Song of a Reformed Headhunter

It is imperfectly written but it has the charm, as Charles Simic said of his earlier poetry, of awkwardness. The introduction written by Laura E. Franey outlines the collaborative process between Yone Noguchi and his editors in writing the book, the diary's critique of turn-of-the-century Japonisme, and Morning Glory's performance of authenticity and identity. The Afterword by Edward Marx surveys the book's reception and afterlife in the USA and Japan. It suggests usefully the different genres in which the diary may be placed: women's confessional diaries popular in the late 19th century in Europe and the USA; Japanese diary literature, or nikki bungaku , whose roots reach all the way back to The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon; the New Japanese Novel; Asian American literature; American trickster tales; and queer literature. The notes to the text are full and enlightening. My favorite bits: "Japan teaches nothing but simplicity. Simplicity is the philosophy of art...

For those of you who have been reading my haiku, I must now reveal that they are not my own works, but translations of Japanese originals. Six of these English translations have now been re-translated into Chinese by Zhou Decheng, and published in the Chinese-language Poetry Monthly . The story of my English translations is as follows: In February 2011, when I moved into my Upper West Side apartment, not far from 80 Riverside Drive, where Yone Noguchi boarded for a time, I found a sheaf of haiku in the bedroom closet, almost as if it had been left for me. To my surprise, the poet made numerous references to people and places that I knew from living in New York City. I was thus compelled to translate the poems from the Japanese. As I worked on these exhilarating, enigmatic pieces, I found myself searching out the street corner, the tree, and even the bird that had so enraptured our poet. In this manner I traced the route taken through Central Park—entering at 86th Street on the west ...

So I returned from my Thanksgiving getaway to learn that my book Steep Tea has been listed by the Financial Times as one of four best books of poetry of 2015, along with the new annotated Poems of T. S. Eliot by Christopher Ricks and Kim McCue; Horace: Poems ed. by Paul Quarrie; and Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Completely unexpected, completely floored. "The Singapore-born poet’s first UK publication is disciplined yet adventurous in form, casual in tone and deeply personal in subject matter. Koh’s verse addresses the split inheritance of his postcolonial upbringing, as well as the tension between an émigré’s longing for home and rejection of nostalgia." - Maria Crawford in UK's Financial Times The time away was otherwise dominated by reading Amy Sueyoshi's study of Yone Noguchi's romantic relationships in a book aptly titled Queer Compulsions . Through the study of the correspondence between Yone and his lovers, Sueyoshi persuaded me that his most passiona...

The blog-post title is also the theme of this year's conference of the Association of Asian American Studies in New Orleans. Four days, from May 18 to 21, with 132 panels and roundtables, covering multiple disciplines such as history, literature, media, sociology, geography, performance and fine arts, ethnic studies, gender studies and women's studies. Many papers referred to the transnational turn that has taken place in Asian American studies. The field has moved from recovery of buried pasts to looking beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The turn involves expanding the term "American" to cover the hemisphere, linking the States to the countries of immigrant origins, studying diasporas and analyzing globalization. Most of the papers I heard were informed by social constructionist theory, primarily Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist. These papers, speaking the same language, seemed like ingenious applications of one theory or another. An...