the beasts you will sacrifice to the Lords of the Mountains To the Lords of great rivers (259)

The insertion of the Latin manes makes clear the resonance with reaching the dead in the western Classical example. Further, this opening invocation of the shades echoes Odysseus’s nekuia in Canto 1: after pouring his libation, Odysseus braces for the onslaught of the dead, who appear in a tumultuous riot. Cantos LII–LXXI begin again the process of bringing the past to robust life that The Cantos as a whole are celebrated for—but this time a Confucian past is unlocked for the reader, and the ensuing appearance of emperor after emperor in capital letters, captured in quick and occasionally vibrant sketches, is not so different from the shades that emerged in Odysseus’s underworld.

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The very end of Canto 52 moves out of this seasonal song: Put now ice in your ice-house, the great concert of winds Call things by the names. Good sovereign by distribution Evil king is known by his imposts. Begin where you are said Lord Palmerston began draining swamps in Sligo Fought smoke nuisance in London. Dredged harbour in Sligo. (261)

The final lines of the Canto return to the West, to one of Pound’s minor heroes, a British minister who was responsible for conducting public works in Sligo and London in the nineteenth century. With this closing mention of draining swamps, the poem reminds us of Mussolini’s public works, and the Canto brings us back to the present of Pound in Italy; the handbook for princes is directed to the Italian leadership. The blacked-out lines have a function in the poem: their very ugliness provides a dark backdrop for the balanced light of the Chinese example. This stark contrast suggests that Pound’s luminous East is at variance with another, deeply disturbing Orientalism: a vicious antiSemitism. Pound depicted this Semitic other as simultaneously abstract and thingly—it could acquire subjecthood and tear asunder all human relationships—and he rendered it in geographic terms as well, positing the Near East as a troublesome obstacle between West and East: “It may be said that in the Near Eastern space the tribe and the people with little sense of the State were trying for millennia to block traffic between West and East, profiting from it, raising prices, etc.”32 In separating Near from Far, these two parts present two different faces of Orientalism: while Pound’s volatile anti-Semitism falls within Said’s othering rubric,33 the Far East can be cast in a position of identity with America. Multiple permutations of these two categories are evident in The Cantos; against each terrestrial paradise Pound rehearses in his epic lies another enemy. In the China Cantos, Confucianism is pitted against Taoists and Buddhists, who are locked into the othering category: Pound’s epic presents a constant splitting of other from self, in which new enemies are lent the dark fury of Pound’s anti-Semitism and new friends acquire the luminosity of enlightened ideals. In crafting a statal alliance between Confucian China and Revolutionary America, Cantos LII–LXXI illustrate an East-West accord particular to the American imagination. This alliance requires constant reinstatement, and the China Cantos lay bare the tensions of this harmony at a crucial point in its unfolding story; despite the overwhelming uniformity of the series, Pound cannot always make his examples conform to the rules of the schoolbook. One of the heroes

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of the China Cantos is Wang An-shih, a remarkable minister of the Sung Dynasty. The proof of Wang’s greatness lies in the echoes he calls forth in the text: not only is he connected to the benevolent reforms of the Chou emperors, the mythical leaders heralded early by Confucius, he is even compared to Yao, an idealized emperor from the dawn of Chinese history. The reforms put into place by Wang are a textbook example of the policies Pound advocated: he was responsible for “enlivening commerce/by making to circulate the whole realm’s abundance” (296). Pound devotes considerable space to Wang, and his portrayal culminates in an unusually heterogeneous moment for the China Cantos: Honour to CHIN-TSONG the modest Lux enim per se omnem in partem Reason from heaven, said Tcheou Tun-y enlighteneth all things seipsum seipsum diffundit, risplende Is the beginning of all things, et effectu, Said Ngan: YAO, CHUN were thus in government (298)

The full splendor of this moment lies in the inclusion of the literally Luminous Detail of the Latin reference to Grosseteste: the light streams through all parts, and the reflexive properties of the Latin lines produce a dazzling multiplicity of light as it gleams on all things. Yet this moment is immediately followed by a sudden darkening: Mandarins oppressing peasants to get back their grain loans, and his dictionary is, they say, coloured with hochang interpretations and Taozer, that is Ngan’s. (298)

We recall the litany of “war, taxes, oppression/backsheesh, taoists, bhuddists,” and the poem arrives at a critical moment which complicates its lesson. The advisor slated as the ideal Confucian reformer is, it seems, tainted by the most damning markers of dynastic disintegration. John Driscoll discusses Wang’s importance to the series and discounts Wang’s troubled status, explaining that Mandarin “opposition came from the more conservative Confucians” (100). Yet it is difficult to set aside criticisms of Wang because it was Ssu-ma Kuang, a great Sung statesman, who exposed Wang as a Taoist—and Ssu-ma Kuang was the chief historian of the account of Chinese history that became the main source of de Mailla’s text. Interestingly, de Mailla defended Wang in an editor’s note, championing his agricultural reforms and suggesting that only usurers would fail to understand its benefits.34 Such a note would certainly have piqued

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Pound’s sympathy, and Pound exposes his own confusion as his litmus test for correct rule fails: and merchants in Caïfong put up their shutters in mourning for Ssé-kouang anti-tao, anti-bhud, anti-Ngan whose rules had worked 20 years til Ssé-kouang reversed ’em Students went bhud rather than take Kung via Ngan, Flood relief, due to Ngan? joker somewhere? (298–299)

Pound is forced to include Wang’s name in the list usually reserved for truancy, yet he cannot help adding “whose rules had worked 20 years.” The line dividing hero from villain has expanded into a shadowy area, and the complications of an economic reformer who is not strictly Confucian forces Pound’s voice into the arena, in a tone seldom heard in the series: “joker somewhere?” The shock of the Wang episode forces Pound to show his hand because his principles have failed the test of the China Cantos. After this point in the text, Taoism and Buddhism are rarely mentioned—in part because, as Nolde points out, de Mailla’s source text “did not go beyond the Mongol period (middle of Canto LVI)” (433) and, further, its practitioners have been for the most part routed out— but I suspect that the Wang episode had an impact as well. Christianity takes over the othering slot in the later China Cantos, and the remaining poems foreground the westward turn. The case of Wang reveals the ideological labor necessary to preserve the alliance Pound forged. The system of equivalences Pound created in the black and white of his Confucian historiography has produced a history which is curiously not historical. As Michael André Bernstein writes, there is nothing “specifically historical connecting or differentiat ing the particular eras,” and, ultimately, “there is no history in The Cantos, no historical process, no dialectic to show the complex interpenetration of the specific and the general” (65). In fact, the Confucian China of the China Cantos is a field for Pound’s economic and political ideals: the place where an ethical, earthly authority kept peace for countless, albeit interrupted, ages. In his 1937 essay “Immediate Need of Confucius,” Pound asserted that “the Ta Hio offers us a meeting-place, a field of agreement” (Selected Prose 78), and when Eliot famously asked, “What does Mr. Pound believe?” Pound’s answer was simple and categorical: “I believe the Ta Hio.”35 Yet in the brutality of its moral simplicity, the China Cantos present only a murky image of China. In contrast to the American idiom that slips out in a revelatory instance in “Exile’s Letter,” the naked question of “joker somewhere?” further tarnishes Pound’s vision.36 Pound can only see his own face reflected back in the glass of

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Confucian placidity; his identification with Confucian precepts flattens his image of China in a way analogous to (but clearly a far cry from) his criticism of Whitman, whose extraordinarily open self forged a relation with every human being and blade of grass he encountered. The astonishing fact of Pound’s life is that his insistence that poetry could enter the political world came punishingly true; the price for yoking his personal and aesthetic beliefs to a political will was imprisonment.37 In his cage at Pisa, exposed to the elements, his detainment battered his statal designs (though his continuing allegiance to them remains a point of debate) but dramatically strengthened his belief in Confucianism. Tim Redman explains that “Confucius was to provide Pound with an entire system of ethics” (78), and in the extreme deprivation of imprisonment, Confucius became Pound’s belief system. Wendy Stallard Flory quotes the chaplain at the Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) in Pisa remembering Pound’s identification of himself as Confucian, and she considers the Confucian Classics that Pound hurriedly took with him in the panicked moments of his seizure by American military personnel as his “prayer book” (155). The Pisan Cantos themselves were written on a palimpsest of his Confucian exegeses—the verso side of each page of poetry was composed of the new translations of the Confucian Classics whose study kept his mind in order during his imprisonment.38 In the crucible of Pisa, Pound discovered Confucianism anew: when Pound covered his specially procured notepaper in the DTC with Confucian translations, he discovered an orderly saving grace through which he was able to shine a light on his own thoughts before turning to the state, the last of the concentric rings that fan out from the Confucian model of discipline.39 In an opening note to his translation of The Analects, Pound explains a small mystery he solved in the wake of his rediscovery of Confucius in Pisa: Given the tradition that the Analects contain nothing superfluous, I was puzzled by the verses re length of the night-gown and the predilection for ginger…these trifling details were useful at a time, and in a world, that tended to myths and to elevation of its teachers into divinities. Those passages of the Analects are, as I see it, there to insist that Confucius was a Chinaman, not born of a dragon, not in any way supernatural, but remarkably possessed of good sense. (Confucius 191) This world “that tended to myths” corresponds to the world that Pound created in Cantos LII–LXXI, in which the Mandate of Heaven shines on emperor after emperor, from the mythic origins of China’s time immemorial all the way to the elevation of John Adams as another emperor. Yet I believe we can see in this passage an inkling of Pound’s awakening from the dream of his own history, one which plunged him into a

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nightmare he never imagined. Confucius may have saved him during his imprisonment, but in his cage and profoundly shaken in his political illusions, Pound finally saw him as another person. Perhaps we may read this acknowledgment of Confucius as a “Chinaman” in the context of Pound’s pact with Whitman, in which he strode toward his ghost and shook hands. In this light, Confucius ultimately became his companion in the long days of his confinement—the one to whom he could share “the things of the heart” locked within the exile. Even though Pound lamented the impossibility of becoming European in “Patria Mia,” he discovered through his study of China that it was entirely possible to become Confucian. Americanness prevents a European affiliation that is “more than half a skin deep,” but Pound’s Yankee accent is no barrier to a Confucian alliance. In fact, as Christine Brooke-Rose points out, Pound’s translations retrieve Confucius from the fortune-cookie tones to which this voice has been consigned— precisely because Pound writes Confucius into his own ringing voice.40 Pound was heralded for translating Cathay “into his time,” but he translated Confucius into his own voice. Indeed, we can chart the progression of Pound’s imagination of China in his translation of the Shih-ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, published in 1954. In translating these odes, Pound revised Cathay’s opening poem, “Song of the Bowmen of Shu.” This version, translated decades later and in the wake of his conversion to Confucianism—as Achilles Fang asserts in his introduction to the text (xiii)—bears almost no resemblance to the haunting war lyric of 1915: Ode 167 is written into the shackles that Pound threw off when he transformed Chinese into vers libre. These rhyming, metrical lines produce a song which we can imagine chanted aloud: Pick a fern, pick a fern, ferns are high, “Home,” I’ll say: home, the year’s gone by (86)

This translation makes familiar all of the delicate alienation of the previous translation; the difference between Cathay’s “Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty” (Personae 131) and this later translation below is the difference between broken and fluent English, and if Cathay presented the exile’s plight, the voice of the Odes sings in unison.41 Sorrow to us, sorrow to you. We won’t get out of here till we’re through (86)

In the easy rhythm of these later translations I imagine Pound walking in step with Confucius; it is my claim that Pound turned to the Orient to counter Whitman’s fluency at the early stages of his career, but in writing out his later alliance with Confucius he used the plain speech

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of his American English, a fitting tribute to a figure he called “remarkably possessed of good sense.” Pound’s political designs compromised his freedom and threatened to strip him of his American identity, and as he discovered anew the lush unfolding of Whitman’s poetic awakening in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” in these dark hours, Pound uncovered a Confucius behind his own ideological construction, a remarkable being on the order of Whitman’s “Camerado.”

Making It American Pound brought together Fenollosan and Confucian China in his brashest saying, which appears in Canto 53: Tching prayed on the mountain and wrote MAKE IT NEW on his bath tub Day by day make it new cut underbrush, pile the logs, keep it growing. (265)

This passage is accompanied by four ideograms which run its length along the margin of the page. The ideogram for sun is repeated twice (“day by day”) and flanked on either end with the repeated character for “renew,” the ideogram “hsin,” which Pound read as its component characters for underbrush and ax. In elaborating “cut underbrush,” then, Pound performs a Fenollosan reading for the ideogram. Modernism’s battle cry is a renewal, and its appearance in Pound’s work is in fact a return to another American innovator, Thoreau, who cited this precise moment, writing out the phrase as “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.”42 Pound’s brand of renewal resonates with Thoreau’s in Walden: in their modes of alignment with a naturalized Orient, both are through-and-through American. Pound used this phrase before the China Cantos, as the title of a 1934 collection of essays whose title pages featured the ideograms as well. Yet there is an earlier instance of this phrase, in Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which he first attempted to publish in 1933. The thesis of this book is essentially stated in the title: Mussolini is a later incarnation of Jefferson. Pound lays out Confucian precepts in a chapter on Confucian doctrine and ends with “Make it new, make it new as the young grass shoot” (112), followed by the four ideograms. It is possible to read Jefferson and/or Mussolini as a template for Cantos LII–LXXI because it contains the essential components of the vision of the series: Fascist Italy, Colonial America, Confucian China. Yet in The Cantos Pound chose to

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lead with the Confucian example and then move into American history. The Confucian paradigm partially explains Pound’s choice of Adams over Jefferson because dynastic progression requires progeny: as Pound writes, “John Adams believed in heredity. Jefferson left no sons” (19). Jefferson appears significantly before Adams in The Cantos, featured in Cantos that emerge from settings in Renaissance Europe.43 In contrast to this European lineage, Pound chose in Adams a significantly less charismatic revolutionary for his idealized conservative revolution. Pound firmly believed in the disintegration of Europe in the 1930s; 44 his earlier advocacy for an American renaissance took on a new dimension in this era, in which he turned to eighteenth-century America as a model to renew Europe. Amid the many curiosities of Jefferson and/or Mussolini, the most striking is Pound’s central claim that Italy is not European: I have had good years in London and Paris and I like some kinds of Frenchmen, and I greatly admire one German, but EUROPE being what it is, the Hun hinterland epileptic, largely stuck in the bog of the seventeenth century, with lots of crusted old militars yelling to get back siph-litic Bill and lots more wanting pogroms, and with France completely bamboozled by La Comité des Forges, and, in short, things being what they are in Europe as in Europe, I believe in a STRONG ITALY as the only possible foundation or anchor or whatever you want to call it for the good life in Europe. (34–35) The title of chapter 14 asks, “Why Italy?” and Pound replies that it is the only “clot of energy” (61) in Europe, and the answer is Italy because, finally, Italy has the potential to become American: The challenge of Mussolini to America is simply: Do the driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren, or whoever else there is in the creditable pages of our history, FUNCTION actually in the America of this decade to the extent that they function in Italy under the DUCE? The writer’s opinion is that they DON’T, and that nothing but vigorous realignment will make them, and that if, or when, they are made so to function, Mussolini will have acted as stimulus, will have entered into American history, as Lenin has entered into world history. (104) Pound imagined Mussolini as heir to the American Revolution, and he fashioned the China Cantos as a textual pathway for the promise of Mussolini’s entrance into American history. The future Pound imagined for Italy was America, and perhaps this circuitous route which requires America as a hinge between an ancient and future civilization may be read as a complicated means of securing

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his own belonging in his exile; just as Pound defamiliarized English in Cathay, in the 1930s he made America foreign by allying the new world to a very old one. Pound turned to the American Revolution and upended the narrative known to all American schoolchildren—that the upstart colony freed itself from imperial England. In Pound’s rendition, America’s revolution is a series of negotiations, and, more important, it is a continuation of a great civilizational lineage. Pound’s “ego scriptor cantilenae” makes its appearance in the Adams Cantos (Pound uses this phrase to differentiate his “I” as writer of The Cantos from the numerous “I’s” in Adams’s papers), and this Latin first person is reminiscent of the vain phrase from “What I Feel about Walt Whitman”: “Et ego Petrarca in lingua vetera scribo, and in a tongue my people understood not.” In contrast to the disaffection of the 1909 quotation, in Cantos LII–LXXI Pound presented an idealized view of his America; he created a text of America in which he could inscribe his own first person—in Latin, the “tongue my people understood not.” The prevalence of the first person in the series and in particular the harbinger of “our revolution” in the China Cantos take little note of Pound’s exilic position. The onslaught of these Cantos, which move swiftly from chapter to chapter, creates a textual paradise which is arguably the only home the “ego scriptor cantilenae” could ever inhabit. The ideogram of America Pound sketched out in the Adams Cantos was only possible in the wake of his plunge into Chinese history, and it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Pound’s China to his poetics and his life. Pound scholarship has tended to consider his early infatuation with Fenollosa and his later ethical alliance with Confucianism separately,45 both because the complexity and significance of each warrants individual focus, and because Fenollosa’s Buddhist stance and focus on the Tang Dynasty, an era that marks the high point of Chan Buddhism in China (the strain that would be translated into Zen in Japan), would seem to fall into the enemy category in the simple moral scorecard of the China Cantos. Yet Pound imagined them together. Fenollosan ideograms never receded from Pound’s view: Pound’s translation of the Ta Hio, The Great Digest opens with a Fenollosan glossary of key terms, half picture and half poetry, and after laboring with the Confucian Classics at Pisa, ideograms proliferate in the late Cantos.46 Wendy Stallard Flory cites a cable Pound sent to President Truman in 1945, an astonishing instance of Pound’s traffic in both Fenollosa and Confucius: PRESIDENT TRUMAN, WASHINGTON. BEG YOU CABLE ME MINIMUM TERMS JUST PEACE WITH JAPAN. LET ME NEGOTIATE VIA JAPANESE EMBASSY RECENTLY ACCREDITED ITALIAN SOCIAL REPUBLIC, LAGO DI GARDA, FENOLOSAS EXECUTOR AND

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TRANSLATOR OF CONFUCIUS, CAN WHAT VIOLENCE CANNOT. CHINA ALSO WILL OBEY VOICE OF CONFUCIUS. EZRA POUND. (143) We can hear the echo of the final line of “A Pact”: “Let there be commerce between us.” Pound marshaled the language of negotiation he brought to bear in his dealings with Whitman’s legacy in the service of an urgent cause. It has been my contention that Pound’s America was an entity only accessible through negotiation, and the diplomatic maneuvers he attempted were consistently routed through the East. In citing his credentials, Pound estimated that being Fenollosa’s executor and Confucius’s translator would be enough to prove his abilities. They suffice for Pound because his labors with both Fenollosa and Confucius were always negotiations with America, and this delusional instance of ambassadorship reveals Pound’s real and felt allegiance to both America and the Far East. The possibility of making America Chinese and vice versa flung open the doors of American poetry and let in a new light. Pound made poetry new for the twentieth century with a singular plunge into strangeness, and he forged alliance after alliance in the adventure of his verse. The exile that launched these poetic treks through time and space labored under Whitman’s shadow: Pound fine-tuned Whitman’s open free-verse line, and he honed Whitman’s ecstatic, global intimacy into a ray of light that traveled from China to America. The Orient was spectacularly useful for Pound, both in his early instigations and his later search for earthly ideals, and as Pound’s writing darkened, his image of China altered as well. I have attempted to read Pound’s early and late interest in China together as an American vision, one that transformed American poetry.

2 Beatific Orientalism Gary Snyder and Zen

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n the title poem of his 1983 collection Axe Handles, Gary Snyder combines his poetic heritage with a lesson to his son: One afternoon the last week in April Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet One-half turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop And go gets it, and wants it for his own. A broken-off axe handle behind the door Is long enough for a hatchet, We cut it to length and take it With the hatchet head And working hatchet, to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle With the hatchet, and the phrase First learned from Ezra Pound Rings in my ears! “When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off.” And I say this to Kai “Look: We’ll shape the handle By checking the handle Of the axe we cut with—” And he sees. And I hear it again: It’s in Lu Ji’s Wê Fu, fourth century A.D. “Essay on Literature”—in the Preface: “In making the handle Of an axe By cutting wood with an axe The model is indeed near at hand.” My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen Translated that and taught it years ago And I see: Pound was an axe, 57

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Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on. (5–6)

Literally embedded in the middle of the poem is one of Pound’s sayings. The line is simultaneously the most visible and most buried in the poem—lodged in the middle, the indent like the ax in the center of the stump. In the figure of the ax handle, the “pattern is not far off” because one uses the cutting tool to shape the new piece; it is a way of recuperating a model to apply toward new tasks. Upon remembering Pound’s line, Snyder recalls the source of the line: a literary essay from fourthcentury China. In citing Lu Ji, Snyder inserts a break after “Of an axe,” lining up this saying with Pound’s: each introduces a half-line of blank space, and the two fit together in the way that the newly shaped handle would fit into the worn hatchet-head. The poem thus suggests a unified ax on the page fashioned by matching Pound to Lu Ji—yet this ax does not appear in the manner of Pound’s apparitions, which flash before the reader by materializing from multiple juxtapositions. Indeed, the poem’s visual cues have little to do with images: when Snyder says “Look” to his son, this command is not about seeing but about imparting a lesson, and when the lesson has been learned, the poem further obscures the visibility of the ax: “And he sees. And I hear it again.” Kai does not see the ax—instead, he understands the method—and the poem is really about hearing: “the phrase/First learned from Ezra Pound/Rings in my ears!” Once Kai “sees,” Snyder himself understands a larger lesson (“And I see”) of cultural transmission. “Axe handles” does not present an ax but a chain of actors: Pound, Chen, Snyder, Kai. The lesson of the poem is finally about the creation and perpetuation of culture; Snyder applies an aesthetic lesson to the work of “How we go on.” The ax handle is a striking figure for the simultaneous rupture and continuity of the lessons Snyder has learned from Pound. Snyder’s long career of lyrics, long poems, and didactic prose clearly matches the contours of Pound’s oeuvre. As Bob Steuding wrote in the first published monograph on Snyder: Snyder has indeed learned from the old master; for similarities in technique, the cultural affinities, and even, if one looks closely at Snyder’s biography, the striking comparison in life-style and approach to the writing of poetry are too obvious to be overlooked. (39) Of the generation of poets that followed Pound, Snyder is unique in his adherence to Pound’s belief in Oriental discipline for a wayward America.1 In describing his high modernist inheritance, “the poetry of

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twentieth-century coolness, its hard edges and resilient elitism,” Snyder explains the singular appeal of Pound: “Ezra Pound introduced me to Chinese poetry, and I began to study classical Chinese. When it came to writing out of my own experience, most of modernism didn’t fit, except for the steer toward Chinese and Japanese” (Riprap 65). Pound was Snyder’s portal to the Far East, but against Pound’s ideological model of Confucianism, Snyder advocates Buddhism, the scourge Pound wanted routed out of Chinese history. By crafting a statal ideal learned from Confucianism, Pound expressed what he believed the age demanded, and Snyder’s radical lessons from the East similarly reveal an American Orientalism for the postwar era. It has been my contention that Pound approached America by magnifying his own distance from it; he traveled East to get back home. Snyder’s East, too, is a mode for accessing an idealized homeland: he spearheaded a transpacific alliance, in which an Eastern spirit suffuses the Western landscape. Pound’s civilizational vision was a catastrophic failure, but Snyder’s anticivilizational philosophy has proven to be a durable creation. Though their ideologies mark opposite ends of the political spectrum, their philosophies share a central ideal: as Michael Davidson puts it, “Snyder, like Pound, wants to write Paradise on earth” (San Francisco Renaissance 112). Snyder’s Oriental transcendence follows from Pound’s terrestrial paradise: in Of Grammatology, Derrida credits the Pound-Fenollosa pair with enacting “the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition”—their “irreducibly graphic poetics” undermined theologism (92). In Derrida’s history, these American Orientalists effected an epistemic break because through their fantasies of Chinese writing, they eluded the divine origins of the word. Pound turned to Fenollosa’s Orient in order to create an earthly ideal, and for Snyder, too, making an alliance with the Orient became a means of bypassing Western transcendence.2 As poet-pedagogues, Pound and Snyder seek to reform their environments, and Pound’s belief in an “American Risorgimento” finds a new voice in Snyder’s lifelong commitment to the American wilderness. Snyder was the Asiatic mystic of the Beat Generation, a subterranean culture which made a religion out of alienation from postwar America. First a counterculture hero, Snyder has been a lifelong ambassador for both Zen and American environmentalism. Snyder’s enduring innovation was to knit together these two strands: in the words of John Elder, whose 1985 Imagining the Earth first considered nature poetry in the context of the environmental movement, “In part because of Snyder’s inspiration, the conversation between poetry and the earth has also included, for me, a long journey out of the Western tradition—toward the lineage of Basho” (Foreword x). Snyder communed with the American wilderness through a “long journey” out of Western theological transcendence and into Far Eastern religion. Through this twinned allegiance to Zen and nature, Snyder popularized a new American transcendence. In

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reading Snyder’s work within a history of alliances between the United States and the Far East, we may understand Snyder’s interlocking structure of Zen and environmentalism as a potent new instantiation of an American Orientalism constructed out of transpacific accords. Snyder sailed to Japan in 1956, nearly a century after Japan’s “opening,” but he discovered a tantalizing Old Japan on the verge of disappearance just as Fenollosa had: American postwar occupation was at least as dramatic a Westernization as the Meiji government’s rush toward modernization, and in both eras a small enclave of romantic American adventurers found their way to Japan to lament its waning exoticism. Timothy Gray notes Snyder’s denunciation of Western influences which risk “polluting Kyoto’s ancient sensibilities” (“Gary Snyder” 26). In Snyder’s hands, however, Fenollosa’s dream of the “Future Union of East and West” came true; Snyder simply made West East and vice versa within a single, cultural whole. Snyder’s American–East Asian amalgam first began in poetry, but his ethical stances occasionally outstrip his verse and indeed exert a considerable pressure on his poetry, which repeatedly expresses a tension between words and the world. “Axe Handles” demonstrates a Poundian cultural inheritance in which aesthetic concerns give way to what Snyder has termed “the real work”: Snyder’s literary genealogy mutates into an actual one. This chapter frames Snyder’s cultural ambitions within the rise of Zen in the United States and Beat Orientalism, and I read the pressures of Snyder’s transpacific commitments on his verse. My readings of Snyder’s poetry examine his use of an Oriental mode to access an America figured as wilderness, a Beat invention which extended a literary genealogy of American Orientalism into an era in which such appropriations became increasingly difficult to sustain.

Everything Zen If Confucius was the mouthpiece for civilizational order in Pound’s writing, Buddhism was a ticket into hip culture and a mode of critiquing Western civilization for the Beats. Pound’s continuum from Confucian China to Revolutionary America sank in the ocean that divided the two lands, and it was a Buddhism routed through postwar Japan that traveled to America as the ultimate accoutrement of 1950s counterculture. American Zen is one strand of a global and heterogeneous Buddhism, a supremely adaptable religion—necessarily the case for any successful world religion—and the liberties taken with Zen have made it into a singularly American concoction. Zen enlightenment promises a direct understanding of both things and nothing, and, ultimately, it aims for a transmission between internal and external natures, in which a heightened self-awareness translates into individual belonging to the natural environment. Zen blossomed in fertile American soil into a simultaneously

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opaque and diffuse entity which has proven to have lasting powers in a growing convert community; the full flowering of Zen was evident by the end of the twentieth century, when “native-born American teachers” rose to prominence.3 Eastern Buddhism was officially introduced to America in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, in which Japanese delegates separated their formulation from the existing North-South axis of Buddhism. Judith Snodgrass explains the pitch of these representatives to their American audience: “Eastern Buddhism was the full exposition of the Buddha’s wisdom, and it existed in Japan alone” (198). By elevating a single, sublime Eastern Buddhism above Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan local expressions, the Japanese delegates fit their construction into a larger, well-worn American groove from West to East: they transcended sectarian differences within Buddhism and dubbed it the spirit of the East. The presentation in Chicago was a reflection of a modern Buddhism that dated to 1869, forged during the Meiji period, in which a religion previously excoriated as an alien presence in Japan was recuperated as one of the building blocks of Japanese modernization.4 Modern Zen was part and parcel of Japanese nationalism and expansionism; indeed, Robert Sharf argues that Zen’s vaunted spiritual superiority fed into Japan’s “obligation” “to assume the leadership of Asia” (49). Japan’s Zen organization dispatched missionaries to far-flung destinations like the American West, a small part of the “rising tide of Japanese nationalism.”5 Zen was a Japanese export, packaged by a fledgling empire whose delegates sought to convert distant lands. The Japanese delegates to Chicago at the turn of the century failed to spread their teachings in America, but their labors bore fruit decades later in a charismatic figure who swept the counterculture. D. T. Suzuki was, as Snodgrass puts it, the “culmination” of these earlier labors because he successfully transformed the particularity of Japanese Zen into universal terms (260–262). Suzuki translated essential Buddhist texts into English and in 1936 he published his first tract, Zen and Japanese Culture, but it was in the early 1950s that he “became a figure”6 with a series of lectures he gave at Columbia, famously attended by counterculture luminaries like John Cage and Allen Ginsberg. Suzuki swept aside the worldly trappings of Buddhism and transformed it into a mirror for American aesthetes increasingly dissatisfied with the hardening contours of domestic life in the postwar era. In book after book, Suzuki posed the question “What is Zen?” but he never quite pinned down the concept because American Zen thrived by making this question unanswerable. The answer is that Zen is nothing—or, to use Suzuki’s terminology, it is “nothingness”; Suzuki emphasized Zen’s concept of “no mind,” in which “seeing into one’s nature” becomes “seeing into nothingness” (165). Zen’s most alluring quality is what Sherman Paul calls its “fertile emptiness” (83), and Suzuki’s gift was to suggest that Zen could point

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the way to the fathomless interiors of the self. Suzuki melded a range of disciplines and discourses to get at “the inexpressible moon” 7 of Zen, and, following his lead, popularizers in the 1950s kept Zen apart from defined categories of thought even as they dangled the concept of Zen before them—and as they worried over what Zen was, they invariably ended up with a list of what it wasn’t. This negative construction led to charges of nihilism, but it was a misunderstanding that Suzuki risked because he sought to preserve the inviolability of Zen. One couldn’t fret one’s way to understanding; the pearl of Zen was the product of a new kind of enlightenment. Suzuki reconfigured Zen for American consumption: he translated Zen into terms of profound religious experience familiar to American audiences—and his reading of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience aided him in this regard.8 As Robert S. Ellwood explains in his study of Eastern religions in the United States: Suzuki made the transmission process all the easier by stressing an interpretation of Zen which drew on Western existentialism at the expense of the discipline, cultic, and sociological sides of Zen in Japan, mixing in just enough of the latter to give it an excitingly exotic flavor but not enough to intimidate the adventurous spirit. (147) Similarly, in discussing “Zen’s adaptation in the West,” David L. McMahan discusses American attempts “to decontextualize it and de-emphasize elements thought to be ‘too Asian’ or ‘too traditional,’ or that simply don’t work in the West” (219). American Zen thus does not rely on assimilating Asian elements into a Western paradigm—in fact the opposite is true: Zen hitches American transcendental ideals to an Eastern guiding star. Suzuki ultimately kept Zen pure from cultural otherness; he divorced Zen from his own race and nationality. Indeed, Zen’s enigmatic transcendence benevolently recasts negative images of the Orient. The Zen koan, or riddle, retools the pithy sayings of Confucius, making playful what had previously been the object of racist ridicule. Pound’s insistence on Eastern tyranny made aspects of his Orientalism unpalatable to the hipster crowd, but Zen turned Eastern discipline inward, into a mode of accessing the self. Zen rehabilitated these long-held caricatures of Oriental otherness, effectively channeling them into an American hunger for self-awareness.9 Thomas Merton explains the significance of Suzuki’s creation: in his estimation, Suzuki “has moved East and West closer together, bringing Japan and America into agreement on a deep level, when everything seems to conspire to breed conflict, division, incomprehension, confusion and war” (66). This is an altogether recognizable harmony, an American construction which positions a shared light against a darker division: this “agreement” resonates with prior dreams of transpacific union, and Suzuki’s “deep level” pierces to the heart of the self. Because Zen revels

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in paradoxes, divisions between East and West simply fall away before the promise of limitless understanding, and Zen ultimately provides a reassuring way into the self and the natural world for its adherents. Merton captured the deeply moving experience of being in Suzuki’s presence: “It was like finally arriving at one’s own home” (61). For the subterranean crowd who positioned themselves at the margins of American culture, Zen was the means for an American homecoming. In 1958, the Chicago Review devoted an issue to Zen, creating a time capsule of its formulation in the era. The table of contents provides a portrait of mid-century Zen: Alan W. Watts, who acted as a bridge between Zen Buddhism and the Beats, opens the volume with a discussion of the present state of Zen; D. T. Suzuki and Ruth Fuller Sasaki (who opened the first Zen institute in Kyoto) provide translations of Zen masters; three different articles attempt to read Zen through the lens of nature, psychotherapy, and philosophy; and three works by Beat artists Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder describe their personal experience of Zen enlightenment through ecstatic derangement, natural reflection, and Japanese discipline, respectively. Zen continues to flourish in this particular nexus of religious tract, social scientific inquiry, and personal experience, but it is through aesthetic appreciation that Zen became a byword of American culture. The literary end of Zen was extolled by R. H. Blyth, a follower of Suzuki who uncovered Zen alliances in the Western canon. Blyth’s Zen and English Literature influenced American disciples of Zen, and the text became an object of intense study for the Zen adherents of the Beat movement.10 In the hands of the Beats, Zen took on the texture it retains today: vacillating between noun and adjective, it presents an apotheosis of a nothingness that is capacious enough to take in everything. Watts’s essay in the Chicago Review, “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” ponders the “complex phenomenon” of Beat Zen: It ranges from a use of Zen for justifying sheer caprice in art, literature, and life to a very forceful social criticism and “digging of the universe” such as one may find in the poetry of Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac. But, as I know it, it is always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen. (8)11 At the other extreme is Square Zen—“the Zen of established tradition in Japan with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori” (9)—but Watts critiques both ends: “Zen is ‘fuss’ when it is mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and ‘fuss’ when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture five hours a day” (11). Though Watts casts Snyder’s practice as Beat Zen, the editor of the edition stars Snyder’s name and adds a footnote: “Mr. Snyder seems to have gone square,” referring to Snyder’s contribution to the issue, an account of

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“Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji,” a period of intense meditation at a temple in northern Kyoto. Snyder’s essay describes the temple, the activities, the food consumed—all in a strict third person. Snyder adopts an objective perspective which keeps his Zen well away from the taint of being “a shade too self-conscious, too subjective.” The only mention of his own presence comes at a description of a nighttime rest period, when someone asks “Are there really some Americans interested in Zen?” (48). This small hint of Snyder’s participation casts him as an American representative and underscores his exceptional status within the traditional Japanese scene. According to Watts’s categories, Snyder’s rigorous practice is as much an affectation as the frivolous Zen typically ascribed to Kerouac, but this “fuss” was the backbone for Snyder’s standing in the United States. Snyder’s “Square Zen” earned him legitimacy; Davidson cites Snyder’s years of training in Japan to counter the misperception that Beat religious practice “was in any way casual”: “Consider the facts: Gary Snyder left San Francisco in 1955 to live in Japan off and on for the next twelve years while engaged in formal Zen training. During this time, under the tutelage of Roshi Oda Sesso, he took formal vows as a Zen monk” (San Francisco Renaissance 95). Snyder famously sailed off to Japan at the height of the Beat movement, but his absence from the scene paradoxically strengthened his position within the community; as Timothy Gray puts it in Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: While in Asia, Snyder served as his community’s offshore representative, its far-flung cultural ambassador, keeping lines of communication open across the Pacific and giving Beats and hippies at odds with cold war nationalism a set of physical coordinates with which to plot their idealistic visions of peace, love, and Buddhist mindfulness. (xi) In the United States, Snyder reigned as Zen expert, and in Japan, he was an authority on American hip. He fashioned himself as a local expert on both sides of the Pacific, and he repeatedly proposed bringing together the best of both, as in “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” an essay published in Earth House Hold, a collection of journal entries and polemical tracts from 1952 to the mid 1960s, in which he writes, “The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both” (92). Snyder’s cultural authority relied on transpacific journeys which were simultaneously pilgrimages and ambassadorships. Snyder’s Zen ambassadorship presents a curious mirror image to that of Suzuki: Suzuki created an American practice that separated itself from his own racial and national identity, but Snyder’s expertise is entirely constructed by managing his absence from the American scene and establishing his traditional practice in Japan. If Suzuki is heir to the 1893 Japanese delegates, Snyder harks back to the contemporaneous American

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delegation of “Gilded Age misfits” who found positions of authority in Japan. Just as Fenollosa’s Japanese experience created the platform for his later authority in the United States, it was through Snyder’s specialized training in Japan that he emerged as the preeminent American representative of Japanese Zen. Snyder left the doctoral program in anthropology at Indiana University to study East Asian languages at Berkeley, but his postgraduate study really took place in Japan—indeed, he applied his anthropological training to his Chicago Review essay. Snyder fashioned his expertise along lines well established in American literary history, but his innovation is to capitalize on the fact of his absence from the American scene. Fenollosa’s authority took the form of public addresses, both in Japan and the United States, but Snyder’s mode of expertise is particularly striking for its reliance on transpacific exile for nearly the duration of the Beat movement: Snyder’s absence made him an especially fitting representative for an enlightenment premised on an empty center. Yet Snyder’s distance from the American scene posed some risks as well. A persistent fear that Snyder had gone square in the Far East shadowed his work; the seriousness of his religious study has been a crucial element in redeeming Beat spiritual practice, but this same rigor could strip his writing of Beat ecstasy. In presenting the correspondence that linked Snyder to his distant community, Gray makes clear that Snyder’s American constituency simultaneously desired and abjected their ambassador: “his quest for more knowledge threatens to render him inaccessible to those in San Francisco who so clearly depend on him” (Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim 163). His Beat friends repeatedly sketched Snyder as himself Oriental—Gray calls Snyder “the counterculture’s yellowface character” (Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim 167)—hence registering the threat of his Asiatic authority; but it was a portrait that Snyder worked carefully to engineer.12 Sherman Paul recalls seeing Snyder for the first time: “I remember my introduction to him in a televized reading on the National Education Television Network: the poet in Japanese student uniform announcing his beliefs, reading his poems in a bare (empty, ‘oriental’) room” (78). Paul goes on to describe his concern over this presentation, wondering if it “might not be a form of spiritual selfadvertisement,” but Snyder’s expertise relied on such portraits. Indeed, Zen can’t quite shake this wearying exoticism because its nontheological transcendence relies on its difference from Western religiosity. In a 1979 interview included in The Real Work, a collection of interviews, Snyder ridiculed the recognizable material trappings of Zen, saying: We all realize by now that Zen is not aesthetics, or haiku, or spontaneity, or minimalism, or accidentalism, or Japanese architecture, or green tea, or sitting on the floor, or samurai movies (laughter). It’s a way of using your mind and practicing your life and doing it with other people. (153)

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Yet it was precisely through the cachet of these cultural markers that Snyder secured his own position as cultural ambassador. Snyder’s Zen advocacy is part of a United States–East Asian alliance several decades in the making; as an element of Japanese imperial ambition which found a devoted following in the United States, American Zen is through and through a transpacific construction. Because his ambassadorship was sustained by special knowledge of the Far East and his own distance from his community, Snyder came to bear the markers of Oriental difference even as he argued for an understanding that transcended such characterizations. We have seen that the tenuous alliances of American Orientalism have been haunted by the specter of Oriental otherness, and firm commitments across the Pacific are required to sustain the relationship. American Orientalism is marked by wide-ranging attempts to imagine East and West together, and Snyder’s American Zen relies on a significant inclusion of America itself, figured as a wilderness. Absence was crucial to Snyder’s authority as an advocate of Japanese practice, but against this physical absence a crucial presence in America became necessary to complete his vision.

Cultural Studies Snyder enlisted Native American spirituality as a crucial interlocking term with Zen; he marshaled Zen’s inward turn to self-nature as a way of accessing “Turtle Island,” which he explains in an introductory note to his 1974 poetry collection of the same name as “the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to ‘North America’ in recent years.” To adopt “Turtle Island” as his own is to claim a belonging to the land reserved for native groups, but Snyder’s innovation was to apply Eastern modes to his Western environment, thus matching a discovery of self with the discovery of wilderness. For Pound, Confucian China was a crucial detour in his return to Revolutionary America—the America that matched his ethical ideals—and the “way” of Zen was ultimately a long way home for Snyder. Explaining that “American Indian spiritual experience is very remote and extremely difficult to enter, even though in one sense right next door, because it is a practice one has to be born into” (Real Work 94), Snyder discusses his Eastern turn: “I knew that Zen monasteries would be more open to me than the old Paiute and Shoshone Indians in Eastern Oregon, because they have to be open—that’s what Mahayana Buddhism is all about” (Real Work 95).13 Snyder’s Zen exile was ultimately a way back to “Turtle Island”; we have seen that Zen was made native to America, and Snyder’s Zen enlightenment provided a means of claiming his own nativity.

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Snyder’s romantic conception of the American Indian takes up nativist discourses of the 1920s, in which belonging to America meant being part of a “vanishing race”: the American Indian could be found at the heart of nativist texts, but only with the certainty of demise. Walter Benn Michaels discusses the curious pride that attended to this particular sense of doom, in which besieged nativists found a strange solace in identifying with a native population imagined to be on the verge of extinction.14 In the limbo after World War II and before the minority nationalist movements of the late 1960s, a peculiar kind of American belonging was imagined within a discourse that returned to the American Indian. Leslie A. Fiedler discusses the reappearance of this figure in The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), remarking upon the flourishing trade in the Native American: “An astonishing number of novelists have begun to write fiction in which the Indian character, whom only yesterday we were comfortably bidding farewell (with a kind of security and condescension we can no longer imagine), has disconcertingly reappeared” (13). Yet if the Indian was vanishing in the 1920s, there was even less trace of him as mid-century writers devoured his land: this later traffic in Native Americans mined their territory in an attempt to find an America unmarred by the enveloping fears of the postwar era; the native wilderness promised an expanse which eluded the cold war logic of containment. Fiedler opens his study by mapping out the “mythological” geography of America, and he singles out the West as “aboriginal and archaic America” (25). This mysterious West stands as a distant horizon; after sketching the westward march of American destiny, Fiedler asks, “Can we reestablish the West anywhere at all, then?” (27). He goes on to speculate on possible new Wests: The earth, it turns out, is mythologically as well as geographically round; the lands across the Pacific will not do, since on the rim of the second ocean, West becomes East, our whole vast land (as Columbus imagined, and Whitman nostalgically remembered at the opening of the Suez Canal) a Passage to India. (27) Snyder, of course, heads straight for “the lands across the Pacific”; he is a direct heir to Whitman’s nostalgic logic, in which the West is a passage to the Orient. In seeking out the horizon, Fiedler wonders if “maybe the moon will serve our purposes, or Mars” (27) but instead of turning, as Fiedler puts it, “up and out,” we need only consider Snyder’s Far East and Far West, terms notably used as section titles in his 1968 collection The Back Country: this meeting of far ends marks Snyder’s horizon. A far-out vision obliterates the distance between East and West in the Beat imagination; in Snyder’s geography, the East has been submerged into a mode of self-awareness which transforms the bohemian into a Native American.

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Fiedler quotes in full a poem by Snyder entitled “A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon,” which Fiedler describes as a “dream of disavowing one’s whiteness and becoming all Indian” (86). Appalled by the atrocities committed by American soldiers in Vietnam, Snyder writes, As I kill the white man the “American” in me And bring out the ghost dance: To bring back America, the grass and the streams, To trample your throat in your dreams. (87)

Snyder is not calling back the American Indian but America, “the grass and the streams”; he speaks in the voice of the Indian so that, as he writes, “my children may flourish.” The Indian is an extraordinary figure of unending vengeance; as Snyder writes in Earth House Hold, “Something is always eating at the American heart like acid: it is the knowledge of what we have done to our continent, and to the American Indian” (119). Snyder’s reference to this deep stain in the American conscience goes back to In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams’s stern reminder of America’s foundational atrocities, but Snyder’s evocations differ in that he believes he can enter this vanished subject position by recuperating the native land. Snyder describes what he will pass on to his children instead of an America tainted by war: I’ll give them Chief Joseph, the bison herds, Ishi, sparrowhawk, the fir trees, The Buddha, their own naked bodies, Swimming and dancing and singing instead. (87)

It is crucial that the Buddha is the pivot of this strophe because through his figure the poem can move from Indians and nature to the children and their joyous movements: this Eastern figure of self-awareness permits Snyder to make the transition from Ishi to his own family. In overlaying his American geography with Eastern insights, Snyder has made his children descendants of a vanishing race. In Earth House Hold, Snyder argues forcefully for a continuation of an archaic line of thought and community. Essentially a handbook on communal living, Snyder lays out his rationale for what he calls the continuation of “the Great Subculture”: “the tradition that runs without break from Paleo-Siberian Shamanism and Magdalenian cave-painting; through megaliths and Mysteries, astronomers, ritualists, alchemists and

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Albigensians; gnostics and vagantes, right down to Golden Gate Park” (115). This line can be continued in America by seeing the world within a Buddhist philosophy in which the world is “a vast interrelated network in which all objects and creatures are necessary and illuminated” (92).15 Buddhist practice permits the individual to access what is irretrievably lost: The traditional cultures are in any case doomed, and rather than cling to their good aspects hopelessly it should be remembered that whatever is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious, through meditation. In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. (92–93) The key point here is “whatever is or ever was in any other culture”; Snyder is singularly uninterested in cultural difference. There is no poignancy to his acceptance of “doomed” traditional cultures—instead, Snyder distills an ecstatic communion with nature from each culture he admires, thus creating an unbroken lineage to which he may attach himself. American theorizations of Zen permitted this fantasy of reconstructing a kind of total culture in the unconscious. Suzuki borrowed psychoanalytic vocabulary in order to suggest the self-awareness unlocked by Zen practice, calling it “realizing the Unconscious in our individual consciousnesses” (199).16 Snyder takes up this terminology to explain the crucial transmission from self-discovery to a communion with wilderness: “To transcend the ego is to go beyond society as well. ‘Beyond’ there lies, inwardly, the unconscious. Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, one step even farther on, as one” (Earth House Hold 122). The Great Subculture is a kind of unconscious for civilization which can be accessed through meditation. In a 1977 interview, Snyder exclaims, “I wish there weren’t any civilization!” (Real Work 128); the Great Subculture is an attempt to elude the superego of civilization. In Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which argues that civilization itself can be mapped onto individual libidinal development, the highest level of civilization is “exploitation of earth by man” (45). Conversely, the Great Subculture is premised upon a reverence for the earth, and, further, by lodging this subculture within the unconscious, there is no development, absolutely no sense of history. Freud demonstrates that history is predicated on annihilation; previous stages cannot be preserved as new structures rise in their place. But the Great Subculture argues the opposite: it is a logic of preservation on many fronts, from the ability to access the past to the preservation of wilderness. This fantasy recalls Freud’s imaginary Rome with all phases of its development intact:17 Snyder’s culture sacrifices history and cultural difference on a tribal altar.

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In acting out of his personal discontent with civilization, Snyder has been charged with cultural imperialism. Gerald Hobson and Leslie Marmon Silko have attacked white shamanism in particular, and when confronted with their criticism in a 1979 interview, Snyder replies with a lesson in his brand of cultural study: “Well, I think Mr. Hobson has a profound misunderstanding when he views a shaman as a cultural artifact. His idea is that a shaman is an Indian thing” (Real Work 154). Snyder goes on to clarify his own understanding of shamanism, “which is a worldwide phenomenon and not limited in any proprietary sense to any one culture” (Real Work 155). Snyder does not aim to present cultures but to create an extraordinary chain of being: the Great Subculture turns culture itself into a dead issue—as he puts it, an artifact. It is certainly the case that Snyder appropriates Native American practices, but at the same time that he makes use of these cultural practices, he is not interested in their specificity. Snyder’s cultural interests are guided by a principle of recognition: instead of offering new and different knowledge, the cultures he mines provide proof for his ethical ideals because his forays into other worlds and eras are attempts to discover harmonies across time and space. In discussing the controversy of Snyder’s use of Native American materials, Tim Dean registers his own hesitation: Having acknowledged the validity of such critiques, I nevertheless cannot fail to register the absurdity of their implications, since if one were to adhere to the stricture of writing primarily from experience, all literature would be reduced to an autobiographical function, and nobody would be able to write authoritatively about temporally distant cultures. (489–490) The curiosity of Snyder’s case, however, is that all of Snyder’s cultural studies are themselves “reduced to an autobiographical function”; he weighs and evaluates cultures for their use-value toward a crisis he feels deeply and personally, in which an overweening civilization threatens to obliterate the wilderness. Snyder never evinces a desire to “write authoritatively about temporally distant cultures”; instead, the reverse is true: there is only one viable culture, with multiple iterations. If we recall the lesson of “Axe Handles,” Pound, Chen, Snyder, and Kai were imagined together as a family: though each figure in the lineage represents an entirely different culture, the only culture that matters is the one crafted when they are bound together.

Native Hip Snyder was less a student of culture than a leader of a cultural avantgarde—as Thomas Parkinson puts it, Snyder “has effectively done something that for an individual is extremely difficult: he has created

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a new culture” (22)—and his creation was part and parcel of the Beat Generation. Snyder’s Great Subculture bears all the marks of its formation as part of the counterculture revolution, but it also has the distinction of outlasting this initial context. Snyder picked and chose amid a panoply of cultures to fashion his variant of a mid-century revolution; to read his alternative mode of transcendence within the context of “beatitude” is to reveal both the terms of its creation and its singularity. This creation has taken on the dimensions of myth, thanks to Jack Kerouac’s account of a season of “Zen Lunacy” in 1955: Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums presents Japhy Ryder (Snyder) as “a great new hero of American culture” (32). On a summer night in Berkeley, Japhy presents his vision to Alvah Goldbook (Allen Ginsberg) and Ray Smith (Kerouac): I’ve been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that’s the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums. (97) Japhy has been reading Whitman’s “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” and he has transformed Whitman’s description of the bard (“The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots” [348]) into a command for a generation of “young Americans wandering around with rucksacks” (97). Whitman’s song of the American bard distills a single requirement for this “leader of leaders”: Underneath all, Nativity, I swear I will stand by my own nativity—pious or impious so be it; I swear I am charm’d with nothing except nativity, Men, women, cities, nations, are only beautiful from nativity. (352–353)

The single aim of the rucksack wanderer is nativity; his wandering is not aimless but purposeful because he claims the land he ventures across. Snyder never questioned his belonging to a true America; instead, his spiritual flights were firmly grounded in American terrain. Whitman celebrated the contradictions endemic to America, and he expanded the self in order to take in these paradoxes: “America isolated yet embodying all, what is it finally except myself?” (354). The miracle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s speech acts, a language willed to equal divine force: facing America from Ontario’s shore, Whitman proclaims, I match my spirit against yours you orbs, growths, mountains, brutes, Copious as you are I absorb you all in myself, and become the master myself. (354)

Whitman had to take in equal parts beauty and horror in order to match his spirit to the nation, but this romantic conflation takes on

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a slightly different form in Beat transcendence. The Beats sought to purify a degraded America; they rejected the sins that Whitman swallowed whole. Like Whitman, they projected their national visions into the self, but they shunned a consumer society that Kerouac depicted in The Dharma Bums as robotic lives “imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume” (97). Though they embraced Whitman’s ghost, they turned to religion in order to purify themselves, and, by extension, America. This religious turn was shaped by the shadow of nuclear annihilation: Whitman’s “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” opens as he “mused of these warlike days” (340), and the Dharma Bums, too, outfitted themselves for manmade disasters. The “rucksack revolution” was a response to new technological horrors: upon buying “a brand new rucksack,” Ray says, “I was all outfitted for the Apocalypse indeed, no joke about that; if an atom bomb should have hit San Francisco that night all I’d have to do is hike on out of there” (107). Beat ecstasy was a strategy for survival that turned away from “all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values” (31); the Beats saw “all that suburban ideal” as aiding and abetting the perversion of human values made spectacularly visible in the image of the bomb. The Dharma Bums narrativizes the Beat turn to Eastern spirituality as a mode of cleansing the self and the nation. In Buddhism, they discovered a religious practice premised on a belief that addressing the self was a means of restoring the world around them. As a Beat celebrity, Kerouac was hounded for explanations of his generation, and his responses consistently foregrounded the spiritual aspect of the movement, as in his 1957 essay “About the Beat Generation”: “We all know about the Religious Revival, Billy Graham and all, under which the Beat Generation, even the existentialists with all their intellectual overlays and pretenses of difference, represent an even deeper religiousness” (562). For Kerouac, each element of the constellation of the hipster universe bore “hidden religious significance” (560), and his definition of the Beat Generation created an image of lonely angels: It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization—the subterranean heroes who’d finally turned from the “freedom” machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the “derangement of the senses,” talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought) completely free from European influences (unlike the Lost Generation), a new incantation. (559) In this definition, Kerouac sketches his universe: his religious journeys followed literary models—from his heroes, Melville and Rimbaud—and

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in positioning the Beats against the Lost Generation, he turned away from the wasteland of postwar Europe to consider the spiritual possibilities in postwar America. As a means of being “completely free from European influences,” Buddhism was one of many derangements that corresponded to Whitman’s insistence on “nothing except nativity.” Perhaps the most arresting document of the “new style,” one which provided a virtuoso showcase of an attempt at “talking strange” is Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” The Beats themselves were “critical of Mailer’s aggressive posturing,” but “The White Negro” endures as a defining essay on the hipster because Mailer’s contribution to theorizing hip was to historicize and politicize it.18 Mailer read the mid-century appearance of the hipster in the wake of World War II and the specter of nuclear destruction, and the essay opens by sketching this frame: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years” (209). For all of these unknowns, Mailer settles upon one absolute certainty for the age: after the wholesale murder of the Holocaust and the bomb, “our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked” (209). And “if society was so murderous,” Mailer insists that “the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death” (210). Robbed of death, the hipster must seek it out for himself, “on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self ” (211). Mailer’s existentialist model turned to “the Negro for he has been living on the margin of totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries” (211). For white neophytes unaccustomed to a marginal existence, the Negro became a living model. The hipster learned to survive in a murderous age because he “had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro” (213). Primitivism typically read the noble savage as innocent of civilization, but the American mid-century version flipped these values and read white innocence against the terrible knowledge of the Negro. Mailer’s White Negro is extraordinary because it lays bare the construction of the hipster; the Beats may not have stooped to such explanations, but Mailer reasoned through the necessity of an outsider position and read it into the postwar moment. Mailer’s writing wavers when he attempts to make his words “swing”; his “jive” falls apart at the precise moments when transcendence is needed, thus revealing the mechanism of cultural appropriation that Beat luminaries shrouded in mystery. Mailer’s blackface elicited a powerful response from James Baldwin, who wrote in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” that he could not understand why “Norman appeared to be imitating so many people inferior to himself, i.e., Kerouac, and all the other Suzuki rhythm boys” (296).19 Baldwin cut right to the heart of the White Negro: “No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by

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definition, is unassailable” (297). The innocence that longs for blackness is a dangerous sham: as Baldwin writes, “The things that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on pain of death” (290). Baldwin decisively unmasks white purity as both a privilege and a fantasy, thus undermining the “Suzuki rhythm boys” who imagined that their ecstatic communions could pierce through civilization and access a pure existence. Mailer understood that the White Negro was one of a number of poses for the hipster, and in trying to account for the spectrum of possibility he lumped together varying modes of transport: “the Yoga’s prana, the Reichian’s orgone, Lawrence’s ‘blood,’ Hemingway’s ‘good,’ the Shavian life-force; ‘It’; God” (222). Mailer’s list lacks the distinctions of Kerouac’s catalog of derangement, and in the absence of an ordering logic, these disparate forces are brought together by a literalized bit of Beat lingo: “I dig.” In a riff on the phrase, Mailer reads the slang literally and elaborates on the concept: “one must occasionally exhaust oneself by digging into the self in order to perceive the outside” (222). The imperative of “digging into the self ” echoes the dictates of Buddhism, yet Zen suggests a rather different tone from that of the orgiastic death of Mailer’s strident existentialist. Zen has a different kind of response to the forward march of death that the American existentialist chooses to embrace: against Mailer’s rebel, Zen offers serenity and an emptiness that holds the promise of the wilderness, a naturalized counterpart to Mailer’s urban jungle. Against the White Negro, Snyder offered the White Indian: in his revolutionary tract “Passage to More than India,” Snyder advocated melding Indians of the East and West in order to create an American tribe of “White Indians” (Earth House Hold 110). Mailer’s White Negro was born from, in Mailer’s words, “jazz’s knifelike entrance into culture” (211), and Andrew Ross elaborates that “jazz was the Golden Fleece of the intellectuals’ century-long search for a democratic people’s art that was both truly organic and post-agrarian” (93). Unlike jazz’s “postagrarian” organic creation in the United States, however, the Indian refers back to a preagrarian and, crucially, wild essence. Snyder’s White Indian has the advantage of absolute nativity: while Mailer’s Negro subsisted in his no-man’s-land for two centuries, the Native American possesses an exponentially longer sweep of history. Mailer and Snyder each created a portrait of primitivism, but with a striking difference: the White Negro believes he can shoulder a history of racism and violence, but the White Indian need not carry the baggage of racialization. By reconfiguring space and time as Turtle Island and millennia, Snyder’s figure is simply not bound to the contexts that imprisoned the White Negro. Snyder’s version of Beat transcendence presented a significant departure from Kerouac’s desires, which he famously expressed in On the Road:

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I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions…I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearable sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America. (180) Speaking of this passage, Baldwin notes in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” that “there is real pain in it, and real loss, however thin” (298). Kerouac’s desire for racialized otherness in fact made Zen less interesting for him: in The Dharma Bums, Kerouac describes Ray and Japhy as “two strange dissimilar monks on the same path” (176), but by the end of the text their paths have diverged. Kerouac’s account repeatedly indicates Ray’s skepticism about Japhy’s Buddhism, as in Ray’s most emphatic statement of his different practice: “I’m not a Zen Buddhist, I’m a serious Buddhist” (13).20 The exuberant jumble of Kerouac’s prose could never be whipped into the austerity of Snyder’s Zen, and Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism was itself a pitched battle, in which he fought to curb his vices but ultimately failed.21 In the end, Kerouac chose one brand of Beat over another; he explains the options in his 1959 essay “Beatific: The Origins of the Beat Generation”: Much of the misunderstanding about hipsters and Beat Generation in general today derives from the fact that there are two distinct styles of hipsterism; cool today is your bearded laconic sage…the “hot” today is the crazy talkative shining eyed (often innocent and openhearted) nut. (569) Kerouac’s preference for heat is evident; his dalliance with the cold of Buddhism was temporary. Yet the “innocent and openhearted” option was difficult to sustain, and it tumbled nearly as far from grace as the White Negro, an appellation which quickly became unsayable in a subsequent era of black nationalism. Snyder’s cooler variant of Beat enlightenment was forged in the same moment, but it was not susceptible to the same risks; “your bearded laconic sage” is alive and well today because its construction was impervious to cooling passions. Snyder’s vision capitalized on a new resurgence of Orientalism and matched it to a desire for nativity—both through-and through-American predilections—but its genesis in the Beat context lent these desires a purification unique to the era. Just as Kerouac insisted that Beat spiritualism was a deeper version of the mainstream 1950s religious revival, Snyder’s Japanese and American cultural visions were not rebellions but intensifications of both a long-standing American Orientalism and a contemporary response to the alienations of the atomic age. In Snyder’s hands, Zen became a cleansing light and nativity a pure yearning—and their combination created a new culture.

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Natural Poetry Snyder’s verse follows the dictates of his cultural formation: the central criterion for his poetry is that it must resonate with the communities that belong to the Great Subculture. In an essay entitled “Poetry and the Primitive,” Snyder opens with a definition: “ ‘Poetry’ as the skilled and inspired use of voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the singer, but at deep levels common to all who listen” (Earth House Hold 117). A resonance between personal and communal significance transforms a singular inspiration into a deeper, universal art. Snyder goes on to say that poetry is one of the few arts “with roots in the paleolithic” that “can realistically claim an unchanged function” (Earth House Hold 118). His work is thus emphatically not avant-garde; it seeks not to break tradition but to preserve it. Hence, though Snyder uses an array of forms in his verse, he never embraces formal experiment as such. In an unusual outburst in “Tanker Notes,” journal entries from the late 1950s, Snyder contrasts poems that “spring out fully armed” against “those that are the result of artisan care” (Earth House Hold 56). The former leaves one with a sense of gratitude and wonder, and no sense of “I did it”—only the Muse. That level of mind—the cool water—not intellect and not—(as romantics and after have confusingly thought) fantasy-dream world or unconscious. This is just the clear spring—it reflects all things and feeds all things but is of itself transparent. (Earth House Hold 56–57) Snyder’s transparent poetics suggests that the form of poetry should ultimately be dictated by the natural world. The role of the poet is “to embody rare and powerful states of mind,” and the words ought to bubble up from a “clear spring.” Snyder’s poetry is the source of a growing subfield in poetics which considers the intersection of literature and environmental concerns. John Elder’s Imagining the Earth grew from his appreciation of both Snyder’s verse and ecological commitments, and Elder argues that “behind America’s flourishing poetry of nature lies a reinterpretation of culture” (Imagining 26), in which a new “engagement with culture as a process of decay” (Imagining 30) recontextualizes American culture within a larger, ecological frame. Poetry can provide this larger vision by invoking the natural world; poetry that incorporates natural processes has the unique ability, as Elder puts it, to “show a doorway out of the empty house” (Imagining 35): Snyder’s verse steps out from the decaying house of culture and into a rich, natural world. Elder’s study assembles a handful of poets who inhabit this doorway, or “ecotone,” which he defines as a “transition between two or more diverse communities” (Imagining 191); for Elder, the figurehead of his assembly is Snyder, who “characteristically

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works at the entangling edge of science and poetry” (Imagining 192). The tension between a decaying civilization and a true culture with an ancient lineage drives Snyder’s poetics. His detractors have faulted him for vacillating between “naïveté and desperation,”22 but it is precisely this edge between a celebration of nature and a critique of culture that his poetry mines—and through which surprising juxtapositions surface. “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” the opening poem of Snyder’s first published collection Riprap (1959), demonstrates this vantage point on a literal edge: Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air. (3)

The essentials of the Japhy Ryder myth are all here: his famed labor as a lookout, his specific knowledge of mountain terrain, and the distant dissolution of the city. The smoke haze in the mountain valley obscures the city, and the “cold snow-water” purifies the poet and the scene so that the poem may come to rest in “high still air.” The things he can’t remember are crucial to his natural vision, which evokes cultural decay in order to conduct a ritual of purification. In staging renunciation, Snyder’s monastic fantasies rely on a perpetual evocation of pollution in order to position himself in the upper air. It is not just that Snyder forgets his city friends—perhaps most important, he can’t recall “things I once read”: this poem has sprung from glowing pitch and melted snow—and not books. In Riprap’s “Milton by Firelight,” Snyder asks, What use, Milton, a silly story Of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit? (9)

Snyder has a different ancestry for himself in mind, one which goes back much further than the tale of “lost general parents.” His poetry makes a concerted effort to break free from such literary antecedents in order to attach his words to the natural world. Riprap’s title poem carefully matches the word to the world in order to create a path of natural transcendence. “Riprap” is defined on the title

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page as “a cobble of stone laid on steep, slick rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains,” and the poem meditates on the labor of riprapping: Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way, straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things. (32)

The measured pace of the poem is sustained by the weight of the words Snyder ponders and balances: the small rhymes of “mind” and “time” and “loam” and “stone,” the assonance of “Dragging saddles” and consonantal play in “Granite: ingrained.” These perfections seem to occur as they would in nature: they sound less crafted than fitted together, and the careful positioning of the words creates a path dictated as much by the landscape as by language. The beauty of the poem lies in its swift equivalences, in which radical connections appear as assumptions: words are rocks; “riprap of things” equals “cobble of milky way”; “poems, people” and “lost ponies” all share the same texture of existence. In the poem’s most expansive moment, worlds are imagined as “an endless/four-dimensional/Game of Go,” a game involving black and white stones on a board played throughout East Asia; the poem invokes this more distant perspective in order to sketch its largest view. From this galactic image, the poem narrows its focus to the dirt, to “ants and pebbles,” and then breaks open a single

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stone to look in the universe layered within it: “all change, in thoughts,/ As well as things.” The smallest bits of earth contain the full history of its “torment of fire and weight,” but most important, they can hold thoughts as well. Snyder rewrites Williams’s famous dictum of “no ideas but in things” to say instead that all things contain all ideas. To raise the single “creek-washed stone” into a repository of “all change” is to reveal in microscopic focus the nature of our world. Snyder insists that the people scattered over this earth are no different from stones; hence, like the stones in the soil, people are embedded in the middle of the poem, caught in a list between poems and lost ponies. A perspective gleaned from stones shuffles—and ultimately restores—the order of things. Snyder’s illustration of the way in which concepts are embedded in things presents an ecological understanding, in which the mind is no longer lord over nature but itself tied to solid materials. In “Riprap,” Snyder coins the phrase “the body of the mind,” which simultaneously calls forth and undoes Cartesian dualism. Unlike the long-standing elevation of the mind free from the body’s constraints, in Snyder’s vision the mind requires the body to achieve natural transcendence. This imbrication of the mind within its environment echoes the key concern of environmental literature, which aims to shift the repository of transcendence from the literary mind to the natural environment. In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell poses this concern as a critical question: “Must literature always lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?” (11). Buell refutes Leo Marx’s argument that “Thoreau was not really that interested in nature as such; nature was a screen for something else” (11); Buell instead returns to primary experience by reconsidering a famous passage in The Maine Woods in which Thoreau encounters Mount Katahdin: Yet even literary Thoreauvians would hardly deny that the passage refers back to an experience of confrontation with an actual landscape that struck Thoreau as more primal than anything he had met before, and that the evocation of that landscape and what sort of relation human beings might sustain to it are crucial preoccupations for Thoreau here. (12–13) Buell suggests that a confrontation with nature may be something more than a reflection, and, further, he ascribes to the primal scene the power of organizing Thoreau’s thoughts: the landscape inspires him to ponder “what sort of relation human beings might sustain to it.” Building from Buell’s argument, advocates of “ecopoetry”23 insist that the nature poem refers back to the world: its “major function is to point us outward.”24 The poem is charged with directing its readers to the natural scene of its inspiration, and further, the scene itself exerts a considerable force on the poet’s sensibilities. Yet to write a poem which points beyond its textual confines, in which significance is not created within the lines but resides in the world

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beyond, presents a challenge that gets to the heart of modern poetics. Pound’s Imagism insisted on presentation over mimesis—in Pound’s words, “In every art I can think of we are damned and clogged by the mimetic”25 —and sought to present things themselves, but his images were powered by a faith in the word, as in his enduring belief in the direct reference of Chinese writing. Snyder, too, eschews the arbitrariness of the signifier by figuring language as a wild system,26 but his transparent poetics evinces a deep skepticism about the word. For Pound, the word was itself an organic entity, but Snyder ranks the primal world above the secondary word. Indeed, Snyder’s poetics has made his work less amenable to literary analysis: New Criticism insisted that meaning arose from within the poem,27 and the subsequent trend of discursive analysis read a belief in the primal world as a dangerous misperception. To think beyond the language of the poem has long been deemed naive or worse, but in separating himself from this critical mainstream, Snyder has cast his lot with a dream of incantatory language in order to connect himself to an archaic lineage. The ritual aspect of his verse—often heavi ly accentuated, as in Myths and Texts—makes evident this core poetic belief, in which words attend to a range of processes and perhaps even effect them but ultimately return to actors in the world. Snyder’s poetry represents serious and concerted efforts to lead us back to the work of sustaining communal life. His poetry is occasionally consumed by physical labor, as in The Back Country’s “How to Make Stew in the Pinacate Desert: Recipe for Locke & Drum,” which is a straight recipe in the second person with a sprinkling of place-names. Snyder contextualizes his writing as a kind of seasonal labor in a 1973 interview, explaining that the way I live now, I probably write more in the winter. Because in the spring I go out in the desert for a while, and I give a few more readings, and then when I get back it’s time to turn the ground over and start spring planting, and then right after that’s done it’s time to do the building that has to be done. (Real Work 42) The list of chores continues. In his 1977 Ohio Review interview with Paul Geneson, Snyder relegates poetry to a secondary concern: Geneson: You would like to see poetry “grounded” essentially, rather than off in some metaphysical flight? Snyder: I would like to see people “grounded.” Geneson: In touch with their environment? Snyder: In touch with their own lives. Geneson: In touch with their bodies? Snyder: Yes. And the let the poetry do what it wants from that. Get the people grounded and the poetry’ll take care of itself. (Real Work 72)

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In Snyder’s world, poetry comes after “the real work” has been finished— as a result, his poems are artifacts of moments of lived transcendence. As Snyder explains in another 1977 interview, “I always looked on the poems I wrote as gifts that were not essential in my life; if I never wrote another one, it wouldn’t be a great tragedy” (Real Work 127). He goes on to say that he can’t help writing poetry, but his poems are essentially a way of marking lived experiences. Snyder’s poems are thus always occasional poems, yet the burdens of occasional poetry are no less weighty for being tied to an event. In “As for Poets,” the final poem of Turtle Island, Snyder demonstrates how to be a poet in six small segments, one for each of the five ancient elements of the physical world and the sixth, mind, added by Buddhist philosophers. The segments move from “The Earth Poets/Who write small poems” to “The Space Poet,” whose poems, “like wild geese,/Fly off the edge” (87–88). Each poet is planted within his respective element, and the poems produced are akin to the things and animals that belong to earth, air, fire, water, and space. The final segment is the most intriguing: A Mind Poet Stays in the house. The house is empty And it has no walls. The poem Is seen from all sides, Everywhere, At once. (88)

The house stands even though it is empty and lacks walls; it is akin to “the body of the mind,” in which the mind was anchored to its environment. The missing walls are paradoxically necessary to imagine the emptiness within, and the virtue of this contradiction is that it creates an inside and an outside while at the same time demonstrating their contiguity. This last kind of poem in “As for Poets” marks a crucial inner insight that is simultaneously exteriorized; as Snyder makes clear in a note to the poem, “Now, we are both in, and outside, the world at once” (114). The extraordinary home of the Mind Poet permits a transmission between interior and exterior realms. The Mind Poet’s empty house recalls Snyder’s earliest verse, his translations of the Tang Dynasty poet Han Shan, entitled Cold Mountain Poems. As Snyder writes in a note to the preface, “Kanzan, or Han-shan, ‘Cold Mountain’ takes his name from where he lived. He is a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits. When he talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state of mind” (Riprap 35). These translations are heir to Pound’s pioneering translations from the Chinese in Cathay,28 but in contrast to the different voices in Pound’s

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renderings, the poems of Snyder’s translations are all told through a single voice. Snyder has created a reflection of himself in these translations,29 as evidenced in Kerouac’s description of Japhy Ryder translating these poems in The Dharma Bums: Japhy explains, “Han Shan you see was a Chinese scholar who got sick of the big city and the world and took off to hide in the mountains,” to which Ray promptly responds, “Say that sounds like you” (20). “Cold Mountain” names the poet and his abode, thus binding the poet to his environment, and Poem 16 presents this house: Cold Mountain is a house Without beams or walls. The six doors left and right are open The hall is blue sky. The rooms all vacant and vague The east wall beats on the west wall At the center nothing. (Riprap 54) 30

Han Shan is the exemplary Mind Poet and a model for Snyder himself, whose transparent poems all aim to access the emptiness at the center of the house.31 The singular burden of Snyder’s poetics lies in the requirements for “A Mind Poet”: his verse enacts an extraordinary transmission in which “we are both in, and outside, the world at once.” Snyder’s insistence that the poem does not stand apart from nature has meant opening his verse to the outside, and, further, “The east wall beats on the west wall” because an empty center brings far corners into striking distance. The “environmental imagination” insists that the person is subject to nature, but this truth is not enough to make a poem. It is not that the poem is insufficient to the world—this would only mean a failed poem—but that poetry on the edge between the physical world and the literary imagination must provide a channel between these two realms. Snyder chided Romantic poets for turning to a “fantasy-dream world” for transcendence as a weakness which mistakenly suggests the insufficiency of the natural world, but his nature poems are no less tied to a dream of transcendence: Zen correspondence is crucial to his poetics. Snyder’s poetry adheres to the natural order of things, in which the poem is part of the world—but in order to evoke this world within the poem, the poem must signal the necessarily partial quality of its evocation by referring to an emptiness at its heart. Zen makes possible the transmission from inside the house of the Mind Poet to the great outdoors; its “nothingness” presents an ineffable wilderness which resides both in the world and deep within the self. Snyder is finally a Mind Poet; the equivalence between Han Shan and Cold Mountain describes the central ambition of his poetics, in which words stack together like the walls of the Mind Poet’s home, marking the division between inside and out but permeable to both, which share a single truth of nothingness.

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Inhuman Touch Snyder takes pains to specify the kind of communion with nature he espouses, separating revelatory insight from the traditional Western model. In Riprap’s “T 2 Tanker Blues,” he explains the sublimity of nothingness in long, Whitmanesque lines: Mind swarming with pictures, cheap magazines, drunk brawls, low books and days at sea; hatred of machinery and money & whoring my hands and back to move this military oil— I sit on the boat-deck finally alone: borrowing the oiler’s dirty cot, I see the moon, white wake, black water & a few bright stars. All day I read de Sade—I loathe that man—wonder on his challenge, seek sodomy & murder in my heart—& dig the universe as playful, cool, and infinitely blank— De Sade and Reason and the Christian Love. (29)

The poem opens with a trash-littered mind and moves to contemplate “the moon, white wake, black water & a few bright stars” in a moment of respite from the filth. In contrasting his moment of tranquility against Sade’s “low books,” Snyder’s “playful, cool, and infinitely blank” universe rises above “De Sade and Reason and Christian Love.” Foucault positioned Sade at “the threshold of modern culture” as the herald of an epistemic shift in Western thought in The Order of Things (210), but Snyder wants nothing to do with this kind of progress. Snyder casts away the archaeology of the Western mind to offer a hip, “infinitely blank” universe in its stead. Snyder poses Sade’s inhumanity against a truly “inhuman” possibility, and the poem continues by showing us the glories of this other inhumanity: Inhuman ocean, black horizon, light blue moon-filled sky, the moon, a perfect wisdom pearl—old symbols, waves, reflections of the moon—those names of goddesses, that rabbit on its face, the myths, the tides, Inhuman Altair—that “inhuman” talk; the eye that sees all space is socketed in this one human skull. Transformed. The source of the sun’s heat is the mind, I will not cry Inhuman & think that makes us small and nature great, we are, enough, as we are— Invisible seabirds track us, saviours come and save us. (29)

Snyder elaborates upon what he first described as “moon, white wake, black water & a few stars”: the moon provides an entire world of associations, and Snyder notably cites the Japanese saying that a rabbit is visible

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on the moon—a hint of an Eastern inhumanity that resonates with the “Game of Go” found in “Riprap”; and in marked contrast to the name of Sade, Altair names a star, a proper name for an inhuman entity. Indeed, Snyder takes apart the human body to argue for a transforming inhumanity: the “socketed” eye is itself a moon that can see the constellations glowing “in this one human skull”—thus revising Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” within an inhuman perspective. In making an analogy between looking out at the sky and gazing deep within, into a comparably wild interior, Snyder insists that one is not greater than the other: “I will not cry Inhuman & think that makes us small and nature great.” This is precisely the failing of “De Sade and Reason and the Christian Love,” and Snyder’s alternate vision presents an essential equality between the universe within and without “this one human skull.” Against the single savior of Christian Love, Snyder presents a streaming plurality of saviors in the form of seabirds, creatures who faithfully track us and see us as part of their natural world. Snyder often returns to these kinds of saviors—he imagines being followed by wolves and other wild animals—because it is through this kind of vision that we may see the “infinitely blank.” In suggesting a natural perspective through a bird’s-eye view, Snyder replaces Sadean inhumanity with a nonhuman perspective. Dean reads Snyder’s “impersonalist aesthetic” (487) to argue that “it is not so much a question of speaking on behalf of the other as it is of opening a conduit through which the other—including the otherness of nonhuman nature—may speak” (485). Discussing the significance of Snyder’s endeavor “in which nonhuman nature gains a voice” (490), Dean analyzes Snyder’s attempt to “treat nonhuman nature ethically” as ultimately a “de-egoizing” movement (494). Such gestures are possible only if the human perspective is cut down from its heights, but to conflate the outside universe with the interior of the individual skull is less a sign of humility than a differing system of equivalences. Snyder’s alternate ethical system, which argues for the integrity of nonhumanity, undermines Western models of transcendence to install a voice with expansive capabilities—indeed, the voice that can say “I will not cry Inhuman & think that makes us small and nature great” echoes Whitmanesque grandeur. Dean frames Snyder’s aesthetics in the context of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and following this insight, I believe we may replace Tradition with the Great Subculture and Individual Talent with Zen enlightenment. Eliot famously compared the Individual Talent to a piece of metal filament which registered shifts in the monuments of Tradition, and in Snyder’s case, the “infinitely blank” mind can encompass the essence of the Great Subculture. Snyder’s fullest exploration of the communion between mind and universe unfolds in his life’s work, Mountains and Rivers without End, begun in 1956 and completed and published in 1996. Kerouac recorded the genesis of this text in The Dharma Bums, in Japhy’s voice:

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Know what I’m gonna do? I’ll do a new long poem called “Rivers and Mountains Without End” and just write it on and on on a scroll and unfold on and on with new surprises and always what went before forgotten, see, like a river, or like one of them real long Chinese silk paintings that show two little men hiking in an endless landscape of gnarled old trees and mountains so high they merge with the fog in the upper silk void. (200) 32 Snyder’s long poem follows a Chinese convention which he elaborates in “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” an essay published in The Practice of the Wild: referring to “several surviving large Chinese horizontal handscrolls from premodern eras titled something like ‘Mountains and Rivers Without End,’ ” Snyder explains that “ ‘Mountains and waters’ is a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature. As such it goes well beyond dichotomies of purity and pollution, natural and artificial. The whole, with its rivers and valleys, obviously includes farms, fields, villages, cities, and the (once comparatively small) dusty world of human affairs” (102). In aiming to represent an unfolding totality, Mountains and Rivers without End follows an American tradition: the long poem tends to describe a full vision of a single world, whether it is Eliot’s unreal city, Pound’s idealized state, or Stevens’s supreme fiction. The forty-year creation of Mountains and Rivers without End expresses a desire that resonates with—and perhaps even exceeds—those of his modernist predecessors: Snyder wants to present “the totality of the process of nature” as he experiences it.33 Snyder’s experience of “the whole” is integral to his vision, and the mountains and rivers of his title call to mind one of the most oft-cited tales of Zen enlightenment. Alan Watts cites this parable in The Way of Zen: Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters. (127) In naming the representative figures of Zen’s most important lesson, Mountains and Rivers without End thus brings together the Great Subculture and Eastern transcendence, Snyder’s Tradition and Individual Talent. Snyder underscores this significant intersection of aesthetic representation and Zen enlightenment in his book’s epigraph, in which he cites Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of the Soto school of Zen: “If you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real, the Dharma is not real. Unsurpassed enlightenment is in a

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painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting.” Mountains and Rivers without End thus layers poetry onto the Zen premise of the shared reality of the painting and the “entire phenomenal universe.” The form of the book, borrowed from Chinese art, renders visible its terrain, which paradoxically transcends its textual boundaries by being “nothing but” a book. Whitman insisted that his book was no book, but Mountains and Rivers without End relies on a Zen sleight of hand to make this point. Snyder’s long poem unrolls in pieces—the poems bear the marks of their creation at different points in his life—but there is a steady, ambling pace to Mountains and Rivers without End, and its poems describe a series of revelatory walks through different landscapes. The opening poem, “Endless Streams and Mountains,” shows us the painting on the scroll by describing the path that wends through it. Snyder likens the eye following this path to a body walking it, and by the end of the scroll, “The watching boat has floated off the page” (6). The boat shares the ability of the person standing before the painting: both can watch. And, further, both can slip beyond the painting: just as the boat floats away, Snyder describes his own walk away from the painting: “—I walk out of the museum—low gray clouds over the lake—chill March breeze” (8). In fact, upon leaving the museum he sees a scene of clouds and lake which mirrors in small part the picture within; this actual scene shares the same ontological status as the Chinese scroll. The poem closes by repeating its opening tones: Walking on walking, under foot earth turns Streams and mountains never stay the same. (9)

“Blue Mountains Constantly Walking” insists on the moving force of the mountains themselves, and “walking on walking” elegantly describes the experience of visually walking through a landscape which is itself a living, walking entity. This repetition seals the identity between the walker and the path—and even the earth itself, turning and walking its own path in the firmament. In the penultimate poem of Mountains and Rivers without End, we hear the voice of the mountain itself. “The Mountain Spirit” describes a dialogue between the poet and the Mountain Spirit that takes place in the White Mountains: A voice says “You had a bit of fame once in the city for poems of mountains, here it’s real.”

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What? “Yes. Like the lines Walking on walking under foot earth turns But what do you know of minerals and stone. For a creature to speak of all that scale of time—what for? Still, I’d like to hear that poem.” (141–142)

This Mountain Spirit is fashioned after a Japanese mountain spirit, “a mysterious old woman dwelling in the mountains,”34 the title figure of the Noh play Yamamba; the figure of the Eastern shaman thus makes possible what Dean termed Snyder’s understanding of “the literary as a realm in which otherness is given airtime” (490).35 The Mountain Spirit cites Mountains and Rivers without End’s opening lines and requests a reading, and Snyder has cast his own poem—indeed, the book—into the wilderness. By the end of his career-spanning volume, he finds an ideal audience: the mountains themselves. Through this repetition of the beginning of his book, we may posit an arc for Mountains and Rivers without End as a whole in which the poet who “had a bit of fame once in the city” returns to the “real” of the mountain. Later that night, the Mountain Spirit approaches in a dream: Old woman? white ragged hair? in the glint of Algol, Altair, Deneb, Sadr, Aldebaran—saying, “I came to hear—” (143)

We recognize “Altair” from the long night of “T 2 Tanker Blues,” and Snyder names the stars that illuminate the Mountain Spirit. On this lit stage, Snyder recites a poem within the poem, also entitled “The Mountain Spirit” but distinguished by a different font on the page. This internal poem begins by repeating again the opening tones of “walking on walking” but goes on to provide a portrait of the mountain. After hearing the poem, the Mountain Spirit proclaims “All art and song is sacred to the real. As such.” (146)

The Mountain Spirit employs the language of Zen suchness36 and nothingness to posit a relationship between aesthetics and “the real.” The framing mechanism creates a burrowing effect, in which we crack open the poem to discover another poem inside, with the same title. Like the world embedded in the single stone in “Riprap,” the innovation of

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this frametale creates a correspondence between inside and outside by imagining a further interiority, thus mirroring within the poem a larger continuity between poem and world. 37 In “The Making of Mountains and Rivers without End,” an essay appended to the completed poem, Snyder discusses the end of the text: People used to say to me, with a knowing smile, “Mountains and Rivers is endless, isn’t it?” I never thought so. Landscapes are endless in their own degree, but I knew that my time with this poem would eventually end. The form and the emptiness of the Great Basin showed me where to close it. (158) The final poem of the book, “Finding the Space in the Heart,” describes his many visits to the Great Basin over the years. At each encounter, he experiences the same glorious emptiness, an ability to return that is at odds with a developing Western literary experience, which Snyder signals in a small reference: “Off nowhere, to be or not to be” (151).38 Hamlet’s question does not apply to Zen consciousness because, of course, they are the same. No dilemma is possible between being and not being because they are both nowhere: all equal, far reaches, no bounds. Sound swallowed away, no waters, no mountains, no bush no grass and because no grass no shade but your shadow. (151)

The ultimate Zen realization of the book is to say that there are no mountains and rivers at the same time that the book presents them in their totality. Mountains and Rivers without End closes by pointing to the materiality of the book: The space goes on. But the wet black brush tip drawn to a point, lifts away. (152)

The book is the Chinese scroll: both are as real as “the material phenomenal world,” and both have the same ending—“the material phenomenal world.” Just as Snyder walked away from the painting to see a small part of it outside of the museum, we readers are urged to get up from the poem to see in our world a fragment of what we’ve witnessed on the page. The lesson of Mountains and Rivers without End is ultimately a familiar one, one we heard in “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” in which the mountain reveals its single truth. The journey toward Zen

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enlightenment is not a developing story but a web of mirroring instances, and the text celebrates the multiple overlapping steps of its revelatory walks. The modernist epic was fascinated by underworlds, but there is no model for depth in Snyder’s poetics: his longest poetic endeavor reveals endlessly reflecting surfaces upon surfaces: “walking on walking.” When Snyder rejects civilization and celebrates the unconscious, he replaces a depth model with an endless horizontal strand, and his complete jettisoning of theological transcendence—in contrast to Pound, who posited an earthly paradise but also believed in hell—for the completed present moment of Zen enlightenment lends his American epic the singular distinction of complete success. Pound lamented in The Cantos that he “cannot make it cohere” (816), but Snyder can turn to the Great Basin to close his epic and signal its full completion because the landscape, poem, and poet share the same emptiness.39 This shared identity reveals the flat surface of his long poem; his epic is one scroll which repeats the single gesture of pointing beyond. Within its unfolding instances, however, Mountains and Rivers without End presents multiple surfaces as the terrain changes over time and space; from its unifying premise, the individual poems trace a shifting consciousness and landscape. Snyder has been attacked for his occasionally strident political voice, his cultural appropriations—notably including his depiction of women40 —but Mountains and Rivers without End is largely free of these elements.41 The strangeness of Mountains and Rivers without End lies in its perpetual enlightenment; Snyder’s epic calls forth the world with complete confidence—even the Mountain Spirit dances to his verse—and ultimately presents a poem of America. Yet the time has passed for a “rucksack revolution,” and in the wake of the minority nationalist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, Snyder’s own recourse to Eastern and Native American cultures undermined the very universalizing gestures that such modes provided. Pound could no longer imagine the kind of unity Whitman fervently believed, and Snyder’s late adoption of the mantle of the bard may seem downright fantastic. But the death knell for the bard had sounded long before Whitman’s version of it, and Snyder’s fusion of East and West was a true innovation that saw America as a wilderness—for which he labored as an impassioned spokesperson. I believe Snyder’s self-styled continuation of Whitman’s legacy stands at the end of a line of poetic voices that strove to speak for the whole of America, yet the imaginative work required to sustain this possibility ultimately led Snyder away from poetry. Back in 1956, Snyder sailed for Japan as his literary star was ascending; he let go just when everyone else was hanging on because poetry, finally, was a lesser calling than Zen and environmental advocacy. For mid-century artists who shared in a new romantic vision that revered angels at the edge of the postwar cultural consensus, the siren call of Whitman’s vista could be met by finding an alternate path home.

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Snyder modified the United States–East Asian alliances of American Orientalism to condition his own belonging to the American landscape—but his extraliterary commitments did not find their most effective vehicle in poetry. The paradox of his recapitulation of Whitman’s totality is that Snyder’s oeuvre exemplifies the compartmentalization of the postwar era: in contrast to the modernist totality exemplified by Pound’s insistence that it could all come together in the poem, Snyder’s political, scientific, and religious convictions, despite his efforts to bind them together, stand as separate pursuits.42 Poetry as a whole was a casualty of the postwar era, but Snyder’s particular investments reveal the waning of one kind of Orientalist imagination in particular: as the literary romance of the Pacific Rim was unmasked as an economic one, the poetry that continued to circle this basin was branded as imperial fantasy.43 The world continues to spin away from the Mind Poet, whose celebration of stillness seems like a distant idyll—and whose continuing belief in totality has become a liability.

3 Beats and Bandits Lawson Fusao Inada and the Asian American Movement

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he astonishing career of David Hsin-Fu Wand illustrates the peculiar burden of American Orientalism for Asian American poetry. Wand is best known—if he is known at all—for editing one of the first anthologies of Asian American literature, Asian-American Heritage (1974), but his strange career reveals the changing exigencies of avant-garde American poetry. We can begin to see the curiosity of his position in Wand’s note to Asian-American Heritage: Since 1956 I have published original poems and translations in international magazines and anthologies under the nomde-plume of David Rafael Wang. My role as a poet has been kept distinct from my role as a professor, and the two identities coexist in a symbiotic relationship much as Dr. Haggard and Mr. Jive. As David Hsin-Fu Wand I am chiefly a critic and teacher of English and comparative literature, while as David Rafael Wang I am a poet, found by most of my friends to be rather anti-intellectual in my poetry. (173) The janus face of David Hsin-Fu Wand and David Rafael Wang provided Wand with a singular freedom, but his critical detachment from his poetic persona made him suspect, both as poet and critic. This divided self demonstrates a shifting cultural climate, in which a single bardic voice became increasingly difficult to sustain: Wand’s disparate poetic and scholarly careers reveal the perils of a transition between modernist Orientalism and minority poetics. In another biographical sketch, Wand describes David Rafael Wang as a “direct descendent of Wang Wei (701–761), major Tang Dynasty poet and painter”: David Rafael Wang “wandered off to the United States at 17. In 1964 he was reborn in Los Angeles as an American citizen.”1 Between arriving in the United States at seventeen and becoming a naturalized citizen in California, Wand attended Dartmouth College and became an ardent disciple of Ezra Pound, visiting him from 1955 to 1957 at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D. C., where Pound was committed for a charge of treason. Wand went on to transform himself into a Beat and finally a scholar of Asian American literature. In “The Strange 91

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Progress of David Hsin-Fu Wand,” the only essay on the subject, Hugh Witemeyer characterizes the erratic shifts of Wand’s career: “His politics passed from a neo-fascist ideology of racial purity and male chauvinism in the mid-1950s through the radical liberationism of the later 1960s to a liberal advocacy of minority and Third-world literatures during the 1970s” (191). Wand was a neo-fascist because he blindly followed Pound, imbibing the worst of his teachings, and he became radicalized in the 1960s because he found a new master in Snyder. His political vacillations thus followed the progress of American Orientalism: Pound discovered an ideal fascist civilization in Confucian China, and in Eastern spirituality Snyder found a mode through which to access his American dreams. Wand’s odd and seemingly incoherent trajectory traces the development of American avant-garde poetry, from Orientalist to Asian American.2 Witemeyer reads the progress of Wand’s poetry, “from the first, tentative utterances in English to a confident, versatile, and wholly American speech” (“Strange Progress” 191) and Warren French, who mentions Wang in The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, notes his “transition from Oriental politeness to Western frankness” (79). Through Wand’s exceptional linguistic abilities, he produced studied imitations of his mentors. Just as he adopted the most extreme of each of their political stances—becoming, for example, a Hitler sympathizer in the presence of Pound—his poetry, too, was chained to both the form and content of the work of Pound and Snyder, whether in planning a cycle of cantos or copying intimate familial scenes from Snyder’s verse. 3 His poetic pastiches were akin to the mask of David Rafael Wang—neither revealed anything about David Hsin-Fu Wand. Pound’s greatest lines revealed the “ego scriptor cantilenae” and Snyder risked didacticism to present his values, but in holding fast to the fiction of David Rafael Wang, Wand kept himself at an unknowable distance. The only certainty of this cipher was his Asianness. Witemeyer discusses the significance of his name, “Hsin,” a rare ideogram whose beauty captivated Pound; Pound cited this character, in slightly modified form, in Canto 96.4 Pound read Wand’s poetry and chuckled over Wand’s zeal in parroting his views, but it was finally Wand as a “Chinese character” in the Fenollosan sense that interested Pound, a fact which Wand seemed to understand in swearing to Pound in a letter that “as a Chinese I feel myself forever in your debt…I proclaim you the maestro of modern Chinese literature and consider your wisdom to have surpassed that of Confucius.”5 And later, for Snyder, Wand played a fellow Zen lunatic, as evidenced in his “Quartet for Gary Snyder,” which closes with a sketch of Snyder’s “rusty/hair and/iron-/hard nature.”6 French notes that Wand was the only contributor of “Oriental origin” to the Beatitude Anthology, and in discussing Wand’s role in the San Francisco Renaissance, French concludes, “His career offers, however, an upbeat study not only of the assimilation of an artist from another culture into the American avant-

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garde but also of the role of the poetry renaissance in such a transformation” (83). As Oriental informant, Wand secured a foothold in the poetic arenas of both high modernism and the Beats. With the waning of the San Francisco Renaissance, Wand, “like a number of others,” as French puts it, “spent his time in the 1960s acquiring a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Southern California” (82). In 1971, Wand completed his dissertation, “Cathay Revisited: The Chinese Tradition in the Poetry of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder,” which brought together his tutelage under his two masters. Wand’s dissertation argues that American modernists introduced the Chinese poetic tradition to Western audiences, and in analyzing Pound and Snyder as evidence of this claim, his readings demonstrate that their poems are absolutely and faithfully Chinese in sensibility.7 Perhaps most intriguing, however, are his brief admissions of his relationships with Pound and Snyder: he mentions David Rafael Wang’s conversations with Pound in a footnote (64), and he cites a poem by Wang in the conclusion—all the while without revealing that Wang is his “nom-de-plume.” This bizarre self-promotion reappears in his articles on Asian American poetry, as in his 1973 “The Use of Native Imagery by Chinese Poets Writing in English,” in which he cites David Rafael Wang as “the most widely published of the Chinese poets in America” (75). Wand’s Oriental postures held few charms for an emerging coalition of Asian American artists and scholars. Having presented himself as a fascist sympathizer to appease Pound, Wand was then reborn into the San Francisco Renaissance, but his third transition never quite took. Witemeyer notes that Wand was “at odds” with the radical minority movement: Witemeyer cites the obituary of Wand written by Joseph Bruchac, Wand’s publisher: “There were many Asian-American writers who were not fond of David.…Some felt, perhaps, that his scholarship and his approaches to Asian-American literature smacked of a sort of cultural imperialism” (“Strange Progress” 206). In making himself over yet again to fit this latest standard, he did not have recourse to the mask of David Rafael Wang; he was stuck being David Hsin-Fu Wand. Though he had excelled at locating the cutting edge of poetic movements, Wand could not do the same with Asian American poetry. Wand’s own assessment of David Rafael Wang’s poetry in his 1978 article “The Chinese-American Literary Scene” reveals the reasons for his inability to fit himself into the new movement: reading five different poets including Wang, he concludes that “all five poets are highly Chinese in their sensibility, despite their choice to write in English rather than Chinese” (141). Wand traded on his Chineseness in his poetry and, by extension, he believed that Asian American poetry ought to do the same. In his 1973 essay on Chinese American poetry, Wand reproduces Fenollosa’s argument for the deep accord between Chinese and American poetry by citing the “accidental similarity in the syntaxes of the two

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languages—both English and Chinese having the ‘natural’ word order” (“The Use of Native Imagery” 73). Wand’s repetition of American Orientalist rationale imported a long-standing transpacific fantasy into a discussion of Chinese American poetry.8 Schooled by Pound and Snyder in the American avant-garde, Wand could not imagine an Asian American avant-garde that did not subscribe to a special valorization of the Orient. As a poet, Wand attained some success through flattering mimicry, but his foray into scholarship—his attempt to catch the next wave—only unmasked this strategy. Indeed, as his scholarly career progressed, he paraded the distinction between Wand and Wang as evidence of his successes in two worlds, never realizing that this doubleness undermined both. Wand’s splitting of poet from scholar was ultimately a strategy to install David Rafael Wang as the next American poet in the genealogy from Pound to Snyder. Yet it was precisely the aspect he capitalized on—his Oriental quality—which vitiated his candidacy for the avantgarde. Avant-garde poetic movements proceed alongside their theorizations, but Wand and Wang allied themselves to two different movements: in order to attach himself to what he perceived as a vogue for minority literature, the scholar aligned himself with the Asian American movement; but the poet belonged to an American Orientalist tradition which clung to the vestiges of the American bard. Wand’s schizophrenic selves produced a scholarly persona as untenable as his verse, and the two faces of David Hsin-Fu Wand and David Rafael Wang finally appear as a strange and unwanted luxury. Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of Wand’s life was the circumstance of his death: he fell from the eleventh floor of the Barbizon Hotel in New York City while attending a meeting of the Modern Language Association’s Commission on Minority Groups.9 What caused this fall remains unknown, but the stunning shift from neo-fascist poet to radical critic in Wand’s life suggests a dangerously unstable character whose vacillations ultimately could not be sustained. David Hsin-Fu Wand aped the Orientalist gestures of Pound and Snyder without understanding their aims: they were not after Asiatic sensibilities—instead, they used the Orient as a conduit to a deeper cultural figuration. To write poetry as Wang and criticism as Wand thus violated the central tenet of the poet-pedagogue, who binds poetry to a cultural creation. To write one kind of paradise and live another was simply unthinkable to Pound, who paid a heavy price for his beliefs, and to Snyder, who was willing to sacrifice poetry for the “real work.” Hence, though Wand imagined himself continuing their legacy, he debilitated his own efforts by championing a Chinese lineage and not an American one. The poets who forged a new American culture were the leaders of a panethnic coalition who aligned their poetry with their politics in the conviction that an aesthetic revolution could mean a cultural one; Asian American literary expression is, as Lisa Lowe puts it, “an aesthetic

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product that cannot repress the material inequalities of its conditions of production” (44). It was thus the poets of the ethnic nationalist movement who understood the aims of the American avant-garde and crafted their own version of it for a new era. It may seem like a paradox that the ethnic nationalists were in some ways closer to the cultural ambassadors of American Orientalism than Wand, an apologist for their most damaging beliefs, but it was the Asian American movement which created a new American culture. The poets of the Asian American movement were emphatically anti-Orientalist; in fact, the movement was itself largely defined against a history of Orientalism. In creating their new vision of America, the leaders of the ethnic nationalist movement found themselves on often hostile terrain—and they were ready to wage war. They fashioned their panethnic union in response to American fantasies of a distant Orient and anti-Asian policies in America; against transpacific bridges, they erected cultural bridges within the United States. The kinds of coalitions they made were crucially shaped by an American Orientalist past, and nowhere was this pressure more evident than in their poetry. Asian American poets faced a uniquely perplexing legacy: they were heirs to an avant-garde shot through with Orientalism. Though they could and did forcibly decry fantasies of the Orient, their avant-garde poetics were themselves a part of an American revolutionary lineage. This chapter examines the activist formation of Asian American literature, and it reads both a critical disjunction and significant continuity between counterculture forms and Asian American aesthetic productions. In order to explore the range of Asian American cultural alliances, I pay particular attention to the poetics of Lawson Fusao Inada, who led the drive to install an alternate tradition by refashioning a Beat legacy into a new cultural creation.

Creating Asian America Wand’s introduction to his anthology Asian-American Heritage opens by mentioning a 1971 conference panel “devoted to the ‘problems and potential for research in Asian-American Studies’ ”: During a question-and-answer period following a panel discussion in which eight authorities participated, it was brought up that there is a prevalent belief that Asian-Americans are too busy chasing commercial success to engage in art and literature. While this belief may be an oversimplification, it must be admitted that there is, in the Asian-American literary community, no spokesman of the stature of Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin, or Imamu [sic] Baraka (better known to whites as LeRoi Jones). (1)

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Between the cited African American luminaries and the whites mentioned in parentheses lies a missing Asian American cultural leadership. Wand goes on to say that “the two Asian-American writers best known to the white world are probably Dr. S.I. Hayakawa and Dr. Lin Yutang,” although “they are rejected as representatives of the Asian-American conscience by Chinese-Americans of the postwar generations and by nisei” (1). For Wand, this disjunction between white recognition and rejection by Asian Americans meant a leadership vacuum, but the leaders of the Asian American movement rose from the ranks of the American-born Chinese and Japanese that Wand discounts as “militants, such as Frank Chin and Lawson Inada” (4). In his article “The Chinese-American Literary Scene,” Wand surveyed five poets (including himself ) along with “a lone playwright,” Frank Chin. Wand concluded that “like the five ChineseAmerican poets, Frank Chin shows a sense of humor,” “but unlike the Chinese-American poets, he lacks their syncretism and equanimity. His humor is mordant and bitter. In this respect, he might be more American than Chinese” (144). This “mordant and bitter” humor assumed the leadership of a new American culture which radicalized a community and continues to drive theorizations of Asian American literature. In 1974, the same year of Asian-American Heritage’s publication, Chin and Inada, along with Jeffrey Paul Chan and Shawn Wong, edited their own Asian American anthology, Aiiieeeee!.10 Wand’s introduction asked “What is an Asian-American?” (2), but Aiiieeeee! simply claimed its members, stating in the preface that “our anthology is exclusively Asian-American. That means Filipino-, Chinese-, and Japanese-Americans, Americans born and raised” (vii), and presented a fully formed culture: “Asian America, so long ignored and forcibly excluded from creative participation in American culture, is wounded, sad, angry, swearing, and wondering, and this is his AIIIEEEEE!!! It is more than a whine, shout, or scream. It is fifty years of our whole voice” (viii). The ethnic nationalists never asked Wand’s question about Asian American identity because they insisted upon their status as “Americans born and raised.”11 Aiiieeeee!’s preface states that “Chineseand Japanese-Americans have been separated by geography, culture, and history from China and Japan for seven and four generations respectively” (vii), and their focus on American experience excluded voices prominently featured in Wand’s Asian-American Heritage. The earliest literature Wand’s anthology presents is that of Sadakichi Hartmann, a striking turn-of-the-century figure. In Quiet Fire, a historical anthology of Asian American poetry, Juliana Chang introduces this character: Asian American poetry dates as far back as the 1890s, with the publication of poems by Sadakichi Hartmann, considered among the first to write Symbolist poetry in English, and Yone Noguchi, whose work interested his well-known contemporaries Willa

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Cather, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith. Hartmann served as secretary to Walt Whitman, and had the dubious distinction of being referred to by Whitman once as “that damn Japanee.” (xvi) Noguchi traveled in elite literary circles, and Hartmann enjoyed an especially precious reputation, which Kenneth Rexroth discusses in American Poetry in the Twentieth Century: At the beginning of the century the most outstanding personality was Sadakichi Hartmann. Half German, half Japanese, he came to America in late adolescence and almost immediately was writing poems, translating from French and German, and giving lectures on the European avant-garde of the day, and generally playing the role of Atlantic bridge. (28) Hartmann presents an extraordinary example of unconstrained literary exploits, and his work demonstrates an array of influences as varied as Pound’s. Rexroth goes on to mention Pound, who, according to Rexroth “has said that if he hadn’t been himself, the next best thing would be to have been Sadakichi” (29).12 Aiiieeeee!’s preface, however, dispenses with Noguchi and Hartmann: The tradition of Japanese-American verse as being quaint and foreign in English, established by Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartman [sic], momentarily influenced American writing with the quaintness of the Orient but said nothing about Asian America, because, in fact, these writers weren’t Asian-Americans but Americanized Asians. (xv) The category of “Americanized Asians” was cast on the lowest echelons of Aiiieeeee!’s cultural order; the activists defined Asian American experience as distinct from the “geography, culture, and history” of Asia, and the “quaint and foreign” writers who mistakenly presented such elements were paradoxically denounced as “Americanized Asians.” 13 Aiiieeeee! simultaneously valorized American experience and denounced “the quaintness of the Orient” as a fatal Americanization. The ethnic nationalist formation thus split American experience from American Orientalism, demonstrating a peculiar double bind for Asians in the United States: this kind of Americanization meant a betrayal of their American experience. Asian American literature was born out of this political maneuver: in the absence of a single common experience, as in the case of African American culture, or a common language, as in the Latino case, a political ideology of resistance held the formation together. In Asian American Panethnicity, Yen Le Espiritu explains that “their very existence presupposes some amount of consensus” (16),14 and it was in the service of this consensus that the editors of Aiiieeeee! made decisive cuts which have been the source of continuing criticism.15

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In fact, we may register the force of the activist consensus in the experience of Sadakichi Hartmann himself. As Harry Lawton and George Knox write in the introduction to White Chrysanthemums, a collection of Hartmann’s bon mots, Hartmann’s literary celebrity came to an abrupt end: “Then came Pearl Harbor. Hartmann immediately fell under a cloud of suspicion because of his ancestry, although he had been a naturalized citizen since 1894” (xv). The luxury of being Sadakichi Hartmann did not last; Hartmann’s singular experience suddenly aligned itself with the larger condition of the Japanese in the United States. Once his bohemian freedom is revoked, Hartmann becomes legible as an Asian American—a fact which reveals the potent formulation of the ethnic nationalist movement, which yoked Asian American literature to antiAsian experience in the United States. The editors of Aiiieeeee! had specific anti-Asian experiences in mind: they focused on Chinese exclusion and Japanese internment. In fact, though the anthology includes Filipino American literature, the second paragraph of the preface explains that “Filipino America differs greatly from Chinese and Japanese America in its history, the continuity of culture between the Philippines and America, and the influence of western European and American culture on the Philippines. The difference is definable only in its own terms, and therefore must be discussed separately” (vii). Aiiieeeee!’s prefatory material thus includes a separate “Introduction to Filipino-American Literature,” penned by Oscar Peñaranda, Serafin Syquia, and Sam Tagatac which notably proclaims, “We cannot write a literary background because there isn’t any…The only published writing we can speak of that is worthy of note are those writings of Filipinos in the Philippines about the Philippines” (xlix), and presents in large part the history of imperialism in the Philippines. In Aiiieeeee!’s competing introductions, we encounter both an exhortation to speak with a “whole voice” and an exigency regarding cultural specificity. The separation of the Filipino case reveals the significance of differing transpacific relationships: United States and European imperial incursions into the Philippines impinge upon the experience of Filipinos in the United States. Hence, though Chin et al. emphasize the multiple generations and deep roots of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans within the United States, the movement’s defining element of Asian exclusion requires significant attention to specific histories of United States–Asian relations. Though Asian American writers were prohibited from peddling in the “geography, culture, and history” of Asia, they had to attend to shifting—and ever-deepening—American interests in Asia which would condition their American experiences. We may measure the significance of the activist creation in the rapid growth of Asian American literature. In 1991, the four editors regrouped to issue an updated version titled The Big Aiiieeeee!. The revised anthology in fact narrowed the focus of the earlier version, this time devoting its

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pages solely to Chinese American and Japanese American literature and experience, yet its contents boasted a three-fold increase in length. The new introduction held fast to their original claims: “We begin another year angry! Another decade, and another Chinese American ventriloquizing the same old white Christian fantasy” (xi). In the early 1990s, The Big Aiiieeeee! underscored the contours of Asian America as it was created in the late 1960s; and though the second version contracted its conceptual boundaries, it presented a much wider generic range.16 The strength of their paradigm lies in this ability to present a “whole voice” even as it operates on a principle of exclusion; Chin et al. created a coherent and lasting movement by combating an enemy which showed no signs of weakening: “the same old white Christian fantasy.” Yet though the rival remained consistent, individual Asian American texts were accountable to their specific histories in order to present their own cries of protest. Daniel Y. Kim notes the significance of the activist achievement in Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: “I believe it is crucial to acknowledge the debt that current Asian American literary and cultural critics owe to the legacy of Frank Chin” (127). Kim specifies this debt as a “pressure to historicize”: Nearly all scholarly studies of Asian American literature thus begin by sketching out a specifically Asian American cultural history—a history that begins with the influx of Chinese immigrant labor in the nineteenth century, tracks the legislative and judicial exclusions that have impeded the access of various Asian groups to full United States citizenship, examines the impact of Asian immigrant labor, takes up the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, explores the impact of various United States imperial endeavors in Asia on immigration patterns, and concludes with the increasingly heterogeneous and transnational quality of the Asian population in the United States in the wake of the immigration reforms of 1965. (205) The Asian American movement registered the deeply felt repercussions of transpacific contact for their two banner cases, and the editors of Aiiieeeee! presented their inability to account for Filipino American experience as evidence of their commitment to firsthand experience. The later waves of Asian migration to the United States cited above presented further differences: Lisa Lowe explains that the post-1965 Asian immigrant displacement differs from that of earlier migrations from China and Japan, for it embodies the displacement from Asian societies in the aftermath of war and colonialism to a United States with whose sense of national identity the immigrants are in contradiction precisely because of that history. (16)

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We may in fact see the Filipino American experience as an important precursor to these later repercussions of bellicose American interventions in the Pacific. Though the editors of Aiiieeeee! separated and ultimately excised Filipino American literature from their pages—despite the fact that the influx of Filipinos to the United States overlapped temporally and spatially with Chinese and Japanese exclusion—in reading Asian American literature in transpacific contexts we continue to adhere to the dictates of the ethnic nationalist formation, which emphasized American experience shaped by specific transpacific histories. The opening anecdote of Wand’s introduction to Asian-American Heritage took assimilation as its first premise—the Asian Americans “busy chasing commercial success”—while the furious cry of “Aiiieeeee!” marked its defiance and insisted upon a racialized identity as “yellows” which registered the hard limits of an assimilation process understood to be a false and ultimately doomed aspiration for whiteness. The Big Aiiieeeee! presented a concerted effort to excavate an Asian American literary past, and if we go back over its contents, we discover piece after piece which expresses confinement. This emphasis on coercive forces emphatically separated the Asian American movement from the discourse of ethnicity, which sketches a trajectory from ethnic difference to Americanization.17 The texts which have emerged as most representative of the Asian American project of cultural reclamation are the Chinese poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island detention center and the poetry of Japanese internment. The literary evidence of Chinese exclusion set the terms for Asian American literature, and the later trauma of Japanese internment presented terrible proof of the pattern. The creation of Asian America was driven by the constant threat of exclusion and removal, and the innovation of Asian American literature was to transform this source into a vital wellspring of aesthetic expression.

Dharma Trouble The persecution of Japanese in the United States became a flash point for Asian American literature because of the spectacular excesses of antiJapanese policy. In its brutal demonstration of deassimilation, Japanese internment has come to stand as a key event for the literary project of the Asian American movement because it exposes the lie of Americanization. Chinese Americans made significant social gains in the World War II era—citing the relationship between Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, Aiiieeeee!’s preface notes in its first paragraph “the popularization of their hatred for each other” (vii)—but one of the central aims of the Asian American movement was to transform Japanese internment into an Asian American tragedy: if Asian American literature was a response to anti-Asian sentiment, then the literature of internment irre-

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futably belonged to Asian America. The literary expressions of Japanese Americans in particular provide a dramatic demonstration of the gulf that separates Asian American experience from American Orientalism: Japanese culture became a source of suspicion for Japanese Americans— and, by extension, Asian America—yet the practices that endangered the minority population acquired an avant-garde cachet when they were adopted by the counterculture. The conundrum of Japanese culture in the United States—both dangerously foreign and a chic pose—presented unique constraints for Asian American artists. The Japanese were corralled into camps because of their irredeemable otherness, but within the camps, liberal policies of Americanization prevailed; the paradox of the camps is that they were a part of FDR’s New Deal.18 The contradictory pairing of enforced ethnic enclave and a program of assimilation succeeded in making practices identifiable as Japanese both markers of identity and objects of derision. Buddhism provides a pointed example of a practice that posed serious risks for Japanese Americans in the World War II era. Alarmist texts like Alan Hynd’s Betrayal from the East: The Inside Story of Japanese Spies in America (1943) expressed racist fears of Japanese religious practice: The Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines were frequently the locations of secret meetings in the hours before dawn when engineers known to have been engaged in the construction of scale models of bridges, water-supply systems, naval bases and other such strategic locations unquestionably taught sabotage tactics to those in attendance. (155) After Pearl Harbor, Buddhist priests were in the first group rounded up and incarcerated, and the Nazi resignification of the Buddhist symbol of the swastika dramatically symbolizes the grave liability of being a Buddhist in this era.19 As a result of such pressures, Japanese American Buddhism transformed in the camps. Renamed the Buddhist Church of America (BCA) in 1944, religious services were restructured to follow Christian models; these reforms drawn up in Topaz advocated the use of Judeo-Christian terminology, created a new mandate to conduct services in English, and fostered the growth of the YMBA and YWBA.20 Representations of Japanese American Buddhism in the postwar era bear the scars of this suspicion. We can see the vexed status of Buddhism in two of the most widely read fictional accounts of internment: John Okada’s No-No Boy devotes a chapter to the “mumbo-jumbo”(191) of a Buddhist funeral service which transforms the protagonist’s father, already a weak man, into an unsympathetic character whose Buddhism is only a simpering pose; similarly, Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story about internment, “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” sketches a portrait of an otherworldly Buddhist priest who stifles and ultimately destroys his

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daughter because he simply does not notice the outrage of the camps. The Buddhist priest’s religious fulfillment in the debased condition of internment debilitates his daughter, who refuses to adjust to camp life and goes mad as a result. The stigma attached to Buddhism kept Asian American Buddhist communities small, and though the overhaul of immigration legislation in 1965 brought a range of Buddhisms from different parts of Asia, by the end of the twentieth century, Japanese American Buddhism found itself hemmed in on two fronts because of its unique status as “neither convert or immigrant.”21 The domestication and rejection of Buddhism in the camps stand in dramatic contrast to Zen’s heady rise. A decade later, the religion that had threatened the civic status of Japanese Americans entranced the counterculture. Buddhism, and Zen in particular, provided a set of practices for the counterculture, and though they were widely criticized as facile gestures, it was precisely their ease and quick familiarity that made them useful signs for the movement. 22 D. T. Suzuki’s Zen was a Japanese export; it produced a convert community unencumbered by the Buddhism that had endangered Japanese Americans in wartime America. The attempts to assimilate Buddhism in the camps demonstrate one aspect of an effort to fold Asian practices into an American context, yet such modifications made some Buddhisms unattractive to Zen lunatics. Though they too filled the empty center of Zen with homegrown transcendental aspirations, counterculture artists invested Zen with the power to alienate them from mainstream America while at the same time attaining a deeper belonging to America. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac notes Japhy Ryder’s (Gary Snyder) distaste for a Chinese American Buddhism Japhy regards as overly domesticated: Across the street was the new Buddhist temple some young Chamber of Commerce Chinatown Chinese were trying to build, by themselves, one night I’d come by there and, drunk, pitched in with them with a wheelbarrow hauling sand from outside in, they were young Sinclair Lewis idealistic forwardlooking kids who lived in nice homes but put on jeans to come down and work on the church, like you might expect in some midwest town some midwest kids with a bright-faced Richard Nixon leader, the prairie all around. Here in the heart of the tremendously sophisticated little city called San Francisco Chinatown they were doing the same thing but their church was the church of Buddha. Strangely Japhy wasn’t interested in the Buddhism of San Francisco Chinatown because it was traditional Buddhism, not the Zen intellectual artistic Buddhism he loved—but I was trying to make him see that everything was the same. (115) 23

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This Chinatown instance transforms the hipster’s exotic landscape into the American heartland and astonishingly creates a Chinese American Nixon. Snyder, by contrast, championed an alliance between East and West that many Asian Americans preferred to sever. Yet Kerouac’s lesson to Japhy that “everything was the same” couldn’t be sustained in his own assessment of Asian American participation in the counterculture. In Kerouac’s Big Sur, an account of a season of solitude in Big Sur in 1960, he introduces two minor characters: “our Georges and Arthurs” (162), two Asian American Beats who were part of the San Francisco scene. George Baso is Albert Saijo, a Japanese American poet who accompanied Kerouac and Lew Welch on a road trip immortalized in a small collection of haiku by Kerouac, Welch, and Saijo called Trip Trap—a riff on “Riprap” which invokes Snyder, far away in Japan, as a kind of guiding spirit for their journey. In Big Sur, Kerouac briefly describes the 1959 drive “with George Baso the little Japanese Zen master hepcat sitting crosslegged on the back mattress of Dave’s [Lew’s] jeepster” (55). Arthur Ma was Victor Wong, a Chinese American painter, journalist, and actor, described by Kerouac as Ferlinghetti’s “little Chinese buddy” (88). At the start of a long night of derangement with Arthur, Jack (Kerouac’s name for himself in Big Sur) marvels at these new friends: (and here again another great gigantic little Oriental friend for me, an eastcoaster who’s never known Chinese or Japanese kids, on the west coast it’s quite common but for an eastcoaster like me it’s amazing and what with all my earlier studies in Zen and Chan and Tao)—(And Arthur also being a gentle small softhaired seemingly soft little Oriental goofnik). (97) Jack is attracted to these gentle souls because they seem to embody effortlessly the Eastern religions he studied so fervently. Though they are minor figures, the quality of Kerouac’s affection for them stands out: he writes, “I keep saying ‘little’ George and ‘little’ Arthur but the fact is they were both small anyway,” and alongside the “big ruddy” Ferlinghetti, Arthur is “the little childlike Chinese boy who looked so young most bartenders wouldnt serve him tho he was actually 30 years old” (99). For Kerouac, whose novels strove to present the innocence of a generation of angels, George and Arthur present a new kind of innocence. In marveling over these new friends, Jack suggests their difference. Learning that “little old George Baso is probably dyin of T.B. in a hospital outside Tulare” (56), Jack visits George in the hospital and discovers that the previously charming and perverse character has been transformed, “as tho all the old humorous courage of the year before has now given away to a profoundly deep Japanese skepticism like that of a Samurai warrior in a fit of suicidal depression (surprising me by its abject gloomy

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fearful frown)” (79). The bohemian has been reduced to Japaneseness. Jack is shaken by George’s appearance: I mean it was like my first frightened realization of what to be Japanese really meant—To be Japanese and not to believe in life any more and to be gloomy like Beethoven yet to be Japanese in gloom, the gloom of Basho behind it all, the huge thunderous scowl of Issa or of Shiki, kneeling in the frost with the bowed head like the bowed-head-oblivion of all the old horses of Japan long dust. (80) In this portrait, Kerouac establishes an absolute racial difference. “To be Japanese” is altogether different from the Beat longing for alienation and derangement; this racialized dejection casts the Japanese American into “Japan long dust.” Upon describing George’s bowed head, Kerouac records George’s sentiments: “I guess all the Dharma talk about everything is nothing is just sorta sinking in my bones” (81). The Japanese does not have the freedom to indulge in “Dharma talk”; because he is unable to remove the Oriental mask that his friends playfully don, Buddhism ages and debilitates him. Indeed, George’s Japaneseness keeps him from being a Dharma Bum; such poses belong to those who do not bear the weight of the samurai. Despite Kerouac’s portrayal, however, Albert Saijo remained a bohemian, as evidenced in his first book of poetry, Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, which he published in 1997 at the age of seventy. A chatty biographical essay in the text describes the decades between Trip Trap and Outspeaks, in which Saijo tuned out in Northern California and finally ended up in Hawaii. His biography is as remarkable as his poetry, which Rob Wilson describes as a “work of sprawling capital letters, Emersonian rant and discontinuity, and Kerouac-like dashes, language riffs, and sermonizing jeremiads on his Zen monk-poet life.”24 Outspeaks is firmly grounded in the 1960s, a revelatory decade in Saijo’s life: “I CONSIDER MYSELF A CHILD OF THE ‘60S—IT WAS WHEN I BECAME A REBORN HUMAN” (197). Saijo holds fast to being a “reborn human,” and the unrelenting capital letters of the text are a testament to a steadfast desire to seek out pure exhilaration in an America where “THINGS SPOIL FAST” (199). The voice of Outspeaks is rather different from the quiet companion role Saijo played in Trip Trap. A poem entitled “A SYLLOGISM NO DOUBT” suggests a memory of Trip Trap: I COULDN’T BRING IT BACK—I WAS AT AN ODD PLACE WHERE THE WAKING STATE SLEEP & THE DREAMSTATE MET & A POEM OR APHORISM OR CALL IT WHAT YOU WILL CAME TO ME—I SET IT OUT IN PERFECT DICTION WITH JUST THE RIGHT WORDS—THE FEELING & IDEA WERE EXPRESSED COMPLETELY IN 3 SHORT

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SENTENCES—NOW I SAID I’LL WAKE UP AND WRITE IT DOWN—BUT ON THE JOURNEY FROM THERE BACK TO THE WAKING STATE I LOST IT THE POEM OR APHORISM OR CALL IT WHAT YOU WILL—I EVEN WENT BACK TO THE PLACE WHERE IT CAME TO ME & I EVEN FOUND IT AGAIN BUT BRINGING IT BACK I LOST IT AGAIN—YOU WOULD NEVER BELIEVE HOW BEAUTIFUL IT WAS (69)

There is something awfully familiar about this “perfect diction” that presents a dreamlike moment, in which “the feeling & idea were expressed completely in 3 short sentences”: Saijo is describing a haiku. The poem escapes him and he is reduced to saying “how beautiful it was”; it remains a strange and haunting memory of the past. Saijo’s “haiku on the road” in Trip Trap came easily because its form was claimed by the Beats, but decades later, he cannot grasp the form. In his inability to name the “poem or aphorism or call it what you will,” he reveals the precariousness of this Japanese form and turns the very idea of a haiku into a lovely and elusive memory. This suggestive reference to the forms of Trip Trap reveals the distance of the Beat past, but it also hints at the particular challenge that the haiku presents to Asian American poets.25 Saijo’s haiku had been “in perfect diction with just the right words,” but this famously constraining form presented significant challenges to Japanese American poets. The small compass of the haiku, however, made its form singularly appropriate to the experience of internment. Literary culture thrived in the camps, but in this sphere as in all others, the fact of imprisonment was plainly evident: because poetry published in the camps had to get through a censor, interned poets often used forms strategically and expressed an emotion that would be undetectable at first glance.26 The Big Aiiieeeee! includes fifteen haiku by Violet Kazue Matsuda de Cristoforo, each of which is accompanied by a commentary on the camp experience which inspired the poem. In the introductory note to her work, the editors explain that “the object of the free-form haiku she wrote in camp was an emphatic expression of the fleeting deep emotion of a specific flashing moment” (355). The simultaneous specificity and deep emotion of the haiku form provided an expressive outlet for many internees, and de Cristoforo’s poetry captured difficult experiences in a small and sharply defined frame. The constraints of its form made it an exemplary mode for expressing the experience of confinement, but its popularity as an Oriental style added another—and, for some, unwelcome—layer of constraint. In Asian American Literature, Elaine H. Kim notes Lawson Fusao Inada’s critique of the form: Although some of his own relatives even expected him to write Japanese haiku in English, Lawson Inada says that he deliberately avoided traditional Japanese literary forms, observing that “of the

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few Asian American writers he knew those he had read he considered inferior for trying to sound acceptable ‘Oriental’ ”: “No doubt a quaint collection of cricket haikus would have been cause to praise my Oriental sensibility.” Since his experience has been an American and not a Japanese one, Inada writes, trying to use Japanese poetic forms . . . would not express his reality as an Asian American. (235–236) The haiku was a form that Japanese Americans could not use freely; yet like Buddhism, it was easily appropriated by the avant-garde.27 AntiJapanese sentiment made Japanese cultural forms a vexed proposition for Asian Americans, but such proscriptions also opened the way for aesthetic expressions rich in experiment.

American Way The gestures readily adopted by the white counterculture became tangled in a complicated set of cultural negotiations for minority groups which sought to create their own culture. The innovation of the counterculture lay in its willingness to try on other cultures: though it was precisely this aspect which made it suspect, the possibility of not aligning oneself to the mainstream yet still claiming a place in the American landscape presented a powerful new opportunity for Americans who had long been barred from traditional modes of Americanization. Though minority poets fought cultural appropriation, they appreciated the new creation of the counterculture. The Beats used derangement—attained in various ways—to position themselves at the vanguard of a new culture, but Asian American activists used defiance to fashion a new avant-garde. Minority poets found a way into the American terrain through counterculture poetics: we can see a transmission of Snyder’s legacy in The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (1978), a collection of poetic meditations on a California highway by Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, and Lawson Fusao Inada. Lau discusses the genesis of the book: I discussed with Lawson the possibility of doing a book together about our different upbringings along Highway 99. Everyone thought it was a good idea and so on a whim, I submitted a grant proposal to the then newly formed California Arts Commission.…It was the bright-eyed optimistic early days of new Governor Jerry Brown’s administration. There was also the fact that the commission had members like Ruth Asawa, Gary Snyder, and Peter Coyote who were active artists instead of arts bureaucrats.28 Snyder’s Zen poetics—along with the fragile sculptures of Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa—had become a part of Jerry Brown’s

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idealistic administration, and in securing funding from the California Arts Commission, the Buddha Bandits aligned themselves to the California avant-garde of the previous generation. The subject matter proposed by Lau resonated in particular with Snyder’s poetry: Highway 99 featured prominently in Snyder’s Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End (1965), the first published installment of the epic finally completed in 1996. The resonance and discord between Snyder’s “Night Highway 99,” the first peripatetic poem in an epic modeled on the structure of Chinese scroll painting, and the raucous voices of the Buddha Bandits reveal both a shared landscape and very different cultural ambitions. Snyder’s poem combines several different trips hitching along the West Coast, with stops in different towns that Snyder names along the margin of the page. Snyder introduces himself as man out of town go hitching down that highway 99 (11)

Each stopping point on 99 calls forth a different memory; we may piece together a small slice of Snyder’s life with these vignettes, but we are also invited to survey the heterogeneous population that moves up and down the coast along with Snyder, who stands with them “on the rightside of that/yellow line” (15). In quick and often moving strokes, he relates the stories of the strangers he meets. Snyder blurs together a dozen different trips and leaps out of order on the map, but he describes one overarching trajectory southward to San Francisco, and the poem as a whole describes a movement from the wilderness to another kind of wildness. In one instance, Snyder determines to hitch down 99 because he “Got fired that day by the USA” (16), and he describes losing his job with the Forest Service: (the District Ranger up at Packwood thought the Wobblies had been dead for forty years but the FBI smelled treason —my red beard) (16)

Elsewhere in the poem one of his rides describes the persecution of the Wobblies, and Snyder cites the rallying cry of “Forming the new society/ within the shell of the old” (13); but Snyder is agitating for a different cultural revolution: driven out of the “USA,” Snyder attempts to create a new society which follows the contours of the American landscape. “Night Highway 99” describes the members of this diffuse community,

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from Native Americans riding buses to the memory of Sokei-An, the founder of the Buddhist Society of America. In his wanderings, Snyder lets us hear the voices and experiences of the different “natives” of this terrain, and they come together to transform the singular experience of the “man/out of town” to a communal first person: Going to San Francisco Yeah San Francisco Yeah we came from Seattle (22)

This shift to the plural pronoun extrapolates from Snyder’s singular experience to fashion a “we” which carries many different voices. Snyder is himself transformed by this plurality; indeed, he no longer exists when the poem finally arrives in the city: SAN FRANCISCO NO body gives a shit man who you are or what’s your car there IS no 99 (23–24)

The “man” who opened the poem becomes the object of a different voice by the poem’s end. “Night Highway 99” presents glimpses into different lives and the sum total of the experience is to convert the poet into one of the many who move through the landscape; he can survey 99 just as his gaze can move through the Chinese landscape painting, noting the different figures—including himself—walking within the picture. Stating that there “IS no 99” is an instance of Zen enlightenment, in which Snyder achieves the central aim of his poetics, as expressed earlier in “Night Highway 99”: —Abandon really means it the network womb stretched loose all things slip through (20)

Through walking and walking on 99, Snyder approaches the Zen epiphany of nothingness; there is no 99, and the highway which brings together a web of people and memories has “stretched loose all” and inspired the moment of complete abandon. Snyder thus locates Zen enlightenment in the Western American landscape: whether alone by the side of the road or sharing a long, careless night with others, the poet is moved only by

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the illumination of letting go. The “night of the long poem” (13) finally permits the distinction between first and third person to collapse. What remains is not even the path that connects the different points of this constellation: total abandon means that the existence of 99 itself wavers. Years later, in The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, the role of the solitary hitcher was occupied by three Asian American poets. Inada’s introduction describes a joint performance of the text: The Buddha Bandits first performed as a unit in the spring of 1977, at California State University, Long Beach. It was an evening unlike any other, an event: three poets in concert with some of the finest musicians of Asian America or any area. This book, then, is an outgrowth of that program, natural and continual: the music, the languages, the images.29 The singular event Inada describes was notably like one other: the famous Six Gallery reading that launched Beat mythology, in which Snyder read Myths and Texts—but with some salient differences. The Buddha Bandits’ reading presents a culminating instance of the panethnic coalition, and its university location is of a piece with the aims of the movement, which created an interdisciplinary field in the academy.30 Inada cites a crucial continuity with their avant-garde precedent, however: “Above all, it is tradition we are conveying and carrying on, spanning waters, mountains, memories…” (original ellipsis). The “tradition” Inada emphasizes is, at heart, an Asian American one—as in his “The Discovery of Tradition,” collected in The Big Aiiieeeee!, in which he presents Toshio Mori and John Okada as Asian American literary forefathers31—but his mention of “waters, mountains” echoes Mountains and Rivers without End, signaling that this text is a continuation of a tradition instigated by Snyder. Indeed, “Buddha Bandits” echoes “Dharma Bums,” but with a difference: Buddhism is not central to The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, but the Buddha of the Buddha Bandits serves to align these new adventurers to the Dharma Bums of the counterculture. Their formation is indebted to Beat culture, but the Buddha Bandits are “conveying and carrying” an Asian American tradition. Inada’s introduction explains the impulse behind their coming together around an American highway: “It’s a natural: the three of us, doing what we do. And 99 is no idle connection: call it a lifeline, a supply trail, a tokaido like a river…” (original ellipsis). This connection is a “natural” one, but not in the manner of Snyder’s celebration of wilderness. For Snyder, Highway 99 was just a road and finally nothing at all, but for these poets the highway is a river. In casting the highway connecting their hometowns as a river, the Buddha Bandits replaced the body of water which had traditionally been considered the lifeline home for Asian Americans, the Pacific. Linking Chinatown to Chinatown, 99 is, as Inada puts it, “THE YELLOW STRIPE DOWN THE BACK OF AMERICA”: the

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“yellow” of the ethnic nationalists insisted upon a raced unity, and Inada makes clear their belonging to the American landscape. The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 argues that Asian Americans are not only a part of America but also active participants in its culture. Snyder simultaneously opened and emptied the American landscape, but Hongo, Lau, and Inada want to fill it with their experiences. The book is divided into three sections, one for each poet, and in his section Lau writes that “chinatown was upstairs in my gramma’s kitchen,” installing a foundational Asian American community into one American home. In Hongo’s section, a poem called “Pilgrimage to the Shrine” describes the three poets finding themselves at Tule Lake, a key site of internment. This pilgrimage brings together the Buddha Bandits: although initially “Alan recognized nothing”—a Chinese American detached from the site—while Inada utters “a few mantras,” as they approach the camp all three share a single emotion: But our eyes go blind, fill with tears and ashes

In contrast to Snyder’s “we,” this plural pronoun is a creation of Asian America, which transformed internment into a shared past. In using the highway as a figure that turns ethnic individuals into Asian Americans, the Buddha Bandits grapple with the United States from which Snyder gleefully described being ejected. The final poem of the book, Inada’s “I Told You So,” retraces a segment of Snyder’s journey southward but ends in Fresno, Inada’s hometown. The poem opens “up by Shasta,” and suggests a movement from “numbest winter,” through the town of Red Bluff, then through “Woodland Sacramento,” finally taking the exit at “the giant orange” to Fresno’s West Side. Inada discovers that his old neighborhood has been rezoned into a shopping mall, but the memories flood back despite the commercial transformation. The poem writes out a fantasy of repopulating the now-antiseptic commercial park with the ragged inhabitants of the old West Side. Inada describes the pristine perfection of the new complex: it’s peaceful now & with the perfect light it’s a Japanese garden & you’re contemplating it

The figure of Zen contemplation has become the style of choice of corporate structures—thus describing the fate of the Zen cultural revolution—

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and Inada cheerfully describes the sullying of this purified space when “dawn shows up”: then all the Brothers & Sisters come out of the cracks & start tearing things down

An array of unkempt characters from the old West Side appears, clogging the fountain, and even your grandmother shows up limping twitching fist stuck full of fish bones

The Japanese grandmother assists in the destruction, and the grandson jumps into the action: & you’re helping her & there’s the helicopters spraying & the spray makes a rainbow & you’re cracking up

The rainbow of racial coalition makes its appearance and “cracking up” means both laughter and the breaking up of the conventional ethnic body. The Japanese grandmother assists in tearing down the Japanese garden; her appearance marks the distance between a rarefied Japanese aesthetic and minority American existence. The poem ends just after this moment of solidarity and dissolution: god damn man this is FRES-NO baby where can you go from here

These lines resonate with the previously cited end of Snyder’s “Night Highway 99”: both poems showcase a similar tone, and the separation of “fres” and “no” clearly recalls Snyder’s rhyming of “no” and “San Francisco.” In place of Snyder’s sublime negation, however, Inada insists upon his concern for “who you are”—precisely what no one cared about in Snyder’s poem. If San Francisco is the destination for

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losing the self on a long path toward nothingness in Snyder’s poem, Fresno is a paradigmatic space of racialized identification. Indeed, all three Buddha Bandits remake America in ways at odds with Snyder’s Beat consciousness because they care enormously about who they are, as evidenced in the “Self Portraits” that close the book, in which a scribbled sketch of each poet accompanies idiosyncratic and longish bios. 32 The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 transforms the “night of the long poem” of the Beat revolution in order to present an Asian American cultural collective, one which remakes the American landscape.

Inada’s ABCs Asian American culture required a new vision of American culture: Inada’s fantasy of “Brothers & Sisters” emerging from cracks in a smooth, corporate surface suggested a multiplicity of voices just beneath the surface, fighting to speak out. These voices did not present a simple harmony, and Inada’s poetry often returns to the scene of Fresno’s West Side to lay out the complexities of ethnic expression. Inada’s “West Side Songs” (1970), the last poem in Chang’s anthology Quiet Fire,33 presents a series of snapshots of the West Side’s different ethnic enclaves. The poem opens in “Whitearama”: Catch the skyline, baby— Security, Towne House, P.G.&E. Know what I mean? That’s Whitearama, baby, the big wide screen. (91)

In its easy rhythms, the opening swagger of “Whitearama” presents an all-too-familiar landscape. The poem opens with this “big wide screen,” a Hollywood production we’ve seen countless times, in order to tear it open and expose the heterogeneous elements underneath. Having established this panorama, the poem moves from skyline to street, moving through different neighborhoods. A distinct voice dominates each section, and Inada presents each in a different form. The tenth section, “Chinks,” opens with the emphatic alliteration of a children’s taunt: Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence trying to make a dollar chop-chop all day.

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“Eju-kei-shung! Eju-kei-shung!” that’s what they say. When the War came, they said, “We Chinese!” When we went away, they made sukiyaki, saying, “Yellow all same.” When the war closed, they stoned Japs’ homes. Grandma would say: “Marry a Mexican, a Nigger, just don’t marry no Chinese.” (96)

The aggressive jangle of the taunt dictates the rhythm of the section, but the last line of the saying has been altered: instead of completing the saying with “trying to make a dollar out of fifty cents,” the poem closes the jeer with “chop-chop all day,” simultaneously reinforcing the alliterated sound of the opening line and forsaking the rhyme. The unrhyming “day” opens up the initial chant and provides a linking assonance to the two following strophes: the children’s rhyme has been forced open and made serious, and, conversely, the ensuing betrayals are shown to have taken their cue from the childish attack. Framed within the guiding rhythms of the chant, Grandma’s lines express a sentiment that is as simpleminded as “Ching Chong Chinaman.” The poem casts Japanese American sentiment against the Chinese in the 1940s and 1950s in racist tones, but the poem does not present an absolute equation between antiChinese feelings held by whites and Japanese; the specific anti-Japanese actions detailed in the poem present strategic uses of ethnic differentiation and racial uniformity that correspond to a complex American history in which Japanese and Chinese were alternately separated and lumped together. The poem presents a stinging critique of Grandma, but it also suggests the power of “Whitearama” in setting the tone for her lines. The next and final section of the poem trains ethnic caricature on itself: XI. Japs are great imitators— they stole the Greeks’ skewers, used them

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on themselves. Their sutras are Face and Hide. They hate everyone else, on the sly. They play Dr. Charley’s games—bowling raking, growing forks on lapels. Their tongues are yellow with “r’s”, with “l’s.” They hate themselves, on the sly. I used to be Japanese (97)

In these sharpened lines, Inada entertains anti-Japanese stereotypes. Narrowed into a sword, the truncated lines and cutting diction come to a deadly point: to the poet’s “I.” This caricature distances the poem from the speaker, whose easy fluency in previous sections presents an unyellowed tongue, and the closing strophe turns “They hate” onto “themselves,” seemingly closing off the category of “Japs” from the speaker. The enjambed “I,” however, shows us that this divorce between “I” and “They” cannot be complete, and the lack of a period at the close of the last sentence—and, by extension, the poem as a whole—indicates a missing finality. This missing punctuation suggests that “used to be” does not have any terminal force in the context of being Japanese; the stereotype of the unassimilable alien makes the past tense of “used to be” a continuing imperfect. As in the “Chinks” section, the poem reveals its inability to transcend the perspective of “Whitearama,” which hangs suspended over the different ethnic enclaves. Inada’s complex portrait of the American cityscape does not simply lash out against “Whitearama”: the initial white panorama first appears as an easy target, but the proliferating caricatures of the poem’s different sections, in which different ethnic groups use the terms of Whitearama against each other, suggest the force of this overriding perspective. Inada cannot ignore the frame that Whitearama provides, and the poem pres-

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ents ethnic groups in varying distances from whiteness. By burrowing into an American urban landscape teeming with rifts, “West Side Songs” presents difficult relationships between ethnic groups, from the complex antipathy between Chinese and Japanese to outright conflict, as in a section entitled “Sunset,” in which “Mexicans beat/the bad Japanese” (93). The poem’s presentation of an unfeeling “Whitearama” which overdetermines these fractious groups ultimately indicts this larger, hegemonic position; Inada makes his case against this overriding racism by presenting multiple manifestations of its logic within the city’s different enclaves. Inada’s work as a whole is marked by an attention to relationships between groups of color, and in his landmark 1993 poetry collection Legends from Camp he cites a crucial link to African American culture. Legends from Camp describes a family that survives internment intact, and Inada is very clear about what held his family together: “The Music” (55). At the heart of the text is a section called “Jazz,” and its preface describes a stack of records—acquired by his father while serving in a munitions factory on Chicago’s South Side during internment—which traveled from Chicago to Amache Camp in Colorado, and finally to Fresno (55–56). Inada could only imagine the music contained on the records because he couldn’t play them in the camps, but these “fragile items” were “packed, carried and finally played” (56) in Fresno; unbroken, they became “the cornerstone of a collection, which continues to this day” (56). Yet the records were not silent in the camps because father and son discovered a way to play them, as Inada describes on an evening walk from the shower house with his father: “Coming back, warm and clean, glowing, all the stars were out. We paused; he was teaching me how to whistle. So I whistled, and then we whistled, ‘Melancholy Baby,’ his song, loud and clear—and glowing on the horizon, I could see, I could hear, Chicago” (56). “The Music” transports the boy from the camp in which he is incarcerated, moving him closer to a metropolis in the American heartland; “Melancholy Baby” belongs to both his father and the American city, thus creating a chain with links from son to father to America. Later, back in Fresno, “The Music” expanded beyond the small figures whistling in the dark to encompass an entire community: Moreover, the music we most loved and played and used was Negro music. It was something we could share in common, like a “lingua franca” in our “colored” community. And in our distorted reality of aliens and alienation, it even felt like citizenship. It seemed so very American—“un-foreign,” on “un-foreign” instruments—and the words it used were English. Not “across town” or “Hit Parade” English, perhaps, but nevertheless an English that, in its own way, did the job. (And we were all criticized, continually corrected and ridiculed in school for the way

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we talked—for having accents, dialects, for misusing, abusing the language.) (57) The father’s gift to the son ultimately becomes a means of suturing a raced body into America via a language shared by an assemblage of different abusers of English. We may read the power of “The Music,” which binds together different groups, against the fracturing force of “Whitearama”: while the white panorama hovers above, intensifying alienation and multiplying divisions, the common language of black music provides a mode of unification against “ ‘across town’ or ‘Hit Parade’ English.” “The Music” which bound the family also has the audacity to suggest citizenship to a ragtag minority. This echo between domestic and civic spheres is unusual in ethnic immigrant experiences generally, but it is especially rare in the Japanese American case. The experience of internment, marked by the violation of domestic space, reshuffled familial order: as the Nisei rose to prominence, communicating with their wardens in fluent English, the first generation was simultaneously alienated from their children and left powerless.34 “The Music” provides a means of cultural belonging well clear of both the dominating order of the camps and “across town” English; and through its tones Inada demonstrates an aesthetic mode of securing a place in the United States. In “Time, Jazz, and the Racial Subject,” a reading of Legends from Camp, Juliana Chang charts shifting interpellations in the text, from a poem in which Inada imagines a personal call from FDR, which Chang reads as an instance of “the state ‘hailing’ and calling into being the racial subject” (151), to a later instance of what she terms an “alternative kinship” in a moment with Billie Holiday. In this latter case, Inada describes asking Lady Day for her autograph: After a while, in a hushed voice, he speaks: “Excuse me—but may I have your autograph?” Her face lights up as she smiles: “Why certainly, son! What’s your name?” He tells her, and she pronounces it, somewhat “sings” it, as she writes in the book. Then, still smiling, she looks him straight in the eye and says, “You were here last night.” “Yes, I was, ma’am. I’ve been here all week.” And you might say he never left. And what she wrote in that book, her book, was this: For Lawson Sincerely Billie Holiday

And before he knew it, he was writing poetry. (58–59) Chang reads Roosevelt and Holiday against each other: the former infantilizes the racial subject while the latter’s “recognition of him as part of a jazz community—her musical pronunciation of his name rearticulating

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his subject position from that named by President Roosevelt—facilitates his entrance into a jazz-influenced poetry” (151). Following Chang’s reading of Holiday’s role in interpellating the young poet, I read this cold night under a streetlamp in conjunction with the instance of father and son whistling in the camps: just as “Melancholy Baby” transplanted them from the camp to Chicago, Billie Holiday herself “sings” Lawson into existence as a poet. I believe we may read Holiday’s melody as a counterpart to Inada’s father’s whistled tune, thus creating a raced parentage which brings the poet to life and forms an American subject. Inada’s allegiance to black music creates an alternative to “Whitearama.” If we return to Inada’s poem in The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, we discover a further cross-cultural link. As Inada approaches Fresno on 99, the memories flood back: you take your old name back Chano

This old name is not Japanese, as Inada explains in an essay in his third volume of poetry, Drawing the Line (1997): After the war, we lived for a while in my grandparents’ home (the home and family fish store had been entrusted to longtime friends) while my father picked peaches and grapes, eventually saving enough to resume his dental practice and rent a home several blocks away. The very first day, I simply went across the street to play at the Palomino home, with their boys, Henry and Herb, only a few months separating us in age. And for the next decade or so, there were very few days when I wasn’t at the Palomino home. They had five children, and I simply became the sixth; they even gave me my own name: Grandmother called me Losano, but little Sylvia said I was Chano, as I’ve been since. (57)35 His “old name” is Chicano, and Inada describes an acquired ancestry: from the “grandparents’ home” “entrusted to longtime friends” during internment, to a different “Grandmother” who “called me Losano.” The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 features a repeated line by Inada that defines the “Brothers and Sisters” he imagines storming the mall complex: “the ABC’s: Asian, Black, Chicano.” The entirety of Inada’s work suggests that Asian American culture and identity may only be legible within the “ABC’s”; the Japanese garden dismantled in “I Told You So” is culturally meaningless because it is not recognized by his “ABC’s,” and it is because the perspective of “Whitearama” is devoid of the cross-racial solidarity of the “ABC’s” that the different groups remain isolated and abject in “West Side Songs.” Inada’s “ABC’s” ultimately transcend affiliation in order to create alliances: his family is held together not by blood but by culture. I believe

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that the drive behind Inada’s poetry goes beyond the perplexing issue he discusses in his introduction to Legends from Camp as “ ‘tribal’ and ‘clan’ affiliations” (v), the group identities that the camps simultaneously enforced and undermined. The camps forced Japanese American families together after material evidence of their Japaneseness had been torched or secreted away, and culture for Inada instead took the shape of the treasured records from Chicago. “The Music” gathered a community of listeners and speakers, not in a familial model but in a cultural coalition. Inada cannot find a place for himself in a city dictated by “Whitearama,” but he discovers full belonging in a union of the “ABC’s.” Internment destroyed Japanese American families that relied on Japanese culture as a binding element, and Inada’s alliances ultimately present a strategy for survival in a difficult landscape. In forging ties across a fractured social environment, Inada traverses cultural bridges within the United States and not a transpacific one, made suspect in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

Citi-Zen-ship If we recall Kerouac’s yearning in On the Road to be “a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap,” but most especially to be one of “the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (180), we discover a kind of mirror image of Inada’s “ABC’s”: Beat cultural appropriation on the one hand and a cross-racial coalition on the other. One of the side effects of Beat cultural appropriation was the sudden visibility of whiteness: Kerouac’s lament against his existence as “a ‘white man’ disillusioned” in the above passage racialized whiteness and read it in a spectrum with minority groups. Though individual Beats felt the burden of their own whiteness, they did not then imagine its oppressive weight for the groups they desired to be. Yet it was precisely this weight that galvanized minority avant-garde artists of the next generation, who politicized their aesthetic labor by forging cross-cultural alliances. These alliances were crucial for their art because they provided a way of negotiating with the forms and practices aestheticized by Beat cultural appropriation. Inada’s work demonstrates this new strategy for Japanese aesthetics and practices rendered Oriental by Beat admiration: within the framework of Inada’s “ABC’s,” we discover ways of recuperating two hallmarks of Beat Orientalism: haiku and Buddhist practice. Like the Japanese garden destroyed by the “ABC’s,” the haiku marks an unwanted sympathy with Japan and “Whitearama.” Yet Inada does not simply reject haiku; traces of the form appear in Legends from Camp, notably in a series of portraits of jazz greats entitled “Listening Images.” The title’s emphasis on listening returns sound and voice to the silence of the image presented by Poundian modernism. “Listening Images” opens with:

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LESTER YOUNG Yes, clouds do have The smoothest sound. (69)

Typically, the final line of the haiku creates a sudden juxtaposition to the scene deftly sketched in the first two lines; in this case, however, the name of the artist in the first line collides with the aural image that follows, thus creating an inverted haiku. Just as Billie Holiday sang out “Lawson,” we are meant to sing out these names and hear their music in the synesthesia of image and sound that follows. The long stretch of “smoothest” melds “clouds” to “sound,” and these gliding sounds— sibilance and rounded assonance—recreate the music of Lester Young. Inada’s achievement is to get us to hear “The Music” in a form typically used to create a mute image; he turns the haiku itself into an instrument for hearing “The Music.” Inada’s evocation of “The Music” presents a stark contrast to the Beat reverence for jazz, figured in Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” as a mode of alienation: the allure of the African American for Mailer lay in his proximity to death, and jazz was portrayed as an apocalyptic art. By contrast, “The Music” possesses a life-giving power. To turn to African American culture to stake out a subject position is a long-standing American tradition, but the black-yellow alliance proposed by the Asian American movement aims to counter a white appropriation suffered by both groups. Aiiieeeee!’s introduction singled out African American artistic expression because “they have been cultural achievers, in spite of white supremacist culture” (xxv).36 In the fine-tuned music of “Listening Images,” Inada rehabilitates the haiku by reframing it within his “ABC’s”; he turns the form on its head and fills it with “The Music.” The haiku was an emblem of Pound’s modernist revolution, but when it was taken up by the Beats it was valorized as a Buddhist art. Just as Inada recontextualized the haiku, Inada presents an instance of reframing Zen within Asian American contexts in “Picking Up Stones,” a poem from Drawing the Line, in which he portrays Nyogen Senzaki, a Zen monk who was interned at Heart Mountain. After internment, Senzaki established a Japanese congregation in his apartment in 1945, and Rick Fields’s now-canonical 1982 account of American Zen, How the Swans Came to the Lake, presents Senzaki as a lesser-known but significant figure in American Zen. Senzaki’s own poetry presents a haunting sketch of his time in the camps, but Inada’s “Picking Up Stones” imagines the effect of Senzaki’s presence on the other elders of the camp, who pick up pebbles he has inscribed with simple Japanese words in an “Eastern eggless hunt” (124). The play of “Easter” and “Eastern” conveys the religious significance of this “amusing sight” of “these old people”

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shuffling about in dust, mud, snow, sleet— sometimes even crushing ice with their feet— (125)

Their search for these trivial objects reveals the geography and geology of the land on which they are imprisoned: the stones themselves reveal “the colorful proximity of Yellowstone” and “pebble-searching” had resulted in enlightening arrowhead finds (125)

Zen enlightenment is recast as a discovery of Native American habitation on the land—a combination that recalls Snyder’s overlay of Zen practice with Native American belonging to the land. Yet for Inada, these “finds” are not the result of an attempt to secure a place in the land; instead, the arrowheads reveal an American history to which the internees have been added. Discovering arrowheads has the effect of inspiring some elders to try their hand at chipping obsidian in this land where the buffalo roamed… (126, original ellipsis)

Senzaki’s stones finally lead to a paean to the American West, “where the buffalo roamed,” and its attendant request, “O give me a home.” Native Americans and Japanese Americans share this land, but this fact does not provide the pure solace that Snyder’s “White Indian” imagined. Inada brings together Japanese American and Native American because they have been forced to share the same landscape; and despite their location in the American heartland, both groups reside at an often painful distance from an American home. The poem ends with Senzaki’s end: And as for Senzaki, he died in obscurity, an old dishwasher with a few friends, resting, perhaps, among headstones in Los Angeles, a citi-Zen of sorts, of the earth,

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one who spoke broken English and wrote on some stones

WHILE

LEAVING

OTHERS

ALONE (126–127)

Inada reclaims this forefather of American Zen—a community largely composed of converts—for Asian America. “Picking Up Stones” insists upon the conditions of Senzaki’s American existence: the job of “old dishwasher” and the emphasis on “broken English” bring his racial identity to the fore. In dubbing Senzaki a “citi-Zen,” Inada situates the Zen monk in Los Angeles, a city teeming with “ABC’s.” Further, the emphatic statement of “leaving others alone” in the poem’s last line suggests a rebuke to Beat Zen, which became a fad by not “leaving others alone” and instead fantasizing otherness. Inada’s “Easter” in this poem finally resurrects Senzaki as an American citizen, and Senzaki becomes another stone on an American landscape dotted with arrowheads. Activist Asian American poets redeployed the terms of Beat enlighten ment in order to usher their own culture into existence. Alan Chong Lau recalled attending one of the seminars Frank Chin gave to university students across the country, in which Chin “would stomp around classes cajoling us to write about ourselves, shouting that there was a distinctive Asian American voice in literature, and that we should express it.”37 Ethnic nationalists girded aesthetics with political aims in order to present a new literary voice. The poets of this avant-garde faced a daunting literary history, and their response was “to write about ourselves”: against an Orientalist past, they created an Asian American history through which an antiracist voice would emerge. The movement made heavy sacrifices for cohesion—they ultimately kept out more Asian American artists than they brought in—but the streamlined entity they fashioned was able to make alliances across race through a political coalition. Against the open-ended grouping suggested by Wand’s anthology, in which a multiplicity of ethnicities could be collected under the title “Asian American,” the initial narrowness of Aiiieeeee!’s formulation permitted radical Asian American literature to circulate within different cultural ambits. In keeping a single politics at the fore, the ethnic activists ultimately discovered a way of building multiple bridges within the United States, through which Asian America became a link in a network of raced groups who shared a common ideology of resistance.

4 Modern Warfare Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim

M

axine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) presents Wittman Ah Sing, a Chinese American artist, in a freewheeling tale set in 1960s San Francisco. Named after the American bard, his last name not only sounds like the repeated “I sing” of Whitman’s ringing lines but reminds us of Ah Sin, Bret Harte’s 1870 “The Heathen Chinee”: both halves of his name bear their translations between East and West. Wittman explains the peculiarity of his last name by acknowledging that “I’m one of the American Ah Sings. Probably there are no Ah Sings in China. You may laugh behind my family’s back, that we keep the Ah and think it means something. I know it’s just a sound. A vocative that goes in front of everyone’s names” (307). The mistake of the vocative case makes for a name that is an address, and Wittman is a champion talker and performer with bardic aspirations. Tripmaster Monkey depicts a narrative arc from foreign Chineseness to American belonging: the novel opens with Wittman on a walk in the park in which he crosses paths with a Chinese family he disdains—“whole family taking a cheap outing on their day offu. Immigrants. Fresh Off the Boats in public. Didn’t know how to walk together” (5)—and concludes with the staging of a grand and messy play which Wittman dubs “The Journey In the West,” a revision of a Chinese epic for his American present. In a long soliloquy after the performance, Wittman cries, “There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West” (308). Wittman proclaims his American lineage by reciting a poem by his namesake: Facing west from California’s shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled…(162)1

To hear Whitman’s poem in Wittman’s voice transforms it: “the house of maternity” is made literal. Wittman’s recitation, however, stops short of 122

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the complete poem; he is interrupted by his bride-to-be Taña, who says, “Wittman. Wittman.” She is calling out to him, but she also inadvertently cites the poet: we may read her doubled call as an identification of both Wittman and Whitman. The scene ends with a spontaneous marriage between Wittman and Taña, a vision of blonde, California beauty—thus staging Fenollosa’s vision of “The Union of East and West”—which seals Wittman’s claim to Whitman. In Leaves of Grass, “Facing West from California’s Shores” goes on to describe global wanderings, and the poem concludes with two lines in parentheses: (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?) (111)

These lines express the tireless inquiry of the poem’s second line, but on their own, they sound especially bewildered: the purpose is lost, and the speaker’s powers of discovery have faded. I read Taña’s repeated call to Wittman as a replacement for Whitman’s uncertain ending; in excising and replacing these lines, Tripmaster Monkey completes Whitman’s near-circle by imagining a new American bard whose “house of maternity” resides far across the Pacific but whose claim to America is sealed by an American alliance. Tripmaster Monkey traces a genealogy from Whitman to the Beats and suggests that Wittman may take this lineage further: “Gary Snyder had gone to Japan to meditate for years, and could spend five minutes in the same room with his mother. Beat his record” (182).2 The text lightheartedly suggests that Snyder’s religious study served to reunite him with his mother, and Wittman aims to “beat” Snyder not at meditating but at enduring his parentage. The trouble for Wittman is the “house of maternity,” which risks undermining his artistic claims. He expresses this anxiety as a hindrance to his Beat desires: Find the open mikes, and sing. Stand in doorways of auditoriums where known poets are on platform, and hand-deliver dittos of your own outcast poetry; Richard Brautigan did that. And Bob Kaufman on megaphone in front of the St. Francis Hotel. Bring the poems back to the East Bay to read to Jack Spicer at Robbie’s, the F.O.B. cafeteria men acting like they don’t notice you. (51) Wittman’s dreams are marred by the “F.O.B. cafeteria men” who trump his aspirations of literary celebrity; the hard separation between Beat alliance and the Chinese workers threatens Wittman’s artistic pursuits. By the end of the novel, however, Wittman condemns a famous Beat for mistaking him for one of these “cafeteria men”: Once when I was in high school, I met one of the great American Beat writers—I’m not saying which one because of protecting his reputation. He’s the one who looks like two of the lohats,

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beard and eyebrows all over the place. He was standing next to me during a break at the Howl trial. I told him I wanted to be a playwright. I was a kid playwright who could’ve used a guru. While he was shaking my hand, he said, “What’s a good Chinese restaurant around here?” I tell you, my feelings were hurt bad. Here was a poet, he’s got right politics, anti-war, antisegregation, he writes good, riding all over America making up words for it, but on me he turned trite. Watch out for him, he’s giving out a fake North Beach. He doesn’t know his Chinatown, he doesn’t know his North Beach. (318)3 Wittman’s contradictory impulses to protect and indict this Beat celebrity express the complexity of a Beat legacy for the Chinese American artist. He reveals a key weakness of the counterculture: “right politics” is no guard against cultural appropriation. But in the absence of a Beat guru, Wittman has fashioned his own radical art: he opens the classic Chinese epic and packs it with everyone he has ever met. In the novel’s finale, Kingston brings together every character in the book—they all have parts in Wittman’s play. Tripmaster Monkey thus suggests a model of radical inclusion for Asian American literature. Wittman’s caution to the crowd—“Watch out for him, he’s giving out a fake North Beach”—directly alludes to Kingston’s most vocal enemy, Frank Chin. Chin’s ninety-two-page diatribe against “fake” Asian Americans in The Big Aiiieeeee! singled out Kingston for falsifying Chinese myths, which—according to Chin—“are, by nature, immutable and unchanging because they are deeply ingrained in the cultural memory, or they are not myths” (29). Chin’s grounds for attack are ultimately Kingston’s failed “cultural memory,” which blends together East and West. As a result, Kingston is tainted with Orientalism, and Chin excoriates Kingston for her “white racist genius” (34); he directs his fiercest invective at Asian American writers who cross the transpacific bridges of American Orientalism. Chin’s aesthetics advocated cross-cultural alliances only within the United States and with sanctioned cultural entities. The ethnic nationalist stance relied on exclusion, and Chin’s essay flatly stated his qualifications for entry into the movement: one had to be a “real” Asian American and not an American Orientalist, and he devoted pages and pages to identifying fakery. Chin and Kingston stand as competing figureheads for Asian American literature, but with Tripmaster Monkey Kingston made public record of her victory in the battle. Wittman possesses a clear resemblance to Frank Chin: as Patricia Chu notes in her reading of the novel, Kingston notably includes a “parody of Chin’s attacks on Kingston” (125).4 Yet Tripmaster Monkey is strikingly free of acrimony, and Kingston’s narrator demonstrates an affection for her protagonist. Indeed, the last lines of the text show us a teasing, motherly interest: “Dear American monkey, don’t

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be afraid. Here, let us tweak your ear, and kiss your other ear” (340). Kingston’s novel violates Chin’s standards by modifying a Chinese epic, and she also threw in Chin himself as a figure who could be altered through the process of her writing. In a MELUS interview with Marilyn Chin, Kingston describes Tripmaster Monkey’s narrative as “a novel in which Wittman grows up to be a socially responsible, and effective, and good man,” concluding: “If I can write such a novel, then it means that I will have made Holden Caulfield grow up; I would have made Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer grow up” (73). In likening Wittman to these hallmarks of the American canon, Kingston has turned Frank Chin into an American boy, thus converting the howl of the ethnic nationalists into a childish outburst. Kingston domesticated Wittman Ah Sing and cast ethnic nationalism as a phase to outgrow.5 Kingston and Chin are exact contemporaries: both born in 1940, they attended Berkeley, where each was deeply influenced by the radical movements that swept the campus. Both writers have staked significant claims on their groundbreaking work: one created a new canon, but the other radically expanded the American canon. For each artist, however, the other presents a throwback: for Chin, Kingston’s work refers to the Orientalism that sparked his literary countermovement, but Kingston’s Wittman Ah Sing is locked into the 1960s.6 These two founders of Asian American literature thus present competing teleologies: from racism to antiracism on one hand, and from exclusion to inclusion on the other. Their differing principles of exclusion and inclusion posed varying aesthetic challenges: the literary experiments of the ethnic nationalists were driven by a quest for new forms to express their new voice; but for those on the inclusive end, folding in a mainstream literary inheritance newly invoked American Orientalism. The problem of transpacific alliances lies behind both ideologies of Asian American literature—one presents a turn away, but the other returns to long-standing bridges across the Pacific. Kingston unsealed the literary past that ethnic nationalists rejected: she has foregrounded her debt to high modernism and framed her work as a continuation of this lineage.7 Kingston’s work queries the links between her American existence and a distant Asia, and this chapter considers Asian American poets in the late twentieth century who negotiate these ties. Asian American poetry makes the difficult legacy of American Orientalism especially visible because of the particular significance of transpacific ties in twentieth-century American poetry. The formal traces of high modernism are starkly visible in Asian American poetry, and I examine two Asian American poets who experiment with this inheritance: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. Cha’s epic Dictée reshaped the Asian American literary canon by destabilizing voice and imagining a speaker at the mercy of history and a literary past, and Kim’s work follows Cha in problematizing speech itself for the Asian

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American artist. Both artists invoke a long history of political and military alliances between the United States and East Asia in poetic forms which themselves bear the traces of American Orientalism.

Warrior Poets Of course, it was Kingston’s groundbreaking first book, The Woman Warrior, published in 1976—two years after Aiiieeeee!—that put her on the literary map. First-person accounts by Asian immigrants and their children were nothing new, but The Woman Warrior took apart the genre of the memoir in fractured tales overrun with myths. The Woman Warrior is often read as an Asian American Bildungsroman, but the text in fact presents two generations in different episodes of mother and daughter.8 The mother’s story describes a westward movement, but the daughter journeys into a China of memory and fantasy. The text’s episodic structure suggests the form of the epic: the mother’s Odyssey against Maxine’s Telemachy. The epic is a story of homecoming, and Kingston’s twist on the formula is to require the daughter to make an excursion into her mother’s past. Kingston’s young heroine thus crosses an imagined bridge across the Pacific, harking back to the alliances of American Orientalism. Kingston’s affinity with modernist Orientalism has been attacked, as in David Leiwei Li’s critique of Kingston’s use of Chinese writing in The Woman Warrior as a quotation of Ezra Pound, “whose calculated modernist experimentation with poetic and ideographic Chinese might have given Kingston’s image of self an aesthetic legitimacy,” in which Li concludes that her work is a “blurring of two discourses, American orientalist and Chinese American” (“The Production of Chinese American Tradition” 327). Yet Kingston’s connection to modernism goes much deeper: The Woman Warrior taps into the epic tradition, a genre revitalized by modernism, and she employs a “mythical method,” to cite Eliot’s appraisal of Ulysses, in which she layers contemporary experience onto a mythic pattern.9 The opening prophecy of the text, with its blending of memory, history, and fable in the tale of her nameless aunt, launches into an epic mode; Kingston’s “mythical method” is to imagine a mythic China and inject this fantasy into a silenced American existence. The Woman Warrior installed itself into the American canon by imaginatively reconsidering forms and themes enshrined by modernism. The epic sweep of her text made it expansive enough to provide a foundation for Asian American literature, and its formal difficulty facilitated its inclusion on college syllabi because it was amenable to unpacking in the classroom. The Woman Warrior is a staple of the student diet, and its multiple layers and textures continue to make it a formidable object of study. This predilection for formal difficulty can be traced back

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to literary modernism, which advocated a cultural renewal in textual adventures that simultaneously destabilized and newly adhered to formal conventions. Translated into the terms of Asian American literature, the kind of difficulty showcased by high modernism neatly folded into the Kingston side of the canon debate. A blunt division between politics and aesthetics is never easy to sustain, yet this ideological rift lingers in discussions of Asian American poetics in particular because of the problem of high modernism. Poetry was a secondary act for both sides of the debate—the main battle was between fiction and autobiography—but poetic discourse assumes primary importance when we reconsider literary modernism as a past for Asian American literature. We can chart theorizations of Asian American poetry from Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s important essay “Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics” (1987), which argues for “ethnocentered reading” (51). Lim excoriated Orientalist ornament, and she ultimately made a structural argument, reading three different levels of “ethnopoetics” in Asian American poetry (53). Her essay revealed the range of textures and nuances possible in a poetics that is engaged with questions of ethnicity. By 1992, however, George Uba suggested a new turn for poets in a postactivist era, who “have been thrust back on their sense of an individual self ” and back “toward European-American poetics” (“Versions of Identity” 35).10 In a 1995 essay, David Mura similarly argued that “Asian American poets need to be read against the backdrop of a multiplicity of contexts” (181) in order to overcome a problematic tendency “to view Asian American poetry solely from a social/historical model” (172). A less nuanced view is evident in Garrett Hongo’s introduction to The Open Boat (1993), his anthology of Asian American poetry, in which he positioned himself against ethnic nationalism, criticizing Aiiieeeee!’s “strongly worded and hectoring introduction” (xxvi) and stating instead that “being doctrinaire is not a requirement for inclusion in this anthology” (xxxvii). The terms of this debate are entirely recognizable; the only surprise is that they unfolded twenty years after Aiiieeeee! and The Woman Warrior. If these issues appear late, it is in large part because poetry itself dropped out of Asian American literature, a fact made evident in both of the foundational texts of the canon, in which poetry plays no part. In her 1996 overview “Reading Asian American Poetry,” Juliana Chang opens with the “apparent turn away from poetry toward prose” in the 1970s and 1980s (81). In pitching poetics as itself a marginalized art within minority literature, Chang discovers a way of reading a range of Asian American poets without succumbing to the standard divide. Instead, she aims “to destabilize readings of multicultural literature as simple instantiation of social experience or reflection of fixed cultures” (90). Chang secures a single, albeit “rough and uneven terrain” for Asian American poetry by uncovering “histories of psychic or material violence” (94): in

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short, Asian American poetry as a whole can be read as a mode of resistance to a dominant culture that would conceal such violence. We can see a mirror image of this claim in Sunn Shelley Wong’s 2001 “Sizing Up Asian American Poetry,” in which she reconsiders “a binary scheme that rhetorically lines up activist poetry with ‘raw energy’ and ‘shock tactics’ and postactivist poetry with ‘sophistication’ and ‘finesse’ ” because this formulation “lends itself to being read as a recapitulation of the politics-aesthetics divide, with the second term being privileged as a developmental end point” (293). Wong’s essay suggests a shared condition of Asian American poetry: “we may characterize the Asian American poet’s existence in the English language as one of estrangement” (301). This sense of alienation leads to multiple kinds of difficulty, which Wong theorizes structurally; through an elaboration of difficulty, Wong discovers a way of discussing activist and postactivist poetry without privileging either. Chang and Wong provide significant arguments for considering Asian American poetry as a field: for Chang, Asian American poetry unveils obscured histories; for Wong, linguistic estrangement. Yet in foregrounding cultural resistance on the one hand, and difficulty on the other, these theorizations of poetry themselves do not escape alignment with the politics-aesthetics divide that both seek to overcome. This theoretical recapitulation reveals the potency and continuing significance of the overarching debate: Asian American literature as a whole has not transcended its initial conundrum of exclusion versus inclusion. If we read the summaries by Chang and Wong more narrowly within these terms, we may see how important each kind of argument is to the field: a resistant mode creates the field; an account of differing formal strategies expands it. Wong’s analysis reveals the key problem of the “politicsaesthetics divide”: aesthetics is “privileged as developmental end point,” but politics has never gone away and a resistant mode seems only more pressing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This debate within Asian American studies thus suffers from a larger problem of modern literature, in which the prefix post is repeatedly affixed only to discover an illusory temporality: postactivism proceeds alongside activism. In his discussion of opacity and difficulty in Asian American poetry, Brian Kim Stefans rejects a timeline altogether: What becomes clear in reading this nonlinear history of Asian American poetics is that many of the writers appear to have reached this element of their poetics without having had much communication with each other, at least not in the manner that many poetry movements—from imagism to the Umbra poets— have in the past. (44) Because Stefans does not subscribe to a unifying term for Asian American poetry, the category of Asian American poetry cannot be sustained, and

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his essay presents a series of illuminating readings without attempting to bind them together. Stefans thus demonstrates the fate of not positing a shared sensibility or problem: his essay eludes the recuperation of the politics-aesthetics divide, but the price is the field itself. He concludes his essay by reasoning that Asian American poets “are forced into a consideration of the Western literary tradition, especially the ‘avantgarde,’ in a peculiar way because of a vague sense of membership in a racially defined community that often is not loyal to the various binaries mentioned earlier in this essay” (72). Hence, in the absence of a coherent Asian American poetry, the “Western literary tradition” reappears. Stefans’s argument presents a logical endpoint for a poetics that has never been fully incorporated into the Asian American movement: his essay is not part of a collection on Asian American or minority literature but in a book on avant-garde poetics. If we give up on the category of Asian American poetry as anything more than “a vague sense of membership in a racially defined community,” this poetry thus follows American poetry generally— and, more specifically for the poetry Stefans examines, high modernism. Against this end, we may read Chang’s and Wong’s analyses of resistance and difficulty as crucial attempts to condition the experiments of Asian American poetry within a cultural frame. In the absence of such a frame, modernism appears unmediated by the major cultural revolution of the 1970s, the intervention which unmasked the Orientalism of high modernism. Asian American poetry is missing a past precisely because modernism ultimately troubles the existence of Asian American poetry itself. At the crux of this problem, however, a single text has emerged seemingly to tackle this dilemma of Asian American poetry: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Nearly every scholarly account of Asian American poetry in the last decade— including, of course, the above-cited articles—features Cha’s text as a kind of savior because Dictée demonstrates that it is possible to write poetry that looks like a modernist epic without succumbing to Orientalism. Scholars of Cha’s text have noted its formal similarities to the modernist long poem. In her essay “Unnaming the Same,” Sunn Shelley Wong mentions this inheritance in a note, but she does so with some qualifications: In invoking The Cantos and a tradition of the American long poem that would also include Williams’s Paterson and Olson’s The Maximus Poems, I am not suggesting that Dictée would fit readily within that tradition. While Dictée maintains certain formal resemblances to the long poem, it is also marked by divergences, perhaps most notably in its refusal of the presence and prerogatives of a single controlling authority. (138–139)11

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The Cantos are famous for their array of inclusions, and Cha’s newly imagined epic goes one further than Pound’s grab bag of letters, conversations, and histories: she shows us the documents themselves, ranging from letters written in longhand to photographs and film stills. Cha’s inclusions visibly demonstrate their sources instead of relying on the filter of a single voice, and Wong reads Dictée as an indictment of modernist aesthetics. Wong theorizes her discomfort with this literary inheritance by naming Cha’s technique a “poetics of cleaving” (112) in which the text simultaneously breaks apart as it binds together, and she suggests that this strategy pits the conventions of modern epic against the lyric: Cha “draws forward both a lyric and an epic tradition of poetry” in order “to cast them into mutual conflict” (106). Identifying a dialectical opposition between epic and lyric produces a critique of “the ideological dimension of genre” (106)—yet Cha’s invocation of the modernist epic recalls the plasticity of the form.12 Wong’s reading is characteristic of academic accounts of Dictée, which have balked at ascribing a modernist inheritance to the text, a fact about scholarship in ethnic literature that Anne Anlin Cheng puzzles over; Cheng, like Wong, writes that “Cha’s ‘novel’ has more in common with poetic experimental writing dating back to the 1970s (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan)” (140), and she goes farther back in literary history to remind us that “the whole of twentieth-century literature, from Pound’s first thirty cantos on, has been an assault on ideological narratives and the certitude of historical narration” (150). Yet Cheng goes on to note that “such awareness seems to almost wholly disappear when it comes to reading ethnic literature.” Cheng’s analysis argues that to refer to a literary past is to reopen it. Against the “certitude of narration,” then, I think we may reframe Wong’s discussion of Cha’s use of lyric and epic modes: Cha revises both lyric and epic in Dictée—but not for the purposes of destroying them. Her invocations of these modes remind us that they were never settled in the first place. The wonder of Cha’s text is her creation of an aesthetic frame that keeps alive the many tensions that preoccupy her. First published in 1982, Dictée was rescued from obscurity by Asian American scholars, thanks in large part to the 1994 publication of a collection of essays focused on Cha’s text, entitled Writing Self Writing Nation and edited by Elaine H. Kim and Norma Alarcón. The title of the volume is particularly telling: it states that Cha’s text writes both a self and a nation, and as a result Dictée has been read as a complicated expression of Asian American identity. Wong’s essay “Unnaming the Same” closes the collection, and I believe we may apply Wong’s valuable formulation of a “poetics of cleaving” to the self and nation of the volume’s title. The specific lyric and epic invocations of the text work to disrupt received notions of self and nation; Cha revises the terms of lyric self and imagines this figure on an epic journey. We may turn to Cheng’s illuminating

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reading of Dictée for a further elaboration of the difficulties of incorporating self into nation: Cheng demonstrates that “Dictée is not interested in identities, it is profoundly interested in the processes of identification” (141). Cheng reads the text as a cluster of melancholic attempts to fold the individual into a communal understanding, and this gap between self and nation is the rich territory that the text as a whole mines: Dictée is about a self facing a nation, working through the trauma of the encounter with the grim knowledge that the self cannot—indeed, in some cases, must not—be embraced within the larger order. We may read this kind of “cleaving” in terms of Cha’s use of the modernist epic: she inhabits this form at the same time that she destabilizes it. In its formal strategies, Dictée has become the banner text for making high modernist aesthetics safe for minority literature; but its heterogeneous inclusions—especially its historical documents—ally Cha’s text to a political aim. Cha’s formal allegiance to modernism and transpacific crossings ultimately permits its lessons in history and politics. Through modernist experiment, she has discovered a singularly apposite mode—one shaped by alliances between the United States and East Asia—to tell a painful story of historical and political intimacies between East and West.

Reliving the Past Dictée is an experimental epic comprising nine sections named after the Classical muses and shaped into a novena. Through its avant-garde strategies, the text weaves together different kinds of afflictions: individual somatic concerns, mythic plights, and political occupations. Cha has created an aesthetic framework which is both rigorously ordered and flexible enough to delve into a single body and survey a historical landscape. The central document of Dictée is a “Petition from the Koreans of Hawaii to President Roosevelt,” which warns of Korea’s long occupation by Japan. Cha includes the entirety of the letter in Dictée’s first section, “Clio/History.” The text of the document pleads for American assistance because, as it points out, “the clause in the treaty between the United States and Korea gives us a claim upon the United States for assistance, and this is the time when we need it most” (36). The petition describes the fateful deal struck between Japan and Korea in order to ward off Russian occupation and the belated realization that Japan would only be another occupying force, not a protector of Korean sovereignty. What is striking about this extraordinary document, dated July 12, 1905, is the way in which it underscores American involvement. The letter is signed by P. K. Yoon and Syngman Rhee. Rhee went on to become Korea’s leader, much later and heavily backed by the United States. Subsequent events proved the line “The United States has many interests in our country” (36) to be crucial: Rhee leveraged this plea

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on these interests, and, half a century later, strategic interests embroiled American military forces in Korea, ultimately hardening the division at the 38th parallel. By including this document, Cha reveals the long history of American involvement in Korea, and to cite a plea by Rhee is to plot a narrative of growing Western intervention which culminated for Rhee in a puppet government backed by the United States with himself installed at the helm. After his corrupt regime was overthrown in 1960, Rhee lived out the last five years of his life in the United States, returning to the nation which educated and groomed him to stand as its screen. President Roosevelt was unmoved by this appeal against Japanese occupation—he considered Japanese imperial policy a way of countering Russia13 —and Cha refers to another poignant example of the perils of letter writing when she cites Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which dramatizes Joan’s fateful signing of a treacherous letter which seals her execution.14 In fact, Dictée is littered with unsuccessful missives: from these letters fraught with historical significance to personal letters from Cha’s mother. The seventh section of the text, entitled “Thalia/Comedy,” includes two rather cryptic letters interspersed between different memories. The first letter, typed and addressed to “Mrs. Laura Claxton,” is a brief response to a misdirected letter, letting Mrs. Laura Claxton know that the Mr. Reardon she has written to has moved (142). The second, also addressed to Laura Claxton, is a very different kind of letter: written by a “friend” in an urgent and occasionally illegible hand, it informs Laura Claxton that her sister is dangerously ill and threatening suicide (146–148). These are old-fashioned letters (the first is dated 1915, the second 192–) directed at people with blandly American names, but the contents of the letters describe strange absences and illnesses, in which senders and addressees are curiously missing. These letters reveal an America dotted with missing persons and desperate appeals: Cha shows us letters without replies, and failed connections between sender and addressee have deadly consequences. The consequences of the failed petition to Roosevelt direct us to the key division of the text: the 38th parallel, which Cha shows us on a map included in “Melpomene/Tragedy.” At the heart of the text lies a persistent rupture that refuses to be healed; from this central divide, Dictée shows us division in many different guises, and the text never suggests that division is something to be transcended. Cha uses this method in order to understand a riven nation: all of her aesthetic labors are in the service of revealing a fraught history. In “Clio/History,” she makes the history lesson apparent: Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion.

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To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion. (33) Cha distinguishes between reliving and repeating history: Dictée relives history in a ritualized Catholic confession as a deliberate counter to repeating history. Cha is arguing for a kind of embodied remembering over the oblivion of repetition. From the petition, we can fast-forward through modern Korean history: the threat of Russian occupation was replaced by Japanese occupation, which was in turn replaced by American occupation and persists today with the present fact of tens of thousands of American troops stationed along Korea’s demilitarized zone. This series of substitutions is quite literally an example of repeating history, and through its formal innovations, Dictée takes up the enormous task of reliving this history without repeating “in oblivion.” The burden of reliving history is assigned to a single heroine, whose voice emerges in the opening pages of the text. Dictée makes its way through its nine sections only after several initial starts and stops, and its stuttering beginnings provide a kind of textual birth for its heroine. The hesitations at the opening of this text demonstrate the difficulty in starting to speak, and Cha gives us a page of dictation, a literal “dictée” which shows us an instance of French converted into English. In the French version, the punctuation marks are written out (“Aller à la ligne…point…point…virgule”), and we can imagine the French being read aloud in order to be transcribed. The English translation that follows, however, is a bit of a surprise: the English version has the same spoken cues (“Open paragraph…period…period…comma”) written out as well (1). In this dictation which is taken and returned with the markers intact, the content falls away and what emerges is the spoken quality of the exercise: the text dictated aloud in French is, in turn, spoken aloud in English. These punctuation marks keep their spoken places despite the transport from one language to another; they persist across the border between languages. These marks can be faithfully translated in a way that the other words in the exercise cannot, and in their stubborn existence we can see the position of the exile who keeps her physical integrity in the new tongue. Further, to return dictation without converting the voiced grammatical markers into silent punctuation marks results in a failed dictation: in refusing to become invisible, the punctuation marks signal the fact of dictation, the commands of dictating.15 In these opening pages, Cha exposes the agonies of speaking. The text poses the physical movements entailed (“The entire lower lip would lift upwards then sink back into its original place”) against what is within (“Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say”) (3). Cha names this speaker and genders her in French: the diseuse. The diseuse is the central figure of the

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book, and this prefatory material lays out her shamanistic labor: she must be a speaker for disparate voices. She “allows others” to occupy her, literally and physically, and she must convert these presences into speech: She would take on their punctuation. She waits to service this. Theirs. Punctuation. She would become, herself, demarcations. Absorb it. Spill it. Seize upon the punctuation. Last air. Give her. Her. The relay. Voice. Assign. Hand it. Deliver it. Deliver. (4) The initial invocation of the exile in the punctuation marks of the failed dictation exercise now takes on the flesh of the diseuse herself: “Punctuation. She would become, herself, demarcations.” She is herself a border between these other presences and their voices; she takes the place of the spoken punctuation marks that would not disappear seamlessly into the dictated text. Her unique presence reveals that what is within does not simply find a matching exteriorized expression: all speech must be channeled through a painful moment of embodied delivery; it must be conveyed across the interruptions of punctuation marks and multiple demarcations. The diseuse marks the traces of dictation, and her art is inseparable from a complicated notion of coercion. Speech is never free from the tinge of occupation in this text, and Dictée insists that the labor of the individual speaker caught between two tongues exists along the same continuum as political occupation. The occupations in this text are multiply figured—from the literary to the political—and in all instances they endanger the physical integrity of the diseuse. The very fact of speech is inseparable from a historical memory and political understanding; writ large, the diseuse producing a voice evokes one nation’s occupation of another. She incurs a grave risk in her labor of delivery; speech in this text is propelled by loss and a twentieth-century political occupation. Yet Cha cannot imagine a world without such boundaries, and she demonstrates that existence is itself founded on a divide: the diseuse, figured at the cusp, must walk along this fine edge in order to be a voice for others at the same time that she signals the dangers of attempting this ventriloquism. Each time she makes such an attempt, she is met with the dividing line between herself and others, between the present and the past. Her work is in large part an effort to retrieve voices made distant in time and space, and she manages not to slip into the dangers of repeating history only by keeping her position along the divide. Dictée acknowledges the mere flicker of a difference between the two, however; the pain the diseuse incurs in taking in others is only a shade away from occupation. Indeed, it is crucial for her text that the ritual of the diseuse flirts with this edge of occupation because it is only at this border that we can imagine the experience of occupation. The reliving of history verges on repeating it in order to address the folly of repetition whose interrogation is the driving force behind this text.

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The prefatory material of the text closes with a poem created out of the initial dictation exercise between French and English. The poem takes its title from the final line of the dictation on page one (“There is someone period From a far period close quotation marks”): “From A Far.” On the eve of nine days of channeling speech, the text provides a portrait of this “someone” hemmed in by demarcations, punctuation marks which break into her arrival and condition her existence. The poem tries to identify this figure by posing a series of questions of belonging: From A Far What nationality or what kindred and relation what blood relation what blood ties of blood what ancestry what race generation what house clan tribe stock strain what lineage extraction what breed sect gender denomination caste what stray ejection misplaced Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other Tombe des nues de naturalized what transplant to dispel upon (20)

The identificatory questions proliferate and grow in specificity, but the poem does not attempt to answer them. In this portrait of the diseuse we never learn anything more than what the title of the poem tells us: she is “from afar.” After the questions about national and blood affiliation, a second site appears, and we are signaled to the fact of its being another nation because it is written in French, the other language of the dictation exercise. The naturalized are thunderstruck, “Tombe des nues,” and all they possess is their bodies, shorn of “house clan tribe stock strain.” Literally posited between these two nations and languages, however, is the phrase “Tertium Quid,” pointedly written in Latin, which has a transnational existence in both English and French.16 Like the punctuation marks of the diseuse, the use of Latin describes a position at the border between two languages. The notion of this “third thing” reveals that the exile remains trapped between two places: the first demands a precise categorization which overwhelms; the second site is marked by the bewildering demands of naturalization. The diseuse keeps herself separate from these two options which threaten to swallow her: hence, the diseuse can only be this “Tertium quid” “from afar”; and when “afar” is separated into its syllables we are made to expect a missing place, the noun modified by “far.” But it is only the distance itself that we can be sure of.

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The poem’s final line provides a gnomic portrait of exile. “What transplant to dispel upon” recasts the anaphoric construction of the previous questions of belonging, creating a statement instead of a question. The notion of dispelling, with its suggestion of both ridding the mind of and scattering, is caught in a complicated grammar which makes the transplant the object of the action. Cha exploits this confusion between subject and object throughout the text; it is one of the ways in which she registers the fact of occupation. The agent of the action isn’t clearly stated because the diseuse never has a straightforward agency: she is always being worked on and through; she is always channeling others. Instead, the poem closes with the act of dispelling, the action of releasing out of a vessel—often, out of the body—which is crucial to Cha’s notion of speech and writing. To close with this act makes dispelling integral to the experience of exile, and these opening pages of the text finally declare their intention to meditate upon different experiences of dispelling through the figure of someone from afar, between two realms, who takes on the responsibility of voicing this liminal experience.

Breaking English The third section of the text, “Urania/Astronomy,” expands upon the role of this “tertium” position, ultimately showing us an anatomy of the body of the exile trapped between French and English. The opening image of the section is a Chinese chart of the human body, a universe of a body composed of starry points on the black page. This chart diagrams two sides of a body, and these two halves prefigure the doubled contents of this section. Cha opens this day of devotion with a minute description of giving blood, in which the line of blood flowing into the needle is called “near-black liquid ink” (64).17 She imagines the needle as an empty body, awaiting the blood/ink, and we can imagine the opening figure of the human body as the vessel which will be slowly emptied. Cha focuses on the drops of blood that spill onto a cotton square: “Stain from within dispel in drops in spills” (64). In writing “dispel,” she reminds us of the statement of exile that concluded “From A Far”: the diseuse’s painful, halting arrival at speech is mirrored by this figuration of writing, in which escaping blood is like flowing ink. Cha insists that the surplus of blood is itself textual: She pushes hard the cotton square against the mark. Stain begins to absorb the material spilled on. Something of the ink that resembles the stain from the interior emptied onto emptied into emptied upon this boundary this surface. (65)

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The elegant reversal of this passage, in which the spill absorbs the material, insists on the importance of the surface; the spill spreads to match its shape. The singularity of the passage lies in its supreme textuality; the innovation of Dictée lies in Cha’s ability to expand the text, to make it capacious enough to show us the fullness of the spreading stain it captures. The diseuse is herself a boundary, and the blood that flows from her is textual: its inky quality defines and marks the surface it touches. The passage ends with a command: “When possible ever possible to puncture to scratch to imprint. Expel. Ne te cache pas. Révèle-toi. Sang. Encre. Of its body’s extension of its containment” (65). This call to action elaborates upon the act of dispelling, tying these acts to the body in an exhortation to reveal the self. “From A Far” closed by insisting on action; the opening pages of “Urania/Astronomy” tie this action to the body and the physical act of writing. And in switching into French, Cha reminds us of both halves of the dictation exercise, inaugurating the acts of translation which follow. The call to scratch and imprint is answered by a spare lyric, given to us in French and English on facing pages. This poem presents a lyric “I” who struggles to capture a single memory which evades her. The modern lyric, from Wordsworth on, typically presents the self through an evocation of a specific time and place; when Cha struggles to retain a memory, however, she marks a destabilization of the lyric self—she is no longer tied to a single moment and her identity suffers as a result.18 The poem opens with the fleeting memory: J’écoutais les cygnes. Les cygnes dans la pluie. J’écoutais. (66) I heard the swans in the rain I heard (67)

In French, this opening has an echo: Baudelaire’s great portrait of exile, “Le cygne.” Cha returns to the French Symbolist lyric, with its profoundly lonely first person, and in writing against this beautiful standard, she demarcates the position of her diseuse by showing us the difficulties of the lyric “I” for her exile. In Baudelaire’s poem, the swan conjured out of memory reminds the poet simultaneously of Andromache and “la négresse” searching for “la superbe Afrique” (164) two exemplary portraits of feminine exile. Baudelaire describes memories “plus lourds que des rocs” (164) (heavier than stones)19 in which a swan that has escaped from a menagerie dips its wings in the gritty Parisian gutter. We hear the swan’s words in Baudelaire’s poem: “Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?” (164) (Rain, when will you fall? Lightning, when will you

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strike?). Years later, in a changed city, the poet ponders this “mythe étrange et fatal” (164) (strange, fatal myth): Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime, Et rongé d’un désir sans trêve! (164) (I think of my great swan, with his wild gestures like those of exiles, ridiculous and sublime, and consumed by an unceasing desire.)

The swan is interchangeable with Andromache and the “négresse” because all exiles share the same quality: ridiculous and sublime, they are eaten away by a single desire. In her gestures, the exile is a figure physically shaped by her desire for home; the ferocity and purity of this desire moves the poet to cry out “A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve/Jamais, jamais!” (164) (to those who have lost what can never, never be reclaimed). Baudelaire remarks parenthetically that “la forme d’une ville/Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel” (162) (alas the shape of a city changes more quickly than the heart of a man), and this sense of a city which alters beyond the poet renders the Paris of the past into a kind of lost home for the poet. The poem ends by considering a series of exiled figures, and Baudelaire includes himself in their ranks: the poet is himself “dans la forêt où mon esprit s’exile” (164) (in the forest where my spirit is exiled). In exile, the spirit of the poet is not a part of the changing urban landscape. In his forest, unchanging in his melancholy, he is consumed by thoughts of growing bands of exiles, “Aux captifs, aux vaincus!…à bien d’autres encor!” (164, original ellipsis) (Of captives, of the vanquished…and many others besides!), until the whole world seems to be swept into his grieving. The moving and absolute desire of the exile, however, becomes something else in Cha’s hands. After remembering the speech of the swans, the poem acknowledges the effects of time on this memory: Là. Des années après Impossible de distinguer la Pluie. Cygnes. Paroles souvenus. Déjà dit. Vient de dire. Va dire. Souvenu mal entendu. Pas certain. (66) There. Years after no more possible to distinguish the rain. No more. Which was heard. Swans. Speech. Memory. Already said. Will just say. Having just said. Remembered not quite heard. Not certain. Heard, not at all. (67)

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The memory has eroded with time. Not only is it impossible to distinguish the words from the rain, it is impossible to distinguish what was said from what is about to be said. I read Cha’s poem as a recollection of Baudelaire’s meditation on exile, but in her hands the poem has remembered the swan’s cry for rain as rain itself. The English version on the facing page adds an extra emphasis to the close of the strophe: “Heard, not at all.” Even the fact of having heard the words is questioned, and on the next page the poem confuses the memory of the memory: Là. Plus tard, peu certain, si c’était la pluie, la parole, mémoire. Mémoire d’un rêve. Comment cela s’éteint. Comment l’éteindre. Alors que cela. s’éteint. (68) There. Later, uncertain, if it was the rain, the speech, memory. Re membered from a dream. How it diminishes itself. How to Dim inish itself. As it dims. (69)

This opening “Là” marks another passage of time, in which the memory itself could have been, as the English puts it, “Re membered from a dream.” Unlike Baudelaire’s complete recall, Cha’s poem muses over the disintegration of memory. The speech of the swan is never cited in Cha’s poem—indeed, it becomes unclear if the cries that Baudelaire quotes in his poem were ever voiced. The speech of the exile is utterly lost because Dictée hesitates at the threshold of Baudelaire’s poem: Cha complicates even the possibility of speech for the exile. Indeed, the whole of the text demonstrates that speaking is itself the most difficult aspect of the exilic condition. Further, if the cry is no longer distinguishable from the rain or a dream, I would like to suggest that this is a nuanced version of the “désir sans trêve” of the exile: she realizes that the idea of home is a dream, a fantasy, and a running, constant sound like rain. Baudelaire’s “I” imagined a forest for his exiled heart in order to share in the experience of the swan; Cha’s “I” is herself in exile, and in this collapsing of the poet and the object of the poem the source of the cry becomes indeterminate. Indeed, collapsing the lyric self into the desolation of the swan silences the poet herself because Baudelaire’s modern lyric is premised on a flaneur who speaks beautifully despite everything

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he witnesses. By contrast, in Cha’s poem the rapidly fading memory of the cry is followed by a forced silence: Mordre la langue. Avaler profondément. Plus profondément. Avaler. Plus encore. Jusqu’a ce qu’il n’y aurait plus. D’organe. Plus d’organe. Cris. (68) To bite the tongue. Swallow. Deep. Deeper. Swallow. Again even more. Just until there would be no more of organ. Organ no more. Cries. (69)

In French, “langue” denotes both tongue and language equally; the poem goes on to demonstrate the swallowing of sentences, paragraphs, and, ultimately, all speech. The final “Cries” of the strophe refers us to the cry of the exile which is absolutely lost in this muteness. After the establishment of total silence, the poem returns to its beginnings, but with a difference: J’écoutais les signes. Les signes muets. Jamais pareils. Absents. (68) I heard the signs. Remnants. Missing. The mute signs. Never the same. Absent. (69)

In French, the exact echo of sound between “cygne” and “signe” locks the swan into a devastating muteness; it is forced to become an image. The English, however, cannot register the homonym of swan and sign in French. Cha does add a couple of words to the line in English (“Remnants. Missing.”) yet she does not attempt to compensate for the lost connection between swan and sign in French. Like the loss of memory to the dream, the poem demonstrates what is lost in translation, and the metamorphosis from “cygne” to “signe” silences the poem: Images seulement. Seules. Images. Les signes dans la pluie, j’écoutais. (70) Images only. Alone. Images. The signs in the rain I listened (71)

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The poem comes to a close in devastating silence: “Vider les mots./Vider le silence” (72). “Void the words./Void the silence” (73). When we turn the page, however, we see that the poem has a kind of coda, and a gradual reversal is taking place: Stop. Start. Starts. Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise. Broken speech. One to one. At a time. Cracked tongue. Broken tongue. Pidgeon. Semblance of speech. (75)

This time, the left-hand page does not give us the French version; instead, we are faced with medical diagrams of larynx, lungs, and vocal cords. Curiously, the French has turned into the diagrams, clinical images of the organs of speech. The French has been broken off, and what emerges is the English freed from its existence as translation. Although this English is no longer bound to French, it is itself “Cracked tongue. Broken tongue.” Yet this broken English suddenly takes on the richness of the French, mimicking the wordplay between cygne/signe, which had previously been impossible to render into English: in misspelling “Pidgeon,” Cha’s English registers the homonym between “pigeon” and “pidgin.” By pairing swan and pigeon, sign and pidgin, we can see that broken English creates a flexibility within the language which had previously been lost in the movement between French and English.20 The English is broken because it has carried the weight of translation, and I believe that “Pidgeon” is akin to the “Tertium quid” of “From A Far.” Broken English reveals the fact of emigration; like the persistent punctuation marks of the translation exercise, it bears the evidence of its speaker’s movement between two realms. If we consider the medical diagrams which take over the French half of the poem, we can see that Cha insists on a physical intervention, a reminder of the body. The exquisite language of Baudelaire’s poem is literally swallowed by the diagram of the throat Cha presents to us; she interrogates this construction of the figure of exile as the object of the poet’s longing. In converting swan to sign, Cha puts forth a subtle critique of the modern lyric, in which objects all too often become silent images. Her poem challenges the lyric persona who, in regarding his objects, stands apart from them. Cha insists instead that the poem disintegrates when the swan becomes a mere image. Ultimately, exile is a physical condition that constrains speech; unlike the lyric poet, the diseuse exposes the boundary between two languages even though she risks the poem itself in the process. In shattering the rarefied air of the Symbolist lyric, Cha shows us the limits of the modern lyric; indeed, in exposing these limits her art drives straight to its boundaries, the edge which the diseuse simultaneously exposes and inhabits.

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Lyric Descents Perhaps Cha’s most startling revision of the lyric self happens on a formal level in Dictée: she casts this painfully embodied and fragmented figure within an epic frame. Cha has rewritten the lyric “I” into a diseuse who is never a single self—and this diseuse conducts an epic descent in a complicated attempt to access a motherland and mother tongue with the full knowledge of the danger and impossibility of the task. Just as Cha revisits the modern lyric in her interrogation of Baudelaire, the text as a whole inhabits the dark terrain of the modernist epic. I think we can read the larger logic of Dictée against the opening gestures of Pound’s Cantos in order to explore Cha’s new iteration of the American epic—one in which she further expands a genre famous for its openness while at the same time exposing its limits. The very first page of Dictée shows us the cry of the exile in a photograph of lines in Korean etched in stone: Mother I miss you I am hungry I want to go home

This photograph was taken on the underground walls of a coal mine in Japan, carved into rock by a Korean worker.21 We can see the swan’s swallowed cry and imagine the body of this exile, not speaking but chiseling these words. These scrawled lines, untranslated, stand as the single instance of Hangul in the text; the Korean language itself is a ghostly underground presence, never voiced. In this frontispiece, Cha takes the first stop in The Cantos, Odysseus’s descent to the underworld, and expands it into a landscape for her epic. To consider the anonymous Korean worker exiled in Japan alongside Pound’s translation of Odysseus’s underworld descent is to compare two epic beginnings, and in creating a kind of dialogue between them we may register Cha’s revision of the Poundian epic in a tale that includes a wholly different history. Cha’s frontispiece provides a lyrical and visual counterpart to Pound’s translation of Andreas Divus’s sixteenth-century Latin version of the Odyssey in Canto 1. Upon recounting Odysseus’s encounters with various shades, including a former shipmate, the prophet Tiresias, and his mother, Anticlea, Pound orders Divus to “Lie quiet” as he performs his own translation. Pound speaks to his fellow translator at a crucial moment, interrupting and abruptly ending the account of Odysseus’s visit to the underworld. This sharp intrusion immediately follows the line “And then Anticlea came,” the second appearance of Odysseus’s mother in Pound’s rendering of the descent. The first time Odysseus sees his mother, Pound dispenses with her in order to speak to Tiresias:

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“And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban” (4). If we go back to the Odyssey, we learn that Odysseus’s sorrow when he fails to embrace his mother who “fluttered out of my hands like a shadow or a dream” “sharpened at his heart,” but Pound’s translation transforms Odysseus’s grief into a harsh act.22 Anticlea’s second approach drives Odysseus out of the underworld, and after the apostrophe to Divus, Pound leaps to Circe. The Canto closes with an image of Aphrodite, and this beautifully rendered portrait completes the turn away from Anticlea. The mother is not only forcibly repudiated; she is banished by goddesses and gold, two of the ideals of Pound’s epic. The epic is a tale about a hero’s homecoming, and Pound’s innovation is to turn the homecoming into a series of exempla of the ideal state; hence, mother and motherland can be dispensed with because even as he winnows through millennia of history Pound is seeking to make new, to envision a new state. If the modernist epic is predicated on a new kind of homelessness indicative of the modern condition and searches for better models of the state, Cha’s reinvention of the genre knows better than to look for this ideal state. Instead, the frontispiece returns to the mother beaten away by Pound; she is the complicated object of longing in Cha’s underworld descent, even as we must understand that this desired figure can never be fully reclaimed. Indeed, the exilic condition Cha insists upon founds its existence in transit, in the fact of the flight and return, even as the coordinates at either end of the travel become blurred and change places as home and away. Cha’s work dwells on the elements of epic that Pound took for granted and scorned: Dictée’s opening image calls out for the mother that Pound’s Odysseus repudiates, and her work agonizes over the role of the translator Pound openly rebukes in his epic opening. Immediately preceding the first muse, Cha writes: “And it begins” (19). In her reading of Dictée, Wong notes the similarity of this line to the first line of Pound’s epic (“And then went down to the ship”) (123), and in Cha’s phrase I think we see a combination of both this famous opening and the succinct anticipation of the close of Canto 1: “So that:” (5), the final line that propels us into the whole of the epic that follows. Dictée’s “And it begins” thus encapsulates Pound’s epic beginning, and the memory of the frontispiece combined with this line—the two bookends to the prefatory material of the text before the onset of the novena—usher us into an epic expanse. Cha most explicitly lays out the text’s epic journey in a section entitled “Elitere/Lyric Poetry,” the single invented muse of the text (replacing the muse of music, Euterpe). In converting lyric poetry into a muse, she turns this genre into one of the arts and sciences embodied by the muses; the lyric becomes a figure on the order of astronomy or history, thus making the lyric self coexistent with the universal and historical preoccupations of the text. It is curiously fitting that Cha’s epic descent should be featured in “Elitere/Lyric Poetry”; she has lodged the small gem of the lyric within an epic frame.

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Cha’s brilliant achievement is to cast a politically inflected journey to the neocolonial center as a classic heroic one. The text shows us a range of heroines, from Yu Guan Soon, a Korean revolutionary who formed a resistance group in 1919 at the age of sixteen, to Cha’s mother’s experience as a young teacher in Manchuria—and ultimately, to the experience of Dictée’s speaker, caught in between languages. All of these figures dramatize a boundary, and amid the many boundaries in this text, the movie screen holds a paradigmatic place. Cha was first and foremost a filmmaker, and one of the innovations of this text is its manipulations of the plastic possibilities of cinema. “Melpomene/Tragedy” opens with a map of Korea, divided between North and South, and the facing page describes the experience of sitting in a movie theater. At the appointed time, stillness reigns: “The submission is complete” (79). The following page opens with a letter from Cha in Korea to her mother in the United States, in which she notes that nothing has changed: she takes part in a demonstration, and she writes, “I am in the same crowd, the same coup, the same revolt, nothing has changed” (81). This instance of repeating history devastates the speaker, and Cha gives us an explicit image of this repetition: You soldiers appear in green. Always the green uniforms the patches of camouflage.…You are your post you are your vow in nomine patris you work your post you are your nation defending your country from subversive infiltration from your own countrymen. (85–86) The rows of soldiers facing their northern countrymen at the boundary demonstrate the deadly force of an inexorably repeating history. The section ends with a submission to this division: “Suffice that should be nation against nation suffice that should have been divided into two which once was whole” (88). It must “suffice” that this tragedy is to be accepted, and the section closes by demonstrating this sufficiency in terms of the cinema screen: “Suffice Melpomene, arrest the screen en-trance flickering hue from behind cast shadow silhouette from back not visible. Like ice. Metal. Glass. Mirror” (88). This is an understanding of the screen as hard, material object, as implacable as the DMZ and a line of soldiers in green. Yet inside the theater the screen is transformed from a white object to a moving and living entity. The following section, “Erato/Love Poetry,” rewrites the experience of the cinema into an arena of multiple possibilities. In this section, the pages are laid out like shots in a film: as one moment is described, the matching section on the facing page is blank—and so on, in alternating succession. Unlike the facing pages of the poem in French and English in “Urania/Astronomy,” this crosscutting illustrates a dynamic way of bringing together both pages at the same time. Unlike previous sections in which hesitations and divisions were prominently displayed, this section brings together its multiple strands. The two senses of the cinema screen, blank whiteness and living surface,

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illustrate Cha’s distinction between repeating and reliving. This section rewrites the viewer’s own entry into the cinema, and the viewer is viewed on the screen; the actions of the viewer have dictated the opening of the film, and in this possibility I think that Cha is describing a textual, not filmic, plasticity. Cha creates a textual and supremely malleable film on the page, and the film which unfolds sutures together a range of materials from the journals of St. Thérèse de Lisieux to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. In fact, even after the film has ended and we exit the theater, we have not lost the powers of entry and identification learned during the viewing session: the film had ended with a scene of snow (“Suddenly. Snow.” [114]), and Cha describes the world outside the theater, in which “It had been snowing. During the while” (118). The snow from outside the theater has come onto the screen, and the snow from the film is falling outside: this is the radical possibility of the reconceptualized screen Cha argues for in the text, and her aesthetic experiments ultimately demonstrate how we might relive history without repeating it. Cha’s accomplishment is to make painfully clear the specific contours of Korean American experience at the same time that she marshals a range of allusions well beyond the bounded limits of Asian America initially set by the ethnic nationalist agenda. Just as she refers to the origins of the Western canon and high modernism, Cha moves beyond the space- and time-bound confines of Asian America. Dictée describes an astonishing artistic freedom, but all of its innovations are anchored to a central experience of occupation and, at bottom, the difficulties of speech. The fluidity of these connections is singularly suited to lay bare the dark alliances and ruptures at the heart of Dictée: Cha squarely indicts both American involvement in and disregard for the Korean peninsula, and just as Japanese soldiers greeted her mother in Manchuria, where she had fled to escape them, Cha captures the pervasiveness of occupation by plumbing its living echoes, felt deeply by Cha herself. Cha holds out the revolutionary possibility that an aesthetic rendering of the experience of occupation may be more than a representation: it may permit us to understand “the pain to say”; history may come to life in the manner of the transformative possibilities of the cinema screen. Dictée closes by demonstrating screens on which life is cast. In “Polymnia/Sacred Poetry,” the ninth muse, the text recounts a simple story: a young girl, in search of a cure for her ailing mother, meets a woman at a well who gives her ten packets of medicine.23 Nine packets are for her mother, but the tenth is a gift for herself, and in adding the tenth packet, Cha signals the completion of the text’s novena, the nine days of meditation. The story ends with the child about to enter the house where her mother awaits her: Already the sun was in the west and she saw her village coming into view. As she came nearer to the house she became aware of

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the weight of the bundles and the warmth in her palms where she had held them. Through the paper screen door, dusk had entered and the shadow of a small candle was flickering. (170) She arrives at dusk and faces her house, lit within by a solitary candle; the warmth and heft of the bundles promise recovery. “Polymnia/Sacred Poetry” ends here, at the threshold, the border between child and mother, figured as a paper door. At this final moment, the child hesitates before the flickering paper, a private cinema screen, because the art of Dictée is to make such boundaries visible. It is crucial that Cha stops short of showing us the healing properties of the medicine packets; the text can provide a living, feeling understanding of division, but it cannot heal the rupture. Cha’s formal strategies capture the experience of division, from Korean American alienation to mythic plights, and Dictée’s aesthetic difficulty beautifully matches the formidable challenge of this project.

Building Bridges Myung Mi Kim’s poetry shares Cha’s obsessions: the open wound of history and its repetitions, the work of translation and dictation, and the figure in transit. Against the mythic tones of Dictée, however, the poetic consciousness that speaks out of Kim’s poetry shows us different dimensions of exile. In contrast to Cha’s breathtaking expanse of epic underworld, Kim’s artistry takes place in minutely observed details. I read Kim against Dictée’s modernist legacy, but Kim’s redeployment of these aesthetic tools shows us different strategic uses of this literary past. In Kim’s writing, the words emerge in compact bursts, surrounded by white space. Kim’s language bears the evidence of the pain of speech because their complicated sound patterns show us how difficult it can be to assign meaning. The difficult and dazzling combinations of sound in Kim’s poetry make us sound out her lines, and one of the joys of reading her poetry is the desire to look up a known word because it suddenly sounds different in the context she has made for it. To make uncertain our own competence in English is not only a demonstration of immigrant experience but also an aesthetic renewal of the language. 24 Modern Korean history looms over Kim’s poetry, and her wordplays are embedded within a history of war. Her poetry is especially attentive to the troubling intimacy between the United States and South Korea; Kim’s poetry often imagines Koreans in America and Americans in Korea. In her essay “Korean American Literature,” Elaine H. Kim discusses a crucial moment in which these two experiences overlap in her reading of “Food, Shelter, Clothing” from Myung Mi Kim’s first collection of poetry, Under Flag (1991). Elaine H. Kim cites a crucial passage in the poem:

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They had oared to cross the ocean And where had they come to These bearers of a homeland Those landing amphibious (under cover of night) In a gangplank thud and amplification take Spot of ground. (22–23)

Elaine H. Kim discusses this moment: Kim draws an ironic parallel between the Korean immigrants’ “landing amphibious (under cover of night)” and the United States military landing in Korea. Unlike the United States invaders, however, the immigrants walk a “gangplank,” taking up only a “little space” in the vastness of the United States, a limited and restricted “spot of ground” where they will live tyrannized by fear of “smear” and attack. (176) This “ironic parallel” between Korean and American action stands at the heart of Myung Mi Kim’s poetry: Kim imagines the Korean immigrant on United States soil simultaneously with the covert United States landing on the Korean peninsula during the Korean War. This is certainly an indictment of United States action, as Elaine H. Kim points out, but in describing these shared movements the poem is pointing out not just the extraordinary disparity between the two instances but the singular connection that they share: America’s “Forgotten War” has everything to do with these unseen migrants who arrive “under cover of night.” One built the bridge that the other crosses. Kim’s point again and again in her poetry is that the immigrant cannot be separated from the military and political forces that created the conditions of her migration; she shows us the ghostly imprints these opposing experiences make on each other because her work shows us the bridges whose construction too often remains obscured. As in Dictée, Korea’s division along the 38th parallel is Kim’s central preoccupation. “Demarcation,” another poem from Under Flag, describes this implacable fact and the difficulty in describing it: “No way to speak it” (37). The poem closes with the incoherence of the division: As compass locates relocates and cuts fresh figures As silence to mate(d) world Not founded by mother or father Spun into coherence (cohere) Cohere who can say (38)

The arbitrary line of the DMZ, drawn by the superpowers, “cuts fresh figures,” two new countries. This division creates a pair mated not to each other but to a brutally mated world, aligned with the dyad of

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United States and USSR in the logic of the Cold War. The notion of an entity “Not founded by mother or father” underscores the unnaturalness of the division, one which issues from a larger power struggle. Interestingly, the question of coherence alludes to Pound’s failed coherence at the end of The Cantos: “And I am not a demigod,/I cannot make it cohere” (816). Kim invokes Pound’s epic failure, but she emphasizes the fact of this failure “Spun into coherence.” The trouble is that the incoherence of the division has become obscured; unlike The Cantos, it is not that the poet cannot make it cohere—in present fact it simply does not. Pound’s fantasy of providing models of idealized states doesn’t quite fall apart, but he laments that his poem does; in contrast, the world Kim witnesses remains arbitrarily divided and she implicates attempts at spinning this fact into coherence. Kim makes a reference to high modernism in her poetry, but she alludes to Pound’s epic only to destabilize the very notion of coher-ence that Pound sought, suggesting instead that the attempt to make it cohere may have been the problem all along. The high modernist legacy explicitly emerges in the book’s title poem. “Under Flag” shows us the battlefield of the Korean War, a battlefield which includes not only weaponry and soldiers but “Chonui, a typical Korean town” and Of elders who would have been sitting in the warmest part of the house with comforters draped around their shoulders peeling tangerines. (16)

This intimate image is balanced against a different American experience, however; Kim goes on to describe the experience of American soldiers: At dawn the next morning, firing his machine gun, Corporal Leonard H. was shot and instantly killed while stopping the Reds’ last attempts to overrun and take the hilltop. (17) This scene provides a dramatic counterpart to the elders: the indoors of the house against the open hilltop, victims against soldiers, old against young, Korean against American. Yet these diametrically opposing scenes have been forced to share the same world. As in the “ironic parallels” Elaine H. Kim noted, we realize that, despite these differences, the poem is describing a shared experience, and Kim shows us the brute facts of what both sets must face in a list of proper nouns of weapons which explode in succession. And as Kim writes, “More kept coming. More fell” (18). From this vision of war, the poem moves to the present of the speaker, expressing her protesting voice by recording both her distance from the Korean War and the wounds that persist despite the years. While the passages explicitly about the war are cast in the past tense, much of the poem is written into the present; Kim writes that “The eye won’t be appeased”

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(19) and the emphatic present tense of the contraction reminds us that even years afterward, the way we see is indelibly marked by war. The lost figure of a schoolchild caught in the crossfire propels the poem into the future tense: His name stitched on his school uniform, flame Flame around what will fall as ash Kerosene soaked skin housing what will burn (19)

Distance does not make the flames any less scorching; their intensity pushes them before us. “Under Flag” finally closes with a lingering image: Faces spread in a field On the breeze what might be azaleas in full bloom Composed of many lengths of bone (19)

The poem shows us the effects of years under “Sun, an affliction hitting white” (19) and returns us to the battlefield. Even if the poem has cast the battle itself into the past, the battlefield cannot be left behind and the poem returns to it to find a place of uneasy rest. The Korean War settled with the divide, after the losses of both Korean civilians and American soldiers, and what is striking about this final image is that the faces in this field could be Korean or American. This closing image echoes Pound’s most famous Imagist poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. (Personae 111)

Pound’s “apparition” is the culmination of Imagism’s “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Literary Essays 4), and the perfection of this image recalls the precise strokes of the ideogram.25 The beauty of the faces figured as petals in Pound’s poem resonates with Kim’s image, but the contrast between life and death establishes an inexorable difference. Kim’s image is the afterimage of Pound’s: these faces have been reduced to their bones; they are like flowers because they dot the field. The noted collision of the subway with the natural image in Pound’s poem has been recast onto an altogether different level; if Pound’s juxtaposition surprised with its urban setting, this image is startling in its deceptively pastoral quality. The flowerlike faces in the field and the bones which constitute them have returned to nature. What’s missing is the modern engine which created the image—and by virtue of its significant absence Kim leads us directly to it. The negative space

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of this image is the machinery of war, and it is Kim’s innovation to use the tools of Imagism to direct us to what is no longer visible. In this, she turns Imagism away from the image and toward the past, to the event of war. Kim’s image startles because it uses the precise art of the modernists, borrowed from Eastern poetry, and retrains it on the Eastern stage of war. Pound’s argument for the presence and emotional effect of Imagist poetry is here borrowed in the service of rendering something that happened in the past immediate in its emotional impact. Kim turns the Imagist innovation back on itself, taking it back to its origins in the East, and through this imagined return she renews the innovation of the beginning of the century into a tool for a late twentieth-century plight. If we return to the beginning of “Under Flag,” we see that the poem opens with the motion of “Casting and again casting” and the present tense of the figures of the evacuees in the “Rigor of those who carry households on their backs” (16); and it may be possible to cast this particular line even farther: the “singular wave” of these evacuees is part of a larger movement of many singular waves that make their way to American shores. The poem gestures toward the different flows of displaced people whose link to another time and place shapes their relation to the United States. And if “Casting and again casting” is further stretched to mean casting and recasting, in this line the poem may already be signaling the labor of reenvisioning and refashioning modernist poetry which closes it. For Kim, the active manipulation of the stylistic traces of an Orientalist poetic renewal provides a means of addressing American involvement in the world beyond its borders; Kim uses an Imagist effect to demonstrate the enormous price of East and West coming together. To recast the American poetic lineage is a way for the poet both to register her difference and even dissent and to add herself to the line.

Where We Are

Kim’s long poem Dura (1998) mines the epic expanses invoked by Dictée. Kim’s title is a tribute to Cha’s speaker—“Dura” returns us to the first day of Dictée’s novena: “She makes complete her duration” (28). This line described the diseuse in her readiness to be a voice for others, and Kim channels Cha’s voice as the basis for her text. Dura is composed of seven titled sections, and “Cosmography,” the opening section, elaborates “The beginnings of things” (9), going on to show us the slow dawning of land and language. From the elaboration of gradual discovery found in “Cosmography,” the next three sections lay the groundwork for the “I” which fully emerges in the middle of the text. “Measure,” the second section, balances the travels of Marco Polo against the experience of the “natives” living in the fantastic region he seeks out. The next sec-

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tion, “Labors,” describes a movement “Due west directly west” (32) to America, and those who make this journey encounter grueling work. The fourth and closing section of Dura’s groundwork, “Chart,” creates a complicated music by weaving together two separate strands of words in which memories of hardship in Korea are posed against the expanse of “An America as big as it is” (42). After the careful mapping of the first four sections of the text, “Thirty and Five Books,” the longest section, shows us the journey of the immigrant. The section opens with an admission: “Never having been here when the sun rose” (53), but we move rapidly through this unknown past, arriving at the point of “Deployments to the assigned parallel” (54), the nation divided. This is a compressed history of Korea, and upon this establishment of the DMZ we meet something like a protagonist: “Unrecognized she went about the city” (54). This line, taken from Odysseus’s movements through the Phaiakian city while shrouded by Athena’s powers, describes Odysseus’s last stopping place before his return to Ithaka. As a guest in Alkinoos’s palace, Odysseus tells his greatest tales, and with the assistance of his host he is sent on his way home fully stocked and rested. Clearly, this is a journey in the epic sense of the word; and in referring to this moment in the Odyssey, Kim pinpoints both the heights of Odysseus’s skill as a storyteller and the beginning of Odysseus’s actual journey home. Kim deliberately calls upon the epic voyage and refigures it for the “she” of the female immigrant, and in alluding to this moment in the Odyssey, Kim suggests that the move from Korea to America is a kind of homecoming. This is more than an “ironic parallel”: perhaps this suggestion of the Korean going to America to claim her household may implicate the shaping force of American foreign policy in Korea; as in Dictée, Cha sketches a homecoming to the neocolonial center. The first few pages of this section provide us with markers that place us in Korea: “Various kinds of rice in the manner of living in that country” (55), “Little in the way of progress. Firesticks bundled” (59), “Primitive tabulation of need” (60). This enduring agricultural existence is subject to violence from without: Describe the success of the random bomb. Black rain had its mark. (61)

This dispassionate mention of an exploding bomb is followed, on the next page, by a description of “its mark”: Speed of water drops. Speed of cease-fire. Playground when the planes close in. The hands of the boy and girl are firm hands. Fume, vapor, forge of metal aimed. Each child’s hand in the mother’s hands. No heads, fugitive heads. Eyes turned lid. Blood mat hair. Each their hands (held). (62)

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This compact description shows us the speed of the event, the horror of the simultaneous separation and fusing together of bodies as a result of the smoking metal. From a portrait of a nation transformed into a battlefield, the following page shows us the migration: In so locating a time of geography before the compass. Do not ask again where are we. (63)

In the confusion of the journey, we can hear the voice of the adult admonishing the child for asking “Where are we?” In setting off for this new land, this family takes a course little different from that of Marco Polo “before the compass”: the geography of the ocean between East and West remains the same. Once landed, they discover Population gathered to population. More uninhabited space in America than elsewhere. (63)

America is remarkable for its space, but the tendency of “Population gathered to population” signals the troubles that are to come in this place of uninhabited spaces; and immediately after the statement of arrival in America, the poem shows us the Los Angeles riots: He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans Beat the fresh burning The boy in the newspaper wore a dark shirt Flakes of fire ripen fire It could not be my son Agate of insistence Contents of the boy’s pocket—a dime and a pen Percussive In the LA Times the picture was in color Body moving in circle be fire What looked black in the Korean newspaper was my son’s blood (64–65)

This passage describes a literalization of Cha’s conflation of blood and ink: here, the bloodied shirt is rendered in black ink in the Korean newspaper, and this giving of blood supplies words for the news. This blood does not have an expressive function; it is only the result of violence. The factionalism within what had been imagined as “uninhabited space” results in another scene of smoking ruins. Kim shows us different ethnic groups as variables in a painful and persistent equation:

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arrived in America. Bare to trouble and foresworn. Aliens aboard three ships off the coast. and clash. Police move in. What is nearest is destroyed. (67)

This passage presents Dura’s most blunt portrait of America; we are not led to imagine that these recent arrivals in America will ever fully shed alien status. Kim makes this clear for even those who have inhabited America’s space for generations: Torch and fire. Translate: 38th parallel. Translate: the first shipload of African slaves was landed at Jamestown (68)

The ship off the coast carries not only the next wave of immigrants but also suggests the ships of African slaves; these longtime inhabitants, too, retain a sense of their alien status in America. This rewritten translation exercise describes an unrelenting pattern. The equivalence of the groups that can be filled in for the two blanks of the repeated American story is here demonstrated for the two groups implicated in the Los Angeles riots, and both parties have arrived on these shores as a result of American intervention: for Koreans, the arbitrary assignment of the 38th parallel which America effected; for African Americans, the commissioned slave ships. Kim goes on to imagine other possible groups which could fill the blank spaces: Bodies in propulsion. Guatemalan, Korean, African-American sixteen year olds working check-out lanes. Hard and noisy enunciation. A banter English gathers carriers. What is nearest is destroyed. (73)

The figuration of “A banter English” amassing speakers turns the concept of naturalization on its head: instead of aliens folding themselves into America and English, a spoken English gathers and carries along these aliens. This is the extent of Americanization: a shared, spoken banter which brings together its speakers. The passage closes with a line heard twice in this section, “What is nearest is destroyed.” This is the conclusion drawn from examining America, and this repeated statement resonates with similar lines in The Cantos: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage (540–541)

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Pound wrote these lines during his incarceration in Pisa, and the bittersweet recognition in these lines has been heralded as the point of greatest beauty in his epic. In the face of the Los Angeles riots, however, the heroic self of Kim’s epic arrives at a very different conclusion: Pound’s “true heritage” is, for Kim, the Korean American son, and the fact of his death shows how “What is nearest is destroyed.” She rewrites the modernist epic in order to make her own ringing claims about the American experience. “What thou lovest well remains” and “I cannot make it cohere” are two of the most oft-quoted lines from The Cantos, and these lines stand as Pound’s two central and opposing convictions about his epic. True heritage is all; the rest is dross—and it is the aim of his epic to illustrate this true heritage; yet the late acknowledgment of incoherence shows us that this goal is impossible to sustain. Just as Under Flag’s allusion to coherence questioned it, Dura shows how readily what is nearest can “be reft from thee.” This guarantee of destruction stands as a kind of truth of America on the order of the blank spaces of the two replaceable parties which clash. As we have seen in the blank spaces in the American story, there is always a ship off the coast. Kim presents her own immigrant experience in a two-page chronology, numbered from 6.1 to 35.0. This timeline of her life marks her age at key events (“32.10 Given birth 5:05AM” [80]), thus refocusing the figure at the center of the text, she who “walked about the city.” These memories inscribe Kim into “Thirty and Five Books,” which rewrites her thirty-five years into books. Pound was haunted by Whitman’s conflation of self and book (“Camerado, this is no book,/Who touches this, touches a man.”) and Kim reimagines this founding premise of the American long poem, but with the books and heroine embedded within the complex tale she unfolds. In the lineage of the American epic, with both Cha and Kim the poet has herself entered the poem; she occupies the spaces mapped out by the epic’s bardic voice. “Thirty and Five Books” closes with a brief evocation of Dictée’s final myth: Inside the hand-stitched pouch. Pebbles. A clean wind. Having arrived here. Trace of timber in a gravelly loam, possibly part of a collapsed fence. Affection to touch dirt. All harmonics sound. (85)

I read this moment with the pockets of medicine in Cha’s text, and this final arrival not into a house but its traces rewrites the moment of the child at the screened door at the end of Dictée. In this case, the structure

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has fallen; these lines do not somehow cover over the loss of “What is nearest is destroyed,” but they end on a note of affection. Dictée ultimately closed with ringing bells (“to break stillness bells fall a peal to sky” [179]), breaking into the silence of the text, and Kim recasts this great noise as the sound of harmony, felt in the dirt after destruction. By the end of “Thirty and Five Books,” the journey that began in the Korean countryside ends with an arrival. The heroine claims only “gravelly loam,” but the harmonics that issue from the dirt herald a kind of homecoming. The following section, “Progress in Learning,” shows us the slow work of making progress and creating something like a home, and “Hummingbird,” the final section of the poem, presents an image first suggested in “Cosmography,” Dura’s opening section: “If one thing is seen and seen clearly and the effort to see it/Hummingbird in foxglove whir” (14). “Hummingbird” opens with the drudgery of learning, a translation exam composed of homilies of agricultural life. This command to translate is reminiscent of Dictée, but it quickly becomes impossible to complete the task because the lines are broken up with brackets that group the words in bewildering arrangements. Finally, the banality of the exercise is set aside, and the poet instead focuses her energies on observing the hummingbird: wright’s deer vetch scarlet pimpernel filaree thistle monkey flower cow’s parsnip scotch broom horse chestnut Hummingbird on lavender (107)

The list describes a series of flowers with small blossoms which may entice the hummingbird, a catalog of blooms which delineates its possible journey. This is the hummingbird’s cosmography; the poem tells us that “Hummingbird happens as a sound first” (106), and from this sound we move on to careful observations which ultimately result in mapping out the path of the hummingbird. Kim’s epic maps the complicated movements of sound, paying particular attention to the transformative forces of the gulfs which must be bridged between the points along the path. What began writ large as cosmography closes on a new understanding of the individual condition, and Dura closes on the poet herself, in her experiment. The figure of the hummingbird finally brings together a minute observation of the image and the larger arc of its path. Through her experiments with American poetry, Kim’s work

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interrogates American action in Korea and Korean American experience in America: she contends with the aftermath of a fantasized intimacy between East and West come true. Both Cha and Kim discover formal modes for demonstrating the human costs of transpacific bridges built by poetic and political alliances.

Conclusion

rank Chin’s groundbreaking play The Chickencoop Chinaman, first produced in 1972, opens with his main character, Tam Lum, explaining his birth: “My dear in the beginning there was the Word! Then there was me! And the Word was CHINAMAN. And there was me” (6). Tam elaborates in thunderous tones:

F

Born? No! Crashed! Not born. Stamped! Not born! Created! Not born. No more born than the heaven and earth. No more born than nylon or acrylic. For I am a Chinaman! A miracle synthetic! Drip dry and machine washable. (8) Tam’s immaculate conception is miraculous because he comes “out of junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes” (6). The list goes on, but this first handful of detritus sketches an American past of cheap Asian imports and labor. Tam cannot simply jettison this mess; instead, it comes together to create him. In fact, Tam orphans himself in the play in order to claim a lineage of exclusion and Orientalism. A synthetic creation made from the dregs of racism, Tam is an emblem of Asian America: the miracle of Asian America lies in this transformation, a new cultural formation come to life against a history of anti-Asian sentiment and policy. Tam explains that “The Word is my heritage,” but this grim past has been especially difficult to embrace for Asian America. Asian America has dramatically expanded since its 1968 creation. Perhaps we may read the literary shaping of Asian America in the last forty years as a dialectic of exclusion and inclusion, in which periodic delineations inspire new entries. The originary “Word” as Chin construed it, however, continues to be theorized as a hard limit: Asian America has a heritage, but it is emphatically not Orientalism. The breach between Orientalism and anti-Orientalism has widened since The Chickencoop Chinaman as a growing field of scholarship has significantly uncovered an anti-Orientalist literary past. As a result of these crucial excavations, Asian America created a canon untainted by American Orientalism. Yet the Asian American movement itself provided an extraordinary demonstration of the artistic riches that could result from grappling with an Orientalist heritage, and Asian American artists have returned again and 157

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again to Orientalism as a complex source for new experiments. Jessica Hagedorn’s important 1993 anthology of Asian American literature proclaimed that “Charlie Chan Is Dead,” but the truth, as the anthology demonstrates, is that reviving him is a means of bringing together a wide range of texts. The original spark of resistance was the miracle of Asian American literature, and later generations of Asian American artists continue to return to this potent stance, in ever-changing and often surprising ways. Indeed, resistance hasn’t gone away in Asian American literature because Orientalism has never gone away—and the call to Asian American political resistance seems as crucial in the twenty-first century as it was when it was first sounded in the late 1960s. It has been the aim of this study to examine this heritage by reopening a past of literary Orientalism which has long been walled off from Asian American literature. The Orient examined in the first half of this study was ultimately a legitimizing force: Pound and Snyder secured their authority in the Far East, and the poetry that resulted from their transpacific journeys presented Eastern aesthetics as the mode of an American literary revolution. Each was locked into his own distance from the United States, and each found a way of grasping an essence of nativity by sailing due east. To garner authority in a distant land in order to trumpet it back home is a well-known colonial enterprise, but these American adventurers presented a subtle twist on the old formula by operating through alliance over difference. At the base of such alliances lay commerce: these literary accords were offshoots of political and commercial ties across the Pacific which periodically hailed a friendly Orient. The sympathetic Orient these poets discovered and, in particular, their aesthetic admiration for the Far East presented a singular bind for Asian American poets. Asians in the United States tend to be branded with alternating praise and blame, each of which calls for varying tactical responses: “junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes” provide fodder for combat, but altogether different maneuvers are required to negotiate a legacy of haiku and scroll painting. How to respond artistically to this Orientalism, one premised on appreciation—in all senses of the word—and not denigration, has been the central conundrum of this study. In making the leap from Orientalism to Asian America, I have attempted to convey the formidable task of creating a new culture out of an ill-fitting heritage—and routing this question through poetry brings to bear a distinctly formal pressure. The modernist and counterculture poetic revolutions were shot through with Orientalism, and it is my claim that this heritage conditioned the formal innovations of Asian American poetry. Lawson Fusao Inada’s poetry presents a significant experiment away from this past: he turned to different cultural amalgams, applying African American and Latino rhythms to his verse, but he also critically revised Orientalist forms for Asian America. My

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study closes with further formal experiments in Asian American poetry, in which an Orientalist heritage is invoked in order to break it open and reveal the fissures within. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim reopen a literary past, and their difficult poems provide a kind of anatomy lesson for American poetry as they dissect its forms. Apparitions of Asia has traced Pound’s modernist apparition of “Petals on a wet, black bough” to Myung Mi Kim’s “azaleas in full bloom/Composed of many lengths of bone.” Against the momentary flash of Poundian Imagism, Kim’s apparition refers to a bitter transpacific history. At the end of the twentieth century, Asian American poets newly invoke the United States– East Asian alliances that drove the literary revolutions of the past. American poetry is itself a supremely synthetic creation. For the poets of the first half of my study, the component parts of their verse were aligned with an American ambition: they dreamed of bardic status, a role which had long been declared defunct. These poets quite literally circumvented the problem of their full belonging to America—the first and most important requirement to be a bard—by reforming their native land through a discipline learned in the Orient. In reading the poetic forms of American Orientalism, I have sought to examine the precise configurations that result from transpacific alliances in order to understand their significance within modernist and Beat poetics—and, further, in order to comprehend the formal burden they present for Asian American poets. The miracle synthetic of Asian American poetry emerged in the wake of these extraordinary claims to nativity. In querying their own belonging to the United States, these poets conducted experiments in verse which took apart and newly assembled the forms that constrained them in literary acts that ultimately renewed American poetry.

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Notes

i n t roduc t ion 1. Beongcheon Yu discusses this “first poetic treatment of Japan by any major American poet” (63). 2. Malini Johar Schueller analyzes Whitman’s fascination with India, in particular “the theory of the common ancestry of Europeans and Asians” (191). 3. Fields, “The Restless Pioneers” 14–15. 4. Emerson famously kept a journal called “The Orientalist” in the 1850s. Arthur Christy notes that Emerson recognized an “Oriental quality” in Whitman (250). 5. Quoted in Yu 70. 6. Iriye frames this economic interest within “the Jeffersonian dictum of ‘peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations’” (14). 7. In “Orientalism, an Afterword,” Said emphasizes this point, arguing that “the development and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of a different and competing alter ego” (35). 8. In “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Said classes his critics into three types: nativists, nationalists, and fundamentalists (94–95). See Timothy Brennan and Robert Young for compelling critiques and Aijaz Ahmad for a contentious one. Lisa Lowe’s Critical Terrains makes a strong argument for the heterogeneity of Orients. 9. Although Said begins his introduction by saying that “Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly)” (1), he goes on to explain that “the American Oriental position since World War II has fit—I think, quite self-consciously—in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers [Britain and France]” (17). 10. Lye explains that “‘China’ and ‘Japan’ provided examples of a highcivilizational discourse whose intersection with the problematics of late modernization uniquely marked off East Asia from other regions of the nonWestern world” (10). 11. Palumbo-Liu points out that United States support for Japan’s restoration far exceeded the support designated for the Marshall Plan: “the American effort in the Asia-Pacific region constituted a second and continuing Marshall Plan in all but name” (264). 12. This phrase is taken from the title of Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. 161

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13. Chisolm 28. Chisolm notes that Fenollosa is credited with inspiring “the turning point of Japanese thinkers toward German philosophy” (42). 14. Quoted in Yu 94. 15. Quoted in Chisolm 50–51. 16. Chisolm cites Fenollosa’s own accounts of his cataloging labors: “I have recovered the history of Japanese art from the 6th to the 9th centuries A.D. which has been completely lost”—and in exhuming treasures from Buddhist temples, Fenollosa described priests “everywhere greedy for my certificates” (53). Victoria Weston frames Fenollosa’s commercial considerations: “Fenollosa argued that art was intrinsically national, and that only by remaining true to its unique character would Japanese art attract international prestige and foreign buyers” (27). His precise calibrations of scarcity created a market for objects newly visible as rare art. 17. Fenollosa purchased enough artistic treasures—with the help of another “Gilded Age misfit,” William Sturgis Bigelow—to stock Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts with the largest and most distinguished collection of East Asian art outside of Asia. Thus, at the same time that Fenollosa was championing national preservation in Japan, he was carting away many of the choicest pieces, a paradox that occasioned some soul-searching: in an 1884 letter to Morse, Fenollosa pondered, “Already people here are saying that my collection must be kept here in Japan for the Japanese. I have bought a number of the very greatest treasures secretly. The Japanese as yet don’t know that I have them. I wish I could see them all safely housed forever in the Boston Art Museum. And yet if the Emperor or Mombusho [Department of Education] should want to buy my collection, wouldn’t it be my duty to humanity, all things considered, to let them have it? What do you think?” (quoted in Chisolm 65). These “greatest treasures” were shipped to Boston. In fact, Fenollosa’s clandestine purchases triggered new legislation in Japan barring the removal of cultural treasures. 18. Fenollosa’s role in Japan is as Weston puts it, “a hotly contested subject” (2); in recent work, art historians have refuted his centrality in “inventing Japanese art.” As Christine Guth argues, “The process of reevaluation of Buddhist Art was already well under way when Ernest Fenollosa, the man widely credited with promoting the appreciation of Buddhist Art in Japan and the West, arrived in Japan in the fall of 1878” (109). In a similar vein, Ellen Conant demonstrates that there is little evidentiary basis for Fenollosa’s belief that a “debilitating” westernization had taken place (12) and goes on to argue that Fenollosa was not the only Westerner to dabble in Japanese art: Conant notes a German attempt to “revamp a new Westernized school of art in Kyoto in 1880” (20) and an Italian engraver who cataloged ancient art in 1878 (22). Cohen cites one prevailing characterization of Fenollosa as a “reactionary Japanophile” (27). 19. The title of part 4 of Fenollosa’s epic. 20. Discussed and cited in Chisolm 55. 21. Chisolm 127. 22. Palumbo-Liu discusses Japan’s new-found stature, which led Americans to question “whether the Japanese should even be considered as Asians” as popular perception separated “the enterprising, modernizing Japanese state from the ‘mass’ of Asia” (32). 23. Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement uses the expansiveness of transpacific migration to read both high modernist and Asian American poetry.

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Huang writes, “Placed in the larger perspective of transpacific displacement, which is, as I argue, indispensable to the creation of American literature, Asian American literature will be able to maintain its subversive role in undermining the ‘American’ canon without risking the danger of segregating itself ” (6). Though my reading of American Orientalism differs from Huang’s argument for ethnographic discourse, I share Huang’s premise of a transpacific context in order to suggest a relationship between this “American” canon and Asian American literature. 24. In a recent critique of this founding premise of the movement, Viet Thanh Nguyen complicates its political imperative by situating the 1968 formation of Asian American identity in a larger context of “the maturation of a global capitalism that had the ability to turn even resistance into a commodity” (4). Nguyen provides a valuable analysis of the packaging and promotion of resistance. 25. Chuh’s analysis provides a cogent response to Koshy’s suggestion that Asian American studies has a “catachrestic status”: “I use the term ‘catachresis’ to indicate that there is no literal referent for the rubric ‘Asian American,’ and, as such, the name is marked by the limits of its signifying power. It then becomes our responsibility to articulate the inner contradictions of the term and to enunciate its representational inconsistencies and dilemmas” (342). 26. See Benfey (102–107) for an account of Okakura’s Western conquests. 27. Just as Fenollosa took advantage of his official role to smuggle Eastern treasures, Okakura collected Chinese art for the Museum of Fine Arts at a propitious moment of political unrest: “When chaos came, when grave robbers ran rampant and Chinese connoisseurs feared for the safety of their collections, Okakura was there with Boston money” (Cohen 46). 28. Karatani 156. 29. Juliana Chang’s important anthology Quiet Fire includes these early Asian American poets. chapter 1 1. A chapter title in Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. 2. See Qian, Orientalism and Modernism (1995) along with his edited volume Ezra Pound and China (2003); Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (1996); Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (1997); Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry (1999); Yao, Translation and the Language of Modernism (2002); Huang, Transpacific Displacements (2002); Hayot, Chinese Dreams (2004). 3. As Zhaoming Qian writes in the introduction to his edited volume Ezra Pound and China, “My intention is to illuminate an uninterrupted, career-long preoccupation with China that is centrally important to Pound’s modernism” (4). 4. Pound’s innovations took hold in America over England, as Glenn Hughes notes in discussing Pound’s Imagist revolution: “It is obvious that they carried the fortress of America and are now safely encamped within the citadel. England they never carried. Five years at the most were sufficient to win places for their work in the best American anthologies and in college curricula. But after fifteen years imagist poetry goes begging in London” (44).

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5. Pound remarks on Whitman’s late reception in America in Canto 82: “Whitman, exotic, still suspect/four miles from Camden” (546). 6. Guiyou Huang discusses the relationship between Whitman and Pound: “It seems natural that Pound enjoyed reading Whitman and imitated the earlier poet’s writing style, for Pound thought they belonged to the same literary and cultural traditions” (23). Huang notes formal similarities in their verse: Pound “utilized the Whitman metric and adopted everyday language to poetic ends” (30). 7. Bruce Fogelman reads this poem in his essay “Whitman in Pound’s Mirror” and notes its placement in the collection. 8. See Blackmur, “The Masks of Ezra Pound,” in Language as Gesture. 9. Quoted in Bergman, “Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman” 59. 10. Peter Coviello discusses Whitman’s concept of nationality as “the specifically affective attachments that somehow tie together people who have never seen one another” (87). 11. Fogelman quotes Brooke’s 1909 review of Personae: Pound “has fallen… under the dangerous influence of Whitman” (639). 12. Hugh Witemeyer discusses the Whitmanesque rhythm of the poem and reads the green coat as a metaphor which “closely parallels Pound’s picture of himself as a Whitman in collar and dress shirt” (Poetry of Ezra Pound 136). Ira B. Nadel notes Pound’s costume of a “green robe that appeared to be Chinese” (12). 13. Kenner discusses this added line: “No wet leaf clings in the Chinese, and there is no indication that Pound supposed one did; he simply knew what his poem needed” (197). 14. Pound famously defined the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” in his 1913 essay “A Few Don’ts” (Literary Essays 4). 15. From The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 9–10. 16. Benjamin T. Spencer opens “Pound: The American Strain” with these statements of Pound’s ineradicable Americanness (457). 17. Kenner writes that Mary Fenollosa’s gift may been “prompted, it appears, by the command of idiom displayed in [‘In a Station of the Metro’]” (197). 18. Steven G. Yao provides an illuminating reading of the significance of modernist translations and Pound’s in particular, which “undertook to extend the limits of English itself ” (7). Yao argues that Cathay “consecrated the most fundamental change in the practical dimensions of literary translation in English wrought by the Modernist period”: “Pound’s achievement obviated intimate knowledge of the source language as a precondition for translation” (26). 19. Qian discusses Pound’s study of Oriental art with Lawrence Binyon in the British Museum in Orientalism and Modernism. 20. A forthcoming edition of the essay edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein restores Fenollosa’s original text. Their introductory essay is invaluable for understanding the status of the essay and the forces that account for its distortion. I am grateful to Haun Saussy for sharing this material with me. Laszlo Géfin discusses Pound’s revision of Fenollosa. In addition to editing out some metaphors and rewriting some sentences, Pound “leaves out two long paragraphs in which Fenollosa sets forth his motives for propagating Chinese culture in the West…a political alliance with a strong and independent China

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as a means of maintaining Anglo-Saxon hegemony in world affairs” (16). This kind of political concern would dominate Pound’s later incursion into China. 21. This replacement was in part possible because Fenollosa and Whitman were both intellectual descendants of Emerson; in Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, Kern discusses Emerson’s “unavoidable presence in American poetry” as that which “decisively conditioned Fenollosa’s approach to Chinese” (10). 22. Kern discusses Emerson’s and Fenollosa’s shared assumption of “the complete correspondence between language and nature” (Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem 135). 23. Fenollosa’s disregard for the sound of Chinese is read as evidence of his ignorance, though Saussy reveals that Pound simply cut Fenollosa’s discussions of the phonetic component of Chinese. Under Pound’s editorship, sound is only mentioned in the final pages of the essay, in which the “pictorial clue” of Chinese writing is claimed to be so complex that the “paucity of Chinese sound could not so hold them” (30). 24. Max Nänny discusses Pound’s poems as electric fields in their “instant and simultaneous presentation of a whole configuration of luminous facts” (20). 25. Anne S. Chapple provides a meticulous account of Pound’s choices in translation in “Ezra Pound’s Cathay: Compilation from the Fenollosa Notebooks.” 26. Kenner calls Cathay “largely a war book” (202). 27. Gyung-Ryul Jang argues that “Pound could invent Cathay—not in spite of his ignorance of the Chinese language, but because of his ignorance of the Chinese language” (353). 28. Wai-Lim Yip praises Pound for the way his “creative spirit sometimes breaks through the crippled text to resurrect what was in the original” (7) and almost intuits the consciousness of what Yip calls the “cuts and turns” of the mind of the poems (106). 29. Barry Ahearn argues that “Pound uses complicated means to make his translation seem authentically ‘foreign’” (36), creating the impression that Cathay is “by a native speaker of Chinese whose command of English is less than fluent” (41). 30. For all Chinese names in these Cantos, I follow John J. Nolde’s use of the Wade-Giles system. Pound followed de Mailla’s French transliteration. 31. See Moody for a creative analysis of musical composition in the Adams Cantos. 32. Quoted in Casillo 92. 33. At the very end of the introduction to Orientalism, however, Said mentions the ironic proximity of his work to accounts of anti-Semitism: “In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood” (27–28). 34. As discussed by Driscoll 102–103. 35. Pound answered this question, posed by Eliot in 1928, in his 1934 essay “Date Line” (Literary Essays 86). 36. Rabaté discusses the “progressive introduction” of Pound’s American accent in the China Cantos (32).

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37. See Sieburth’s introduction to his edition of The Pisan Cantos for an illuminating account of Pound’s imprisonment. 38. Yao discusses the significance of Confucius to Pound as a “blueprint for a world order” (155). 39. Flory discusses the importance of a Confucian “provenance of self ” to Pound’s psychological survival during his detention (146). The Confucian order of things is explained in Pound’s rendition of the Ta Hio: “wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families” (Confucius 31). 40. Christine Brooke-Rose writes that “Confucius is pretty unreadable in any other [translation than Pound’s], a plethora of stupefying platitudes” (33). 41. This later translation is arguably more accurate. Kern writes “that Chinese poetry, especially the classical variety that Fenollosa studied and that Pound brought into English in Cathay, is a highly formal poetry, governed by rules and conventions that, as James Liu shows, can be fairly complicated and elaborate. Generally speaking, almost all Chinese poetry rhymes…And this suggests…that in at least one major way twentieth-century translations of Chinese poetry into free verse are misrepresentations, and that the kind of verse we have learned to identify with Chinese poetry in fact bears little resemblance to it” (Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem 182). 42. Mottram discusses this connection on 227. 43. In “Revolutionary Figures in Canto XXXI,” Nick Selby reads a continuity between “the ‘Old World’ of the Renaissance, the major preoccupation of the first 30 Cantos, and the ‘New World’ of Jeffersonian America” (115). 44. Spencer cites Pound’s response to this conviction: to “get[ing] on with the work fast enough to have a bearable civilization ready to take on when Europe collapses” (459). 45. A notable exception is Yao, who considers both in terms of translation. 46. In “Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms of The Pisan Cantos,” Ronald Bush discusses the prevalence of ideograms in The Pisan Cantos, only recently discovered through his careful labor of rectifying their omission. chapter 2 1. In addition to Snyder’s interest in the Orient, Michael Davidson reads Snyder’s poetic method as “a version of Pound’s ideogrammatic method, juxtaposing one cultural tradition on top of another with a minimum of critical commentary” (San Francisco Renaissance 103); Christopher Beach similarly argues that “Snyder is drawn to Pound’s ideogrammatic method and social and economic critiques” (198). 2. In “Regarding Silence,” David Gilcrest compares Western and Eastern transcendence: “The idealist epiphany of Plato and the theist epiphany of Augustine both stand in stark contrast to what we might call the materialist epiphany recorded in Taoist and Zen literature” (26). 3. Seager 92. Seager provides a clear overview of American Buddhism. 4. Snodgrass discusses this history on 118. 5. Seager 90. 6. Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, 203. Fields’s groundbreaking account linked American Buddhism to the counterculture, and Seager pin-

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points this bias: “In effect, he gave countercultural Buddhists a sense of their own indigenous Buddhist lineage” (x). 7. Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake 205. 8. Fields cites James as “an early and important influence” for Suzuki: “James had classified the various elements of mystical experience; in the same way, Suzuki categorized satori” (How the Swans Came to the Lake 205). 9. This chapter focuses on the successful rise of Zen in the postwar era, but in the following chapter I discuss American sentiment against Buddhism and Japanese Americans during World War II. 10. Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake 204. Describing Japhy’s cottage, Kerouac mentions Blyth’s text in The Dharma Bums: “books, books, hundreds of books everything from Catullus to Pound to Blyth” (17). Jeff Humphries provides a more recent reading of Buddhism and literature, in which he turns to Buddhism as a corrective to dualism, “a particularly troublesome aspect of every Western theory of literature” (xii). 11. Watts singled out Snyder as a “Buddhist beatnik hero”: “my only regret is that I cannot formally claim him as my spiritual successor. He did it all on his own, but nevertheless he is just exactly what I have been trying to say” (quoted from Tweed and Prothero 231). 12. Davidson makes a similar point in Guys Like Us: “Snyder is himself a product of orientalist discourse through Jack Kerouac’s portrayal of him as Japhy Ryder in the novel The Dharma Bums” (86). 13. Bernard W. Quetchenbach notes that “his acknowledgment that he turned to Buddhism because Native American religions were not accessible to non-Indians is well known” (102). 14. See Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. 15. Katsunori Yamazoto, citing Junjiro Takakuso’s The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, explains this figure from the Avatamsaka sutra, Indra’s net, as “‘a net decorated with bright stones on each knot of the mesh,’ and the jewels reflecting each other endlessly, reflecting ‘the real facts of the world’ mutually interpenetrating” (232). Yamazoto notes that Snyder’s Buddhist creation, a “daring new synthesis,” is “perhaps not feasible in the vision of traditional Buddhists, as Snyder himself is aware” (234). 16. In the foreword to Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, Carl Jung discusses the Zen postulate of “no mind” in psychological terms, as the “readiness of the unconscious contents to break through to the consciousness” (22). 17. Freud presents a vision of Rome in which both Nero’s Golden House and the Colosseum appear in one spot (18). 18. Ross 88. As Ross puts it, “Mailer’s essay was an attempt to provide a political form for the disaffections of the hipster code” (87). John Tytell identifies “The White Negro” as “the first philosophical manifesto of the Beat movement” (309). 19. Eric Lott writes, “Mailer and other white Negroes inherited a structure of feeling whose self-valorizing marginality and distinction require a virtual impersonation of black manhood” (484). 20. Davidson elaborates this distinction: “When translated into poetics, these differences in spiritual practice can be seen in the opposition between a poetics of immediacy and improvisation, derived from Whitman or jazz, and a poetics of objectivist clarity and economy, associated with Pound or Williams” (San Francisco Renaissance 98).

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21. Some of the Dharma, Kerouac’s tome of notes which charts his efforts to make peace with Buddhism, describes multiple attempts to transpose Buddhism into Western terms. 22. Quetchenbach 118. Quetchenbach notes in particular the “didactic and superior tone” (116) that marks some of Snyder’s poems. Davidson, too, notes the “shrill, hectoring tone” of Snyder’s pedagogical poetry (San Francisco Renaissance 109). In a reading of Turtle Island, Charles Altieri concludes that “the need to prophesy creates a burden that Snyder’s particular use of aesthetic structures for epistemological functions cannot easily carry” (763). 23. J. Scott Bryson offers a definition in his introduction: “Ecopoetry is a subset of nature poetry that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues, thus resulting in a version of nature poetry generally marked by three primary characteristics” (5): “ecocentrism, a humble appreciation of wildness, and a skepticism toward hyperrationality and its resultant overreliance on technology” (7). 24. Scigaj 38. Scigaj argues that “sustainable poetry maintains a healthy balance” between the “textual and referential needs” of the poem (78). His argument takes on language theory to argue for a phenomenological reading of contemporary poetry; the simultaneous resistance to and use of key poststructural terms in his study invites further questions. 25. From “I gather the limbs of Osiris,” Selected Prose 42. 26. See Snyder’s “The Etiquette of Freedom” in The Practice of the Wild for his thoughts on the nature of language. 27. Edward Brunner explains, “To read New Critically, nothing intertextual was required. By insisting on the autonomy of the artwork, the New Criticism democratized the reading site. At the same time, the New Criticism succeeded in professionalizing that reading site by claiming a distinct set of interpretive procedures that would do justice to the literary text” (6–7). 28. In Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, Kern reads Snyder’s translations as “a replay of Waley’s debate with Pound” (233). 29. Kern explains that Snyder left out the “domestic and mundane dimensions of Han-shan’s character” because he is “more interested in his antinomian spirituality and his eccentricity and irreverence” (Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem 236). 30. This poem represents Snyder’s most dramatic intervention as a translator of Han Shan: he breaks the poem into two strophes, and the second half is translated into colloquial American English. 31. These open houses were also a kind of blueprint for Snyder’s actual house in Northern California. 32. It was Kerouac who took this idea literally when he famously typed On the Road onto a single scroll of paper. Snyder’s long poem is in fact less continuous than Kerouac’s novel. 33. Mountains and Rivers without End is in fact Snyder’s second epic: he completed Myths and Texts in 1956, a “poem sequence” whose aim is, as Snyder explains in his introduction, “to find a way to actually ‘belong to the land’” (viii). 34. Chung 49. Chung explains that “the dance portrayed in ‘The Mountain Spirit’ is modeled after the dance in Noh drama” (50).

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35. In Greening the Lyre, Gilcrest argues that “it is clear that an ecocentric ethic is better served by aesthetic strategies that eschew the nonhuman speaking subject in favor of a rhetoric of alinguistic agency” (59). Snyder presents his nonhuman subjects in a variety of ways, but this speaking subject appears as a kind of reward for a lifetime of poetic endeavor: at the far end of his epic, Snyder permits himself to have a dialogue and dance with the mountain. 36. As Watts explains, “To arrive at reality—at ‘suchness’—is to go beyond karma, beyond consequential action, and to enter a life which is completely aimless” (The Way of Zen 144). 37. The dance of “The Mountain Spirit and me” results in a passage reminiscent of a nursery rhyme (147). Once poetry is opened to reveal poetry, a strange hollowness pervades the poem’s finale. 38. A second reference to Shakespeare appears in Snyder’s depiction of the landscape: “The tooth/of a far peak called King Lear” (151). 39. In “Mountains and Rivers Are Us,” Kern reads the end of Snyder’s epic against other modernist epics which were “notoriously difficult to conclude and even resistant to closure, ending, in some cases, only with the deaths of their authors” (122). 40. Feminist critics have found much to deplore in Snyder’s poetry, as in Riprap’s “In Praise of Sick Women,” which opens with “The female is fertile, and discipline/(contra naturam) only/confuses her” (6). 41. In “Created Space,” Nick Selby reads Snyder’s epic against “Emerson’s desire to see America as a poem” (42–43) in order to register the poem’s “anxieties that haunt American culture” (42); he argues that “Despite its echoes of Far-Eastern poetics, its structural use of Japanese Noh theatre, and its reliance on classical Chinese landscape painting as an aesthetic model, Snyder’s text explicitly foregrounds the sorts of impossibilities of reading the land that Emerson’s vision of America as a poem discloses” (48). I trace such “anxieties” in Snyder’s career, but I find Mountains and Rivers without End to be curiously less interested in these issues; indeed, Snyder’s final version of Mountains and Rivers without End emphasizes its Eastern aesthetics and serenity. 42. Ecocriticism also exists at a crossroads between disciplines which tend toward increasing specialization. As Quetchenbach explains in defining nature writing, “Though this nature writing is conceived in various ways, there is something of a consensus that the blending of scientific, personal, and philosophic perspectives and the tension between those perspectives is intrinsic to and central to nature writing as it is currently practiced in America” (2). 43. In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim, Gray writes, “The search for an alternative Pacific Rim discourse motivates my own study of Gary Snyder” (20). See Gray’s first chapter for an insightful account of the development of Pacific Rim discourse. chapter 3 1. From a note in Wang’s 1975 poetry collection, The Intercourse, which comprises three sections entitled “The Thrust,” “The Insertion, and “The Withdrawal.” 2. Wand collaborated in a few translations of Tang Dynasty poetry with William Carlos Williams as well. Witemeyer notes that Wand’s letters to Williams “are disingenuously critical of Pound’s politics” (“Strange Progress” 198).

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3. Wang “The Rub” (Asian-American Heritage 179) is an imitation of Snyder’s “The Bath” (Turtle Island 12–14). 4. Witemeyer, “The Flame-style King” 333. 5. Quoted in Witemeyer, “The Strange Progress of David Hsin-Fu Wand” 193. 6. Published in Asian-American Heritage 174–176. The poem’s four parts describe a vision of golden, nude bodies, the disorder of an intimate relationship, a rugged outdoor scene set in China, and the death of the poet. The heterogeneous themes in “Quartet for Gary Snyder” allude to different Snyder poems and are thus unified by this influence. 7. Interestingly, Wand suggests Chinese qualities in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore as well. 8. Wand’s reading of Wing Tek Lum’s Chinese sensibilities is especially off the mark (“The Chinese-American Literary Scene” 129–131). 9. Mentioned in Witemeyer, “Strange Progress” 191. 10. One 1972 anthology, Asian-American Authors, edited by Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas, predates Wand and Aiiieeeee!. Chin et al. cite Hsu’s critique of autobiography in their introduction (xxiii), and they name him in the dedication of The Big Aiiieeeee! as well. 11. More recent anthologies of Asian American literature are in fact closer to Wand’s gesture of ethnic inclusion. For example, Koshy cites a review of Jessica Hagedorn’s 1993 anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead, in which Sven Birkets complains that “there are just too many kinds of inclusions,” and critiques Hagedorn for not explaining “the need for, or grounds of, such inclusiveness within the contemporary context of Asian American fiction” (332). 12. Pound mentions Hartmann in Canto 80:

and as for the vagaries of our friend Mr. Hartmann Sadakichi a few more of him, were that conceivable, would have enriched the life of Manhattan or any other town or metropolis (515) 13. “Americanized Asians” follow an Orientalist fallacy identified in Aiiieeeee! ’s introduction: “The myth is that Asian-Americans have maintained cultural integrity as Asians, that there is some strange continuity between the great high culture of China that hasn’t existed for five hundred years and the American-born Asian” (xxiv). 14. Espiritu provides a sociological portrait of the new conditions that facilitated consensus: “By the late 1960s, pan-Asianism was possible because of the more amicable relationships among the Asian countries, the declining residential segregation among diverse Asian groups in America, and the large number of native-born, American-educated political actors” (52). 15. Jinqi Ling emphasizes the “historically constituted constraints” (9) on Asian American expression and reads ethnic nationalism as “a manageable surface of contestation” (72). The most significant critiques of Chin et al. discuss their ideological limitations in questions of sexuality, as in David L.

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Eng’s analysis of Chin’s valorization of heterosexuality as a means of rescuing his protagonist in Donald Duk (97). Daniel Y. Kim extends this critique in his study; as he explains, “Where previous studies have done an effective job of ‘outing’ the homophobia of cultural nationalism, they have not attended sufficiently to the figural complexity of its articulation” (xxii). Nguyen critiques Chin’s “efforts to recuperate Chinese American masculinity and literature” (90) as an attempt to secure a literary market and indicts his use of violence, which “serves as a disturbing bond of unity” (106). Nguyen provides a far-reaching critique of the formulation of and continuing adherence to Asian American cultural nationalism. 16. The Big Aiiieeeee! includes poetry (notably not included in the first version), historical accounts, sketches, and even a dictionary. Unlike Aiiieeeee!, it is arranged in chronological order, thus emphasizing the historical context of Asian American literature. 17. This founding claim of confinement and coercion is missing in the theorizations of the ethnicity school, as in Werner Sollors’s famous analysis of the ethnic experience as one which is marked by poles of consent and descent. 18. See Lye (141–203) and Simpson (43–75) for historicist readings of the camps that situate them within the context of liberal ideology. 19. Duncan Ryuken Williams 197. I owe my reference to Hynd to Williams’s essay. 20. Kashima 40–54. 21. Seager 57. 22. See chapter 2 for a discussion of Beat Zen. 23. Snyder attended a Japanese American congregation in Berkeley, however; Gray writes, “While living in the Bay Area, he immersed himself in the study of Buddhism and came to hold a special affinity for the Jodo-shin or “Pure Land” variety practiced by Japanese immigrants at the Berkeley Buddhist Church” (Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim 100). 24. Wilson, “From the Sublime to the Devious.” 25. Outspeaks presents the meditations of a “reborn human” and not a Japanese American or Asian American—phrases he never utters to describe himself. Upon stating that he was born in Los Angeles, in a hospital which has since been torn down to make a freeway, Saijo writes, “YOU CAN’T GET MORE AMERICAN THAN THAT—BOTH MY PARENTS HOWEVER WERE FROM JAPAN” (192). Instead of an Asian American vocabulary, Saijo uses a Beat strategy of suturing himself in the American landscape. 26. Susan Schweik suggests an emerging Japanese American sensibility in Toyo Suyemoto’s forms: “In Suyemoto’s ‘Hokku’ and ‘Tanka,’ the cultural differences between ‘Japanese’ and ‘European’ forms is at once stressed and minimized; it is, perhaps, exactly in that simultaneous emphasis and erasure that we can trace a specifically Japanese American discourse” (190). In her essay “Writing of Poetry” Suyemoto writes, “It may be strange that as much as I enjoy reading what is termed ‘free verse,’ I write consistently in form” (75). 27. In his foreword to White Chrysanthemums, Rexroth claims that Hartmann “was probably the first person to write English haiku” (ix). The American fascination with the haiku has produced a wide range of poetry, including Richard Wright’s haiku and experiments like John Yau’s “Sam Spade Haiku.” 28. Quoted in Chang, ed., Quiet Fire 122.

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29. The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 is unpaginated. 30. Espiritu mentions that “on colleges and university campuses, the most important legacy of the Asian American movement was the institutionalization of Asian American studies” (35). 31. “The Discovery of Tradition” is dedicated to Mori and Okada and imagines them together, along with the poet: “I’m sitting here with Toshio and John,/talking over such momentous things” (604). The first stanza of Inada’s “On Being Asian American,” also in The Big Aiiieeeee!, states, “Of course, not everyone/can be Asian American./Distinctions are earned,/and deserve dedication” (619). 32. Hongo has since criticized the sociological bent of ethnic nationalism. See chapter 4 for a discussion of theorizing Asian American poetry. 33. The introduction to Aiiieeeee! quotes extensively from this poem, stating that “Inada wrote of hatreds and fears no Asian-American ever wrote of before” (xliv). Though this piece is celebrated by the editors, the anthology did not include any poetry. 34. Okada’s No-No Boy famously captured this rift between generations, in a scene in the camps in which a young Japanese American sociologist accuses the Issei of not understanding their children. 35. Inada’s account illustrates the difficulty of homecoming for internees: his father’s farm labor is a return to an earlier moment in the immigrant narrative of progress from hard labor to entrepreneurship to white-collar work. The devastating disruption of internment collapses these stages as Inada’s father goes from peach picking to his dental practice; spatial relocation upsets the teleology of American immigrant progress. 36. Nguyen’s reading of cultural nationalism asserts the continuing signi ficance of black and white: “While the creation of an autonomous Asian American identity will inevitably heighten the importance of multiculturalism in recognizing American diversity, this does not necessarily mean that the historically marginalized status of blackness and the historically privileged status of whiteness will not continue to serve as symbolic embodiments of failure and achievement for Americans, especially immigrants” (30). Similarly, Daniel Y. Kim states, “But what I intend this study to question is an assumption that cultural assertions of Asian American particularity must necessarily be attempts to transcend the constraints of the black/white binary. In fact, literary assertions of a distinctly Asian American sensibility such as Chin’s do not necessarily seek to conjure forth a ‘yellow’ space discretely separated from a black one and a white one” (205). 37. Quoted from Chang, ed., Quiet Fire 117. chapter 4 1. From Tripmaster Monkey; Kingston’s ellipsis. 2. Wittman also mentions “a Chinese-American guy who rode with Jack and Neal. His name was Victor Wong, and he was a painter and an actor” (21). 3. Despite the prominence of Whitman, Tripmaster Monkey demonstrates an ambivalence toward poets, most notably in the figure of an aging stockboy Wittman encounters: “And here’s this Yale Younger stock guy getting older and getting nowhere, ending up a minor poet” (51). In Wittman’s rambling epic play, the Yale Younger Poet is given the part of Kipling: after a scene in which

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Kipling wrestles with a Mexican in a Chinatown poker club, “Rudyard Kipling exits, chased off by cherry bombs and cymbal clangs. Nobel Prize winner. No wonder the Yale Younger Poet was depressed in spite of honors” (300). 4. Chu opens her essay “Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition” with a scene in which Wittman frets over the sound of steady typing in a neighboring apartment—he fears that a “workhorse big-novel writer” is out-creating him, but then dismisses this threat by concluding “it had to be a girl, a clerk typist, he hoped, a secretary, he hoped” (41). Chu discusses the monkey in Chinese myth and concludes, “By linking Wittman to Monkey, Kingston hints that Wittman, her combative rival Chin, also needs lessons in humility and detachment” (132). 5. As David Leiwei Li writes in “The Formation of Frank Chin,” “Frank Chin is apparently a fading figure on the Chinese American literary stage he has helped to construct” (211). In Imagining the Nation, Li identifies three phases of Asian American criticism: the “ethnic nationalist phase,” the “feminist phase,” and “heteroglossia” (185–186). In this schema, Kingston belongs in the second category—and it is important to remember that initial scholarly audiences celebrated The Woman Warrior as a liberatory women’s novel. 6. In his reading of Chin’s Donald Duk, Eng notes similarities between Chin and Kingston: “despite Chin’s public denunciations—and in spite of the ideological gulf separating these two writers—Chin’s and Kingston’s creative works clearly converge around a common set of historical anxieties and theoretical concerns regarding the truth status of the photographic image” (91). 7. In the MELUS interview with Marilyn Chin, Kingston describes China Men, her counterpart to The Woman Warrior, as a continuation of Williams’s In the American Grain (71). One example of Kingston’s modernist allusions can be found in a chapter title in China Men, “The Making of More Americans,” which suggests an echo between her work and Stein’s American epic. China Men’s allusions to Western literature balance the Chinese myths of The Woman Warrior: against Fa Mu Lan’s story, China Men retells the story of Robinson Crusoe, and Kingston’s exploration of her parentage in these two texts is a literary exercise through which she connects an Asian American consciousness to a wealth of Chinese and American mythic worlds. 8. See Chu’s Assimilating Asians for the importance of the Bildungsroman in Asian American literature. Lowe, however, coins the term decolonizing novel in order to argue for the anti-hegemonic function of Asian American novels against the problem of “privileging a nineteenth-century European genre as the model to be appropriated” (45). 9. Eliot defined the mythical method as “simply a way of controlling, of ordering, or giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (“Ulysses, Order, Myth” 681). Epic has had a troubled existence in the twentieth century, as either an “inflexible master discourse” in Bakhtin’s terms, or, through Benjamin’s storyteller, an “irrecoverable past” (Beissinger et al. 4–6). Reed Way Dasenbrock notes the “bad press” (248) epic has had during the modern era of “a century of decolonization” (251), and perhaps epic’s worst publicity comes from Pound and the “moral morass” (261) of The Cantos. Sollors, however, suggests the signi ficance of epic for ethnic literature: “the epic, which is generally associated with ethnogenesis, the emergence of a people, and can therefore seemingly be appropriated transnationally by all peoples” (238).

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10. In “Coordinates of Asian American Poetry,” Uba emphasizes the diversity of forms and themes in Asian American poetry; we may read his call for “redirection” in this context, which argues for greater heterogeneity. 11. Wong’s assertion that a “single controlling authority” presides over the modernist long poem can be problematized in several different ways—perhaps most notably in the indeterminacy of The Cantos, whose fragmentary final pages undermine the notion of an authoritarian voice. 12. Stefans refers to Wong’s discussion of Cha’s generic combat and takes a more pragmatic view: “Cha was not approaching literature from the angle of one invested in various subversions of tradition but rather as a filmmaker, and hence she takes a more anthropological view of writing genres, remaining free of ideological battles” (53). 13. Iriye explains that Roosevelt “was convinced that the Japanese first of all wanted to concentrate on continental affairs, staking out their sphere of interests. Only when their appetites were satiated would they turn eastward and southward to confront the United States. ‘So long as Japan takes an interest in Korea, in Manchuria, in China,’ wrote Roosevelt in December 1904, ‘it is Russia which is her natural enemy’” (108). 14. See Cho for a compelling discussion of this moment (88). 15. In “Unnaming the Same,” Wong discusses the coercive nature of dictation revealed in this passage (119–120). 16. In addition to the occasional Latin phrase, Chinese characters figure prominently in the text: pages 26 and 27 are each devoted to a single character, one denoting mother and the other, father. As Naoki Sakai points out, Chinese characters have an indeterminate nationality; they are part of several different national languages and they are “registered in graphic visuality” (26). Indeed, these Chinese characters have an exilic presence in Korean. 17. Lowe discusses the parallels between blood and ink (Immigrant Acts 109–112). Shu-mei Shih elaborates on this notion of writing as bleeding, connecting it to the “ritual of ‘blood writing’ conducted by Korean revolutionaries” (154). 18. Mark Jeffreys discusses the “conventional description of lyric as a solitary voice that ‘speaks out of a single moment in time’” (198). His essay argues against assigning an ideology to lyric, which corresponds to the failure of scholars of modernist literature to find a form that matches a political valence. 19. My translation. 20. Eun Kyung Min discusses the ungrammatical English of Dictée as an illustration of the attempt “to recuperate the experience of the foreignness of a language” (315). 21. Wong provides this translation in “Unnaming the Same” and discusses the origins of this photograph (107). 22. From Lattimore’s translation (173). 23. Shih discusses this Korean myth of Princess Pali (156). 24. Indeed, the notion of language as itself an agent pervades her work; in an essay on Kim’s poetics, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon argues that “Kim’s poetry attempts to dramatize not how a foreign speaker learns to speak the native language of a new place but how the languages themselves learn to speak each other” (127). Jeon emphasizes Kim’s “attempts to re-imagine English as if it were Hangul and Hangul as if it were English” (128). 25. See chapter 1 for a discussion of Pound’s poem.

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Index

Adams, John, 40, 44, 45–46, 51, 54 Adams, John Quincy, 45 aesthetics Asian American aesthetics, 94 avant-garde movements, 91–95, 97, 121 and culture, 22 in Dictée, 131, 145–46 Fenollosan aesthetics, 8, 32 and Orientalism, 9–10, 106 and politics, 22, 121, 127 African American culture. See culture Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian–American Writers, 17, 96–98, 99, 100, 119, 121, 127, 171n.16 Alarcón, Norma, 130 Alexander, Michael, 42 alliance Asian American cultural alliance, 95, 118, 121 Fenollosa’s Japan-United States. alliance, 10–14 legacy of transpacific alliance, 20–22, 124–26 as marriage, 11–13, 123 Pound’s China-United States. alliance, 48 Snyder’s Japan-United States. alliance, 60, 66, 90 structure of, 6–7, 14 transpacific alliance, 3–4, 16, 131, 156, 159 Altair, 84, 87 ambassadorship “ambassadors of culture,” 22 Asian American cultural ambassadors, 95

Gilded Age ambassadors, 7–8 Pound’s ambassadorship, 15, 28 Snyder’s ambassadorship, 59, 64–66 American Indian culture. See culture American Orientalism. See Orientalism American Revolution, 46, 54, 55 antiracism and Asian American activism, 121 and origins of Asian America, 18, 20 anti-Semitism, 46–48, 165n.33 (See also Orientalism) apparition, 29–30, 58, 149, 159 Asawa, Ruth, 106 Asia. See Orientalism Asian America and anti-Orientalism, 94–95, 121 creation of, 3, 16–18, 96 and counterculture legacy, 106–12 panethnic coalition, 17, 97 theorizations of, 18–19 Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, 91, 95, 96, 100 Asian American literature activist creation of, 98–99 Asian American poetry, 93, 127–29, 158–59 Chin-Kingston debate, 21, 124–25 and literary Orientalism, 20–21, 91–95, 126 and modernist legacy, 21–22, 126–27 theorizations of, 17–20 See also canon avant-garde. See aesthetics

185

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Baldwin, James, 73–74, 75, 95 “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” 73, 75 bard. See epic Basho, 59, 104 Baudelaire, Charles, 137–38, 139, 141, 142 “Le cygne,” 137–38 Beat Generation and Asian American literature, 21, 91, 106–12, 121, 123–24, 159 Beat cultural appropriation, 72–75, 103–4, 118, 119 Beat enlightenment, 59, 70–72 and Poundian influence, 15 Benfey, Christopher, 7, 161n.12, 163n.26 Bernstein, Michael André, 50 The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, 98–99, 100, 105, 109, 124, 171n.16 blackface, 73 Blackmur, R.P., 27 Blyth, R.H., 63, 167n.10 bomb, 72, 73 Brooke, Rupert, 28 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 52, 166n.40 Brown, Jerry, 106 Bruchac, Joseph, 93 “Buddha Bandits,” 107, 109, 110, 112 The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, 21, 99, 106–7, 109–12, 117 Buddhism American rise of, 60–66 and Beat appropriation, 106, 118, 119 Buddhist Church of America, 101 Buddhist Society of America, 108 Chan Buddhism, 55, 103 Chinese American Buddhism, 102–3 and commercialization, 13, 110 in counterculture, 72–75, 102–4 and Fenollosa, 55 Inada’s “citi-Zen,” 118–121 Japanese American Buddhism, 101–2 and literature, 167n.10

in Pound and Snyder, 15, 59 Pound’s characterization of, 41, 48, 50 Snyder’s “White Indian,” 74–75 Snyder’s Zen, 15, 59, 69, 74–75, 82, 84, 85–89 Buell, Lawrence, 79 Cage, John, 61 canon Asian American activist canon, 17, 157 Asian American canon debates, 21, 125, 126–27 Orientalist canon, 16 Western canon, 145 See also Asian American literature Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 21, 125, 129–46, 150, 154, 159 “Clio/History,” 131, 132–133 Dictée, 21, 125, 129–46, 147, 150, 151, 154, 155 “Elitere/Lyric Poetry,” 143 “Erato/Love Poetry,” 144 “From A Far,” 135–36 “Melpomene/Tragedy,” 132, 144 “Polymnia/Sacred Poetry,” 145–46 “Thalia/Comedy,” 132 “Urania/Astronomy,” 136–41, 144 Chan, Jeffrey Paul, 96 Chang, Juliana, 96, 112, 116–17, 127–28, 129, 163n.29 Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, 158, 170n.11 Cheadle, Mary Paterson, 40 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 130–31 Chicago Review, 63, 65 Chicano culture. See culture Chin, Frank, 21, 96, 121, 124–25, 157, 173n.4, 173n.5 The Chickencoop Chinaman, 157 Chin, Marilyn, 125 China Chinese exclusion, 17, 98, 100 Chinese poetry, 29, 31–32, 35–39, 59 Chinese-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, 43–44

i ndex

Chinese writing, 23, 33–35, 59, 80, 126, 174n.16 (See also ideogram) as market, 7 as origin, 9 as Poundian ideal, 23–25, 29, 39–46 Chinese America Chinese American laborers, 16–17 Chinese American literature, 93, 96 Chin’s “Chinaman,” 157 Inada’s “Chinks,” 112–13, 114 Kingston’s “Woman Warrior,” 126 Chisolm, Lawrence W., 9, 162n.13 Christianity, 44, 45, 50, 83, 84, 99 Chu, Patricia, 124, 173n.4 Chuh, Kandice, 19, 163n.25 Cohen, Warren I., 10 Columbus, Christopher, 5, 14, 67 commerce and Fenollosa, 10, 12–13, 162nn.16–17 and literary transactions, 27–28, 56, 158 Pound’s ideal of, 49 Whitman’s dream of, 4, 7 Confucianism Confucius as “Chinaman,” 53 Confucius in China Cantos, 41–43, 45 in contrast to Fenollosa, 53, 55–56 in contrast to Snyder, 59 Pound becoming Confucian, 39, 50–51, 60 as Poundian ideal, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, 46, 48, 92 sayings of Confucius, 62 Coyote, Peter, 106 culture cultural appropriation, 66–67, 89, 106, 118 cultural imperialism, 70, 93 Inada’s creation of, 115–18, 158 Snyder’s creation of, 58, 68–70, 76–77, 120 See also alliance Cumings, Bruce, 7 Davidson, Michael, 59, 64, 166n.1, 167n.12, 167n.20, 168n.22 Davie, Donald, 31, 35

187

Dean, Tim, 70, 84 de Cristoforo, Violet Kazue Matsuda, 105 de Mailla, Pére Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac, 40, 41, 43, 49, 50 Derrida, Jacques, 59 Deutsch, Babette, 28 “Dharma Bums,” 71, 72, 104, 109 Divus, Andreas, 142, 143 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 132, 145 The Passion of Joan of Arc, 132, 145 Driscoll, John, 49 “economic animal,” 7, 17, 20 ecopoetry, 79, 168n.23 (See also environmentalism) Elder, John, 59, 76 Eliot, T.S., 39, 50, 84, 85, 126, 173n.9 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 84, 85 Ellwood, Robert S., 62 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 8, 84, 104, 161n.4, 165n.21 Eng, David L., 170–71n.15, 173n.6 environmentalism, 15, 59, 76–82 Eperjesi, John R., 10 epic bardic voice, 91, 94, 154, 159 Cha’s epic, 129–31, 143, 154 Chinese epic, 124, 125 Kim’s epic, 154–56 political epic, 12 Pound’s epic, 23, 40, 47, 48 Snyder’s epic, 89, 107 theorizations of, 173n.9 Whitmanian bard, 25–28, 71, 89, 122 See also modernism Espiritu, Yen Le, 97, 170n.14, 172n.30 ethnic nationalism. See Asian America Europe, 33, 40, 43–44, 54, 72, 97, 98 Fang, Achilles, 52 Fenollosa, Ernest, 7–14, 15, 16, 20, 25, 31–35, 41, 53, 55–56, 59, 60, 65, 93, 123, 162nn.16–18

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Fenollosa, Ernest (continued) The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 32–35, 41, 164n.20, 165n.23 The Discovery of America, 14 East and West, 11–13, 15, 20 Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 8 influence on Pound, 14–15, 25, 31–35, 41 Fenollosa, Mary, 31 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 103 feudalism, 7, 43 Fiedler, Leslie A., 67–68 Fields, Rick, 119, 166n.6 Filipino America, 98, 99, 100 Flory, Wendy Stallard, 51, 55, 166n.39 Foucault, Michel, 83 Freud, Sigmund, 69 French, Warren, 92, 93 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 34, 37 Geneson, Paul, 80 Genghis Khan, 43, 45 Giles, Herbert, 29, 33 “Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord,” 29 Ginsberg, Allen, 61, 71 Go, 78, 84 Graham, Billy, 72 Gray, Timothy, 60, 64, 65, 169n.43, 171n.23 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 22 Hagedorn, Jessica, 158, 170n.11 haiku, 30, 103, 105–6, 118–19, 171n.27 Hamlet, 88 Han Shan, 81–82 Harte, Bret, 122 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 20, 96–98, 170n.12 Hayakawa, S.I., 96 Hayot, Eric, 24 Hegel, G.W.F., 8, 12 Hitler, 92 Hobson, Gerald, 70 Holiday, Billie, 116, 117, 119 Hongo, Garrett Kaoru, 106, 110, 127, 172n.32 “Pilgrimage to the Shrine,” 110

Huang, Yunte, 162–63n.23 Hynd, Alan, 101 ideogram, 25, 40, 41, 55, 149 (See also China) Imagism. See lyric. Inada, Lawson Fusao, 21, 95, 96, 105, 109–21, 158, 172n.31, 172n.33 “The Discovery of Tradition,” 109, 172n.31 Drawing the Line, 117, 119 “I Told You So,” 110–12, 117 Legends from Camp, 115–17, 118 “Listening Images,” 118–19 “On Being Asian American,” 172n.31 “Picking Up Stones,” 119–21 “West Side Songs,” 112–15, 172n.33 India, 4, 9, 12 Iriye, Akira, 6, 12, 161n.6, 174n.13 Ishi, 68 Italian Fascism, 46, 53–54 James, William, 62, 167n.8 Japan as Fenollosan ideal, 12, 14 in Gilded Age, 7–8 Japanese art and Fenollosa, 9–11 Japanese culture, 101, 106, 111, 118 Japanese garden, 110, 111, 118 Japanese nationalism and Zen, 60–61 Japanese occupation of Korea, 131–33 modernization of, 4, 6 and postwar occupation, 60 Japanese America Amache Camp, 115 figure of internee, 17 Japanese internment, 100–1, 118 Hartmann as Japanese American, 98 Heart Mountain Camp, 119 Inada and internment, 115 Inada’s “Japs,” 113–14 literature of internment, 105 Nisei, 96, 116 Topaz Camp, 101 Tule Lake Camp, 110 jazz, 74, 115, 116, 117, 119

i ndex

Jefferson, Thomas, 44, 45, 54 Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun, 174n.24 Jung, Carl, 167n.16 Kano, Hogai, 11, 12, 13 Karatani, Kojin, 9, 10 Kenner, Hugh, 31, 36, 40, 45, 163n.1, 164n.13, 165n.26 Kern, Robert, 165n.21–22, 166n.41, 168nn.28–29, 169n.39 Kerouac, Jack, 63, 71–73, 74–75, 82, 84, 102–4, 118, 168n.21, 168n.32 “About the Beat Generation,” 72–73 “Beatifi c: The Origins of the Beat Generation,” 75 Big Sur, 103 The Dharma Bums, 71–72, 75, 82, 84–85, 102–3 On the Road, 74–75, 118, 168n.32 Some of the Dharma, 168n.21 Kim, Daniel Y., 99, 171n.15, 172n.36 Kim, Elaine H., 105–6, 130, 146–47, 148 Kim, Myung Mi, 3, 22, 125, 146–56, 159 “Demarcation,” 147–48 Dura, 150–56 “Food, Shelter, Clothing,” 146–47 Under Flag, 3, 147, 154 “Under Flag,” 148–50 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 21, 122–27, 173n.7 China Men, 173n.7 Tripmaster Monkey, 122–25 The Woman Warrior, 21, 126, 127 Klein, Christina, 7 Knox, George and Harry W. Lawton, 98 Korea division of, 133, 144, 147–48, 151, 153 Japanese occupation of, 131–32, 145 Korean history, 133, 151 Korean language, 142 Korean War, 146, 148 “Petition from the Koreans of Hawaii to President Roosevelt,” 131–32

189

United States.-Korean relations, 146 Korean America Korean American immigrant, 146–47, 151–52, 154 Los Angeles riots, 152–53 Koshy, Susan, 18 Lau, Alan Chong, 106, 107, 110, 121 Lewis, Wyndham, 31 Li, David Leiwei, 126, 173n.5 Li Po, 36 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 127 Lin Yutang, 96 Lost Generation, 73 Loti, Pierre, 11 Madame Chrysanthème, 11 Lott, Eric, 167n.19 Lowe, Lisa, 18, 94, 99, 161n.8, 173n.8, 174n.17 Lye, Colleen, 6, 17, 161n.10 lyric critique of, 137, 141 and epic, 130, 142–43 Imagism, 80, 149–50, 159, 163n.4 Pound’s line in Cathay, 35–36 Symbolist lyric, 96, 137, 141 See also haiku Mailer, Norman, 73–74, 119 “The White Negro,” 73–74, 119 Marx, Leo, 79 McMahan, David L., 62 Melville, Herman, 72 Merton, Thomas, 62, 63 Mexican American culture. See culture Michaels, Walter Benn, 67 Miller, Joaquin, 20 Min, Eun Kyung, 174n.20 minority nationalist movements, 89 (See also Asian America) Modern Language Association, 94 modernism and Asian American literature, 21–22, 125 and Cha, 129–31, 143, 145, 174n.11 and Inada, 118, 119 and Kim, 148, 150, 154 and Kingston, 21, 125, 126–27

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modernism (continued) modernist epic, 85, 89, 143, 148, 169n.39 modernist Orientalism, 3, 9, 14–15, 159 Poundian modernism, 24, 53, 118, 119, 142–43, 174n.11 and Snyder, 58, 89, 90 Monroe, Harriet, 9, 30 Mori, Toshio, 109 Morse, Edward, 11 Mura, David, 127 museums, 10, 20 Mussolini, Benito, 42, 48, 53, 54 Native American culture. See culture nature. See environmentalism Nazi, 101 New Criticism, 80 New Deal, 101 Nguyen, Viet, 163n.24, 171n.15, 172n.36 Noguchi, Yone, 9, 20, 96–97 Noh drama, 31, 87 Nolde, John J., 43, 50 Odyssey, 47, 126, 142–43, 151 Okada, John, 101, 109, 172n.34 No-No Boy, 101, 172n.34 Okakura, Kakuzo (Tenshin), 20, 163n.27 The Book of Tea, 20 Okihiro, Gary, 18 The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, 127 Orientalism American literary Orientalism, 14–16, 159 and Asian American experience, 100–102 and Asian American literature, 19–20, 121, 157 Asian American Orientalists, 20–21, 96–97, 124 Beat Orientalism, 75, 118 chinoiserie, 24 Fenollosa’s Orientalism, 7–10, 13, 31–35 Pound’s Orientalism, 25, 31–35, 48

Said’s Orientalism, 6–7, 48, 161n.7–9, 165n.33 Snyder’s Orientalism, 59–60, 63–65, 90 Transcendentalist Orientalism, 4, 10 and Wand, 91–95 Whitman’s Orientalism, 4–6 Palumbo-Liu, David, 7, 17, 161n.11, 162n.22 Parkinson, Thomas, 70 Paul, Sherman, 61, 65 Pearl Harbor, 98, 101, 118 Peñaranda, Oscar, 98 Polo, Marco, 150, 152 Pound, Ezra, 14–16, 21, 23–56, 57–59, 62, 66, 70, 80, 85, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 118, 119, 126, 130, 142, 148, 149–50, 153–54, 158, 159, 164n.5, 164n.6, 170n.12 Adams Cantos, 40, 41, 45–46, 55 “The Beautiful Toilet,” 38 Canto 1, 47, 142–143 Canto 13, 40 Canto 49, 40 Canto 52, 46–48 Canto 53, 42, 53 Canto 54, 42, 44 Canto 55, 43 Canto 56, 43 Canto 57, 42, 43 Canto 58, 41 Canto 59, 43–44 Canto 60, 44 Canto 61, 40, 45 Canto 62, 40 Canto 63, 45 Canto 70, 45 Canto 71, 46 Canto 80, 170n.12 Canto 82, 164n.5 Canto 96, 92 The Cantos, 15, 23, 40, 41, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 89, 129, 130, 142, 148, 153–54 Cantos LII–LXXI, 25, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53 Cathay, 31, 35–39, 41, 52, 55, 81 China Cantos, 40–45, 46–53, 54, 55

i ndex

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 32–35, 41 “Commission,” 29 “The Condolence,” 28 “Exile’s Letter,” 36, 37–38, 39, 50 and Fenollosa, 14–15, 25, 31–35, 40–41 “Further Instructions,” 29, 30 “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” 38 “I gather the limbs of Osiris,” 34–35, 36 “Immediate Need of Confucius,” 50 “In a Station of the Metro,” 29, 149 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 53 “The Jewel-Stair’s Grievance,” 36 “Liu Ch’e,” 29 A Lume Spento, 26 “Luminous Detail,” 34, 39 Lustra, 27, 28, 29, 31 “Make It New,” 24, 53 “On His Own Face in a Glass,” 26, 29 “A Pact,” 27–28, 56 “Patria Mia,” 30–31, 39, 52 The Pisan Cantos, 25, 31, 51 “The Plunge,” 23 “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” 36–37 “Salutation,” 29 “Salutation the Second,” 29 Shih-ching, 52 “Song of the Bowmen of Shu,” 52 “A Song of Degrees,” 30 and Snyder, 57–59 at St. Elizabeths, 91 Ta Hio, 50, 55 “What I Feel about Walt Whitman,” 26, 55 and Whitman, 14–15, 25–31, 164n.6 primitivism, 16, 73 Qian, Zhaoming, 163n.3, 164n.19 Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892– 1970, 96, 112, 163n.29 racism in Inada’s “Whitearama,” 112–15 in Mailer’s “White Negro,” 73–75

191

railroad junction, 5, 16 Redman, Tim, 51 Rexroth, Kenneth, 97 Rhee, Syngman, 131–32 rhyme, 13, 27, 113, 166n.41 Rimbaud, Arthur, 72 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 101, 110, 116, 117 Roosevelt, Theodore, 131, 132, 174n.13 Ross, Andrew, 74, 167n.18 Sade, Marquis de, 83, 84 Said, Edward. See Orientalism Saijo, Albert, 103–105, 171n.25 Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, 104 “A Syllogism No Doubt,” 104–5 Sakai, Naoki, 174n.16 San Francisco Renaissance, 92–93 Sasaki, Ruth Fuller, 63 Saussy, Haun, 164n.20, 165n.23 Senzaki, Nyogen, 119–21 shamanism, 70, 87 Sharf, Robert, 61 Shih, Shu-mei, 174n.17, 174n.23 Shintoism, 101 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 70 Snodgrass, Judith, 61 Snyder, Gary, 15–16, 21, 57–60, 63, 64–71, 74–90, 92, 93, 94, 102, 103, 106–9, 111–12, 120, 123, 158, 168.26, 168n.33, 171n.23 “As for Poets,” 81 Axe Handles, 57 “Axe Handles,” 57–58, 60, 70 The Back Country, 67, 80 “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” 85, 86 “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” 64 Cold Mountain Poems, 81 “Cold Mountain Poem 16,” 82 “A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon,” 68 Earth House Hold, 64, 68 and environmentalism, 76–82 “The Etiquette of Freedom,” 168n.26 “Finding the Space in the Heart,” 88

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Snyder, Gary (continued) “Great Subculture,” 68–69, 70, 71, 76, 84 “How to Make Stew in the Pinacate Desert,” 80 and inhumanity, 83–89 “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” 77, 88 “Milton by Firelight,” 77 “A Mind Poet,” 81, 82 “The Mountain Spirit,” 86–88, 89 Mountains and Rivers without End, 84–89, 109 Myths and Texts, 109, 168n.33 and Native American spirituality, 66–70 “Night Highway 99,” 21, 107–9, 111 “Passage to More than India,” 74 “Poetry and the Primitive,” 76 and Pound, 57–59 The Practice of the Wild, 85, 168n.26 The Real Work, 65 Riprap, 77, 83, 87 “Riprap,” 77–79, 84, 103 Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End, 107 “Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji,” 64 “T 2 Tanker Blues,” 83–84, 87 “Tanker Notes,” 76 Turtle Island, 81 “Turtle Island,” 66, 74 “White Indian,” 74, 120 and Zen, 63–66 Stefans, Brian Kim, 128–29, 174n.12 Steuding, Bob, 58 Stevens, Wallace, 85 Suez Canal, 5, 67 Suyemoto, Toyo, 171n.26 Suzuki, D.T., 61–63, 64, 69, 73, 74, 102 Syquia, Serafi n, 98 Tagatac, Sam, 98 Taoism, 48, 50, 103 Terrell, Carroll F., 47 Thoreau, Henry David, 53, 79 The Maine Woods, 79 Walden, 53

Transcendentalism, 4, 6, 25, 31 translation in The Cantos, 41, 46 in Cathay, 24, 31–32, 35–39, 164n.18, 166n.41 of Confucius, 51–53 Snyder’s translations, 81, 168n.30 transpacific alliance. See alliance Trip Trap: Haiku on the Road, 103, 104, 105 Truman, Harry, 55 Uba, George, 127, 174n.10 unconscious, 69, 76 Vietnam, 68 Wand, David Hsin-Fu, 21, 91–96, 100, 121, 169n.2 (See also Wang, David Rafael) Wang, David Rafael, 91–94, 169n.1, 170n.3, 170n.6 The Intercourse, 169n.1 “Quartet for Gary Snyder,” 92, 170n.6 “The Rub,” 170n.3 See also Wand, David Hsin–Fu Wang Wei, 91 Watts, Alan W., 63, 64, 85, 167n.11, 169n.36 Welch, Lew, 103 Whalen, Philip, 63 Whitman, Walt, 4–7, 9, 14, 15, 16, 20, 25–31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 43, 46, 51, 52, 53, 56, 67, 71–72, 73, 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 97, 122–23, 154 “A Broadway Pageant,” 4, 6 “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” 71–72 “Facing West from California’s Shores,” 122–123 influence on the Beats, 71–72 influence on Pound, 25–31 Leaves of Grass, 4, 26, 71, 123 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 25, 53 “Passage to India,” 5–6, 14, 16, 67 Song of Myself, 26–27

i ndex

Williams, William Carlos, 68, 79, 129 In the American Grain, 68 Paterson, 129 Wilson, Rob, 7, 9, 104 Witemeyer, Hugh, 92, 93, 169n.2 Wong, Shawn, 96 Wong, Sunn Shelley, 128, 129–30, 143, 174n.11, 174n.15 Wong, Victor, 103, 172n.2 Wordsworth, William, 137 World War I, 36, 39 World War II, 31, 39, 67, 73, 101

193

World’s Parliament of Religions, 61 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 101 “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” 101–2 Yao, Steven G., 38, 164n.18, 166n.38, 166n.45 yellowface, 65 Yoshihara, Mari, 8 Young, Lester, 119 Zen. See Buddhism 30