Dialectics of Aesthetic Politics in Asian American Experimental Poetry

초록

History and society as sedimented content remain mediated in the form of art. Experimental poetry in Asian American literature, I argue, is a striking example. Utilizing Theodor Adorno’s theory, to reveal historically mediated relation between the autonomous form and the politics of colonialism in its content, I select poems written by two Asian American poets: Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco and Yunte Huang’s Cribs. I will analyze those poems to unfold how form itself politically mediates history and content and how this mediation illuminates the way poetic form of autonomous Asian-American experimental poems subsumes political meaning contextualized with Western discourse and history of colonialism, imperialism, and so on. Through reading closely Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco, this paper argues that the more experimental and autonomous a poem becomes, the more readily it can answer to the complex social and historical problems it is located in. Opaque (post) colonial history in Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco immanently opposes naiveté as a means but set it as a goal for the virtual utopian semblance in untimely future. Naïve form in poems in Huang’s Cribs is his goal, not his means. The paper concludes that the experimental poems in Asian American literature show the negative dialectics of autonomous form and natural history/social reification in (post)modern society that also expands into the totalizing ideology in (post)modern society where dominance on nature is reproduced on the second nature of people.

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