Now that I’m a subscriber to the Chicago Review, I can whine that I haven’t gotten my copy yet of the latest issue. Timothy Yu has a significant think-piece in it, posing as a review of Victoria Chang’s Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, a gathering of 28 poets in 194 pages from the University of Illinois. While there are some writers one might identify as post-avant in the list here, including Linh Dinh & Nick Carbo, the bulk of the volume seems to stick much closer to what Yu calls the “lyric” tradition, and which I of course would characterize as the School of Quietude. Of particular interest to an outsider like me is how Yu, placing Chang’s book into an historical context, distinguishes three separate tendencies in Asian American writing: a politicized & populist poetics that has its roots in the identarian movements of the 1970s (Janice Mirikitani would be an example, or Al Robles), an anti- (or at least a-) political assimilationist poetics of the 1980s (a representative figure would be Garrett Hongo, who edited Open Boat, the iconic anthology of that poetics), and a post-avant tendency that is well represented alongside the other two in Walter Lew’s wonderful (but sadly out of print) anthology, Premonitions (Brian Kim Stefans, Myung Mi Kim, Tan Lin, alongside several Canadian poets, such as Roy Kiyooka & Gary Shikitani). One of Yu’s most explosive observations here is a claim, which Yu takes care to document, that Chang misrepresents her book’s relationship to this past – largely by identifying Hongo et al as an instance of identarian writing, when the poets of that generation saw themselves quite differently. A second level of tension here is the idea that newer post-avant poets have a much more complicated relationship to politics than their predecessors have been willing to acknowledge (think of Linh Dinh in relationship to the Iraq war & then in relation to the corrupt bureaucracy that is contemporary Viet Nam). What is needed, Yu suggests, isn’t so much a Open Boat: the Next Generation as an updated version of Premonitions, ideally with the sort of contextual material that would render it easy to use in the classroom.

Eileen Tabios has republished Yu’s essay (in what a note says is a slightly different version) online in Galatea Resurrects #2. You should read it, rather than deal with my clumsy précis. What called my attention to this in the first place is a series of intense notes Pamela Lu posted to her own blog on the questions raised not only by the anthology, but by Yu’s response to it & her response to all of the above. Including the issues implicit in the ideas of these three different tendencies, especially as Lu found them embodied during her student days at the University of California.

Between Yu & Lu, there’s enough here to think about for days. And I feel certain that these are not (will not be) the final words on this topic.