Song of a Reformed Headhunter

"For some reason I cannot pin down, I go to the word “soft” often in my poetry. It does not only speak, it also touches and tastes, and it does all this while meaning, variously, listen, gentle, vulnerable, honest, subtle, strong, tender, comfortable, pre-erection, post-orgasm, receptive, sympathetic, malleable, formal, transformative. It is not the opposite of hard, but is a state of hardness, just as hard is but a state of softness. It appears in conjunction with “ware,” “water,” and “power.”" Pleased to be included in this special Singapore feature of the Portugal-based journal Jogos Florais. Shout-outs in my interview to Tan Pin Pin, Sonny Liew, Gwee Li Sui, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Yu, Jahan Ramazani, and Gina Apostol. And thanks, Marguerita, for sharing your story with me. Your poem has appeared! Poems and interviews by Angeline Yap, Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, Cyril Wong, Edwin Thumboo, Jee Leong Koh, Loh Guan Liang, Pooja Nansi, Shirley Geok-lIn Lim, Tania De Rozario, and...

An American honor! Steep Tea makes the "2015 Poetry Books We Love" list from Split This Rock, joining such terrific poets as Marilyn Nelson, Nicholas Wong, and Timothy Yu. * Gray day another salon lights up for coloring nails

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. ...

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...