Song of a Reformed Headhunter

This special issue of Mascara Literary Review presents work by 17 Asian American poets. I'm honored to publish new poems by John Yau, our featured poet, and by many established and new writers of diverse ethnicities, regions and ages. The poetry covers a wide range of subjects and explores an exciting variety of forms. You will enjoy reading the work of Wendy Chin-Tanner, Floyd Cheung, Kim-An Lieberman, Jennifer Tseng, Lee Herrick, Katie Hae Leo, Jenna Le, Jeffrey Hecker, Yim Tan Wong, Rey Escobar, Tiel Aisha Ansari, Jason Wee, Vanni Taing, Jason Bayani, Minh Pham and Lisa Shirley. In addition, in the prose section, Singapore critic Gwee Li Sui interviews Timothy Yu on his study of experimental and Asian American poetry Race and the Avant-garde ; Meena Alexander reminds us of the "intimate violence" of racism; Jennifer Kwon Dobbs introduces the poetry of the Korean adoptee diaspora; and Joseph O. Legaspi explains the special place of Kundiman, a non-profit devoted to t...

I take my reviewers seriously. I take them seriously because I really like to know how my poetry impinges on an informed and acute sensibility. I take them seriously because I want to know the faults and limitations of my writing, and so learn how to write better. A negative review is more useful to me than a fulsome, ignorant one. What follows is my attempt to read a review carefully in order to understand its reservations and learn from it. It is also, of course, a piece of self-justification, but I hope it is not merely that. Carol Chan does not like Seven Studies for a Self Portrait . For her the book "unfolds like a series of scientific experiments that don't quite take off." By "experiments" she means to indict me for being overly intellectual: "He frequently makes the wrong bet, falling in love with the idea of a poem, the idea of art." To support her contention, she quotes in full "Bulb" from the sequence "What We Call Vegetab...

I have three poems in Mascara , which take Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Elizabeth Bishop as their point of departure. The first two "In His Other House" and "The Hospital Lift" are set in Singapore, one in an imaginary city, the other in a real one from the past, and so possibly just as imaginary. The third poem "The Bowl" is set in New York City. The city is my pastoral poem. Mascara , edited by Michelle Cahill, is "particularly interested in the work of contemporary Asian, Australian and Indigenous writers."

Am I becoming controversial? "The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity" is a mere reading list, according to Nicholas Liu, but Andy Quan thinks that the whole sequence "uses Asian images and ideas in ways that are not kitsch but instead playful and original and matches it with a voice that crackles with energy." Besides the question of personal taste, the different opinions pivot on a number of interesting issues, such as the reviewer's familiarity with Chinese history, his attitude to the same history, his poetics regarding historical references, his stance towards the recuperation of a lost tradition, in this case, that of Chinese homosexuality. That both Liu and Quan are part of the Chinese diaspora--Liu is Singaporean whereas Quan is Canadian--only makes the comparison more interesting. Quan's review  has just appeared in Mascara Issue Seven. The same issue publishes new poems by Patrick Rosal, and a youtube video of Franz Wright reading ...

Larina Warnock read my poem "Brother" on the Bench Press website, and liked it so much that she invited me to be the Guest Poet this month on the online discussion forum of the Academy of American Poets. She asked for a note on my poetics, and so I wrote something of my current thinking for her: A forthcoming review of my new book says, quite correctly, that my language faces three directions: Singapore, England and the USA. Loitering at the place where three roads meet, my person cannot travel down all three and be one traveler, but my poetry attempts that impossible integration, and so records the successes and failures of that attempt. The disparate elements are not just those of place, but also of time, people, idea, feeling, and what lies below feeling. If modern life has been characterized by fragmentation, I sense a new—old—desire for wholeness. Wholeness not based on discredited formulas—for salvation, community or knowledge—but on new, and renewed, forms that realiz...