Dear Warren Liu,
Thank you for your presentation last week at Scripps College. Your research on Asian American literature is definitely thought provoking. While on one hand your analysis is difficult to fully understand because of my lack of experience with Asian American literature, on the other hand, the lens of ethics, aesthetics and politics creates a point of access for many audiences. The construction of perceived reality through literature occurs in a range of texts. Your case study of Asian American literature zooms in on the true crisis that can result from the constraining modes of interpretation. If this framework is applied to other collections of writing, people could observe how, at times, literature and analysis confine art, artists and its subjects. This contrasts the concept of literature as an outlet from societal paradigms. A certain underlying critique becomes the norm and falls back into the trap of a prototype. Your analysis of Asian American literature’s crisis of representation uniquely highlights this dual nature of literature.
The emphasis on experimental literature as a means for permeating the assumptions that persist in textual groupings underscores a new conception of protest. By exiting what is considered the common agenda of certain writers, it is not what is in the text that disputes common modes of thought, but actually what is not there. Your choice of Sesshu Foster’s poem in City Terrace Field Manual appropriately highlights a difficulty of distinguishing a piece as Asian American literature. While still using ethics, aesthetics and politics, the audience understands how this structure of analysis does not need to be constrained by precedent. It is also clear how readers grasp onto what is considered Asian American. Political terms that are held hostage include, “immigration” and “labor.” When you also point to the aesthetic assumption of reality, the crisis is fully absorbed. The experimental literature falls prey to the conventional analysis, and as a result is stuck within common assumptions. Since readers strive to conventionalize Foster’s unconventional poem, his attempt at expanding the scope of Asian American literature and its analysis becomes completely stifled.
This analysis of Foster’s poem challenges basic methods for understanding many types of literature. However, it also leaves the question of what to do next. In your lecture, a need for education and some unlearning seemed to mold the formula for how to solve the crisis of Asian American literature. A continued outline is needed for serious reconstruction of the assumptions at hand. Without a more specific model for re-analysis, a crisis of a deficient structure would likely arise. Even though structure limits interpretation it is also required. While the negative effects of a parochial analysis are apparent, how is one to draw the line between a limiting analysis versus an appropriate evaluation? Just writing that actually helps me somewhat answer my own question. By declaring an evaluation of a text as “appropriate,” I ask for a value judgment, and this reveals a major problem.
Nonetheless, it is not just value judgments that you point to as hindering Asian American literature. A major part of the crisis is the assumption that the primary function of the literature is to reveal reality. The aspect of literature that allows for criticism of a social system is then less effective. Since condemnation occurs in the literature, people believe it is taking place in reality, and are unlikely to be inspired to change highlighted offenses. Thus, a crisis of all literature and reality ensues. Literature loses its necessary role as a way of escaping and understanding, and reality is devalued all together.
Thank you for inspiring a greater look into the important connection of literature to ideas of analysis, politics, ethics and representation.
Sincerely,
Tess Sadowsky
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Between the Lines: Poetry Reading Review
Literary Event Blog and Letter
Dear Professor Armendinger,
I recently attended your poetry reading at the Claremont Library and as your introducer promised, I was able to experience the “lyrically electric” nature of your work. I was especially struck by the way your work not only reaches the reader or listener in an intellectually meaningful way, but also - and most impressionably - in a way that conveys complex feelings and allows for the exchange of emotions on behalf of both the poet and the receiver of the poetry.
A person’s interaction with literature is conventionally viewed as an independent interaction between the reader and the text; simply words on paper, literature is seen too often as something static without the potential for expansion or the ability for transformation. Perhaps in poetry more than in any other medium, one is able to challenge this belief and to experience literature as a tool for building a relationship. Poetry is an kind of offertory, where the reader is able to respond to, contemplate, and then receive the poet’s work. As you said during your reading, there is a lot that happens between the written lines of poetry; it is between the lines that the poet and listener exist together and interact with one another to create a multi-dimensional relationship from something that exits physically in one dimension.
In particular, the oral presentation of your work amplified for me the emotionally interactive nature of poetry. The combination of your lyricism and vibrant imagery allowed me to be moved by the general feeling elicited by the spoken sound and rhythm of your words, so that as the listener to your poetry, I was able to experience your work beyond the confines of syntactic logic. Your work therefore affected me in a more profound, multi-dimensional manner simply because of the event’s focus on oral presentation.
There were certain lines of your poetry that especially affected me: “mile and molecule,” “leaf as a crumpled telegram,” “I sink into the calendar on the wall as if it were sand,” “my body is a silver parachute,” “there is so much space between my bed and bones.” Once again, I am reminded of the way that poetry transforms a personal relationship between the writer and his or her own experiences into a relationship accessible to the reader. It is interesting to me that your poetry was able to affect me on a personal level despite the fact that we were coming to the reading from different places and perspectives. Whether your poem used lyrical metaphors or precise language to reference your own individual experiences, I was able to relate to the ideas and images of your poetry in a personally meaningful manner.
In this way, your poetry exists in many different forms. Most fundamentally, your work is the product of your own creativity and writing process. However, your work also exists independently and autonomously from its original form - not only in the spaces between the lines, but in the spaces between people and their individual experiences. Therefore, the relationship you have as a writer with your words and the connection I find to your words through my own personal experiences culminates collectively to realize a new poem.
In addition to your presentation, I enjoyed the work by Marcyn Del Clements. Documenting her backpacking and climbing treks around the world, Del Clements’ work could be classified as travel-poetry. Her poems were narrative in form and based less in metaphors and more in detailed descriptions of things seen and mountains conquered. As poets, however, you both used personal experiences to artistically convey complex emotions like awe, remorse, grief, pleasure and pain. The contrast between your work and Del Clements’ work also exemplified for me the way that extremely different points of inspiration can produce similar emotional responses to create myriad relationships in their wake.
I look forward to reading your forthcoming chapbook, Archipelago.
Thank you,
Leah Milne Wright
Dear Professor Armendinger,
I recently attended your poetry reading at the Claremont Library and as your introducer promised, I was able to experience the “lyrically electric” nature of your work. I was especially struck by the way your work not only reaches the reader or listener in an intellectually meaningful way, but also - and most impressionably - in a way that conveys complex feelings and allows for the exchange of emotions on behalf of both the poet and the receiver of the poetry.
A person’s interaction with literature is conventionally viewed as an independent interaction between the reader and the text; simply words on paper, literature is seen too often as something static without the potential for expansion or the ability for transformation. Perhaps in poetry more than in any other medium, one is able to challenge this belief and to experience literature as a tool for building a relationship. Poetry is an kind of offertory, where the reader is able to respond to, contemplate, and then receive the poet’s work. As you said during your reading, there is a lot that happens between the written lines of poetry; it is between the lines that the poet and listener exist together and interact with one another to create a multi-dimensional relationship from something that exits physically in one dimension.
In particular, the oral presentation of your work amplified for me the emotionally interactive nature of poetry. The combination of your lyricism and vibrant imagery allowed me to be moved by the general feeling elicited by the spoken sound and rhythm of your words, so that as the listener to your poetry, I was able to experience your work beyond the confines of syntactic logic. Your work therefore affected me in a more profound, multi-dimensional manner simply because of the event’s focus on oral presentation.
There were certain lines of your poetry that especially affected me: “mile and molecule,” “leaf as a crumpled telegram,” “I sink into the calendar on the wall as if it were sand,” “my body is a silver parachute,” “there is so much space between my bed and bones.” Once again, I am reminded of the way that poetry transforms a personal relationship between the writer and his or her own experiences into a relationship accessible to the reader. It is interesting to me that your poetry was able to affect me on a personal level despite the fact that we were coming to the reading from different places and perspectives. Whether your poem used lyrical metaphors or precise language to reference your own individual experiences, I was able to relate to the ideas and images of your poetry in a personally meaningful manner.
In this way, your poetry exists in many different forms. Most fundamentally, your work is the product of your own creativity and writing process. However, your work also exists independently and autonomously from its original form - not only in the spaces between the lines, but in the spaces between people and their individual experiences. Therefore, the relationship you have as a writer with your words and the connection I find to your words through my own personal experiences culminates collectively to realize a new poem.
In addition to your presentation, I enjoyed the work by Marcyn Del Clements. Documenting her backpacking and climbing treks around the world, Del Clements’ work could be classified as travel-poetry. Her poems were narrative in form and based less in metaphors and more in detailed descriptions of things seen and mountains conquered. As poets, however, you both used personal experiences to artistically convey complex emotions like awe, remorse, grief, pleasure and pain. The contrast between your work and Del Clements’ work also exemplified for me the way that extremely different points of inspiration can produce similar emotional responses to create myriad relationships in their wake.
I look forward to reading your forthcoming chapbook, Archipelago.
Thank you,
Leah Milne Wright
Friday, February 6, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
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