Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In this work of criticism, Tim Yu brings together two groups of poets not usually considered together, the Language poets and the Asian American poets. The first is usually thought of along aesthetics lines whereas the second is usually described as a social category. By thinking of the avant-garde as life praxis, Yu illuminates the common origins of both Language and Asian American poetries in the New Left politics of the 1970s. Faced with the splintering of the Left into what they saw as identity politics, the Language poets, mostly straight white men, had to confront the ethnicization of their own subject positions. Their Beat precursor Allen Ginsberg in writing his auto poesy provides a clear example of how not to be mix poetry and politics in the 1970s, as Chapter One discusses. Chapter Two examines Ron Silliman's attempt, both in his correspondence with other Language poets and in his book Ketjak , to acknowledge his ethnicized position and still maintain his centrality. ...

Inada's book of poems pays his respect to his elders, those in his family and beyond. It opens with a prose meditation on a photograph of Inada as a young boy and his paternal grandmother. There are poems to his grandparents and a long prose-poem to a larger-than-life uncle who made all kinds of horticultural life thrive in his "personal atmosphere." There are also love poems to his big Latina sisters and his fellow Latina brothers, with whom he grew up in their neighborhood in Fresno, California. A poem in 20 sections pays tribute to hardworking Hiroshi from Hiroshima, who migrated from Japan to work in Inada's grandfather's fish-store. There is a hint in the poem that Hiroshi is his grandfather's son from another family he had in Japan. These family portraits are drawn with so much love and admiration that it seems callous to ask for a more critical perspective. However, when in the poem "Picture," Inada invites the reader, and everyone, to join hi...