Some Active Asian American Poetic Voices

May is Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month. For this month’s poetry circle presentation, I selected four distinguished and active Asian American poets to honor their contributions to the Asian American community and the poetry world. Cathy Park Hong is one of them.

I use the word “active”, not only because they are all award-winning poets who teach poetry, but also because they engage conversations in their own way, while courageously voicing a wider and more intricate Asian American experience.

 “Asian American”, according to the brilliant poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong(link) in her award-winning memoir Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020 National Book Critics Circle award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist), is a term that emerged from student activists in the late 1960s, which united them against racial discrimination and in support of social injustice. 

Born and raised in Koreatown, Los Angeles, from an immigrant Korean family, Hong experienced first-hand racial trauma. She powerfully identifies these encounters in her memoir and poetry. Since the start of the pandemic, when so much fear and hurt in the Asian American community became impossible to ignore, and reports of anti-Asian racism and violence increased, she became more outspoken in defending her vulnerable community. She was named in the TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people list of 2021 for her writing and advocacy on behalf of Asian Americans.

Growing up in a bilingual and multicultural environment, Hong’s poetry is a creative mix of language and ruthless honesty, with self-scrutiny and cultural confrontations. She published her debut poetry collection, Translating Mo'Um (2002), while attending the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This book showed her rare talent as a promising young poet, and won her a Pushcart Prize. Her second poetry collection, Dance Dance Revolution (2007), was handpicked by the legendary poet Adrienne Rich to win a 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize for “her mixture of imagination and historical consciousness in a passionate, artful and worldly manner”. 

In her 2012 poetry collection Engine Empire, Cathy Park Hong’s playfulness and mastery of the English language reached a new height when she used a poetic practice called “lipogram”, which forbids the entire poem to use certain letters of the alphabet. For example, the poem titled “Ballad in A” forbids using any vowels other than A:

“A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.”

Along with two more lipograms, “Ballad in I” and “Ballad in O”, as well as other poems in Part One of the book – Ballad for Our Jim, Hong creates a fictional character “Our Jim”. He is half Comanche Indian and half white, a typical iconic Western guy like Billy the Kid. Our Jim is also reminiscent of Mark Twain's Huck Finn in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well as William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas in Light in August. By revisiting the old and exploring the myth of American Western literature tradition, Hong also creates something new in the later part of the book, which the 2018 Windham–Campbell Literature prize praised for her “exhilarating and surprising language that connects us to unheard migrant voices”.

Cathy Park Hong teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and is poetry editor for The New Republic. Three other selected poets for our poetry circle discussion in May are: 

Artur Sze (1950 –), a second-generation Chinese American poet and translator, was born and raised in New York and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1968. Sze's ninth collection, Compass Rose (2014), was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His tenth collection, Sight Lines (2019), won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry for his “quiet mastery which generates beautiful, sensuous, inventive, and emotionally rich poems that unfurl like ink in water, circulating through meditations on the natural world.”

Sze was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012 and was also the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he currently resides and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Victoria Chang (1970 –), a Taiwanese American poet, was born and raised in Michigan. Chang is the poetry editor for The New York Time Magazine. She also teaches in Antioch University’s MFA program in California. In 2004, Chang edited the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Her notable poetry collections are: Circle (2005, winner of the Crab Orchard Review Award), Barbie Chang (2017), Obit (2020, NPR's 2020 National Book Award in Poetry).

Ocean Vuong (1988 –), a Vietnamese American poet and novelist, was born in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, and immigrated to the United States with his family as refugees when he was two years old. Vuong’s work draws heavily on his refugee experiences. He is a fierce defender of his illiterate and working-class family's struggle to make a living in the United States. He received the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). His debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. Vuong is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts. He is also a practicing Zen Buddhist.

This special lecture and all other poetry circle monthly events are open to the public. Please visit our MCLS Poetry Circle website for registration and other information.

- by Sharon Wang, Lawrence Branch